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Speakin' Up the Yin/Yang
Solo performance by Kip Fulbeck
Running Time: Approximately 90 mins
Description
Speakin' Up the Yin/Yang is a humorous and touchingly honest performance based on the experiences and observations of a mixed-blood Asian man in this country. Combining wild monologues, autobiographical stories, comedy sketches, and outrageous videotapes, Fulbeck attacks the politically taboo topic of the Asian Male. In between blasting media representation of Asian men, interracial dating patterns, cultural icons, and selling out -- Fulbeck constantly questions where mixed bloods "fit in" in a country which ignores multiraciality. Fulbeck's characters constantly shift between art and life, stage and reality, fiction and fact. He moves from a crazed Mortal Kombat kid to a white man with an Asian fetish, tackling everyone from Bruce Lee to Connie Chung to David Carradine to Oliver Stone. Personally recounting everything from his first Asian American date to a white girlfriend who thinks all Chinese know karate, Fulbeck's personal anecdotes hilariously and painfully poke at ingrained racism and the roles of Asian men in America.
Style
Fulbeck's controversial performances are highly energized, encompassing direct audience address, stand-up comedy, character playing, improvisation, and emotional tirades. The work sparks discussions and raises questions long after the stage lights go down.
Experience
Fulbeck has performed solo performances at the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial , The Asian American Arts Centre, Highways Performance Space, El Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Francisco Camerawork, Club Uno's (Malaysia), The Substation (Singapore), and numerous colleges and universities throughout the U.S. He is a powerful and moving speaker who lectures nationwide on issues of Asian American activism, identity, and direction.
"(Fulbeck) ... never lets you relax into the comfort of conformity. He works as a stand-up comedian, a political activist, a free verse beat-style poet, a racial antagonizer (or self-proclaimed 'bomb-thrower'); but always with an underlying current of irony and tongue-in-cheek. Fiction melds and intertwines with fact, autobiography morphs into fantasy and character charades ... we're left knowing as much about the "real" him as we know about our own identity; sometimes very, very little."
- Keith Fung, Momentum
"Fulbeck has a lot ot say and he ain't afraid to say it ... (he) addresses his experiences as an Asian and Amerasian man with his foot on the accelerator and never lets up. This verbal improviser uses monologues, character parodies, video works, and poetry with fast-paced eclecticism, MTV-style. It's a show jam-packed with anecdotes, images, an ideas that entertains as well as provokes thought .. a whirlwindride from silly humor to scathing satire fraught with complex, intelligently articulate insights."
- Celeste Maglan, The Santa Barbara Independent
For additional information and bookings of performances or lectures, or
to view a preview tape:
Please contact Victoria Namkung at
VKN Communications (310) 477-0799.
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Speakin' Up the Yin/Yang
Biography
Curriculum Vitae
Performance
Reviews
