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攝影│陳彥穎
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攝影│陳彥穎
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攝影│陳彥穎
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攝影│蕭如君
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攝影│陳彥穎
Enactor─2017 Taipei Fringe Festival
Goon zone
Venue：Gu-Ling Street Theatre
Comments on the finalist artworks
This is a work posited between performance art and theatre. For about fifty minutes, the four performers and a mannequin were just quietly facing the audience. There were no movement and lines, just intense facial expressions and sounds the performers were immersed in. From the sounds of disasters to occasional sounds from home appliances, noises and silence create a sense of dramatic tension. On the other hand, the performers’ stillness forced them to fill themselves with a fuller interiority to counter possible hollowness. Feelings and emotions overflew through their delicate performance and seemingly unchanging looks, which sustained the intensity of the entire performance.This was a bold experiment that showed incredible confidence; and the result proved the fact that a work, rich in its delineation of the inner power, could still create a profound impact on the audience’s mind, even without plots, movement and lines. (Commentator: LIN Jing-Jie)
About the Artwork
With the acceleration of technological developments, objects that were once cold and unresponsive seem to have a life of their own when coupled with the internet and software; hence we have shifted from human perspectives to that of objects. The idea that “humans are as insignificant as all things are in the universe” seems to come helter-skelter. In an era where the screen occupies everything, gradually replacing reality, are there elements in the status of an actor’s performance that cannot be superseded? When an actor no longer possesses action, do possibilities still exist for the actor to put their expertise into practice?
In addition to exploring differences that may exist between humans and objects, Enactor also attempts to interrogate the liveness of performance art. Confined to a chair, the performer is stripped of corporeality, leaving behind only the senses and the gaze. All objects within the space are able to produce action with the exception of the actor, allowing a relationship with the environment to develop. The objects are at times vexing, at times resonating. The relationship with the audience, the relationship with human beings, is thus restored; so that the unadulterated humanness can be seen.
About the Artist
Goon zone
The “Goon” of Goon Zone is a rough transliteration of the Chinese character for “stem” – a point of origin for a tree branching out, extending and renewing itself. With Jimmi Zhang’s Wedding Banquet in 2008 as an establishing work, the theater group began a series of works that reversed the roles of audience and performer. In shows as one-performer-to-one-audience motorbike taxi performance in CYH-279, to shows as big as the festival-within-a-festival performance of The Fourth Taipei Fringe Festival, as well as explorations of dilapidated veterans’ villages in EXIsTence, the theater group is adept at transcending the limitations of the theater space through subversive creativity to excavate the boundless possibilities of performance art.
