Academic publication

Minor Aesthetics of Falling: Reframing “Left-Behind” Children in Rural China, 2026

Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Care, Change, Community co-edited by Eunice S. Ferreira and Lisa Biggs

Abstract: This chapter attends to two documentary theatre performances, Fly and Return, collectively created by rural youths in southern China in collaboration with US- and local-based artists in 2013, to document how Chinese rural youths negotiate the changing conditions of migration, capitalism, and climate change towards collective liberation. Drawing from Asian/American studies and performance studies, this essay pushes towards minor aesthetics as a way of reading and making “applied theatre” by leaning into affects, gestures, ephemeras, and fissures to refuse majoritarian frames that undergird narratives of liberal freedom. By framing (im)mobility as an aesthetic, this essay argues that the minor aesthetics of falling in Fly and Return do not just make normative aspirations and sufferings visible, but they suspend the major conditions of upward mobility and invite us to reckon with “left-behind” feelings. By dwelling in falling and its afterlife, Fly and Return call for a recognition of interconnectedness across rural lives and migratory birds in contemporary China.