Produced by House Peace and ET@T, and adapted from Chiou Chang-ting’s epic fantasy novel Beastosis, the immersive theater work Beastosis: Call of the Skull announces its self-awareness of the interplay between technology and the body from its very first moment. In the original novel, the skull is a vessel that holds the memories of the dead, a device for summoning lost souls; in the theatrical space, this ancient shamanic object is translated into a mixed-reality (MR) headset. The production does not simply transpose the novel’s sprawling plot onto a virtual platform. Instead, through the layered interplay of the headset, live performance, ritual chant, and movement through space, it turns “Mimesis,” the work’s central concept, into an embodied experience the audience can actually take part in. In this way, technology becomes not merely a tool for producing visual spectacle, but an essential vocabulary for probing the consciousness and reshaping emotion.
Beastosis: Call of the Skull, Photo by Lin Chunyung, Courtesy of National Taichung Theater.
The Skull’s Journey of Root-Seeking and Resurrection
To understand this perceptual journey woven from the real and the virtual, one must first trace the narrative of the piece. The plot unfolds along the spine of the novel: the human world faces the devastating threat of an emerging disease known as the Fu-fungus, and the protagonist Luan’s brother, Taibang, is killed amid the ensuing war and disaster. To recover the memory of the reservation where she and her brother had once relied on one another to survive, Luan impulsively steals a skull on display in a foreign land — a skull belonging to her brother, a native of the Isle of Wan. In that fictional realm known as the Isle of Wan, there exist Mimesists capable of mimicking the truth of the world through specific hand gestures. To bring her dead brother back to life, Luan trains in Mimesis, and in the theater she recruits the audience as her “Mimesist apprentices,” leading them to wear the headset, cross the border of reality, and journey to the reservation in search of the highest order of Mimesis — the Force of Resurrection. But this journey of root-seeking is no easy path: at the border between the Urban Area and the mountain forest, the apprentices encounter Ivivigi, the Shaman who guards tradition. Guided by the Shaman and her ritual chanting, the audience moves through the crevice between reality and virtual image, living through the brutal memory of Taibang’s fight against the invading war machines before his death, and under Taibang’s own call — “Let me die again; let me die here. Let me live again; let me live here” — they gradually piece together the island’s historical trauma under colonization, war, and the pressure of foreign civilizations. In the end, the skull returns to the land, and Luan and the audience alike, through the re-enactment of memory, arrive at a moment of emotional catharsis. 
Beastosis: Call of the Skull, Photo by Lin Chunyung, Courtesy of National Taichung Theater.
Technology as an Extension of the Senses
What makes Beastosis: Call of the Skull most compelling is its precise command of what makes mixed reality distinct. Unlike traditional virtual reality (VR), which seals the audience entirely within a digital image, isolated from their surroundings, this production uses MR to let virtual spectacle overlay directly onto the physical theatrical space. Once the audience puts on the headset, they do not lose their perception of the room around them — instead, they enter a dimension suspended between the real and the unreal: before their eyes are ruined landscapes, soaring Beast Spirits, and towering machines, while at the same time they can see the other audience members moving around them as silhouettes, and even glimpse the actual bodies of the live performers and the Shaman. This coexistence of the real and the virtual produces an extraordinarily visceral effect. As the eye is drawn into the vastness of the virtual space, the image magnifies the mind’s own illusion of scale, while the ear is wrapped tightly in the performers’ live lines, the Shaman’s ethereal chant drawing near and then receding, and layered frequencies of sound — anchoring the body’s actual position in the room. The audience seems to inhabit their own mind and the perspective of the Beast Spirits at once, hearing their own inner thoughts within this nest of consciousness, as well as the echo of an outer myth. The tension between sight, sound, and movement through space entirely breaks the one-directional gaze of the traditional proscenium stage, transforming the whole theater into a dynamic field of shared sensation. 
Beastosis: Call of the Skull, Photo by Lin Chunyung, Courtesy of National Taichung Theater.
From Mimesis to Emotional Resonance
In Chiou Chang-ting’s original novel, Mimesis is a magic charged with shamanic meaning — by mimicking nature, animals, and even other people, the self can momentarily step outside its own frame and forge a connection with a world unlike its own. Director Wu Zi-jing seizes on this premise with great sensitivity, translating it into a set of physical instructions through which the audience intervenes in the performance. And the wise choice made by Associate Director and Spatial Designer Wu Tzu-ching, together with co-adapters Jing Wu, Chen Yi-en, and Tsai Meng-ru, was to precisely extract the work’s core emotional motif — loss, the weight of memory, and how an individual might seek a way to stand firm within a shattered world. During the performance, the audience is no longer merely a passive recipient — they are given the identity of “apprentice,” and must learn specific gestures of Mimesis on the spot. When the audience sees their own hands within the headset and, following instruction, performs a gesture of defense or summoning, Mimesis is no longer just a textual symbol from the novel — it becomes a concrete, felt perception. Through a non-linear narrative design, the entire piece breaks free of the conventional constraints of setup, development, turn, and conclusion; scenes cut instantly as the audience moves through the space, and although the information feels fragmented, it is precisely because of the audience’s own active bodily participation that the weight of feeling can gradually be pieced together from these scattered clues.。 
Beastosis: Call of the Skull, Photo by Lin Chunyung, Courtesy of National Taichung Theater.
Yet within the piece, Mimesis is not meant to deliver a game-like sense of achievement in “clearing a level” — it moves, instead, toward something closer to empathy. As the piece itself makes clear, no one can ever fully become another person; Mimesis, in the end, has its limits. But it is precisely because we cannot know everything, because we cannot fully occupy another’s pain, that we need, again and again, to set aside our own rigid point of view through the act of mimicking — drawing closer to the departed Taibang, coming to understand the suffering Luan. This lets the audience, when confronted with the theme of parting through life and death, form their own distinct projections, shaped by each of their own lived experiences. 
Beastosis: Call of the Skull, Photo by Lin Chunyung, Courtesy of National Taichung Theater.
The skull in the novel symbolizes a frozen past, while the headset in the theater opens up a space of future possibility. When the performance ends and the audience removes the headset, what remains in their hearts is not only the piece’s intricate fantastical world-building, but also the particular tremor of having walked, for a moment, along the border between the real and the unreal. Beastosis – Call of the Skull, with its highly self-aware vocabulary of technology and art, offers a deeply illuminating attempt for contemporary immersive theater in Taiwan. It shows us that when technological art no longer indulges in piling up cold technical spectacle for its own sake, but returns instead to theater’s essential gaze upon the body and space, virtual images can grow a soul of their own — and within each audience member’s heart, reshape a singular, unrepeatable poem of their own life. —[SCR]
*Header Image: Beastosis: Call of the Skull, Photo by Lin Chunyung, Courtesy of National Taichung Theater.
