Founded in 2015, Gung Ho Projects is a New York-based performance and education platform aimed at creating opportunities for self-expression, empowerment, exchange, and understanding across linguistic and cultural divides. 

Our Mission, like our work, transcends the boundaries of a single language or cultural perspective:

Gung Ho工合Projects

שפּרינג leaps 跨文化

into the 間 between cultures and languages,

creating theater, film, and spaces for learning that

変えるgozar‏تنوير 변화 遨遊 שפּיל

to propel us forward, together.

Our Vision

We work to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to learn, find community, and experience transformative art in any language, including their native one(s) or languages they are just beginning to learn or hear for the first time. Creemos que no hay una jerarquía de idiomas (there is no hierarchy of languages), and that storytelling is at the forefront of diplomacy.

Our Process

All of our projects involve the creation of original, multilingual performance or film in response to a social issue and centering a collaborative process and narrative that exists between dominant cultures. Past projects have touched on racial divides in Appalachian America and Sichuan, China; LGBTQ+ identity and marriage in Taiwan and the US; the history of Chinese American detention at Angel Island; the Chinese social media app WeChat; the radical liberation of gay cruising in Asia and the US; and the tension between tradition and reform in Jewish and Chinese communities (explored through the lens of the musical Fiddler on the Roof). Artists from the communities whose stories we are telling are always central to the work, and our collaborative teams are always pluralistic to ensure exchange across identities and experiences.

(1)

It begins with an idea or a curiosity that lives between cultures and languages – a vibrating semilla. 

(2)

Whoever has this 씨앗, quivering in their pockets, comes together. We each explore this 種子 in our various tongues, and, over time, find our new, shared way of describing <<[{}]>>.

(3)

We eventually discover what the semente will grow into – a film, a play, or an all-night dance party. 

(4)

We define individual and group roles for us to tend our garden and cultivate our seedling as organically as possible. We cultivate, we revise, we sample, we trim as it grows and grows, stirring the pot and adding unlabeled spices from our ancestors' cupboards.

(5)

And we share what has bloomed with our communities. They learn a new word for it, and taste some of the fruit, with a delicious flavor beyond words.

Core Values

Y los cuentos, se los lleva el viento - Everyone, regardless of their identities or artistic training, has a story to tell and the ability to transform the world by telling it.

Play it by Ear (or, A Method to the Madness) – There is joy and drama and discovery in the space where multiple languages and cultures clash, overlap, intersect, or fall short of one another. Go there.

דער שׂכל איז אַ קריכער - The magic of exchange and connecting across cultures happens not only in the presentation of an artistic work but in every stage of its creation.

Cuentan los que vieron (y no estaba, pero me lo dijeron) - Cultural ownership, autonomy, and representation - we aim to have a broad range of identities and experiences present in the room. At the same time, artists who share the identities of the key figures in the work should be at the center of creating it.