When Li Ming-chen (李銘宸) talks about his work, he uses a sometimes fluid and coherent, sometimes abrupt and disjointed stream of ideas. But never with a plot, let alone a story.
Like his speech, his theater is rich with aesthetic detours and asides. There is no script and every work is a collective effort.
Performers improvise and brainstorm ideas; concepts materialize, which are later structured into a composition.
Photo courtesy of StyleLab
FRAGMENTS
In Li’s latest work, Love Song 2010 (戀曲2010), eight performers — four women and four men — spend 110 minutes on stage performing “fragments from everyday life.”
“It took shape about one week ago [after] spending a significant amount of time experimenting with different material,” Li told the Taipei Times on Tuesday.
Photo courtesy of StyleLab
IN THE NEWS
Li’s plays are typically a response to current events.
The critically-acclaimed Dear All, for example, examined issues surrounding the forced expropriation of land from people living in Miaoli County’s Dapu Borough (大埔).
Li, 25, says the inspiration for the present work comes from Love Songs, a series of eponymous albums produced every decade since 1980 by Taiwanese pop legend Lo Ta-yu (羅大佑), which serve as the singer/songwriter’s meditations on a particular decade.
Li riffs off this theme to ponder the recent protest movements.
“Each news headline is the result of a day of complications, a month, a year or longer. I hope people will become aware of it through the work.”
Li’s Dear All is among the five finalists, selected from the 15 nominated works, at this year’s Taishin Arts Award (台新藝術獎).
All of the nominated visual and performing art pieces will be on display at the 12th Taishin Arts Award Exhibition set to open tomorrow and run through July 13 at the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (北師美術館).
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