Grace Chang Brings Her Original Magic Window to Lincoln Center

On July 22, 2026, Grace Chang took her original work Magic Window to the stage of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center in New York. The show was part of Theater Storytime, a program of Chinese Arts Week at the Summer for the City festival, and played twice that day, at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Admission was free, each performance ran about 50 minutes, and Lincoln Center presented it in collaboration with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Grace Chang is the daughter of xiangsheng grand master Chang Baoting, and this was the second time she had been invited to appear at Lincoln Center.

At center stage stood an old window, a corner of her childhood home rebuilt from memory. From behind it, life-size puppets appeared one at a time: Jin Jin, the little dragon from her picture book, impatient to find out what kind of animal he is, and her father, Chang Baoting, as a boy. She voiced both puppets through ventriloquism, playing several roles herself. Jin Jin spat out egg after egg; she produced more from empty hands, invited children onstage to crack them open and see whether they were real, and finally conjured an ostrich egg. “Little Baoting” practiced Chinese tongue twisters and imitated animal calls.

Magic is a skill she has trained in since childhood. When the story reached her early training, two large red flowers slowly opened in her palms; when they closed, she had changed back into her adult self. The “father” guided “little Ruisi” hand over hand as she learned to draw from her imagination. Before the end, colored paper butterflies flew out over the seats, and children jumped up to chase them. Afterward, many in the audience stayed to have books signed and to take photos with her.

Magic Window draws on her children’s book Jin Jin the Dragon and on her early years learning her craft, putting magic, puppetry and ventriloquism into a single story about several generations of a Chinese artistic family. She told a Xinhua News Agency reporter that the piece recreates a corner of her family home from those years, and that through an old window she hoped to lead the audience into the world of her childhood.

For her, the performance was also something of a homecoming. She had earlier spoken at a Lincoln Center symposium on the career of xiangsheng grand master Chang Baoting, and the Chang family’s xiangsheng archive is now held on the same campus, at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Her father’s art is kept in the archive; his daughter brought the family’s memories to the stage for the next generation. She said she would keep promoting cultural exchange between China and other countries in her father’s footsteps, so that more works rooted in Chinese culture can reach audiences around the world.