Ming Wong - Persona Performa

In his ambitious new project, which promises to be an unforgettable theatrical experience, Ming Wong has created a site-specific work for the Museum of the Moving Image in response to the building’s dynamic, fluid, and starkly white new architecture. Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece Persona, in which an actress and her nurse exchange identities on the remote Fårö Island, Wong’s piece is a powerful meditation on cinema and theater. It will begin with twenty-four amateur New York actors, each representing one frame of film, winding their way through the museum space. The museum itself will become a camera, pointing at, for example, a “Bergman landscape” through the glass walls of the cafe. After a series of “live action performances” in the public spaces of the museum, the show will move into the main theater, where Wong and his cast will perform a series of live sound and video experiments on a movie studio set. Developed during a residency by Wong at MoMI, Persona Performa will be a revelatory evening, a reflection on nothing less than the history of the moving image and the nature of performance itself, both on screen and in real life. Lead Curator: Defne Ayas.