A long way home

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On Monday, March 24, the members of U-Theater (優人神鼓), along with a support team and some fans, set off on an expedition to celebrate their 20th anniversary. The acclaimed Zen drumming group spent the next 49 days walking around the island, covering 12,000km while giving more than 30 performances along the way at temples, schools and parks.

This wasn’t the first long walk the company had undertaken, but it was certainly their longest and most ambitious. Now the company is taking audiences on the same journey, with their new production, titled simply The Walk.

Company founder and director Liu Ruo-yu (劉若瑀) didn’t set off on the trip in March with the idea of producing a show from it. But after returning home, she and her husband, the company’s drumming master and musical director Huang Chih-chun (黃誌群), began reflecting on what they had seen, heard and felt, and the people they had met.

“I really appreciate these 50 days. For the company, the last 10 yeas have been so busy. At the end of 2000 we were very busy but we decided to stop. We paid members’ salaries while Adan [Huang] went to India and I went to Matsu for three months. But now we can’t do this; there are too many people [involved in the company],” she said in an interview on Tuesday.

“I need to walk. I have to walk,” she said. “We used the walk to stop, to have quietness of mind.”

Liu said her strongest images of the journey were the children at an elementary school in Ilan County, the volcanic clays an Aboriginal woman in Taitung County uses to dye the clothing she makes, the very strong sun, the rain, the ocean, birds singing — and rice.

“From the beginning, before Adan decided to make a piece, the very strong thing [memories] was the people, the restaurants and their food, the warmth of the people, but still the birds, the ocean, how when you are walking your brain is still thinking, the small sounds you hear,” she said.

“When we were walking on the street, we heard the birds, the cars rushing by. Outside of us it was so loud, but inside it’s quiet, so he decided to start from this,” she said.

The show is divided into nine segments, each designed to convey a different element of the walk. The first section (風雨餞行, a farewell banquet before a journey in wind and rain) is about a big storm the night before the troupe set off, and how they felt the power of the wind and rain helped propel them on their way. The second, (千里足跡, a journey of a thousand miles) is about the 12,000km, and a short film of the walk will be projected onto a small screen on stage.

The third segment (木田蟲鳴, insects buzzing in the forests and fields) is about the children in Ilan, and features 20 students in the performing arts class at a high school in Muzha who spend half their day in school and half with U-Theater studying music, drumming, martial arts and sacred dance.

Sections four through eight respectively cover the sun, the clays used for dying clothes, birds singing and “walking into light.” The eighth segment is about a big rainstorm that hit as the company was passing through Miaoli. Liu said the big drum is very strong in this piece, “like a typhoon wind.” The program finishes with the long-awaited homecoming (如風歸來, returning as the wind).

Liu and Huang enlisted some of the people they met along the way to help with the show, including Ama, who created the costumes using fabrics she makes and dyes near a river in the mountains by her home, and Iki Tadaw, an Aboriginal singer they met as they walked from Taroko Gorge to Hualien.