What is yoga? As yoga practice spreads across the world, the concept of yoga has been equated to ideas such as physical exercise, coping method, or business opportunities. As a yoga practitioner, I found myself dazzled by new types of yoga springing up in the U.S. This phenomenon inspired me to debark on a journey of finding out what is the “original” yoga described in Indian classics, how has yoga adapted to different cultural contexts and what has changed in this process of acculturation. Since Fall 2015, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Seattle and two cities in China, interviewed yoga practitioners in both countries and read Indian yoga classics as well as modern yoga guidebooks. The result of my research reveals how yoga has changed from a philosophical state of being to a way of coping with the postmodern lifestyle. This performance presentation contains three main parts: the first part is a visual presentation of yoga documented in Indian classics and its modern day equivalent in U.S. and China. Audience will be exposed to the process of how yoga changed across time and space. The second part introduces various interpretations of what yoga is by practitioners both in the West and the East. The interpretations will unravel how yoga embodied predicaments of the greater social-cultural context. The third part will concluded the performance by challenging viewers to expand their understanding of yoga without offering definitive answers to the question, “what is yoga?”

Johann Sebastian Bach is widely known as the “Father of Classical Music."   Today, his compositions are held in the highest esteem by musicians in many different disciplines. During his lifetime, however, he was recognized more as a great teacher, diligent church musician and virtuoso of the organ and harpsichord. Following his death in 1750, his music lay largely forgotten until its revival with the St. Matthew Passion under Mendelssohn in 1829. My presentation will focus on J.S Bach's Art of the Fugue, his greatest composition in that genre. Written during the final decade of his life, this magnum opus consists of fourteen fugues and four canons, the fourteenth fugue being left unfinished due to his death. Each of the pieces constitutes a variation on a twelve-note fugal subject introduced in the first fugue. Bach develops this subject using various contrapuntal techniques such as augmentation, diminution, inversion, and mirroring. The first four fugues are “simple" fugues, with each entry of the subject clearly delineated. The next three are “stretto" fugues, where the subjects overlap each other. The next four are “double or triple" fugues, meaning two or three subjects are presented and developed contrapuntally. The next two fugues are “mirror" fugues, where the same subject appears twice, the second time in inversion. The last fugue, left unfinished, would have been a quadruple fugue, something unheard of in his output up to that point. I will perform Contrapunctus I,VII, and XI to highlight the different types of fugues mentioned above.