Performance Design
Audio-Visual Design
That works with the cast.
I work as a projection designer and AV scenographer for theatre, dance, ballet, circus, and experimental performance. Scenographic design is spatial, temporal, and dramaturgical, it doesn't just support the work from outside, but constitutes the world the performers live in.
I enjoy working as a creative collaborator together with a team to create a compelling story that is not just a technical exercise, so the design can shape the production and not just service it.
“Wendy Yu’s superb video and AV design is totally transportive…”The Guardian — Legends of the Golden Arches, 2025
Legends of the Golden Arches — Performing Lines WA, 2025. Photography: Joe Wyld.
[01] The Five Functions
Projection can serve a production in five distinct ways. Each requires different design thinking and different conversations with the director or choreographer. The work depends entirely on identifying which function is needed , and for which performers, in which form.
Hover a plane
Each hand-drawn plane describes a different utility projection can take on in relation to the same stage space.
[02] Design Studies
Speculative studies seeded by commissioned work already in the portfolio. These are not fictional departures from nowhere, but extensions of problems encountered in theatre and dance production: memory, presence, choreography, and the role projection can take inside live performance.
Projection as Spatial Memory
A study in how projection can hold trace, afterimage, and accumulated presence around a dancer. Instead of illustrating feeling, the environment stores what has already happened in the room, allowing memory to become spatial and architectural.
Seeded by: Four Sites and site-specific dance documentation.
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The Screen as Co-Performer
A projected figure, force, or world-state is treated not as backdrop but as a dramatic partner with agency. The design challenge is to make a screen behave with intention, timing, and consequence, so the audience reads it as presence rather than atmosphere.
Seeded by: Legends of the Golden Arches and its scenographic transformations.
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Digital Language on Stage
A study in how screens, feeds, interfaces, and online social language can sit coherently inside live performance without becoming illustrative cliche. The question is how digital culture can operate as dramaturgy on stage: not decoration, but social pressure, rhythm, and public address.
Seeded by: seven methods of killing kylie jenner and theatre already shaped by internet logic.
View related project →[03] Selected Work
Past performance commissions, with the primary functions demonstrated.
Further performance commissions will be added as completed.
[04] Commission
The most effective theatrical design starts before the design does. When I come onto a production, the first conversation is always dramaturgical. Technical questions follow from it.
What I want to understand from the outset:
- What the production is actually about , not just the premise, but the central question it is asking
- What has already been decided in the design, and what remains open
- Which performers I will be designing for and in what form , a production involving trained dancers requires a different design approach than one involving actors, and one involving circus artists requires a different approach again
I work across plays, contemporary dance, ballet, opera, experimental and physical theatre, and circus. I can be engaged at concept stage, at design development, or for technical realisation of an existing visual direction , though early involvement always produces better work.
I am based in Berlin and available for remote design development and on-site production worldwide.