We are inviting women from around the world to contribute a one-sentence voice or video recording for Nüshu: Written for Her, on Her, by Her—a sound-based live performance and installation premiering at the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Inspired by Nüshu, the ancient script created by Chinese women to communicate in secrecy, this project weaves personal memory, language, and collective expressions of womanhood into a powerful sonic landscape of remembrance and resilience.

Through these collected voice recordings, the piece explores how memory, grief, care, and identity are carried across generations—particularly in the lives of women.

We welcome contributions from all individuals who identify as women, including trans women and nonbinary people with lived experience of womanhood. All languages and dialects are welcome.

These recordings will form the core of a 12-day sound installation accompanying live performance, body calligraphy, and movement.

Your sentence might be a message to a woman in your life, a personal truth, a memory, or a phrase that speaks to your experience of being a woman.

Whether whispered, sung, or spoken in silence, your voice will become part of a living archive—written into wind, ink, and performance.

Contributors selected for inclusion will receive a handwritten thank-you letter, a Nüshu-inspired artist gift, and a complimentary ticket to the live show.

Gifts can be collected in person at the venue during the 12-day Edinburgh Fringe run. If you are unable to attend in person, we are happy to post your gift and letter to you after the performance.

Let your voice join this international act of remembering, a sentence that connects, honours, and resists forgetting.

About the Artist and the Show

Jiayi Chen is a Chinese-born, UK-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and founder of The Great Her collective, which amplifies East Asian and marginalised women’s voices through contemporary art, performance, and cultural storytelling. Her work centres on memory, language, and intergenerational trauma, often drawing from her own family history and her cultural roots in southern China.

Jiayi’s signature practice explores Nüshu—the world’s only known writing system created by and for women in Jiangyong, Hunan. Through live body calligraphy, sound, movement, and ritualistic performance, she transforms forgotten scripts into spaces of remembrance and resistance.

Her upcoming production, Nüshu: Written for Her, on Her, by Her, will premiere at the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It is a 12-day live performance combining contemporary dance, live body writing, projected visuals, and a multilingual sound installation. The show reflects on personal and collective grief, feminine resilience, and the hidden languages women have used to survive.

This sound call is a key part of the show. The collected one-sentence voice messages from women around the world will be woven into the performance’s soundscape—creating a chorus of diverse female voices that echo across time and space. The project honours Jiayi’s late grandmother, who lived with Alzheimer’s, and speaks to all the silenced stories passed from woman to woman.

Jiayi’s work has been showcased internationally, and her previous Fringe production, Weaving Me, Weaving Mum, was awarded Best Production Runner-Up at the 2024 Asian Arts Awards, and featured in the Fringe’s Accessibility, Diversity and Inclusion programme. She is also the first Chinese woman to win the Creative Edinburgh Award in its 12-year history.

This is a unique opportunity to be part of an award-winning artist’s international show, and have your voice heard on stage—across borders, across generations.