MIA: Out of Sync
MIA: Out of Sync is an immersive theatre work about an autistic woman’s journey towards self-understanding and acceptance.
I began developing Mia’s story with the producer in 2025, with a particular interest in the experiences of autistic women who receive a diagnosis later in life, as well as those who begin by identifying their own autistic traits before receiving formal recognition. As an autistic woman who was diagnosed later in life myself, many of Mia’s emotions, sensory experiences, and difficulties during the early stages of development drew partly upon my own lived experience.
The project changed considerably over its development. What began closer to the naturalistic mode of writing I usually work in was gradually dismantled and reimagined as an immersive piece centred on sound, space, movement, and audience experience. Co-writer Maryhee Yoon contributed extensively to this later immersive development, helping the work move beyond a conventional dramatic structure and towards something closer to an audio journey through Mia’s perception.
That transformation became one of the most exciting parts of the process for me. A script, even after it has been written, remains only one stage in the life of a theatrical work. Different artists repeatedly interpret, challenge, dismantle, and recreate the text before it finally reaches an audience. MIA: Out of Sync became a particularly vivid example of that process.
Rather than sitting at a distance and watching Mia from an auditorium, audiences wear headphones and physically move through Battersea Arts Centre with her. They follow her voice through corridors, staircases, and hidden corners as sounds, memories, anxieties, and fragments of self-perception gradually accumulate around them. Familiar spaces begin to feel unstable: sound layers over sound, details intensify, and the building itself becomes part of Mia’s sensory world.
Mia has moved from China to London. She loves film and dreams of pursuing a creative future, while simultaneously navigating social pressure, a difficult mother–daughter relationship, migration, adolescence, and the continuing process of understanding herself. Autism is both familiar and unfamiliar to her. She has never truly felt at ease within a neurotypical social world, yet she has also never been given the language, recognition, or guidance through which to understand what autism means for her own life.
The performance does not attempt to present Mia as representative of every autistic woman. It offers one autistic woman’s life, one sensory world, and one process of self-recognition. Audiences encounter Mia as an individual first.
This distinction matters deeply to me. Autism is a disability and a spectrum, and autistic experience cannot be reduced to a single personality type, level of “functioning,” or universal narrative. Understanding autism requires continued listening, research, and attention to the enormous diversity within autistic lives.
At the same time, Mia’s story emerges from a group whose experiences have historically been overlooked: autistic women whose difficulties may remain unrecognised for years, particularly when they learn to adapt themselves to social expectations. Her journey is therefore both intensely personal and connected to a wider history of invisibility.
The final part of the performance takes audiences into the Members’ Library, where projection, sound, spatial design, and live performance transform the room into Mia’s inner world. By this point, the audience has moved physically and sensorially through her day. They have not simply been told what she experiences; they have been invited, briefly and imperfectly, to inhabit the shifting relationship between sound, memory, anxiety, perception, and identity that shapes her world.
Ultimately, MIA: Out of Sync is a story of self-exploration, neurodivergence, migration, and a young woman pursuing her love of film while learning to understand and accept herself.
Production Details
Title:MIA: Out of Sync
Form: Immersive Performance
Festival: Homegrown Festival 2026
Venue: Battersea Arts Centre, London
Performance Dates: 29–30 May 2026
Running Time: Approximately 1 hour
Role: Co-Writer
Language: English
Selected Credits
Producer and Story Concept: Summer Xue
Co-Writers: Cassie Siqi Xue and Maryhee Yoon
Director: Belle Bao
Movement Director: Phoebe-Rae Levene
Associate Director: Melissa Cheng
Co-Creator and Performer: Zixi Li
Set Design: Zidi Wu
Sound Design and Original Music: Mingyu Ding
Visual Dramaturg: Ember Wanbo Li
Video Design: Baihan Liao and Xingyu Dai
Production Page
