REVIEW: This Room Is An Island
02.02.24 Te Pou Theatre, Auckland
Photo Credit: Anna Benháková
This Room Is An Island is an immersive performance work that uses “curated space, movement vocabularies, technologies, and visual influences” to explore the memory of Taiwan’s colonial past. Set from the 1890s to 2008, the work moves through three generations of Taiwanese women living on separate islands, reflecting on the generational effects of war, displacement, colonization, and police-state control.
A significant part of the show is its ability to refract history through multiple viewpoints - depending on whether you decide to be an Imperial Spectator or a Body of the Island, you will experience the show from very different perspectives. The Imperial Spectator experiences the show from a distance in standard theatre seating, whereas the Body of the Island sits on the ground upfront and is interacted with as though part of the show. I will be writing this response from both experiences.
Friday: An Imperial Spectator
The show begins before we are actually seated in the theatre. A pre-show context that grounds us in 1890s Taiwan unravels in the Te Pou foyer. Archival music and soundscapes play as performers weave through audience members. People are excited at this display of performance, pointing and whispering; but there is no lull in sound. It’s loud and people take photos of the various props that performers carry into the space. It feels as though we have been ushered away from the world we came from, and into a living archive - a collage of sound, space, and time that Yin-Chi pieced together from documented images and historic materials.
The sound design, even in this casual opening setting, is still deeply affecting. Music and dialogue merge together within the space - a reference to the assimilation of languages under Japanese occupation. The sound is so all-encompassing that when I step outside for a moment, the silence is disconcerting. This contextual pre-show integrates you into the historic narrative, and it blurs the line between audience and performer. I am reminded that we cannot step away from our generational histories. Whether we spectate or interact, we are a part of these memories.
When a performer starts to undress, the energy in the room changes. Interactive performances are always interesting because the performer and the audience both admit vulnerability - both are at the whim of the other, balancing in a precarious see-saw of unknown intention. Eight performers kneel in the middle of the foyer, stripped down to their underwear. It gets so quiet and I notice people look around - is this real or not? Is this a part of the show? And that seems to be a question Lee continuously poses to us: where does this performance start and where does it end? Perhaps on a much larger scale, where do I start and where do I end? The individual becomes intertwined with collective trauma and communal memory just as we are intertwined with the performance.
Officers dressed in black grant the performers new uniforms, jeering at them as they change in front of us. We are still in the foyer of Te Pou - not yet in the theatre. The air is thick with discomfort and I am struck by the intensity of performing situations of injustice. This is a show, and therefore the rules of the show dictate that I am forced to be complacent; to watch and to remain actionless.
When we are finally seated, I grow aware of my status as Imperial Spectator. We are greeted with a welcoming clap from the performers and the officers do not interact with us. Along the front row, I watch the Bodies of the Island get herded in moments later. Two friends start laughing in the front and a officer stands directly in front of them, staring them down: “what are you laughing at?”. The friend puts his head down but the officer doesn’t move. Neither of them talk again. How the body changes when you are confronted, even if just in performance. I was laughing with my partner just minutes ago, but the officers do not bother us in the Imperial Spectator seats. There is an intense sense of space in This Room Is An Island - rows of seats are left empty for performers and the stage stretches out into nothingness.
Once we are all in, the show, in a traditional sense, begins:
Through a series of tightly orchestrated multimodal narratives, we are thrust into the personal, collective, and literal histories of Taiwan. Using visual projections, dance and sound design, we move through generations and timelines with precision.
The somatic dialogues and bodily tensions of the dancers are phenomenal. They move as though unsure about the tendons between their bones. The colonial effect on Taiwanese identity is so evident in the choreography and there is a loss of agency and self in each movement; it is as if their bodies are re-inhabited by someone else with each scene. A new vocabulary of movement is learned with each colonial shift - Japanese imperial radio calisthenics becomes the Republic of China’s goushu training. Bodies become malleable and memories are erased over and over again, constantly ushering in a new era. Learnt ontologies conflict with each other and by the end of the show, there is a weight in the performer’s bodies. Having been molded and traumatized for so many generations, even to leave the island is to still carry the echoes of these memories with you.
Jeff Chen’s sound design is one of the most affecting and visceral arrangements I have heard. There is never a lull in the soundscape. No awkward pauses or gaps; it is a continuous movement through time and sound. The incorporation of political song never feels out of place, and there is a deliberate destabilizing loudness to a lot of the music. The sonic motif of Deng Yu-Xian’s 望春風 Towards Spring’s Wind is recomposed and integrated with such care. Chen’s sonic curation creates a backdrop of shifting histories and identities, providing Lee a sturdy canvas with which to construct the performance. The sound is the backbone for This Room Is An Island and it allows us to move between time and space fluidly.
I really loved the multimodal experiences of this show as well. The print publication of 島嶼日報 This Room Is An Island News not only reminded me of the Kuomintang Central Daily News (a highly censored propaganda newspaper during the 1950s KMT rule), but it also meant that the show bled into the real world. Theatre is inherently ephemeral - I only take home my memories. The publication forces you to remember, reflecting on the central question of the show: why should we remember? Furthermore, the use of projections to create an almost VR-style journey through Taiwanese streets and homes was brilliant. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the projections and was led into this terrifyingly beautiful dreamscape of past memory and future hope.
This Room Is An Island is not just a performance. It is an exercise in radical empathy and collective remembering. The past is (re-)presented through collaged soundscapes and archival materials, and language is refracted through the body. I love how this show uses every aspect of the stage - sound, space, lighting - to embody the complexity and the largeness of this (personal and national) history. The concept of identity and memory is pulled apart and stitched back together and we bear witness to this painful and “ongoing pursuit of freedom and self-determination”.
As an Imperial Spectator, I felt the largeness of history. I was able to see the stage fully from where I sat and could take in the many elements that happened concurrently. But I couldn’t help but feel I’d missed a crucial part of the performance sitting in my seat and writing notes. So, I booked a second set of tickets for Sunday. This time to be a part of the show; A body of the island.
■
Sunday: Becoming a Body of the Island
Even in the opening pre-show, I keep my eyes open for officers, remembering the two friends yelled at for laughing. I still step back from the front of the crowd when the performers start to undress in the foyer.
Walking into the theatre, I am no longer greeted with a welcome. Instead we are lined up and interrogated. I am pulled aside for failing to correctly answer “where are you from originally?”. I stand by the wall while watching everyone else enter the space, my hands behind my back. An officer comes up to me and stares and even though I know this is a performance, I have this strange thought process of rehearsing my answer in my head. I think to myself, “don’t mention Hong Kong, say you’re from New Zealand. It’s safer that way”. How did a performed threat catapult me into survival mode like this? Evaluating what is safer to say to an actor? In this moment, I knew the experience of this show would be vastly different from when I was an Imperial Spectator. I stop writing any notes in my exercise book at this point in the show too. Everyone at the front sits with their legs crossed like children.
Interactive performances are often a source of fear for me. I don’t enjoy being called up to participate and I hate having to play along with the performer: I know these are actors, I know you aren’t going to actually let me slip on the banana. This Room Is An Island is different. I had to remind myself that these were actors and that I could, feasibly, laugh in the face of one of these officers. But I didn’t. No one did. We kept our heads down and followed orders.
The use of space and blocking was already outstanding to me when I first watched the show, but experiencing it from a totally different perspective really solidified the amount of work Lee and the rest of the team have done. Lee has clearly considered the effect of everything on stage - down to the tiniest point of a shoe. A sound that I could barely hear in the Imperial Spectator seats makes me jump as I sit on the floor as a Body of the Island.
On Friday, I remember watching in awe as the officers started to round everyone at the front up, ordering them onto the stage to follow a calisthenics routine. I was initially struck by the amount of bodies on the stage - watching the space change from uncanny sparseness to chaotically overpopulated impacted me deeply. And from my seats, I could see everything play out in full - audience members trying to follow along with the movements, feeling silly and not quite trying, suddenly growing aware that some people were being pulled away and interrogated to the side, feeling a little worried and really trying now. But when you’re down there, the music is loud and the experience is real. Officers stand close to you, watching your movements and once you see your friends getting dragged off as potential ‘spies’ - a terrifying prospect under 50s Kuomintang rule - you do your best. Performance or not.
As a Body of the Island, I saw faces up close. Beads of sweat and fake smiles. I experienced history - as much as you can - rather than simply seeing it represented. Lee has created a work that balances history with empathy; as Imperial Spectators you see history, and as Bodies of the Island you feel history.
With the recent devaluing of theatre and performance in many academic sectors across Aotearoa, This Room Is An Island demonstrates the importance of this art form, illuminating performance as a space to confront, challenge and remember suppressed or painful histories. This Room Is An Island is performance at its most powerful and most necessary.
■