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攝影│陳又維
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攝影│陳又維
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攝影│陳又維
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攝影│陳又維
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攝影│陳又維
Homecoming
Puppet & Its Double Theater
Venue：Wellspring Theater
Comments on the finalist artworks
This work looks directly into the issue of Taiwanese households with foreign caregivers. From an introspective perspective, the playwright unfolds Taiwanese people’s discrimination and bias against the Southeast. Adopting a surrealistic approach often seen in object theatre, the director uses the closet to symbolize the inner world of the protagonist, and reveals the inner secret through the puppet that “comes out of the closet.” Her complex feelings about her Vietnamese mother seems to gradually dissipate through her interaction with the Vietnamese caregiver; however, this dissipation is not a politically correct reconciliation but a return to the self—she is Vietnamese as well as Taiwanese and an oppressor as well as the oppressed. Through the interchangeability of the characters, this work avoids the depiction of foreign workers as “the other” in theatre while sidestepping the pitfall of making theatre a political art form for oppressors in its objective delineation.(Commentator: LIN Yu-Pin)
About the Artwork
Homecoming focuses its gaze on the complex and diverse ethnic groups on the island of Taiwan -- the long-neglected foreign carers and migrant laborers who speak an unfamiliar language. Taking a broader perspective, looking back on Taiwan’s past, the strangers arriving in another land confronted with difficult and complex situations were once our parents and elders too, when they migrated from other provinces or moved north for better opportunities hoping for an iota of validation. Homecoming attempts to touch on internal human textures that transcend nationality, language, and identity to open a window through which the audience can approach these most familiar strangers.
As puppets and humans take the stage, multiple elements including objects, light-and-shadow, real-time projections of play-within-a-play combine to create a magical space where the real and imagined converge, extracting a unique arena for the imagination from within everyday spaces. This tale of the lonely, wishing to return home and drawn together by fate, interrogates ways of finding a place of respite in the vicissitudes of a journey across oceans and seas.
About the Artist
Puppet & Its Double Theater
Established in 1999 with “all objects have puppet potential” as a creative perspective, the Puppet & Its Double Theater has created an innovative style and a transformative aesthetic of magical philosophy in Taiwan’s contemporary puppet theater. The forms of performance include glove puppet, marionette, rod puppet, table-top puppet, shadow theater as well as actor and puppet co-performance, to pioneer unique theatrical narrative methods through a wealth of exploratory experimentation and professional puppet-making artistry. Full of creative styling and poetic interpretive abilities, their work breaks fresh new ground for the human imagination through diverse interdisciplinary collaboration.
