The Little Toe V3.0 and Seahigh, two Shekou-specific performances with opposing ideas
文︰李博文 | 上載日期︰2024年12月12日 | 文章類別︰藝術節即時評論

 

主辦︰招商蛇口演藝互聯
日期︰2024/10/26-27
城市︰深圳 »
藝術節︰蛇口戲劇節2024 »
藝術類別︰戲劇其他 »

Shekou Theatre Festival 2024 starts strong at the end of October. Two new experimental site-specific performances, The Physical Guerrillas’ The Little Toe V3.0 ("Little Toe") and Plain Studio’s Seahigh, are staged at peculiar locations at Shekou, the small southern tip of Shenzhen, a city of Guangdong Province of China. The sites of both performances are adjacent to one another in an area undergoing extensive urban renewal and real estate development. Audiencesnot only can enjoy theatrical performances but also can have atypical encounters with the rarely visited urban space.

 

The author attended both renditions in a single day, beginning with Little Toe mid-afternoon and concluding with Seahigh at night. In this consecutive watching, the author noted that both works share much commonalities. They are both striving to expand the boundaries of their performance genre; they are attempting to forge a connection between their works and the performing site. However, Little Toe achieves them via specificity while Seahigh approaches them with generalisation. A contrasting viewing experience is formed.

 

Little Toe is a uniquely interesting physical movement piece that utilises its performing environment to the fullest. As hinted by its name, this is the third time The Physical Guerrillas is performing on this peculiar topic - the little toe, also known as the pinky toe, the smallest toe on a human's foot. The piece attracts the audience’s attention to this often forgotten body part, probes its relationship with the body and sparks the audience’s reflection on the affinity between individual and society. Unlike their first and second productions in 2022 and 2023, the group takes the work out of the theatre and presents it on an inconspicuous dirt road alley. Deducting from online past production photos, some segments of the past productions are reworked to accommodate this unconventional performing site while some segments are created from scratch. The artistic team's commitment to specifically devise a performance for the dirt road alley makes the work unforgettable.

 

Picking this dirt road alley is surely a brilliant creative decision by Li Ning, the director. Our pinky toe and the alley share a common trait - their existence is essential but is often forgotten. Our pinky toe is crucial for our balance during standing and walking, yet we pay little attention to it; the dirt road alley, parallel to the neighbouring motorway bridge, is a shortcut between the metro station and the revitalised glass factory but the alley is not labelled on the map. In his performance, Li reminds the audience of the existence of the pinky toe and the dirt road alley and invites the audience to closely examine them.

 

The Little Toe V3.0

(provided by Shekou Theatre Festival)

 

The 90-minute physical theatre performance slowly guides the audience's attention to the performers' pinky toe and its metaphor. Apart from the ending, not a single word is uttered. The performance consists of multiple loosely connected segments, in which the performers convey the theme with their bodies and objects. Under a shift of soundscape, the show begins with performers ordinarily walking along the alley. If the performers had not deliberately slowed their tempo to a short halt and regained speed, the audience might have mistaken them as pedestrians. Since the alley has not been sealed off during the performance, it is possible for pedestrians to pass through. The first spectacle of Little Toe involves a pair of performers. One lying on the ground resembles the shadow of the walking partner, disrupts the partner's momentum and removes a partner's shoe to reveal the little toe. Progressively, the performance becomes unrealistic when the performers’ roles morph from a human into a signifier of the toe. Five performers dancing in synchronisation and five performers unifying under a large white sheet to suggest a foot are some memorable sequences in the second half. Furthermore, the motif of the pinky toe is emphasised via the recurrence of white foot sculptures scattering sparsely along the alley and the revelation of the pinky toe X-ray slides hidden underneath the performer's clothes.

 

Li successfully prepares the audience to discover the little toe and the dirt road through estrangement. First, the audience is required to move along a single designated path and to observe actively. Unlike conventional theatre where the audience observes a work from a fixed point, the audience begins the journey from the motorway looking down at the happenings at the alley. Then, they are invited down to the alley to continue spectating. As new segments are presented further and further down the alley, they are drawn to explore the secluded part of the alley. At last, the audience returned to the motorway for the epilogue and to contemplate the ambiguous ending. The audience's physical journey aligns with what the group hopes to inspire – to act, to bear a curious eye, to scrutinise the trivialities, and to cherish their fragile existence.

 

The Little Toe V3.0

(provided by Shekou Theatre Festival)

 

Secondly, the creative team members apply their unusual originality to incorporate multiple found materials near the performing site into their work. For instance, in the fashion walk segment, the performers transform found objects, such as PVC water pipes, tree branches, bricks and a long red banner, into wearable fashion accessories and showcase them to the audience through a barefooted catwalk. These entertaining segments not only remind the audience of the site but at the same time demonstrate how these bland objects affect the balance and movement of the performers.

 

The most impressionable part of the performance is Li as a performer dancing with an over 6-metre-long PVC pipe attached to his right thigh. Indeed, the segment is trilling in itself because Li is putting on a hazardous display of balancing at an arm-length distance from the audience. However, the most theatrical moment is the discovery of the complimentary image of a PVC tube standing vertically emitting smoke with the tall chimney of a forsaken glass factory in the background. This image captures the essence of the entire performance, shedding light on the fact that the artist, the PVC tube, the alley and the chimney are all just the little toes of this world, often being overlooked.

 

Conversely, Seahigh is an ambitious multi-media work endeavouring to create a resonance between the audience and the general plight of young migrant workers. It was developed from one of the new writings in the Shekou Theatre Festival 2023. Although the piece of work is only forty-five minutes long, it is created through a close collaboration of various artists from different disciplines and multiple cultural backgrounds. Their creative ideas are compiled by the playwright and director, Huang Suhuai, with respect, forming a mosaic open for diversified interpretations.

To be precise, city-specific instead of site-specific should be used to describe the work. The piece is displayed at a small empty new art gallery, where chairs of different types, serving as audience seats, loosely surround a small table at the centre. Four screens are set up in four opposing directions matching the Chinese title "Four seas" (四海), which are words from a common phrase depicting people coming from everywhere (來自五湖四海). The art gallery is remotely related to poetry but the work is tightly bound to the city where the migrant worker poet worked and died.

 

The cornerstone of Seahigh is the late poet, Xu Lizhi, whose life and poems are dramatic on their own. Xu is a young man who left his village for Shenzhen to work for Foxconn, a giant electronic assembler for multinational brands. Foxconn was notorious for its harsh working conditions and labour exploitation. The ruthless company was linked with multiple employee suicides in early 2010. Despite the adversity he faced, Xu began writing poetry in his limited leisure time as a hobby to vent his discontent and to question the meaning of life. The language of his poetry is plain; the imageries in his poems are often associated with the factory. Sometimes, his poems are playful, rarely they are angry, but often they are despairing. After approximately 3 years of work in Foxconn, Xu jumped from height and died on 30 September 2014, with a blog post titled "A New Day" scheduled to be posted at 12:00 am the subsequent day of his demise. Is it for art? Is it because he cannot take it anymore? The reason for his suicide remains unknown to date. Plains Studio has found an interesting topic for the production.

 

Seahigh

(provided by Shekou Theatre Festival)

 

To the author’s surprise, Huang decides to take a challenging route to create Seahigh. The most apparent direction to take is to create a story-telling biographical theater piece on Xu such as a solo play and documentary theatre. A more abstract form that avoids storytelling can take the form of a non-narrative dance, Robert Wilson-esque theatre, digital theatre or others. These choices are all valid and each has its distinctive focuses, strengths and limitations. Yet, Huang embarks on the abstract route and incorporates elements from all of the genres mentioned above. There are installations, ethnographic recordings, dance, live improvised music, words displayed on LED scrolling signs, captured videos projected on screens and others. Presented with an assortment of multimedia, the viewing experience is like attending a curated exhibition at a contemporary art museum.

 

As a performance, Seahigh is too dense in information. These aforementioned theatrical elements are organised into four chapters (excluding the prologue and the epilogue) which are each titled after a line extracted from Xu's poems. The four chapters depict the four crucial stages in Xu's journey: arrival at the city with hope, disillusionment by work, struggle for independence and ending his life. Jin Mengjiao plays an unnamed short-haired young girl with a boyish look. The female character is present throughout all four chapters and follows a similar journey to Xu. In Jin's portrayal, the character remains silent for most of the time and conveys her journey through her interactions with objects intended to carry symbolic meanings, such as a small receipt machine and the very long red cord tied around her torso extended to somewhere outside her entrance. The action on stage shares a vibe with Samuel Beckett's Act Without Words I. The live performance is further weaved together thematically with interview recordings of migrant workers, Xu's poetry lines shown in the text, and stationary continuous shots of objects and sceneries perceived by an unnamed male. More unknown characters are brought into the frame. The interweaving is confusing and frustrating as it neither brings forward a coherent narrative nor enhances certain emotions strongly. The basic central narrative thread is muddled by three other characters' "voices" while the symbols in the mise-en-scene compete with the symbols transmitted by audio-video media. Seahigh falls into the trap of expressing too much in a limited time duration.

 

Seahigh

(provided by Shekou Theatre Festival)

 

Although a non-dramatic approach is taken, the audience still hungers to learn about the characters, with the unnamed girl in particular. Although Xu should be the central figure of the piece, his presence is weak in the performance. Having read Xu's poems, the author could identify Xu's words sprinkled over the show. Even with the clue of "Xu Lizhi 1990 – 2014", the audience who are unfamiliar with Xu, surely cannot grasp the story of the poet and is unable to recognise his words. The unnamed girl, the protagonist of the performance, has a stronger presence than Xu. Due to the heavy use of symbols and the lack of speech, the audience is left wondering about her background, her wants and her motivations. For instance, what is the red cord trailing behind the female protagonist symbolising? Her connection with her birthplace, her family or her dream is all valid answer. However, being non-specific reveals no information on the identity of the female protagonist. Indeed, Jin is effective in her movements to convey the state of her character, for example, her light treading to illustrate excitement, passing receipts to customers to represent hard labour and stapling receipts on her new dress to exemplify her resentment towards work. Unfortunately, her character is flat and leaves a huge gap in connecting her resentment with her decision to commit suicide. The void is being filled by the audience's background and imagination, resulting in a diverse interpretation.

 

To sum up, the Little Toe and Seahigh embody the spirit of The Shekou Festival which is to offer a wide variety of innovative original performances for audiences of various tastes.

 

 

 

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香港演藝學院戲劇藝術(劇場構作)碩士生。畢業於香港中文大學英國語文學士。曾參與「新戲匠」系列 ─ 劇評培訓計劃第七擊及香港話劇團2018-19劇場藝術培訓課程。