Make It Fit — A Life Script continues my ongoing performance series, following Make It Fit — A Speech Act, which intertwined spoken word, live instrumentation, and choreography to explore the performativity of language in public speaking; and Make It Fit — Performing in the Form of a Thesis, which turned the thesis-writing process into performance—transforming academic constraint into artistic intervention.

This iteration begins with self and script.
Self as method: an anatomy of lived experience and memory that maps a life script – patterns carved by repetition, reward, and rehearsal. From there, it develops into a performance script that constructs an ordinary yet contrived situation in which familiar roles tug for control: the director grips the text; the translator chases meaning; the scenographer polishes the scene; the cinematographer frames a parallel story; and the self—caught between script and surprise, sound and sense, story and song, speech and silence—tries to make it fit.

Different I’s become sites of translation, creating a live negotiation between language, performance and power. The work drifts between live settings—reality show, memory reenactment, public address,collective reading, artist talk, to explore how language performs us and how we perform through language; how societal scripts are internalized, disrupted, and re-enacted; and how they shape authority, identity, and the chorus we call consensus.

Make It Fit — A Life Script seeks to create a poetic yet critical space where vulnerability, absurdity, sincerity, and resistance coexist. Here, life scripts are not simply reenacted but actively questioned, disrupted, and reimagined. The vitality of Make It Fit lies in spiraling and regenerating.

Concept, direction, text: Tingyi Jiang

Performance: Tingyi Jiang, Lila Maria de Coninck, Lawrence McGuire, Jinglei Zhang, Maarten Keus

Sound & Vocal Design: Lawrence McGuire

Performative Installation: Aldo Brinkhoff

Live Video: Jinglei Zhang

Scenography: Maarten Keus

Costumes: Vincent Wong

Music Composition: Andrzej Konieczny

Production: Anna Møller

Dramaturgy: Eva Lou

Visual Identity: Bo Jiang

Poster Photography: Andrea Bonderup

This project is realized with the support of Stroom Den Haag and Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.

Artist bio

Tingyi Jiang is an artist and performer based in The Hague. She uses performance as a tool to engage with the world through her practice, which she calls situation-specific performance. By claiming the ‘situation’ as a stage, appropriating ‘rules’ as scores, and using ‘action’ as material, she transforms implicit social norms into performative acts—blending reality and fiction to explore themes of identity, memory, language, and authority.

At the heart of her work is the concept of ‘fitting’—both as a creative method and a critical lens. This inquiry led to her ongoing series Make It Fit (initiated in 2021), which examines how both individuals and structures of authority navigate to systems through the condition of ‘fit.’ The series spans a range of formats, including theater, interventions, publications, participatory events, performative texts and sound-based works.

Tingyi’s methodology centers on performative scores that offer structure while leaving room for contingency and improvisation. Guided by conceptual rules, the performer’s embodied, responsive presence engages in a live negotiation with the situation.