Event descriptions:
You are welcome to:
· Get connected with other immigrant and refugee artists
· Share your personal stories as a non-native speaker of English
· Be encouraged and empowered to communicate in the way that represents the real you
· Find the beauty of accents/dialects
· Explore the potential of using other elements related to your cultural background
· Celebrate cultural diversity with your future work
Jaylon Han
is a director, performer, and Flame-ist storyteller based in Vancouver, working on Chinese-Canadian and Mandarin theatre. They established the Face Drama Club, the first Mandarin theatre club at UBC in 2013, and co-founded the Theatre as a Second Language Society in 2019. They produces and directs plays in Chinese and also creates and performs in English. Their recent productions are: Fallacy of the Fist (2017), IF`Love Story*3 (2018), One of A Kind (2018), Present Moments (2019), Herstory Storytelling TAIWANfest Version(2019), Mr. Donkey 2Q20 (2020), One of A Kind online version (2021)...etc. Jaylon is excited to celebrate and explore the potential of accents in creating and performing with other immigrant and refugee artists at the STAND festival.
Yanting Qiu
is a playwright, dramaturgy, and storytelling coach based in Vancouver. Yanting’s mother tongue is Wu Chinese, but she is also fluent in Mandrin and English. As the co-founder of Theatre as a Second Language Society, she is helping building a community for artists and audiences who use English as an additional language. She also helps the local arts and cultural organizations to reach out to Chinese media and audiences as a Chinese media liaison. Yanting has been practising using dialects and accents in her creative works and seeing amazing outcomes. As the co-producer of Celebrate the Accents (2019), she is greatly honored to be invited to sharing her experience at the STAND Festival and looking forward to learning more from her fellow artists.