Ivan Cheng

Ivan Cheng was born in 1991 in Australia, he lives and works in Amsterdam (NL).

The performances of Ivan Cheng are incomplete, failing, desperate, and riddled with absence. He holds an MFA in Critical Studies (Sandberg Instituut), having previously studied at the Royal Academy of Music and Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Past presentations of his texts have occurred at Les Urbaines (Lausanne), Volksbühne Roter Salon (Berlin), Oude Kerk (Amsterdam), Belvedere21 (Vienna), MuHKA (Antwerp), Nacionaline dailes galerija (Vilnius), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Carriageworks (Sydney), Federation Square (Melbourne). He also works as a performer, clarinettist, dramaturg, and since 2017 has initiated project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam.

Writing and its relation to contextualized rhythm has always been central to how my work is developed. I frame my work as context specific, performative situations, driven by transactions and relations with hosts and collaborators. I’m very invested in questions around publics and accessibility, without any delusion that the work is for everyone, but I’m certainly working to regularly provide points of entry. I try to reflect as best I can the visible and invisible infrastructures of the context, often through the prism of my variously trained/historied performing body. I have long been interested in the idea of ‘bad reading’ – qualitative assumptions. The identities of other performers and non-performers in work I’ve produced in the past are embedded through rehearsal, dialogue and entrustment - I offer variously tight scores or structures for another to execute. While I consider the produced work largely ephemeral and held by gossip and interaction, the camera or recording device always holds a position. (text by Ivan Cheng)