Page 20 - APAP Inside Arts - Spring 2020

DESIRABLE
ELEMENTS
THEATER INNOVATOR PING CHONG, RECIPIENT OF THE APAP AWARD OF MERIT THIS YEAR, DEFINES HIMSELF WHILE HE REDEFINES THEATER
18 INSIDE ARTS SPRING 2020
BY RAY MARK RINALDI
When Ping Chong reflects back on his decades-long career in theater, this stands out: how busy he’s been.
“The amount of work I’ve produced is kind of staggering, just in terms of volume,” he said in an interview last December. “No wonder I’m exhausted half the time.”
Quantity isn’t the only measure of success in the arts, of course, but it does say something about drive, an unrelenting desire to tell stories and wanting to entertain. For Chong, enthralling the people who show up to see the works he conceives, writes and directs is actually the core of his craft.
“Artists never forget that the world is miraculous. We are always astonished by it,” he said. “That’s what we try to do when we make our work. We try to astonish our audience.”
Chong has done that more than most theater professionals. He has 90- plus productions listed on his resume in a work life that stretches back to 1971 via his early collaborations with Meredith Monk’s legendary troupe, The House, and continuing through his own Ping Chong + Company, which he founded in 1975.
Along the way, there have been notable achievements in each decade: an Obie Award in 1977, Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985, Bessie Award in 1999, United States Artists fellowship in 2006 and the National Medal of Arts in 2014.
In January, he received the Association of Performing Arts Professionals Award of Merit, given to creatives “who have had significant influence in, not only their art form, but in how audience members approach and view life and our relationships to each other,” according to Mario Garcia Durham, president and CEO of APAP.
“His ongoing work in the area of community and his individual sense of being an outsider or the ‘other’ continues with each new generation of audiences,” said Durham.
ADAM AND CHRISTY KISSICK/APAP