Ping-Pong Meets Dance in Cherrie Yu's Daily Diversions

By Daniel Okafor

Cherrie Yu's Daily Diversions runs at Abrons Arts Center's Playhouse Theater on New York's Lower East Side November 12–14, capping her 2025–26 Performance AIRspace Residency there. The piece puts eight intergenerational ping-pong players and dancers in the same room. On a sunny October afternoon, eight pairs of community players competed in a tournament with dancers officiating.

The theater was busy with the sounds of the piece itself. Bouncing balls, measured footfalls, and the occasional exclamation of victory or frustration filled the blackbox space, where lanky kids, sharp-eyed young adults, and seasoned elders played alongside one another. Each brought a movement signature — a flourish on the serve, a particular tension in the posture while tracking the ball.

Where did the idea come from?

Yu, 31, was born and raised in Xi'an, China, and played ping-pong as a child. She came to dance and performance in her 20s while earning her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "I was interested in the intersection or dialogue between bodies with very different physical knowledge and history," she said of her early work.

A few years ago she returned to the game after encountering a player at a public table in Herald Square. "I would have table tennis practice early in the morning and then take the train to Cunningham class right after," she said. "So in the very beginning those two practices and vocabularies started to have an interaction."

How did the work develop?

Yu began making Daily Diversions in 2023 at the invitation of a Chinatown gallery. The first version ran 10 minutes and was performed by Yu and three Chinatown-based seniors she had been playing with. "The performance wasn't the end," she said. "The performance was the practice — we had to keep practicing the performance."

The following year she expanded into an "open rehearsal" format, bringing dancers she met in city dance classes together with players from parks and recreation centers. The common thread was curiosity. "People were doing two physical practices within the same room, side by side, and that coexistence started to change the two practices," Yu said. The Abrons residency let her house both the performance and the tournament in a proscenium theater.

What holds the piece together?

Set designer Matt Schalzi's modular, wheeled tables, assembled and reconfigured continually throughout the performance, have been essential from the outset. "The table is a really important performer in the piece," Yu said. "I encourage the players to think of it less like a ping-pong table and more like a person, to relate to it through their own bodies."

New to the work is a sound installation by Johann Diedrick and Isaac Silbers, which amplifies and composes the live sounds to give audiences an aural and spatial sense of the two languages conversing. Yu has long been interested in the sound of the game. "I want people to think that they're making music instead of playing ping-pong," she said.

The eight performers, aged 14 to 66, navigate choreographed passages and score-based structures (improvisational frameworks with set rules) drawn from movement vocabularies across both practices. The work unfolds much like a game, in Yu's telling: "You always play to a certain point, but whatever happens between those points is always an element of chance."

What comes next?

Yu describes the process as open-ended. "It felt less like I was developing the work for myself," she said, "and more for the work to grow on its own through the process of people coming into it."

The November run closes this iteration. Whether the practice continues — and Daily Diversions was built on practice, not premiere nights — will depend on who else picks up a paddle.