Against Again Troupe to perform at Japan’s Festival/Tokyo next month
再拒劇團受邀東京藝術節演出

Before heading to Japan’s Festival/Tokyo in November, Against Again Troupe gave a debut performance of its new work Eventually Withering Away Little by Little last week. The play experiments with the possibilities of a theater without people. The new work, being performed in celebration of the troupe’s 10th anniversary, will also be performed at this year’s Macau City Fringe Festival.

Combining various theatrical art forms, including object theater, installation art, sound art and behavior art, the play forms a theater without actors. The production will be put on by Against Again Theater’s five artists, including Joyce Ho, who won a special award at the KOBE Biennale, theater musician and director Chiang Tao, producer Lin Jen-chung, and artists Kappa Tseng and Wang Shih-chi. The five of them use their own individual performance methods to outline evidence that is supposed to prove the existence of a woman who is never actually present on the stage. The play creates limitless possibilities for its stream-of-consciousness narrative, paying tribute to one of the most important female writers of the 20th century — Virginia Woolf.

A theater of actors that does not actually use people was the brainchild of Against Again Troupe director, Huang Sze-nung. He says that the absence of others is something that every individual must experience in life, “Maybe people leave, perhaps they die, or maybe they are there the whole time but just not seen.”

(Liberty Times, Translated by Kyle Jeffcoat)

十一月前往東京藝術節前夕，再拒劇團上週演出《接下來，是一些些消亡》的台灣首演，實驗無人劇場的可能性。該作品也將受邀澳門藝穗節演出，這也是今年成立十年的再拒劇團代表作。

結合了物件劇場、裝置藝術、聲音藝術、行為藝術等多樣戲劇型態，就是不能有「演員」，再拒劇團邀約五位藝術家包括獲得日本神戶雙年展評審特別賞的何采柔，劇場音樂雙棲鬼才導演蔣韜，製作人林人中，藝術家曾彥婷以及藝術家王詩琪。五人分別以自己的表現手法，勾勒出「不在場」的女子存在的證據，嘗試「意識流」劇場的無限可能，也同時向二十世紀最重要的女性小說家吳爾芙致敬。

這場無人演員的劇展由再拒劇團團長黃思農策劃，他表示，事實上，各種各樣他者的缺席，是每個人的生命所經歷的必然過程，「也許對方離開，也許死亡，也許一直都在，卻不被看見。」

（自由時報記者趙靜瑜）