Dreams become life at Whashang

Rive-gauche Theater Group's (河左岸劇團) new performance Ode to the Hundred Nights (百夜詞) is a hybrid of dance and drama that explores the boundaries between dreaming and waking and illusion and truth.

To effectively convey the murky subject matter, choreographer and director Chen Pin-hsiu (陳品秀) deliberately made this play a pantomime without a plot. For Chen, pantomime is the most dream-like theatrical style. Without stage props, both the audience and the performers have to imagine what is actually happening onstage.

The play is a montage of dreamscapes, connected by the dozing off and waking up of the dreamers.

The first dreamscape shows that we may have shared our dreams with another person. A sleeper on the floor laughs and rolls as if tickled by the twitching fingers of three others sitting unconscious by the bed. Ultimately the bedside dreamers caress the lying one as he cries in his sleep.

Then there comes an eerily funny scene of the four performers taking turns acting as the main characters in mock TV commercials. Speaking in incomprehensible languages, these characters make exaggerated gestures and ecstatic expressions until they suddenly drop to the floor and fall into their dreams again.

For Chen, TV commercials and dreams have a lot in common. "Dreams are the silent, unintrusive interludes in our lives. We dream, we wake up, and then we forget all our dreams as we go about our business. It's the same with commercials between TV dramas. They pop up and go away while we go on watching the same drama as if nothing happened," Chen said.

The scene then shifts to the deep of the night. Two men wake up to go to the toilet. They move in sync as if one is the mirror image of the other. Suddenly, both start to suffocate themselves in a suicide attempt. Without success, each lunges to strangle the other. In their struggle, the divide between a person and their mirror image breaks down.

After the characters fall asleep and wake up again, they begin to recite Butler Yeats' The Coming of Wisdom Through Time, which conveys the first moments of waking. "Though the leaves are many, the root is one/Through all the lying days of my youth, I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun/Now I may wither into the truth."

Video images are integrated into the play to further obscure the line between dreams and reality. One of the films by the play's stage designer Chen Jian-bei(陳建北) is of the troupe in rehearsal for the same play. The action in the film precedes by 10 seconds the same action onstage.

For Chen Jian-bei, the footage is more real than the actions that take place onstage. "The real does not have to be what's happening before your eyes. The real is what you feel is real in your heart. I shot the part of the rehearsal that moved me. To me, the film is the reality," he said.

Many scenes present a state of uncertainty, like dimly-lit body parts and a dancer whirling ghost-like in the dark. These sections illustrate Chen's philosophy that "all our life, we're living a dream. You may be busy every day doing a lot, but at the end of the day, you're not sure what it is that you have done, as if your day has been a dream," she said.

The play can be tiresome with its loose structure and illogical development, but the ending effectively leaves the audience wondering whether they have witnessed four sleepwalkers roaming the stage or a play. By blurring the border between dreams and waking, Chen Pin-hsiu succeeds in obscuring the divide between theater and real life.