Isa Huiling Liu

Blood on Your Hands — Cockpit Theatre, London, UK

In 2022, shortly after graduating from East 15 Acting School, I joined this theatre project as assistant producer, in response to the outbreak of the Russo–Ukrainian War. It was the first time I experienced a major conflict as something geographically close rather than distant or abstract. The experience prompted me to reflect on how cultural memory is carried not only through stories and language, but also through the body. I became increasingly interested in how embodied memories, emotions, and learned behaviours travel across borders, and how migration can disrupt, reshape, and transform one's sense of identity, belonging, and self.

Red Hare's Wish — The Space Theatre, London, UK

Directed by Enrico Liou · Written by Jialun Qi

Serving as Producer of Red Hare's Wish, on this adaptation of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, sparked an early interest in questions that continue to inform my artistic research today. The production brought stories of loyalty, war, and displacement into physical performance, revealing how cultural memory can be carried through bodies as well as texts. Witnessing these narratives translated into movement and presence prompted me to consider how collective histories remain embodied across generations — an inquiry that continues to shape my current research into memory, identity, and embodied experience.

Languagist — Golden Goose Theatre, London, UK

As a performer rather than an outside observer, my understanding of somatisation is not merely theoretical but experientially grounded — forged through the practice of embodied translation itself. What if this entire epistemological and performative framework were contained within a visualised "box" — a bounded interface in which somatic knowledge, non-verbal semiotics, and embodied translation are not only enacted through performance, but also made visible as a curated, spatialised field of relations? Such a framing shifts the work from abstract theoretical articulation toward an experiential, visually mediated structure in which embodied knowledge is both generated and perceived within a defined perceptual container.

Bu (埠) — Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, UK

Bu (埠 — "dock") stages the intergenerational story of a Chinese immigrant family in London, speaking directly to this research's core argument: that the body carries cultural memory even when linguistic and geographic markers of origin have been severed. That this story is set against the history of Limehouse — London's lost Chinatown — is not incidental. Living in embodied proximity to this site of displacement and erasure places the researcher within a history that continues to operate as repertoire rather than archive. What Bu makes viscerally legible is the somatic dimension of intergenerational transmission: the affective orientations and relational comportments that pass between bodies through co-presence and repetition, shaping — in Ahmed's terms — the very surfaces through which we encounter the world. For the transnational subject, this somatic inheritance persists long after migration, and Bu becomes a site of practice-based inquiry into precisely that persistence.

Hi, Mom — Blue Elephant Theatre & Central Saint Martin's, UK

Context Creator / Performer

Hi, Mom is a solo physical theatre work in which the performer inhabits both her own body and her mother's — collapsing generational distance into a single, layered presence. The piece centres on "Moonlight," a children's song from the performer's hometown, whose melody functions not as illustration but as embodied transmission: a vehicle through which what Diana Taylor would call the repertoire — the living, body-to-body inheritance of gesture, affect, and cultural knowledge — is activated in performance. Ageing is rendered through physical transformation onstage; the body's turning becomes a timeline, the mother's needle and thread a figure for the quiet, repetitive labour through which culture passes between generations without ever being fully archived.

Where the archive fixes and preserves, the repertoire enacts. Hi, Mom insists on this distinction: what the performer carries of her mother and of the women of her culture cannot be accessed through documents or texts — it surfaces only in the doing, in song, in the turning of the body. The piece thus becomes a site where personal longing and collective feminine inheritance are revealed as inseparable, each legible only through the other. Knowledge, here, does not precede the creative process — it emerges from within it.

Until I Found You — Platform Theatre, London; National Theatre of China, Fengchao Theatre Beijing; Young Theatre Shanghai

Context Creator / Performer

This work offered a formative site of somatic inquiry: a physical theatre piece functioning as an embodied critique of China's economic liberalisation at the turn of the millennium. It translated macro-structural forces — rapid capital accumulation and the seductive pull of the Western imaginary — into the micro-register of a young Chinese girl's dreaming. The rabbit I performed came to figure a generation of Chinese bodies already oriented westward before they could consciously name that orientation.

The work's systematic displacement of verbal dialogue in favour of symbolic facial markings repositioned the face not as a site of psychological expression but as a surface upon which cultural desires and historical forces were inscribed. Performing within this framework sharpened my understanding of pre-linguistic somatic inscription as a primary communicative register. This insight anticipates the central methodological premise of my proposed research: if facial expression, blocked, and embodied memory shape the body before language emerges, then the body in motion may communicate forms of affect, memory, and traumatic inheritance that exceed linguistic representation.