Practicing Performance

Yu Cheng-Ta

Yu Cheng-Ta’s works often contain specific sarcasm alongside his humor. He maneuvers video and moving images to record verbal and body languages of his performers and interviewees, challenging the perceptions of spectators from various cultural backgrounds and examining non-professional actors’ sophisticated psychological activities and status of their performance in the process of improvising and acting the script.

Yu-Chieh LI (YCL): I would like to start this conversation by talking about your new work Practicing LIVE (2014). Until 2014, most of your works employ moving images in single channel video or multiple screens. Many of them are performance in video, which emphasizes audience participation and instigates their different reactions and gap of understanding. The obscurity of language you use, which is applied to a scene found in daily life, also causes misreading by people from various cultural backgrounds. Practicing LIVE is with the largest projection surface among your moving images. Its setting is in a theatrical space. The plot is very dramatic, and you also meticulously inserted footages behind the scene and the documentary of the shooting process, combining the real and virtual theaters—these are all so different from your works in the past. Actors and actresses of this film include curators, art history professors, galleries, artists, and museum directors from Japan, Taiwan, and England. You asked them to switch their roles in real life, and in the film they have a debate about rules for the game in the art world. Like the title of the work, the concept here is “practicing life.” This play made into film is about an unsuccessful artist David X, who turned out to win the Turner Prize. There are many satirical and autobiographical episodes in the film. My question is, why did you decide to employ a larger scale of shooting team and the sophistication of theater to present the work: On the one hand, the story is absurd, on the other hand it reveals many facets of realities of the art world.

Cheng-Ta YU (CTY): The shooting is comparable to reality show, and it still sticks to my concept for video art. I tried larger shooting scale this time, and collaborated with non-professional actors. Under the rules that I enacted for the theater, their performance condition is something between practicing and role play. Theater itself consists of a double structure of fiction and narration. The space of a theater contains abundant layers: on stage, offstage, audience, and backstage. Psychologically actors know they are performing in front of an audience; the audience knows that they are watching a play based on a script. Through this double structure, Practicing LIVE attempts to deal with the reality of the my living environment, my working condition, and personal connection—as an artist in the early 30s. I attached the absurd script to those two realities: my connections in the art world, and the relationship between the shooting team and myself as film director. This project is not about the reality in the art world, but it aims at expanding the discussion surrounding it. Everybody in the team is considered as my collaborator, and we created this reality show together.

YCL: Can you talk about the fictional and narrative characters of theater more concretely? Those structures that belong to theater mentioned by you, when they are turned into a film, how does it change the experience of actors on the stage as well as the spectators?

CTY: Performance in theater happened after a series of planning and rehearsals, and realized in a specific period of time, 90s minutes or 120 minutes. The script itself is put together/realized by the actors. The audience would have a pre-cognition in mind ”I am watching a play.” The time in the play is participated by the audience, it is happening however not in sync with the real time. My film has a structure comparable to a theater, but it was shot by five cameras. The documentation juxtaposed different times and the ideas of front and back stages. The film itself is a collage of documentation of different times and from different angles on stage, put together through editing in an anachronistic way. I created the time of the play through film editing, so it seems to be a play of 30 minutes. Before filming, I also asked a group of professional actors to rehearse, so the finalized film differs from a play that happens the real stage, which has its own linear time that cannot be post-edited. The footages of interviews and documentation of the filming helps you realize this anachronism.

YCL: How did you select your actors? How did you communicate with them about their performance? How much did you rehearse before you start shooting the film?

CTY: There are two groups of actors who worked for this film. One group consists of professional actors: They helped the team to rehearse so that we can design the light, decide on the blocking, and test the filming; another group consists of people from the art world who are non-professional actors. Before the filming, they only tried the fitting and they got the script, they didn’t participate in the rehearsal of professional actors. On the day when we shot the film, the vice-director helped them interact with each other naturally and keep the plot moving forward. We spent two months planning the shooting, and only spent one day to shoot the film. We didn’t have more time to put all those busy people together. Furthermore, the concept of this work is “practicing live.” It’s like a reality show, because we are all in the condition of practicing. The selection of cross-national, non-professional actors, is in fact based on my personal connections. I discussed the selection with Taiwanese curator Freya Chou, who is also co-writer of the script. We asked some friends in the art world to participate in the film production, in the end most people accepted the invitation. For me all participants are collaborators. The play [or the text] is related to both myself and themselves. The actors are not playing themselves, but somebody they can imagine, somebody close to their life experience.

YCL: You mentioned that this film counts as a reality show. Interestingly, the lines contain many epigrams, and the actors often speak them out as if they are reciting the lines an awkward, less natural way, so there is some obscurity between reality show and in the middle of rehearsal. This is the effect you wanted to have from the beginning? How much flexibility and freedom do they have for their own lines and performance?

CTY: Yes, the obscurity was planning from the beginning. I prepared cue cards for the actors, and they also performed within many environmental factors: their lack of experience with the stage, performing another identity, lightings and repetitive work…I think here the original lines became rules and procedures that keep the reality show going, at the same time helping the actors imagine the situation in the play. The effect of the performance as imagined by myself was based on the concept “playing the role of others.” I intended to present the gap between the real characters of the participants and their dramatic personas, at the same time construct their dialogues with the fictional characters. Over 80 percent of the lines are from the original script, while 20% phrases and many of the performance effects are improvised by the actors, even the tone they adopted were decided by themselves.

YCL: The kind of performance between the uncontrollable and the controllable seems to be crucial in your moving images, which also appeared in another piece that is recently exhibited, Exploding Taiwan (2011). The work is based on an absurd story, a gossip that the Taiwanese government is going to explode Taiwan. You passed this text to different non-professional actors. Each of them was interviewed by a fabricated mass media, with their back turned on the camera, and they all expanded the story by themselves. You have tried different film genres to present the kind of performance I just mentioned, including the reality show that was just discussed, documentary of interviews, and other quasi-Music TV films. What is the relationship between those different video genres and the performance?

CTY: The selection of those genres is based on the formalistic needs of different issues and topics. I already thought through how I was going to combine a performance and a genre, because it concerns how I position the bodies of the performances, as well as how to build a relationship between their bodies and the spectators. The way I dealt with the body is based on my reflections on moving images and the mass media, because it is through moving images that I communicate with the spectators. For example, in She is my Aunt (2008), I filmed a protest by a strange woman, added the music and my cutting, turning it into a “fake” documentary film. I claimed this stranger to be my aunt, and I was in fact challenging the truthfulness and showing the absurdity of mass media, and the way I did it was very obscure. In Adj. Dance (2010), I used the form of music video to discuss the production as a result of the interaction of body language and verbal language. I used interview as structure in Exploding Taiwan to collage an absurd feeling of reality through gossiping. I think the performances I created are not separable from the texts, and they are always in the process of practicing, so many imprecisions are created which cased the gap of performances. And the imprecisions created lots of chemicals. They are funny, and reveal different layers of performances that were produced between the controllable and the uncontrollable, which always fascinate myself, and it also brought the tension between the life of the performance and the rules I enacted.

YCL: The tension between the body of the performers, and the media/mass media you created happened through the relationship between the bodies of individuals, the society, and the camera, on the other hand, the structure of language and its interpretability created another layer of the work, which is easily lost with the process of translation: For example, in Practicing LIVE, language is political, and it is also the carrier of knowledge. For example English, French, and Japanese carry the power of speach in the art world; In Ventriloquists: Liang Mei-Lan and Emily Su (2009), the Philippine immigrant brides spoke in mandarin, Taiwanese, and English, which are their second or third languages. This shows the phenomenon of “Cultural Translation” in Immigrant and colonial culture, further, these imprecise communications also reaveal the floating conditions and sophistication of languages. Adj. Dance, presents the 17 adjectives and dances choreographed according to their meanings, so the dances are visual, and the verbal adjectives are added as voice-over, which creates the gap between the signifier and the signified and the time lag of receiving them: in semiotics, image and words are both signifiers, and everybody has different understandings and interpretations for those gestures and adjectives, such creates different signified. On the other hand there are different speeds for the receptions: there are visual and audio experiences in the video, showing the relation and the gap between gestures and the words, and there is also a time lag in the interpretation. All these above caused the asynchronous reception and understanding of different senses. Put it in a simple way, when I try hard to understand and interpret this work, my senses are in disorder.

CTY: The disorder comes from the gap of various choreographed details and there are three layers in the work: Dancers translated the adjectives into their life experiences, the explanations by a dictionary, the machinery voice and rhythm. When the spectator conforms to this structure, new interpretations to those adjectives are given, and the result is a disorder of senses. Many of my works manipulate the gap between the hearing and speaking of languages, and my reflections on translation. Language to me is more like a medium for message circulation. Just think about the game to pass a message to the next person, which we used to play in our childhood: In the game you only hear the sentence another person told you. But my work presents the whole process of the message circulation: including the original text and how to translate. Languages are political. Rules of using languages, its political aspects and power of translation brought another question: who owns the language? In my work, translation for the subtitle often cannot present the process of translation perfectly, it more often gets lost. I usually need to find the best way to position translation and the language in my work, based on different conditions of dialogues. Sometimes languages help the spectators to understand the work, sometimes it’s another interface for thoughts—or for manipulation. I am not trying to return to the original meaning, but I create a space for viewing. In Ventriloquises for example, there are two ways to position the translated subtitles. I decided to present two kinds of English translation: the first one is in normal English, the second one conforms to the interviewees’ original native languages, which was marked in a different color on the screen. Here subtitles can help people understand the content, but their languages are not accurate.

YCL: This space of viewing is actually created by the time lag from reception to perception, or is the gap caused by process of translation. This calls for a specific audience for your work—certain cultural groups equipped with specific knowledge for some languages will react to your works differently. Do you think this has narrowed your spectators?

CTY: Yes, two different perceptions are cased by specific language structures: One group knows the language in the video while the other needs help from the translated subtitle, and this is the boundary created by languages. Many of my previous projects were completed when I was doing residencies abroad, for example I mimicked speaking and singing spoken Japanese, and played a tour guide who spoke English with Maori. There is a small audience who understands the nuance of the accents. However my work is not merely about the narrative plot, so I think my audience can still understand the humor through its formal languages. I believe the way I deal with my position in relation to certain cultures is close to most people’s life experiences.

A Practice of City Guide: Auckland, 2011 from Cheng-Ta YU on Vimeo.

YCL: Can we say that, your work deals with “rehearsal,” “practicing,” “translation”, “in between” conditions. You use video, because it’s easy to record the sound and image of those processes, and it can be replayed. Through such rereading, the audience can watch the videos with their futuristic position, looking back on the rehearsal happened in the past?

CTY: What you described as “in between” rehearsal aims at creating a vivid picture as if yourself were also there. To the audience, watching the film doesn’t fulfill the narrative. There is also no such thing as a perfect version of performances—mistakes are totally acceptable. The existence of mistakes demarcates the position of the audience. So you will discover that in my work, many of the compositions of footages directly engage with the camera: The performers appear with their full length in the middle of the footage, or are shot just above their shoulders, which eliminates unnecessary emotions and gazes.

Yu Cheng-Ta was born in Tainan, Taiwan. He currently lives and works in Taipei. http://yuchengta.com

Practicing Performance

A dialogue with Yu Cheng-Ta

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