Conor Wylie’s nimble mind moves with the speed of a gazelle. An astute writer and experimental theatre artist, Wylie has no difficulty sharing his thoughts on many topics with Pancouver.
One of his great passions is writing and making sci-fi theatre pieces. This is no easy task, given that theatre does not come with the budget of blockbuster Star Wars movies. Wylie also mentions how his work has been influenced by U.S. experimental theatre director and playwright Richard Maxwell. Later in the interview, Wylie—who’s of mixed Chinese-European ancestry—reveals why he’s sometimes offered film and TV roles for Latino characters rather than for those with Chinese ancestry.
“I’ve never been cast in a role as Chinese,” Wylie states. “I’ve only ever played Chinese roles or roles that reflect my identity when I’ve written them myself and created them myself. I think that has a lot to do with the way I look.”
Wylie won’t accept Latino roles, which will please the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition.
On this day, Wylie is eager to discuss his theatre piece, K Body and Mind, which is emblematic of his remarkable imagination. It’s about a security agent named Kawabi who’s seeking to escape hunger, sickness, and war.
“[She] joins this collective called The Grove, who have created these new bio-engineered and shareable bodies,” Wylie says. “So, you basically transport your consciousness into these new bodies. And it’s kind of a values-based collective.”
Their plan is to build a new society. But while pursuing this, their neural network is invaded and colonized by a hostile entity called the Crying Woman.
“So, the story is Kawabi fighting to understand what the Crying Woman is and trying to save this new society,” Wylie explains.
Wylie co-founded A Wake of Vultures
The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival will present K Body and Mind in a double feature on Saturday (February 1) and Sunday (February 2) at the Scotiabank Dance Centre. The twin bill is titled “Seeing Double”, and it will be paired with Nancy Tam’s Walking at Night by Myself. The festival is also offering the Seeing Double shows online from January 31 to February 9.
In 2013, Wylie, Tam, and Daniel O’Shea co-founded A Wake of Vultures, which produced both pieces. According to Wylie, K Body and Mind blends cyberpunk, anime, and quasi-maximalist production values with a “super stripped-down, robotic, minimalist performance style”.
“So, there’s sort of a dissociation between what you see and what you hear,” Wylie adds. “You’re hearing a lush radio play happen, but you’re seeing this minimal stilted choreography.”
Tam is the composer, sound editor, and performing sound designer, whereas O’Shea is the performing, lighting, and projection designer and technical director. Jasmine Chen and Donna Soares are the two performers.
“It’s kind of old school theatre technique done in a new way with some very Asian anime, young-person aesthetics thrown in,” Wylie says.
Over the years, he has learned a great deal through collaborations. He credits Theatre Replacement, Radix Theatre, Hong Kong Exile, and Leaky Heaven, among others, for developing new techniques, which have helped him avoid the campiness that can be associated with theatrical science-fiction. Wylie also praises Mahaila Patterson-O’Brien’s robotic choreography, as well as the work of Tam and O’Shea, for reinforcing a distinctly Vancouver aesthetic to the production.
When Wylie came out of theatre school more than a decade ago, he didn’t know that he would become so interested in creating science-fiction pieces. Now, it takes up much of his theatrical practice.
Watch the trailer for the Seeing Double shows.
Re-imagining society
Wylie views science fiction as a vehicle for exploring community building and utopian ideals. He’s also keenly interested in showing people’s capacity to change.
“The longer that I’ve spent in the genre, the more I become actually interested in the possibility of re-imagining society,” Wylie states.
One of his earliest speculative works was eatingthegame with Hong Kong Exile, which he performed at the 2015 PuSh festival. Wylie co-created this work about international investment with Milton Lim, Remy Siu 蕭逸南, and Natalie Tin Yin Gan.
Wylie says that he embraced sci-fi in full force for the first time in 2016, performing Visitors from Far Away to the State Machine at the Fox Cabaret. Another Hong Kong Exile production, it was performed at the PuSh festival the following year. Visitors from Far Away to the State Machine revolved around two aliens who travel light years to Earth for their honeymoon.
“I was just thinking about that show earlier today,” Wylie says. “I was reflecting that I’m mixed. My dad’s side is, like, European settlers and then my mom’s side is Chinese.”
His maternal great grandfather immigrated from a village in Guangdong to Canada, travelling through Victoria. Wylie’s maternal grandfather and grandmother later came from the same village, which has since been swallowed up by Guangzhou. As a child, Wyle was very close to his Chinese grandmother. And he recalls attending big banquets at Chinese restaurants with extended family members.
“I grew up feeling that I was Chinese, even if people didn’t see it at my school.”
K Body and Mind is science fiction. However, Wylie says that at its heart, it’s a family story. He also maintains that his characters reflect, in a sense, the struggles of his grandparents and great grandfather in Canada.
“It’s about people trying to make a life in a new land,” Wylie notes. “In this case, they have brand new bodies.”
Watch Pancouver editor Charlie Smith’s interview with Conor Wylie.
Event details
The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival will present Seeing Double // K Body and Mind and Seeing Double // Walking at Night by Myself on Friday (January 31), Saturday (February 1), and Sunday (February 2) at Scotiabank Dance Centre. The festival is also streaming both Seeing Double shows from January 31 to February 9. For tickets, visit the PuSh festival website.
Follow Pancouver on X @PancouverMedia and on Instagram @PancouverMedia. Follow Charlie Smith on Bluesky @charliesmithvcr.bsky.social.
This article is part of “Beyond Chinese”, a joint initiative of Pancouver and the Asian-Canadian Special Events Association. Through interviews with artists and cultural workers, Beyond Chinese offers a nuanced view of people with Chinese ancestry.
