The renowned theater artist Ping Chong has created over ninety vanguard works for the stage that have been presented across the country and around the world. Ping Chong + Company, the ensemble he founded in 1975 and continues to lead, is dedicated to addressing significant cultural and civic issues through art and theater productions. Company projects range from grand-scale, cinematic, multidisciplinary productions to the intimate “chamber story-telling” of Chong’s ongoing Undesirable Elements series, developed collaboratively with specific communities.

In Rome, Ping talked with Hou Hanru, the artistic director of MAXXI, the Italian national contemporary art museum, and showed excerpts from two current projects: Collidescope: Adventures in Pre- and Post-Racial America (2014– ) and Beyond Sacred: Voices of Muslim Identity (2015– ). Inspired in part by the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and others, Collidescope combines theater, movement, video projections, and a collaged soundscape in a prismatic investigation of the history of violence directed at African Americans from the colonial era to the present. Beyond Sacred, part of the Undesirable Elements series, chronicles the diverse experiences of five Muslim New Yorkers who came of age at a time of increasing Islamophobia in the United States. The public event was part of the Conversations/Conversazioni series.