About Creation
Age of Audience: 12+
Number of Performers: 5-6 persons
Number of tour member: 10-11 persons
Stage Size: 15m(W) x 10m(D) x 8m(H)
Special Made for: Can be adjusted to suit most spaces.
In Atayal and Truku indigenous tradition, weaving is carried out by female elders of the family. One inspiration for this work comes from an exchange between choreographer Watan Tusi and a female Atayal elder from the Wulai tribe, who expressed a reluctance to teach males how to weave. Tusi, who is male, replied, “So I went to the moon and started weaving.” The setting for this work is conceived as the circle of life, with time as longitude and space as cross- weaving threads on a loom. A female elder usually weaves at night, when the sun’s rays illuminate the surface of the moon. In the context of this performance, weaving connects us to a modern mythology, and reveals the unknown.
About
Founded by Watan Tusi in 2012, Tai Body Theatre seeks new possibilities for Taiwanese indigenous culture through movement and the body’s connection to nature. Tai means “look” or “see” in the language of the Truku, an indigenous group from eastern Taiwan. The group is hailed for its innovative aesthetic approach, which includes an adaptation of indigenous percussion rhythms for choreography, based on field studies by Tusi that yielded a new type of transcriptions he calls “foot scripts.” Tai Body Theatre has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Jogja International Performance Art Festival in Indonesia.
Weaving is a tradition practiced by women of the Taroko tribe. Why have you chosen to explore this craft from the perspective of men?
Everyone is always searching for something. Once you’ve found that thing, you start to look for something else. Even what you found in the past will eventually disappear, and you will search for it again — it’s all part of a repetitive cycle. I enjoy weaving in our rehearsal space, and looking into the mirror and asking: who is this man weaving? Is it another soul that belongs to me? I don’t know this person, but he seems familiar. Is this the soul I’ve been searching for? Is it part of my spiritual self?.
What role do indigenous traditions play in your creations? Or, as a creator, how do you view these traditions?
On stage, we can perform our traditional dances and songs, but when we move away from their original form, I think of these questions: What meaning does tradition have for us? If we take the body as a symbolic system for understanding culture, then the body becomes a metaphor for society as a whole. How is society reflected in the body? How do we understand the changes of the body in traditional, contemporary and virtual settings? With this interaction, how do I blend these changes with traditional culture?
Event
TOUR INFORMATION
Second Body
Performance
19-20 January 2023
Aix-en-Provence, France
Ballet Preljocaj-Pavillon Noir
