Violinist Shaw Pong Liu's passion for connecting with diverse audiences has taken her all over the world, from Berlin to Beijing. She interweaves storytelling, narration and theatrical elements with live music and interactive performance. As a performer and producer of innovative, cross-cultural musical events, she seeks to engage communities who otherwise have little access to live music.

Recent projects include: "Soldiers Tales Untold" a modern-day response to Igor Stravinsky’s 1918 "A Soldier’s Tale" using writings and oral histories of actual 20th century soldiers set to improvised music; "Stone Soup" a musical re-telling of the classic fable with an international cast at the Banff Centre and, performances with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, in the world premieres of several new works.

A graduate of U.C. Berkeley and the New England Conservatory of Music, Shaw Pong is a dedicated educator, an avid improviser and enthusiastic adventurer in Latin music, salsa, and jazz.

Visit her at: www.shawpong.com

My Blue Sky summer was the most intellectually- and artistically-challenging and creatively-stimulating eight weeks I have ever experienced.

The unique, open structure and three-pronged mission of Blue Sky ensured that each artist had copious room to explore, experiment, and grow. I was constantly testing boundaries and pushing the limits of both my and my youth's conceptions of the creative process and of collaboration.

As an artist whose work is difficult to categorize, and whose concepts can be hard for even adult colleagues to understand, it was both a special challenge and an amazing opportunity to engage young people with very different experience levels in a collaborative process. It forced me to distill certain ideas to their simplest form, to identify the essential elements of my ideas, and to make every step of the process transparent -- an intensive learning process for myself as well as the youth.

I believe deeply in the role of artists as teachers regardless of the audience, and as both commentators and transformers of society. Blue Sky gave me the chance to test my ideals against the reality of a real community of both youth and adults.

And the community that Blue Sky creates is a gift for everyone involved. The totally unprecedented form, the open-ness, the space it creates not only allowed each person to recreate themselves in a better form—it forced us to. Every single person in the Blue Sky community is being thrown out of their normal element into an unknown, unforseeable, and constantly changing environment. And we all grow immensely from the process.

For a busy freelance artist who works in many ad-hoc situations, it was incredibly precious to have two whole months to grow relationships with my youth, the other artists, and the local community. To be focused and dedicated to a single community and a single project is a luxury to me, and it enabled me to accomplish an enormous amount of creative work in an organic, healthy manner (the last 2 week-sprint notwithstanding!). And it is yet another rare gift to have this time to develop friendships with other artists from other fields, to know each other deeply through living, eating, playing, and stressing together, and to share the experience (so hard for outsiders to grasp) of our crazy, unique Blue Sky world.

I'm sure every summer is completely different, and I can't fully express how lucky I feel to have had the opportunity to be with these artists, these youth, and this community at this junction in my creative and professional life. Blue Sky embraced me for exactly who I am, and precisely my unconventional work and path, and I feel that it gave me the fertile, nurturing, and yes, incredibly challenging environment to thrive, learn, and leap forward with my work.