The Mobile Reality Theatre “Here Whilst
We Walk”
Presenter: Pleasure Ensemble Theatre
Company
Time:
15:30, December 15, 2012
Place:
Digital Art Center, Taipei (as a point of departure)
Written by Hung-Hung (Hung-ya Yen)
In
the past few years, the boundary between performances, happenings, environmental
theatre, and reality theater has been more and more blurred. Artists’ action and
the theatre practitioners’ audience involvement have come into the same realm.
It’s already difficult to use the term “cross-discipline” to cover it all let
alone the term itself bears an egoism connotation. We can say that it’s already
a common acknowledgement for many artists that they want to create art for
artists and audience to share together an unduplicable experience of a specific
time and space.
Here Whilst We
Walk is led by Brazilian artist Gustavo Ciríaco and Austrian dancer Andrea
Sonnberger. There were 12 participants in the walk I joined. We were surrounded
by a wide white elastic and we walked as a whole in different parts of Shihlin
District for one hour. The rule is no talking and no photographing during the
walk. The group was like an amoeba that changed its shape from time to time
when it walked through big roads, parks, small alleys, bridges, and empty
spaces.
Sometimes
the two artists stopped the participants and let them watch the passing cars
and pedestrian from a narrow gap between two walls of an alley. It was like watching a long-taken shot in a film: each different character got on stage and
passed by, including a woman in a couple always re-arranging her hair while
walking, a man who seemed mentally disordered waving his arm to himself, etc.
Sometimes, the two artists would step out of the elastic circle and went
standing hand-in-hand in front of a small house where there were well-growing
flowers and plants and hanging laundry in the balcony; all together they formed
a picture of happy well-being. Sometimes they let the participants stay at a
L-shaped street corner to watch them separate and walk away from each other
without turning back. Sometimes, the group simply stopped on a bridge to look
at the dirty trench, or squatted in a park looking up at the trees and the sky.
There were two moments that the artists used the elastic to entangle everybody tightly to
make us, strangers among ourselves, get close to each other. At last, the artists set free
all the participants on a empty spacious ground, gave away kites written with
words of WE, WERE, and HERE, and let everybody run to fly kites.
What
is different from the general performance art is that the participants in these
mobile scenes were at the same time audience and performers. This strange group
attracted people’s attention and questioning; the group was like a temporary
mobile sculpture and became a hetero existence in life. (Some comments from a
passer-by on streets: “they’re making a boat. See? That’s the head of the boat
and that’s the tail.”) The group even caused the governor of the neighborhood
uneasy and therefore called the police to intervene and to question; perhaps
the governor thought the group was an evil religious gathering. For the
participants, the tour was like a sightseeing trip but because of the rules of
keeping silent, we were not able to talk and gossip with our friends like we
would usually do when traveling. Instead, we were given the chance to breathe
with eyes and ears open. With calm new perspective, we experienced the crooked and
solitary spaces on the border of a city and also the little reality theatre
either devised or happening spontaneously.
The
promotional flyer mentions that the program Here Whilst We Walk has been
invited to many different cities to perform. It’s hard to say it’s an artwork; in
fact it’s more like a frame of the landscape. With the changing of the characteristics
of each different city and each different participant, the theatre inside the
frame changes. Just like flying kites. It means so much different with regard
to the effect and the meaning whether the kites are played on an empty ground
between old buildings, or by the seaside, or in a big green park. It’s also
like a classical play changing its appearance when presented by different
performers; only now, the creative new performer is this city and every citizen
who lives and walks in it.
