After selling out internationally at the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Sid Zhang ’25 and third-year Ph.D. student Connor Lifson brought their object-based performance “Book of Dew” to Theater of Yugen at NOHspace in downtown San Francisco. “Book of Dew” showed from Jan. 9-11, lasting 45 minutes, with ticket prices ranging from $0-$20.
Zhang and Lifson first met in an introductory performance-making course at Stanford, connecting over their shared passion for the creative arts and collaborating with each other on class projects.
Zhang began as a poet in childhood, before discovering her passion for the performing arts at Stanford. Lifson has been making movies since middle school, though midway through his undergrad he decided to switch over to theater and performance.
Lifson hasn’t looked back since. “[Zhang] pitched me this idea [for “Book of Dew”], and I kind of jumped on it,” Lifson said.
When Zhang brought the idea to Lifson in the spring of 2024, Lifson was especially drawn to it being an object-based performance, meaning it uses objects to create narrative and emotional expression through abstract puppetry.
“Most of the time in theater, we’re trained to work from story,” Lifson said, “but our process really was driven by images and by materials… We’d come in the room and bring in a bunch of stuff and see what we could make out of it.”
The play is centered through non-linear, visually immersive performances. The characters of Spider and Dew drive the story through puppetry rather than traditional acting. Spider loves the Dew and wants to keep its beauty for herself, trapping the moon so dawn can never break, while the Dew only wants to feel the warmth of the sun and tries to persuade Spider to let the moon go free. Zhang and Lifson used fragmented storytelling and abstracted moments, exploring contemporary folklore in a way typically unusual for the Festival.
Part of their process was to loop in musician Sebastian Hochman ’26, who had worked with both Lifson and Zhang in the past. Hochman has been playing piano for 16 years and created the musical score for “Book of Dew.”
“I was in Mexico City at the time, writing an album, and I just had all my recording equipment with me,” Hochman said. “I just wrote individual pieces of music, and then that inspired certain sections of the play that they created.”
The first showing was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the world’s largest arts festival, known for diverse, amazing performances across theater, comedy and dance every August, drawing audiences from around the world.
According to Zhang, setting up for the Fringe was challenging because they didn’t have a full show mapped out at the time.
“It was very exciting and kind of a stressful process doing all the applications,” Lifson said. They sent out emails to seven different venues, getting four offers. “I remember Sid saying, ‘if we don’t do it now, when are we going to do this?’ It was definitely a little bit of a leap of faith.”
Because Zhang and Lifson were busy with school and other projects, work on the play was stalled until mid-June, with the actual show made in five weeks.
The first time they actually ran through the entire show was in front of an audience for the first preview.
“I look back on it as a kind of amazing luxury of being able to just fully dive into this process, and throw ourselves into it,” Lifson said. “I found it very freeing but simultaneously intimidating.”
Hochman pieced the entire score together through descriptions and time stamps without ever seeing the show in person until the Fringe.
“[The first time I saw it], it was just like woah,” Hochman said. “This is just something I was doing in my room, and now it’s being seen by hundreds of people.”
“Book of Dew” sold out at The Fringe, with Lifson mentioning how one viewer called the sensory experience “a visual massage.” Months later, both Zhang and Lifson are excited to return and share it with a U.S. audience.
“I’m very curious about US-based audiences’ [reactions],” Lifson said, “who generally are more geared towards story and plot, rather than more abstract image-based performances.”
Zhang noted how the support of Stanford’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) department helped during the strenuous process, generating ideas in a short amount of time.
While there are no fixed plans for the show’s future, Lifson and Zhang hinted at the possibility of touring, with agencies showing interest. They aim to develop something different in their next show, “Tree of Dreams,” set to run at the San Francisco International Arts Festival in May.
“We want to take what really works and what we loved, but continue to expand to think differently,” Lifson said. “Otherwise, it’s like, why am I making art at all?”