Contact Facing West Shadows Artistic Director, Lydia Greer directly: lydiakgreer@gmail.com
SFMOMA- Halloween! 11 a.m. + 2:30 p.m., Floor 4, White Box | Lysistrata performance by Facing West Shadows at SFMOMA on SFMOMAween, Saturday, Oct. 31, 2026. Free with museum admission!
Enjoy a performance of Lysistrata with handmade animation, puppets, live music, and cast shadows. This reimagining of Aristophanes’ tragi-comedy explores themes of collective resistance and the pursuit of peace. https://www.sfmoma.org/event/sfmomaween/
Facing West Shadows: Lysistrata reimagines Aristophanes’ ancient tragi-comedy, reflecting on collective resistance, reconciliation, and the pursuit of peace amid cycles of war. The work follows a group of women who end the decades-long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, forging peace between warring factions. Originally exhibited as a six-channel, 40-foot audiovisual installation and now performed as an expanded cinema work with live shadow puppets, it was created by Yawen Chien and Lydia Greer of Facing West Shadows using handmade animation, puppets, and cast shadows at MeMeraki in Cyprus. Themes include weaving and spinning, everyday domestic items and rituals, gender and power in dance, Greek theatre masks and artwork, Karagiozis shadow puppetry, and looping images, visual and auditory echoes, euphemisms, and symbols of protest and resistance. Performed as expanded animation with shadow masks and shadow puppets with live music by Désirée Sturrock; shadows performed by Ya Wen Chien, Jessica Nguyen, and Lydia Greer. Désirée Sturrock is an experimental cellist and multi-media artist from Southern California whose work centers on creating immersive experiences through collaborative improvisation. Classically trained, Sturrock draws on a rich background of ensemble performance to engage in deep listening, crafting evocative soundscapes that respond to and reflect their environments. Ya Wen Chien is an illustrator and painter - trained in Chinese painting and watercolor, as well as a digital designer, puppet maker, and shadow-play artist born in Taiwan and currently living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jessica Nguyen (she/her) specializes in movement and visual arts, including dance, puppetry, circus, illustration, and sculpture. Although primarily a shadow puppeteer and designer, Jess is also versed in other forms and has performed with Driveway Follies, OddSavvy's The Ground, and SF Opera's Monkey King. She is a frequent collaborator with Facing West Shadows and Odd Savvy and is a core member of Shadowlight Productions. Jess is also always up to shenanigans with the youth and is a multi-disciplinary educator across the Bay. You can often catch her sipping tea and, unsurprisingly, mulling over fun facts to share with you. Lydia Greer is a widely exhibiting interdisciplinary visual artist, filmmaker, animator, and the artistic director of Facing West Shadows, a Lumia arts collective working with shadow casting/ hybridizing art forms to create magical acts of rebellion as experimental art in the gold rush climate of the San Francisco Bay Area. Expanding into film/animation, theater/opera, puppetry, and sculptural installation, Facing West Shadows creates surprising experiences for the audience by seamlessly combining old and new technologies and art forms. Her work includes sculptural and video installation, hand-made stop motion animation, media sculpture, hand-made experimental animation with puppets, projected shadow and light on paper sculpture, two-dimensional drawings and paper cuts, and built immersive environments.
Facing West Shadows artists Lydia Greer and YaWen Chien creating new work at the MeMeraki Artist Residency in Limassol, Cyprus (Summer 2024)
Exhibition July 11-14 at MeMeraki Exhibition Space in the main residency gallery with Irene Zenonos and Ari Ali in the garden.
Facing West Shadows: Lysistrata (2024) for more information see https://www.facingwestshadows.com/facing-west-shadows-lysistrata, follow us on instagram https://www.instagram.com/facingwestshadows/ or contact Facing West Shadows Artistic Director Lydia Greer at lydiakgreer@gmail.com
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Facing West Shadows: Phantasmagoria
Kanbar Forum, The Exploratorium
Thursday, July 28th, 2022 • 8:00 p.m. Saturday, July 30, 2022 • 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.
Sunday, July 31, 2022 • 2:00 p.m.
JULY 28th Tickets: AFTER DARK (one evening performance), Thursday, July 28th Purchase tickets here for AFTER DARK: https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/calendar/after-dark-shine
JULY 30th & 31st Tickets: Saturday July 30th (two daytime performances) and Sunday July 31st (one daytime performance) Purchase tickets here for the 30th & 31st: https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/calendar/facing-west-shadows-phantasmagoria
Join us for the premiere of Facing West Shadows: Phantasmagoria. Performed by the Bay Area collective Facing West Shadows, the work is a live, multimedia, shadow-theater opera inspired by the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “The Robber Bridegroom.” It incorporates puppetry and shadow play, video projection, stop-motion animation, and live music. Ethereal operatic voice, piano, and clarinet merge with a phantasmagoria of shadows to tell a story about resilience and the power of truth. The premiere brings together two ancient art forms: fairy tales, many of which predate literary records, and shadow puppetry, which uses allegory, drama, music, and the beauty of shadows to tell stories. Ancestors, animals, ecosystems, and communities comprise networks of resistance across space and time in this spellbinding work.
Facing West Shadows: Phantasmagoria was led by Artistic Director Lydia Greer and Theatrical Director Caryl Kientz in collaboration with puppeteer Fred C. Riley III and artist Yawen Chien with musicians, William Sauerland, countertenor, Kylie Stultz-Dessent, clarinet and Andrew Nesler, piano.
Facing West Shadows is a collective of artists, puppeteers, filmmakers, and musicians hybridizing art forms to create magical acts of rebellion as experimental art. Expanding into film, theater, and installation, Facing West Shadows creates surprising experiences for the audience by seamlessly combining old and new technologies and art forms.
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Facing West Shadows: The Endless End
David Pace Gallery, Institute of Contemporary Art San José
On View:
April 1 – August 2022
Facing West Shadows: The Endless End is a cinematic, sculptural installation created by Facing West Shadows at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. Facing West Shadows: The Endless End illuminates the perpetuation of extinction and survival; the disrupted life cycles of native plants and animals, aquatic systems, and fire ecologies as affected by anthropogenic climate change. The viewer’s attention is guided through projected moving images, hand-made animation, and cast shadows with a multi-dimensional soundscape. Collapsing and expanding time, species will live and die over the span of an hour of looping, overlapping, multichannel and multidirectional projection. In a sculptural environment, our role as animals within a system and as the planet’s apex predator is illuminated.
Image above:
Facing West Shadows, The Endless End, 2021, paper sculpture, cast shadows, multiple projections of hand-made stop-motion animation (ink and graphite on yupo, collage, cut paper, found objects and silhouette animation) shadow puppetry and found footage, 30 x 20 ft (variable). Courtesy of the Artists. Photo: Lauren Tabak.
