From DING Magazine Issue #3: ABOUT THE FUTURE IN TIMES OF CRISIS

Link to article: https://dingdingding.org/issue-3/future-perfect-continuous/


Written and conceived by Chloe Chow, Artistic Director

As we move into a post-pandemic world, it is difficult to reconcile with the past life that we left behind. The social and political turmoil that occurred over the past year and a half has caused change beyond imagination, both internally within our personal paths to self-discovery and externally with the ways in which we seek out community.

A screenshot from the 2021 New Works Festival!
(top left to right): Kyle Wang, Chloe Chow, Morgan Gwilym Tso, Claire Yu, Annie Zheng
(middle left to right): Ethan Wang, Hank Tian, Tiger Zhou, Junah Jang, DJ Maceda
(bottom left to right): Sarah Lee, Isaac Vaught, Kathryn Zheng, Yue Hui, Clara Luu

A screenshot from the 2021 New Works Festival! (top left to right): Kyle Wang, Chloe Chow, Morgan Gwilym Tso, Claire Yu, Annie Zheng (middle left to right): Ethan Wang, Hank Tian, Tiger Zhou, Junah Jang, DJ Maceda (bottom left to right): Sarah Lee, Isaac Vaught, Kathryn Zheng, Yue Hui, Clara Luu

In her essay, “Future Perfect Continuous,” Olia Sosnovskaya writes about the power of revolution and how the present is overwhelming and tragic. Sosnovskaya ponders over the temporality of text and the power of imagination as a landscape for political movement.

“The book is a document and a script, an ideological text and a score for collective affect. It stumbles over this mismatch of the past and future, which happens in the Future in the Past. Its tense is the Future Perfect Continuous, also sometimes called the Future Perfect Progressive. Meaning, that the activity will have begun sometime in the past, present, or in the future, and is expected to continue in the future.”

We call upon this idea of the Future Perfect Continuous as we bridge together who we were and who we aspire to be, both as individuals and as the community of the Asian American Theater Project.

A definition of the future perfect continuous tense from Grammarly.

A definition of the future perfect continuous tense from Grammarly.

With this new proposed space, we inclusively welcome the intersection of identities as we find ourselves in established and new texts. We see texts as historic moments of rupture where the ideas of new possibilities are given the grace of literary and social presence. Texts allow us to see into the future.

“The future, though, could only be canceled were we to have lived in linear time. In the companionship of decolonial and feminist thinkers, we address post-socialism in the plural, as being non-unified and associated with multiple places, times, and possibilities. We see postsocialist temporalities as queer, non-linear, propelled by multiple political desires, imaginaries and uncertainties.”

With bodily engagement, we choreograph the future for ourselves in the way that we see it today. Emerging from the pandemic opens opportunities for reimagination amid the uncertainty. We demand our right to be visionaries, and we claim this space for ourselves.

In AATP's 2021-2022 season, we welcome the idea of the Future Perfect Continuous and nonlinearity. As an organization dedicated to change, we uphold our promise to continue elevating all Asian American storytellers and voices. Given the violent treatment of the Asian American community during COVID-19, we also commit to using this season to acknowledge how the intersection of Asian American identities and other identities shapeshift over time.

We anticipate the future perfect continuous manifesting in our season through these considerations: