Shaw Pong Liu 2011

Shaw Pong Liu

Boston, Massachusetts

Improvising violinist, vocalist, and composer Shaw Pong Liu creates performance collaborations which interplay improvised music, narration and audience interaction. A dedicated performer-educator, Shaw Pong seeks to engage diverse communities with creative music and social dialogue.

Her current project, “A Bird a Day”, explores birds, sunrises and music through daily nature expeditions (www.abirdaday.org), including a recent artist’s residency at Acadia National Park. Other recent productions include “Of a River”, a performance collaboration with choreographer artist Rodney Veal (Blue Sky Resident Artist ’09) interweaving dancers, musicians, and silk in Dayton, OH, and “Soldiers’ Tales Untold” a musical-narrative production mixing veterans’ stories, music of Stravinsky, and audience dialogue about the long-term costs of war (www.soldierstalesuntold).

A native Californian, Shaw Pong is currently based in Boston, where her collaborations have ranged from the urban hip-hop slam poetry production, ARTiculation, to appearances with

MIT’s Gamelan GalakTika and Ensemble Robot. Classical music performances include Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. A graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a Masters in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, Shaw Pong was 2008 Resident Artist and 2010 Program Director at the Blue Sky Project. Visit her at: www.shawpong.com

Blue Sky Insight

 
In the new role of Community Artist‐Investigator this summer, I explored the
possibilities of Blue Sky Project’s community‐building collaborative model in two major
multidisciplinary collaborations linking Blue Sky Project, UD and Dayton artists with the
greater Dayton community, as well as three additional community performances.

I truly experienced the power of a community of artists this summer, with support from
every sector of the Blue Sky community. From Peter’s support in connecting me to
people and organizations in town, to artwork and ideas of student artists and youth
participants, to photography documentation and dance performance by resident artists,
I felt enormously blessed to have access to such a wealth of talent, resources, and ideas.
My work depends on having such a diversity of skill and talent, and it is rare to find a
creative home for such ambitious undertakings. In addition, the financial support was
critical in enabling me to engage with local professional artists.

 
It is thrilling to be a part of such a fertile creative environment at Blue Sky Project and to
see the fruit of a collective faith in the idea that everyone has something great to
contribute; that we can accomplish more in collaboration than we can as single agents.
These values were tested, challenged, and proven over and over again this summer, and
it’s been a great inspiration to bear witness to this process.