Sean Devare is a New York-based multidisciplinary theatre artist and designer exploring intercultural relationships to narratives both modern and ancient.
With perspectives and identities colliding at a rate like never before, I seek to create experiences that confront the crucible of an increasingly competitive global society. What stories float to the top? Which languages get boiled off? When can we claim certain identities while others are forced upon us? How do we recover, re-imagine, and reinvent the stories we’ve lost? Can cultural combinations be greater than the sum of their parts? These questions at the heart of my work examine the complexities and contradictions of assimilation in the first (and second) generation American experience.
As a biracial and multicultural Asian American, I aim to challenge the static definitions and ownership of cultures by mining the depths of folklore, mythology, and pop culture in a collage of word/lyric, sound/gesture, song/poem, and image/icon to form a contemplative and cohesive form. Through the lens of my western upbringing and classical training in fine art, music, and theatre, I hope to act as a bridge to Asian diasporic performance traditions and rituals, fully integrating components of modern technology with hand-crafted performance tools—from masks and shadow puppets to hybrid musical instruments.
With the immediacies of live music and physical theatre in dialogue with images of subconscious archetypes, my work aims to transcend and subvert both cultural and national boundaries as live events.
With perspectives and identities colliding at a rate like never before, I seek to create experiences that confront the crucible of an increasingly competitive global society. What stories float to the top? Which languages get boiled off? When can we claim certain identities while others are forced upon us? How do we recover, re-imagine, and reinvent the stories we’ve lost? Can cultural combinations be greater than the sum of their parts? These questions at the heart of my work examine the complexities and contradictions of assimilation in the first (and second) generation American experience.
As a biracial and multicultural Asian American, I aim to challenge the static definitions and ownership of cultures by mining the depths of folklore, mythology, and pop culture in a collage of word/lyric, sound/gesture, song/poem, and image/icon to form a contemplative and cohesive form. Through the lens of my western upbringing and classical training in fine art, music, and theatre, I hope to act as a bridge to Asian diasporic performance traditions and rituals, fully integrating components of modern technology with hand-crafted performance tools—from masks and shadow puppets to hybrid musical instruments.
With the immediacies of live music and physical theatre in dialogue with images of subconscious archetypes, my work aims to transcend and subvert both cultural and national boundaries as live events.