The creative process is never linear. As a company that programs a wide range of interdisciplinary works in our main stage season, the lead artists of our season shows often have intricate, unexpected, and sometimes unusual ways of collecting inspiration for and making the final works that audiences witness on stage.
To bring you closer to Buddies artists and their processes, this season, we’re asking them to tell us about their “process marginalia” — notes in margins, strokes of inspiration, and snippets of songs, films, books, and more that helped the work get made.
Make Banana Cry, produced by Toronto Dance Theatre in partnership with Buddies, is on stage at Buddies from January 14 to 17, 2026. Choreographers Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson are the co-creators of Make Banana Cry, a genre-defying work merging runway aesthetics with contemporary performance and dance. Andrew shares five things that inspired the creation of this work.
1. Parades and Changes (1965) by Anna Halprin
Stephen first encountered the “replay” of Anna Halprin’s Parades and Changes in Vienna, and it became one of many references in our work. The original piece used simple back-and-forth, runway-like actions and everyday objects to deconstruct meaning and logic — turning ordinary gestures into something spectacular. Halprin’s score invited performers to shape the work from within, questioning traditional authorship and opening the door to shared creation. In Make Banana Cry, we take these ideas and push them into another conversation — one about cultural construction and the aesthetics of “Asian-ness” in Western contemporary culture. We use the same spirit of play, transformation, and performer agency to expose how identity is built, framed, and sometimes distorted depending on whose lens is shaping the gaze.
2. Archetypes of Display: Fashion Shows and the Museum Exhibition
Make Banana Cry plays with the tropes of the colonial museum exhibition and a fashion show — two types of events where bodies are routinely displayed, categorized, and consumed. We designed the piece to act as a conveyor belt of cultural, bodily, and gender-based codes. We want audiences to become aware of themselves watching — to recognize how they, too, participate in producing stereotyped images, projecting ideas, and categorizing. Whose bodies are allowed to be desirable? Whose are framed as exotic? Who gets contextualized, and who is left as spectacle? Of course, the fashion show is also a critique of capitalism and consumerism, while the faux exhibition becomes a critical site where the harm of cultural theft is exposed, revealing how appropriation and commodification are embedded in art history.
3. “Made in China”
The scenography for Make Banana Cry is filled with mass-produced “Made in China” items and costumes — objects that circulate globally yet are often dismissed as cheap, kitschy, or culturally shallow. By placing them inside our Fake Museum exhibition, we flip their value system, displaying dollar-store goods alongside real designer garments and objects of genuine cultural significance. The performers constantly shift the meanings of these materials: fly swatters become butterfly wings, an emoji slipper turns into a bouquet, everyday trinkets morph into symbolic artifacts. Each transformation reveals the hidden potential inside even the simplest object. This slippage creates a critical rupture (banana pun intended) that asks: if we can easily recognize endless possibilities in an inanimate object, why do we reduce living, complex human beings to singular stories and fixed identities?
4. Songs of Oriental Fantasy in Western Popular Culture
We draw on instantly recognizable songs from opera, film, and pop culture — Miss Saigon, China Girl by David Bowie, and other staples of the Orientalist imagination — to reveal how deeply these fantasies have been woven into mass media. Audiences often feel a flash of nostalgia when the music begins, only to realize, moments later, how their relationship to these songs has shifted over time. This flicker of recognition followed by unease is intentional. By pairing seductive melodies with the bodies and images onstage, we hope to expose the gap between what we think we know and what these cultural artifacts actually say. The soundscape becomes an invitation to reconsider how representations of “Asian-ness” have been absorbed, normalized, and uncritically accepted.
5. Resisting the Model Minority Through Queer Aesthetics
We wanted to create a work that confronts the model minority myth — the pressure on Asian diasporic communities to be quiet, respectful, submissive, compliant. The performers in the work actively confuse this narrative. We are messy, chaotic, irreverent, glamorous, grotesque, joyful, disruptive. We refuse to tidy ourselves up for the comfort of the western gaze. We sit in the tension between stereotypes and authentic lived experience in order to explore the full spectrum of what it means to be perceived as an East Asian body in Western society.
Get tickets to Make Banana Cry here, and check out our upcoming season shows.