Liu Xiaoyi is the Artistic Director of the Singapore arts group Emergency Stairs. A committed practitioner with a desire to push artistic boundaries, he is regarded as a promising figure at the forefront of the experimental theatre scene in Asia. Xiaoyi received the Young Artist Award awarded by the National Arts Council of Singapore in 2016.
A multi-talented artist, Xiaoyi was involved in over 70 theatre productions as director, playwright, and actor over the past two decades. As a director, the cornerstones of Xiaoyi’s oft lauded but controversial work are unsurprisingly experimentation, introspection, and poetry. Between 2017 and 2019, he created three new works under his Postdramatic Series that challenged the often-sacred theatre traditions here by introducing a new exploratory theatre format to the discomfort of his audiences.
Xiaoyi has also been actively promoting dialogues and creation across cultural and geographical lines for many years, particularly the exchange between tradition and contemporary art forms. As the Artistic Director, Xiaoyi has curated the Southernmost Project, an annual, first-of-its-kind “arts festival for the future” in Singapore since 2017. The inter-cultural festival has regularly brought prominent artists across the region to Singapore for exchange.
An educator at heart, Xiaoyi has started and helmed several talent development platforms- the Practice Lab, Emergency Shelter and most recently, the Emergency Academy. He also founded the first Chinese theatre review platform, the Re-Viewers (众观), in a response to the dearth of critical writing in Singapore.
