Alien without Extraordinary Ability is a game-based interactive performance related to migration and labor practices: on different visa systems and how skills and abilities are being evaluated and calculated differently based on one’s assigned identity. The performance features a love story between aliens (as migrants) and aliens (as non-earthlings) fusion of dystopian science fiction, where intimacy, labor, nationalism, and diversity discourse were discussed in an absurd theatrical constellation. 

The project is based on a year-long research on these visa systems and now focuses on the critique of the arbitrary quantification of the worth of human labor. The game-based interactive performance, we are now developing, amplifies the somatic experiences of such quantification and commodification on migrant bodies and provides gateways of worlding for the collective envisioning of social change. 

The game will make use of public space as a public theater format, and also focuses on the connection with diverse communities through audience interaction. The priority is on connecting with diverse backgrounds and interacting with local residents in public through role-playing formats. We will try our best to make our work accessible for all age groups, but the performance is the most tailored to the audience of youth and senior age groups, instead of younger children. 

The interactive performance also asks the question: who has the ultimate right to define who is the essential worker or not? Can that right be manipulated? What kind of skills and abilities are needed in a state? What kinds of labor are counted and included and what are not? Through our interactive performance, we aim to spark reflections related to these questions and to collectively reimagine the new possibility of beings.

Alien without Extraordinary Ability is originally developed by Xiaoji Song (Xiao Xiao) as a conceptual board game with performative elements during a research residency at the University of the Underground in 2021. This year, media artist Yve Oh, performance artist Yumo Cheng, and Xiao Xiao have come together to develop the conceptual board game further as a performance during the Asian Performing Artist Lab in Berlin. During the APAL residency period, they have developed an 18 minutes teaser performance, as an invite to the collective world-building of the game world and have formed the interdisciplinary performance collective East Alien Company. They had their debut as a performance collective in Berliner Ringtheater.

With the funding provided, we aim to develop and adapt the previous conceptual board game and the teaser performance to be a public interactive performance, which invites local residents to role-play with us and collectively imagine a fantasy world that is beyond our earthy reality, but also reflects on the topics of migration and labor together.