In Family Room, The Falling Company's Marissa Wong unpacks divorce and obligation
Furniture takes an active role in new dance work that navigates familial breakup and and cultural identity
In The Falling Company’s Family Room, furniture stands in surreally for relationships. Photo by Sewari Campillo
The Dance Centre and New Works present Family Room at the Scotiabank Dance Centre on April 19 and 20 at 8 pm
IN VANCOUVER’S hypersqueezed housing market, family rooms are rarely part of floor plans anymore—relegated to the suburbia of decades past.
For contemporary-dance artist Marissa Wong, the title of her new work, Family Room, refers back to that specific room in the suburban Port Moody house in which she grew up. The work comes complete with a set that includes a couch, lamp, and rug which hearken back to that place.
But the title also refers to another kind of container for family dynamics and memories—some of them painful—that she explores in the new piece debuting with The Dance Centre and New Works. Specifically, the production looks at her parents’ divorce in the context of her Chinese-Canadian upbringing.
That marital breakdown came at a difficult time, during the pandemic. Wong found navigating her parents’ divorce challenging as an adult, raising a complex array of issues from the past.
“It was a tough time, because I wasn’t able to see them,” The Falling Company artistic director reflects on a Zoom call with Stir. “I had two younger brothers who were living at my parents’ house navigating this change of relationship. And there were a lot of dynamics of projecting onto me as an adult child. There’s an assumption that the child is an adult and that they can take care of themselves, while at the same time there’s a child still there that has needs that need to be met by them.”
Analyzing it today, Wong realizes that her parents—her mother a first-generation immigrant from Hong Kong, her father the second-generation son of Chinese immigrants—poured all their energy into protecting and assimilating their kids in a largely white suburb. In the new dancework, she wrestles, through movement and spoken text, with the years that led up to the divorce, and the challenges of the immigration experience.
“As children, we had a lot of opportunities that the neighbours had, and then there’s knowing in hindsight that we actually didn’t have the money to support that,” says Wong, who trained rigorously at Ballet Austin and Alonzo King LINES Ballet before moving into contemporary dance. “Or, for example, I would bring lunches in my thermos of dumplings or rice. And when I got made fun of as a kid, the next day I’d immediately have Lunchables. So my parents did such a brilliant job of trying to protect me from this feeling of marginalization.
“Because I was also training in ballet, I was so removed from what that cultural barrier was to me—until they went through the divorce and all of their own defence mechanisms and traumas came up,” she continues. “And that’s when I realized certain things about my childhood. I was reflecting on, ‘Oh, that was why they were harder on me.’ Or, ‘They treated me like an adult at 10 years old.’ And there are certain things that I’m hearing a lot more about now, just how specifically a woman of colour, or a Chinese woman of colour, gets treated, and the expectations put on her, and then how that was kind of passed down onto me.”
Wong deals specifically with her sense of obligation in Family Room—assessing that weight of responsibility, and the way it ties into her parents’ reaction to the environment that surrounded them.
Family Room. Photo by Lula-Belle Jedynak
As Wong began to explore the complex emotions and relationships that she was grappling with, she came up with a clever, slightly surreal device: furniture stood in for characters and her relationships with them. In a further touch, she worked with costume designer Meagan Woods to tie objects to dance characters: the trim of her mother’s outfit echoes the couch’s; the father’s has a pleat that reflects the lamp.
“The furniture pieces allow me to create a little bit of distance from those really intimate relationships and allow people to mirror their own experiences within it as well,” she explains. “I’m incorporating more theatrical aspects, so that it isn’t just about my mom, my dad, and me, exactly.”
A key piece of each performance is the talkback afterward, led by a counsellor. “It allows the audience to bring in their experiences and be supported, rather than just letting them see a piece that could be triggering and then have to sit at home alone with it,” she says.
Wong has spent three years developing Family Room with her three dancers—Justin Calvadores, Tamar Tabori, and Shana Wolfe—building intricate movement and working with the use of their voices and text. Jamie Bradbury has composed the original score.
Along the way, she’s gone through a healing process with her parents, with the project opening channels of communication for the first time. Wong is grateful for their bravery and openness in that regard—making room for family even if she doesn’t live in a home with a family room anymore.
“When they came to the preview last year, they both stood up and they both took the mic and started to share their love to me,” she relates. “And it was a really intriguing experience to witness them do that in public, when that wasn’t something that was built into my childhood. So, yeah, it’s been an experience.” 
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