SEAWEEDS: Michelle Sui’s Live Score Concert at Project Blank
Photo credit Kelly Weaver and Robbie Bui.
When the final reel of a 1922 film disappears, it leaves behind more than a narrative gap. It opens the question: what else could the ending have been?
Michelle Sui’s answer looks nothing like the tragedy history handed down.
Her newest work, Seaweeds — presented as part of Project Blank’s Salty Series program at Bread & Salt — reimagines the lost ending of The Toll of the Sea, the early Technicolor silent film starring Anna May Wong. But “reimagining” understates it. Sui breaks the missing final scene open, building a hybrid work that refuses the borders of cinema, theater, or concert — and questions how stories are received and reshaped over time.
Inside the Room at Bread & Salt
Bread & Salt was already alive with energy when the lights dropped. A flutist, pianist, and cellist began with intentionally disjointed, off-center melodies — not chaotic, but carefully fractured.
On screen, the film moved through a series of sharp tonal shifts: humorous, melancholic, disorienting, occasionally tender. It nodded to The Toll of the Sea through silent-film intertitles, lighting, and framing, but Sui wasn’t reenacting the original. She was interrogating the visual vocabulary it left behind.
The protagonist appeared alternately waiting and wandering between emotional states of being. Time and place are blurred. Audio clips suggested the 1930s or 40s. Visuals gestured toward Paris, Mexico, and places that felt imagined. The effect was deliberate dislocation.
And then the boundary between screen and room collapsed.
At certain moments, Sui sang from the audience. At others, she fell deliberately silent. During a dancing sequence in the film, she rose and mirrored the movements in real time — collapsing spectatorship into something closer to a relationship.
The musicians, too, became part of this negotiation. During a tap-dance scene onscreen, the cellist lifted a pair of tap shoes and created the missing sound live, granting sonic presence to something the original film could only imply.
Where the Film Ends, Sui Begins
To understand Seaweeds, you have to return briefly to The Toll of the Sea.
Its ending (in the restored version) is a tragedy: Anna May Wong’s character, abandoned by the man she loves after giving up their child, walks into the ocean and dies.
Sui is not interested in repeating that.
In our interview, she told me:
“It’s a sad, tragic story where the Asian American protagonist throws herself into the sea and commits suicide in service to this man… We’ve seen that story many times before. I wanted to see where we could go if the ending wasn’t based in trauma.”
Instead of recreating the lost ending, Sui uses it as a departure point. Her protagonist doesn’t die; they move, search, look, wander, respond, shift — refusing the inevitability of the original conclusion.
Courtesy of the Artist
An Ending That Refuses to Settle
If Seaweeds were only a commentary on a missing reel, it would already be compelling. But the work operates on a deeper register of speculative care.
Sui focuses on what the ending of The Toll of the Sea foreclosed. Anna May Wong’s character walking into the ocean has become a familiar image, long associated with tragedy and aestheticized finality, echoing Madame Butterfly and countless narratives where Asian women exist primarily as tragic symbols. Sui uses that familiarity as a starting point.
“As an Asian American artist, we have her to look up to as an icon,” Sui said. “But at the time when she was making her work, she was really frustrated with the roles she had to play. I’m more interested in opening up some alternate realities — what if she had the opportunity to play roles she really wanted?”
“What if a cast of actors were trying to recreate the final scene?” she asked. “Where could they travel? What could it look like if the ending wasn’t based in trauma, or at the site of Asian or female violence?”
That question animates every movement in Seaweeds. Rather than offering a new conclusion, the work lingers in motion: waiting, wandering, searching without arrival. Locations blur. Time slips. The refusal of resolution becomes the point.
In a moment when attention is often partial, one eye on the work, the other on a phone, Seaweeds insists on full presence, without the safety net of distance.
That insistence extends beyond the screen. The performance asks the audience to remain attentive to subtle shifts in sound, movement, and silence, resisting passive spectatorship. Proximity replaces detachment; watching becomes a form of participation.
This closeness carries risk. When I asked Sui how she thinks about vulnerability, she paused before answering.
“My work is really about being present with the audience,” she said. “It’s not easy. You have to be in your body, willing to improvise and go off script if the moment needs it.”
Although the score is structured, moments stretch or contract in response to the room.
Seaweeds lives in that liminal space—between archive and imagination, structure and improvisation—asking what it might look like to remain visible without knowing how the story ends.
In Conversation with Michelle Sui
Seaweeds is not finished. When we spoke over Zoom, Sui described the performance as one of the first iterations — the beginning of a work still in motion.
“I’m really happy to have done that show,” she said. “I think I’m still processing it. That was one of the first rounds of workshopping the music.”
The 30-minute video shown at Bread & Salt is one iteration within a longer trajectory. More videos are planned, alongside an expanded score.
On why she chose The Toll of the Sea:
Sui’s interest in The Toll of the Sea is both technical and political. Seaweeds is her second project inspired by Anna May Wong; an earlier work in Los Angeles explored similar questions of legacy, iconography, and constraint.
“As a filmmaker, I find the source material very interesting,” Sui explained. “It was the first two-strip Technicolor film. And the last reel was lost and then restored with this new depiction of the ending. I found that really interesting in terms of the archive — what does it mean if we can just come in and keep rewriting the ending to these stories? Who gets to rewrite these endings?”
That curiosity extends beyond the film itself. Wong’s renewed visibility — on the U.S. quarter, in retrospectives and institutional reevaluations — has brought renewed attention to both her influence and the limitations placed on her career.
“There’s this resurgence of Anna May Wong now,” Sui said. “And I’m interested in what things could have been, in a speculative way, as an homage to her adventurous spirit.”
Photo credit Kelly Weaver and Robbie Bui.
Working in the Gaps
Throughout our conversation, Sui kept returning to “the gaps” — the spaces within the film that interested her more than its plot.
The project began with footage shot by a pond in New York, a location that echoed the original film’s atmosphere. She developed a movement score with her actor that then traveled into other locations. Layers accumulated: place, movement, image, then music.
“It’s not really about adapting the story beat by beat,” she told me. “It’s about whatever in the film — the colors, the gaps, the things that are missing — sparks something. That’s where the work starts.”
The Role of the Body
Given how many mediums she works in, I asked how she decides what belongs where. For Sui, there is no hard separation between music and movement.
“My approach to music-making always comes from the body,” she said.
She teaches voice through physical warm-ups and embodied techniques, and that carries into her performance work. There is a score, but there is also improvisation, freedom, and a willingness to redirect the energy of the room.
It’s why she sings from the audience, slipping between observer and protagonist, while the musicians sometimes feel activated and suspended in real time.
What She Hopes Audiences Carry
Sui hesitated before answering.
“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “Everyone will have their own reaction. But I hope it opens up space for curiosity—for imagining things differently.”
Then she added:
“It’s never just another show. Everyone took care to make this work — my team, the venue, everyone in the room. We could have all been somewhere else, on our phones, scrolling. But we weren’t. We were together. That’s important to me.”
A Note to Young Artists
Before we ended, I asked what she would tell someone trying to enter this field.
Her answer was simple:
“Do it. Even if it’s hard. And don’t spend a lot of time trying to explain yourself to people. If your art doesn’t fit neatly into a brand or a marketable box — good. Art isn’t a commercial. Listen to your instincts. Don’t be discouraged when people tell you that you don’t fit.”
Seaweeds in the Context of Project Blank
Project Blank has become one of San Diego’s most consistent homes for experimental performance — work that resists easy classification and refuses to explain itself away.
It’s a fitting home for a piece built on re-entering the archive, loosening its edges, and asking who gets to rewrite what once seemed fixed.
Seaweeds leaves film history and representation unsettled, refusing the comfort of resolution in favor of something more demanding and more generous. It invites audiences to sit inside ambiguity instead of rushing toward closure. In doing so, it honors Anna May Wong by imagining a horizon she was never allowed to approach.
Project Blank’s season continues through May 2026. If Seaweeds is any indication, the most compelling work ahead may not be the stories we already know — but the ones we finally dare to rewrite.
Credits & Artist Links
Thank you Michelle Sui for supporting the making of this article
IG @michelle.sui
Photo credit Kelly Weaver, Robbie Bui and Reb Rich.
Seaweeds (2025)
A live score
Performed by Leanna Keith (flute), Sofia Leal (double bass), Lorraine Oliveira (keys), and Michelle Sui (voice) with the blue choir: Michelle Lou, Sivan Silver-Swartz, and Jeremy Wei-Rosenstock
L’heure bleue
Starring Sherwood Chen, Nazlı Dinçel, Carissa Matsushima, Christina Ree, Jeanne Tara and Michelle Sui
Written, Produced, and Directed by Michelle Sui
Director of Photography: Alex Takats
Paris Unit: Céline Brunko
Tijuana/San Diego Unit: Lev Kalman
Edited by Jorge Ravelo & Lev Kalman
Production Assistants: Jafet Arzate, Sarah Bogner, Dana Del Castillo, Peter Moua, Cléo Xia
Developed in residency at Cité internationale des arts in Paris, France. Filmed on location in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York - Paris, France - Tijuana, Mexico - San Diego, California.
Special thanks to Julienne Mackey