Learning in Motion: Xuan Zhao Is Rewriting the Rules of Improv, Language, and Connection

As the late afternoon light thinned into evening in a rehearsal room somewhere between Midtown and downtown Manhattan, Xuan Zhao stood barefoot, testing the weight of a story before letting it speak. A chair sat a few feet away, unoccupied but charged, waiting to become a partner. Somewhere beyond the walls, the city moved at its familiar, unforgiving speed of trains, footsteps, and voices overlapping in a constant improvisation of their own. Inside the room, Zhao paused, inhaled, and began again. This moment, quiet and unglamorous, carries the signature of her work: attention sharpened by motion, play disciplined into purpose, and the belief that something alive can happen if you trust the room enough to meet it honestly.

Zhao is not an artist who arrived through a straight line. Her practice, which spans comedy, musical improv, storytelling, movement, and applied pedagogy, resists the premise that a single discipline could ever contain her voice. She speaks about creativity less as a ladder than as a geography, shaped by climates and crossings. California, where she first developed as an artist, opened her. New York, where she now builds her most ambitious work, focused her. The difference is not cosmetic. It lives in the nervous system.

“In California, there’s ocean air, space,” she reflects. “People say hi on the street. Things move slower.” New York, by contrast, compresses everything: bodies, sound, ambition, time. “California opened me; New York focused me.” The move east for graduate school was not an erasure of what came before, but an intensification, a sharpening of instincts already present, now asked to operate under pressure.

What unites Zhao’s training of on-camera acting, musical improv, advanced voicework, dance, and storytelling is not a recognizable aesthetic, but a posture toward creation. Again and again, she returns to the same impulse: the desire to be inside the mechanism, not observing it from a distance. “I’ve always enjoyed the creator’s seat more than the spectator’s,” she says. Each new form presented itself not as a category to master, but as a question to test: what happens when a voice is pushed through rhythm, language, emotion, and risk?

That curiosity produced a practice that lives in overlap. Zhao did not discover comedy, improv, or storytelling as discrete steps; they arrived as a chain reaction, each door opening into the next. Only later, when asked to explain her work in a single sentence, did she realize that neat labels arrived too late to contain it. Her creative home was already elsewhere; in the spaces between.

Identity, in Zhao’s telling, is not a slogan but a lived condition of rooms entered and rooms noticed. As one of the few, and often the only, Chinese, Asian, or international artist in many of her training environments, she became attuned to how silence can erase presence. At first, it registered simply as a fact. Over time, it revealed its stakes. “If a conversation touches on experiences I come from,” she explains, “and silence would mean that voice disappears, then I feel a responsibility to speak.” This was not the burden of representation, but a choice: to build work where individuality and community overlap, rather than pretending they do not.

Improv, often misunderstood as chaos, becomes in Zhao’s hands something closer to architecture. She describes her philosophy as “play with purpose,” a structure that draws from both Eastern and Western assumptions about spontaneity. The Chinese word 真诚 sits at the center of this thinking: 真 meaning truth, 诚 meaning honesty. Together, they describe a way of being grounded and open at once. In musical improv, Zhao leans into honesty in the moment, keeping play tethered to something real. In narrative storytelling, she seeks truth, resisting performance habits in favor of clarity. The result is not fragmentation, but coherence: the same principle expressed across different modes.

This grounding is visible not only in performance, but in pedagogy, where Zhao’s most field-shifting work is currently unfolding. An accidental moment during a Chinese improv workshop reframed what she thought was possible. A non-Chinese-speaking observer, sitting idly through the session, walked out repeating Mandarin words with accurate pronunciation and correct tones. For Zhao, who had formal experience as a teaching assistant in East Asian Studies, the moment was disruptive. Tone acquisition in Chinese is famously difficult, time-intensive, and expensive. That someone could absorb it through embodied play challenged foundational assumptions about how language is learned.

Rather than evangelize the discovery, Zhao followed it quietly into research, testing, and iteration. She began developing workshops that use theatrical improvisation to teach Chinese to English speakers, not as spectacle, but as method. Skepticism has been minimal, in part because she builds with the curious rather than the resistant. “No method will satisfy everyone,” she says. “I focus on building evidence through practice and letting results speak.”

The results are often visible within an hour. Participants arrive carrying the belief that Chinese is impossibly hard. This is a myth reinforced by pop culture portrayals of “high-IQ” characters speaking it fluently. By the end of a session, fear gives way to astonishment as they realize they can, in fact, produce tonal pronunciation. What shifts is not only skill, but belief. Learning, reframed as play, becomes accessible. The myth cracks.

Zhao refuses to adjudicate whether this work is educational or artistic. Categories, again, feel beside the point. “Learning is about results,” she says. “You can reach an educational outcome through an artistic process.” What matters is resonance, whether something actually happens in the body, the voice, the room.

That same attention to resonance drives her current performance work, including an upcoming full-length solo show that blends narrative, comedy, and movement-based storytelling. The risk, she says, is attention. Sustaining focus alone, over time, requires a different kind of precision. Her solution echoes her pedagogy: attention must be co-created. Stories live in motion. A ladder becomes a landscape. A chair becomes an anchor. At times, she steps into the audience, breaking the frame entirely. Each section introduces a new way of watching, inviting the audience to continually reorient rather than passively consume.

What audiences may never guess is how much trust undergirds this risk. Right before stepping onstage, Zhao assumes the audience already loves her. It is not bravado, but strategy, and a way to begin from connection instead of fear. “It lets me take risks and play honestly,” she explains. Trust, here, is not naive; it is the ground that makes spontaneity possible.

Behind the joy-forward ethos lies quieter labor. Zhao is developing workshops to help emerging artists integrate creativity with administration, challenging the myth that the “business side” can be outsourced without consequence. “If you don’t understand how to articulate your work,” she notes, “how will someone else advocate for you?” Building administrative fluency, in her view, is not a distraction from art, but what allows it to endure.

Across rehearsal rooms, classrooms, and collaborative spaces, Zhao occasionally encounters moments where she must advocate for her comedic or narrative vision, particularly when subtle stereotypes surface. These moments rarely erupt into conflict; instead, they open conversations. Again, the pattern holds: responsibility without spectacle, intervention without erasure.

When asked about legacy, Zhao hesitates, not from lack of vision, but from a sense that the work is still unfolding. Still, she names three hopes. First, to establish an Improvisational Play Curriculum grounded in embodied play, where language grows through co-created meaning. Second, to see performing arts treated as a spectrum rather than siloed disciplines. And third, to redefine cross-cultural exchange. This is less about correctness and more about collaborative creation.

Taken together, Zhao’s current projects: her applied improv pedagogy, her solo performance work, and her mentorship of emerging artists, form a coherent proposition: that joy can be rigorous, play can be precise, and learning can happen in motion. She is not asking audiences or students to abandon structure, but to encounter it differently; from the inside.

As evening deepens in the rehearsal room, Zhao resets the space once more. The city continues its relentless improvisation beyond the walls. Inside, she listens to the room, to her body, and to the spark that first drew her here. The work is not finished, but it is unmistakably alive.