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An intriguing and evocative new video trailer for Yang-May Ooi’s memoir Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes [video]

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We are delighted to unveil this new video trailer for Yang-May Ooi’s memoir, Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes. It features photos from the book as well as some from Yang-May’s personal photo albums which we hope evokes the mood and themes of this powerful family memoir.

 

 

Yang-May writes:

Writing a memoir isn’t an ego thing for me. Rather, it was a way to look back at my life – and also the lives of the women who came before me in my family – and to make sense of the challenges and heartache as well as remembering the joy and human connections that have made me the creative artist I am today.  I write my own story to transform the personal into the universal.  My hope is that readers will be inspired by the stories in Bound Feet Blues to look back at their own lives and find the moments, stories and people who can inspire *them* going forward.

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You can buy a copy of Bound Feet Blues from:

Amazon

or the publishers website at Urbane Publications

Doing the Unimaginable – Bound Feet Blues at the Oxford Literary Festival

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Writer/ performer Yang-May Ooi will be featured at the Oxford Literary Festival in a solo event as part of the St Hilda’s Writers Day on Saturday 09 April. Yang-May will perform an extract from Bound Feet Blues and talk about Doing the Unimaginable – how and why women in China practiced the brutal process of footbinding on their daughters for a thousand years.

Yang-May writes:

I’m delighted to have been invited back to Oxford by my old college St Hilda’s as part of the Oxford Literary Festival. Bound Feet Blues opens in Oxford as I stroll across Magdalen Bridge from St Hilda’s to a summer ball with a gang of my friends in our ball gowns with our boyfriends in black tie. So it feels just perfect to be heading back to Oxford to talk about my show and the accompanying book of the same name.

Here’s some blurb:

The brutal practice of footbinding is unimaginable to us today but was the norm for women in ancient China. In her one woman show Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes, inspired by her great-grandmother who had bound feet, writer/ performer Yang-May Ooi explores what led those women to do the unimaginable in breaking and binding their daughters’ feet for the sake of beauty – and why footbinding is still relevant in modern times. In this talk for St Hilda’s Writers Day, she draws from the themes of love and courage in her theatre piece to discuss what it means to do the unimaginable as mothers, daughters and creative artists today. Yang-May will also be performing a short extract from the show.

There’ll also be the chance to buy a copy of the book – and I’ll of course be around to sign your personal copy.

Bound Feet Blues performance photo: Yang-May uses her hands on stage to demonstrate footbinding

If you’re in the Oxford area on Saturday 09 April, it would be lovely to see you at this one hour event. If you’d like to say hello afterwards, please do drop me a line and I’ll keep an eye out for you – or just come up and say “hi”.

If you know anyone in the Oxford area who might be interested to come along, please do tell them about the event. It would be great to see some warm and friendly faces in the crowd.

EVENT DETAILS:

Bound Feet Blues: Doing the Unimaginable – Yang-May Ooi

When: Saturday 09 April 2016, 12pm (1 hour)

Where: Jesus College, Oxford – Lecture Theatre

Tickets: £12

BUY TICKETS NOW

 

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If you can’t make it you can still Continue reading →

How Yang-May Ooi’s great grandmother with bound feet inspired Bound Feet Blues [video]

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In the  video below, writer/ performer Yang-May Ooi tells the story of her great-grandmother that inspired her to write Bound Feet Blues.

Yang-May writes:

The show was only one hour long so I made certain artistic choices in portraying my great-grandmother in the theatre performance. Her story is incomplete in the show because I wanted the audience to stay with the moment of transformation rather than seeing how her story ends.

The book of Bound Feet Blues takes great-grandma’s story and extends and deepens it at the more leisurely pace that a long read can offer. So for those of you who Continue reading →

28 Days in the Writing, A Lifetime in the Making – Bound Feet Blues, the BOOK [video]

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Author Yang-May Ooi talks about how she was able to write the book, Bound Feet Blues – all 420 pages of it! – in 28 days.

This groundbreaking family and personal memoir was a lifetime in the making. The stories span several generations, going back to the young boy who was kidnapped by bandits and the young woman with bound feet who ran away from an unhappy marriage. Yang-May interweaves these ancestral tales with her own personal story as she learns what it takes to become her own woman.

In this video, she gives us a flavour of the book and shares her creative process in bringing these stories to life.

TO BUY THE BOOK, click on the links below:

AMAZON.CO.UK

AMAZON.COM

URBANE PUBLICATIONS – special 25% discount code: shoes

“Mum, tell us a story!” – Bound Feet Blues Performance Photo

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Bound Feet Blues evolved from stories that were told to writer/ performer Yang-May Ooi by the women in her family. In this scene, Yang-May portrays an evening at home in Malaysia when she was an 8-year old child, running into her parents bedroom with her brother and sister, and asking her mother to tell them a story: “Mum, tell us a story!”.

** Bound Feet Blues is NOW ON  at the Tristan Bates Theatre until Sat 12 December 2015. Don’t miss this “mesmerising” and “powerful” show – buy tickets below or via bit.ly/bfbtickets **

 

The photo is from the Oct 2014 showcase performance.

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BUY TICKETS

**You can buy tickets for Bound Feet Blues via bit.ly/bfbtickets **

DETAILS

Tristan Bates Theatre
1A Tower St, Covent Garden WC2H 9NP

Tue 24 Nov – Sat 12 Dec, Tue – Sat at 7.30pm.
Tickets £16 / £12 concessions.
Q&As post-show, 27 Nov & 4 Dec.

**BUY ONLINE via: bit.ly/bfbtickets **

“This was not the life I was meant to have…” – Bound Feet Blues Performance Photo

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In Bound Feet Blues, writer/ performer tells the story of her great-grandmother in China who had bound feet. This performance photo from the showcase night in Oct last year, shows Yang-May enacting a scene of this bound foot woman from her family’s history: “This was not the life I was meant to have…!”

** Bound Feet Blues is NOW ON  at the Tristan Bates Theatre until Sat 12 December 2015. Don’t miss this “mesmerising” and “powerful” show – buy tickets below or via bit.ly/bfbtickets **

~~

BUY TICKETS

**You can buy tickets for Bound Feet Blues via bit.ly/bfbtickets **

DETAILS

Tristan Bates Theatre Continue reading →

4 Sisters over 40 years – Women’s History Month

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Bound Feet Blues tells stories from my family’s past as passed down the generations by the women – my mum, my great-grandmother, my auntie. In researching these stories for the show – and also the book that I am currently working on – I looked through my personal photo albums and also asked my mum to send me photos from hers. It was fascinating to watch my family and I evolve, grow up and grow old over the years.

So when I came across this photo project of four sisters photographed every year for forty years by Nicholas Nixon, I was captivated. The forty photos are intimate, moving, poignant.

<p>2007, Cataumet, Mass.</p>

Susan Minot in this NY Times article says:

“Throughout this series, we watch these women age, undergoing life’s most humbling experience. While many of us can, when pressed, name things we are grateful to Time for bestowing upon us, the lines bracketing our mouths and the loosening of our skin are not among them. So while a part of the spirit sinks at the slow appearance of these women’s jowls, another part is lifted: They are not undone by it. We detect more sorrow, perhaps, in the eyes, more weight in the once-fresh brows. But the more we study the images, the more we see that aging does not define these women. Even as the images tell us, in no uncertain terms, that this is what it looks like to grow old, this is the irrefutable truth, we also learn: This is what endurance looks like.”

Do go over to the NY Times article and look at all 40 photos.

Continue reading →

A Love Story passed down from My Grandma – Women’s History Month

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In Bound Feet Blues, the show, I recount the story of how my parents met – as told to us by my mother when we were kids. On stage, I become my mother as we all curl up in bed and she tells the romantic story of meeting the man who would become her husband.

“How we first met” is a genre of the oral storytelling tradition within families – and also among circles of friends. We all want to know where we come from – even, or especially, as young children. We are trying to figure out who we are and what being alive means. Hearing how our parents met gives us the context and if we’re lucky, it tells us we were born from love.

My grandparents (R) met and fell in love. My parents (L) met and fell in love. So here I am (baby in the middle)

 

In my story performance, I can only tell the one story ie about how my mother met my father. But there are a number of “how we met” stories in my family. The show is only one hour long – which amounts to 25 pages of text. In the book Bound Feet Blues: The Stories behind the Story that I am currently writing, I have more room to tell those other stories as well.

Here is an extract, telling the love story of my grandparents, my mother’s mum and dad:

“It was funny to think of Grandma and Grandpa – well, before they became Grandma and Grandpa. We loved leafing through their photo album and seeing them so young and fresh-faced, Grandpa in those baggy ‘30s style trousers and Grandma in pretty cheongsams and chunky high heels of that time. It was odd to see them in our minds as two young medical students, hanging out with their pals and horsing around in such a scandalous way. It was odd to see a photo of Grandpa playing rugby and running in a race, looking hunky and sweaty, his Brylcreemed hair flying in the wind.

 “I would go and watch him play matches-lah,” Grandma said coyly. “And then he notice me always there and he Continue reading →

Capture your family history before it’s too late

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Where do we come from? WHO do we come from? Our family history can give us our identity, shape how we view ourselves and our place in the world.

I am so grateful to my 13 year old self. Because in 1976, I asked my Grandpa to tell me about our family history and I recorded it on a tape recorder. In that recording, he tells the story of how his grand-father, my great-great grandfather, came to Malaya (now Malaysia) from China. He died the following year. It is the only family recording we have of Grandpa’s voice and it is the official account of the story of our family (on my mother’s side).

You can listen to the recording via the player below. (The recording was first published on my previous blog Fusion View)

[audio http://media.ipadio.com/698228_201308311429507588.mp3]

 

My Grandpa carrying me

In addition to this recording I have recordings of my Grandma and also reams of notes of stories and conversations with other aged relations, collected over time.

Now I am 51+ – about the same age as my Grandpa was in the photo above. My fascination with my family heritage has led me to create Bound Feet Blues, the story performance. I am also writing a book telling the Stories Behind the Story of the show – which will include the story about the Bandit Boy that Grandpa refers to in the recording. Not only has my interest in my family history sparked my creativity, it has also given me a sense of who I am and my place in the world.

Audiences for Bound Feet Blues seem fascinated by the family stories portrayed in the show – and I think this is as much because it prompts them to reflect on their own family and their relationship with their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents as it is to do with any particular interest in the specifics of my family. Many people have said to me that they wish they knew more about their own family history.

If you are interested in your family history, Continue reading →

Yang-May Ooi talking about Bound Feet Blues at SEA Arts Festival 2014 [video]

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Here’s a short video interview of me talking about the inspirations behind Bound Feet Blues and the challenges of bringing it to the stage.

It was filmed just after the Heritage Panel that I took part in, discussing the role of heritage in South East Asian Performance with Anna Nguyen of Trikhon Theatre and Elaine Foo of TrueHeart Theatre.

There’s also a short snippet of me performing a scene from the show for the audience at the Heritage Panel.

Enjoy!

Continue reading →