How might the memories of the deceased be transformed and embodied in one’s movements? YU Yen-Fang’s piece, A few suggestions on disappearance III, attempts to interpret that in one’s manners of daily routines. To be able to understand the choreographed language of “internalization” and “continuity” in the performance, the nature of the image and the context of space are the keys.
A space of daily routines
While the audience enters A few suggestions on disappearance III, they receive an envelope with written notes such as “Do you remember the way he looked when he woke up?”, “Do you remember how he used to walk?” These provide a hint as to what might occur in the subsequent performance. In those questions, there is an emphasis on whether the memory of “his” image remains active in “you.”
When the performance starts, YU Yen-Fang lays on a bed with a duvet. After a series of posture changes such as turning her body and putting on layer after layer of T-shirts, she rides a motorbike and leaves. Not long after, she brings back a bag of braised snacks and imitates her father’s accent to invite everybody to enjoy the food. The bed is a site of image transition, and YU Yen-Fang can switch effortlessly. After only a couple of push-ups, she resurrects the image of her father in the performance. [1] As many critics had noted previously, she has opened up the space of HORSE theater. Through the door, a view of daily life can be seen. But to me, how the image of a father remains active in daily life is more significant. This activity cannot be accomplished by the deceased. From the way the play unfolds, YU Yen-Fang doesn’t intend to rely on spirit resurrection to uplift herself from the memories of her father. Instead, she attempts to embody the image of her father, for that to become part of her body. [2] In addition, she tries to fix the image of her father at places that are familiar to her, places that her father might frequent before he passed away. [3]
Fixture of narrative
To maintain an image of her father in his absence and in a dimension of ordinary (living) reality, visual representations of bodily memories are not enough. The challenge of daily reality on memory is that it takes effort to “persistently maintain the presence” of memories. The ways in which memories reoccur are often not persistent; their nature is too fragmentary and illusive to be ever-present. [4] To accomplish the mission of persistent memories of her father, YU Yen-Fang employs a lot of narratives simultaneously and consecutively in the play. For example, she lays on a large canvas on the ground and uses her body’s shape as a reference to draw her father’s. She reiterates her perspective by writing on the overlapping contour of herself and her father on the ground; and, at the same time, she tells stories about her father and family histories. By creating narratives of her father’s images—as a professional carver of seals—and by mimicking his daily routines such as engraving, pulling a metal roll-up door, shooting a basketball, and moving a car, YU Yen-Fang mounts a continuous presence of her father with a solid foundation in order to resist the erosion that time makes on memories and attention. Due to this fixture of narrative that she employs, the images YU makes seem to expand. They escape the confinement of time to the point of obtaining the potential to transform the whole theatrical space. While recalling her father’s image, YU Yen-Fang turns the HORSE theatre into Yu Guang-Song’s seal shop, as critic WEI Wan-Rong described.
The memory of an image, and the image of a memory
After she transforms the HORSE theatre into Yu Guang-Song’s seal shop, there is a segment that leaves a unique impression on some of us: YU Yen-Fang invites a few audience members onto the stage to imitate her father’s gestures. While everyone turns into statue-like sculptures, Yu Yen-Fang covers them with a large white cloth. [5] A fan is blowing under the fabric. She uses a light to illuminate these people, and at the same time, shakes the cloth. The forms and shadows of the audience become uncertain. She then goes under the fabric and releases the volunteers, until only she and a body-shaped duvet remain. In comparison to other parts of the performance, in which the images are more defined, (a projection of her parents walking by a river bank remains clear) we are curious as to the blurriness or uncertainty of this particular section: was it created intentionally, and what does it signify?
Apart from the confusion provoked by the uniformity of imagery breaking clarity, there is also a question of space. While the space is transformed into the memory (of Yu Guang-Song’s seal shop), the choreographer invites the audience to mimic her father’s image. What might be the intention of presenting multiple images of her father simultaneously? In terms of internalized body memory, the meaning of inviting others to imitate YU Yen-Fang’s father and performing them on her own are entirely different. For an audience, such gestures are impossible to internalize.
For us, one way to understand this puzzle is to shift the “spatial” context from “Yu Guang-Song’s seal shop” to YU Yen-Fang’s “internal memory space.” Within this space of internal memory, some memories cease to be internalized or to become part of YU Yen-Fang’s body performance. [6] Through inviting others to imitate Yu Guang-Song, and reconstructing photos, YU Yen-Fang’s impressions, “memories of imageries” are reiterated. These “memories of imageries” are not internalized or digested thoroughly. How they are presented on stage reflects their relative position on the edge of memory.
While the fixed postures and stances of those who were invited to participate are covered up by the white cloth, the original certainty of the form of human figures is lost. We think it is worth examining if the space has been transformed by YU Yen-Fang and become a projection of spiritual space. Why does she use a white cloth to cover up all the movements and imageries? Could the large, enclosing fabric be seen as a metaphor for “memory” itself? While covered up by the cloth, those gestures and imageries, representing her father, enter the realm of memory. This ambiguity differs from the vivid and precise representations provided by pre-internalized memories. Similar to the mechanism of Sigmund Freud’s dream interpretation, there are various stages of transitioning and processing when an image enters the mind, sometimes it’s even mixed with other images. Through “the memory of an image” and “the image of a memory,” we may see the transformation underneath the white covering as a symbolic mechanism that “internalizes memories.” YU grabs the cloth, waving up and down, with a fan blowing underneath. The space created under the fabric could be a metaphor of “memory space,” that is transitory, in which images can be overlapped, bridged, de-contoured, layered, even to the point of undergoing the process of changing scope. The most profound example is the dance between YU Yen-Fang acting as her father with the body-shaped duvet. It embodies the contrasting qualities of blurriness and clarity, in terms of spatial, temporal or narrative construction, between memory and imagery, a “strange loop” is formed, allowing the transition between external daily reality and YU Yen-Fang’s internal memory space. [7]
Life goes on
Underneath the white fabric, the duvet symbolizes the imagery of her father. Her father used to sleep with that same duvet. The duvet is then folded and carried out of the white cloth. Here, the space undergoes another transition. There is a video of her parents on vacation projected on YU Yen-Fang as she begins to take off layers of T-shirts that she had put on while attempting to imitate her father’s body shape at the beginning of the play. She finally switches back to her own identity. After taking the T-shirts off, YU Yen-Fang turns the projector towards the big rehearsal mirrors in the theatre. Through them, the entire space is filled with the glimmering light projecting from the video. Then, YU Yen-Fang dances with the reflection of illuminating imageries in the mirror, walls, and ceilings. After attempting to internalize the memories during the previous section, in this part, she breaks down the difference between the internal or external world by presenting a space that is filled with her father’s image. For YU Yen-Fang, any ray of light that shines through any corner of the world could now embody her father. However, life has to go on. Through the motorbike’s honking noise and headlight that penetrates through the transparent glass door, the artist brings us back to reality, in a manner similar to Roland Barthes’s notion of “not the indispensable, but the irreplaceable,” to signify that the one and only Yu Guang-Song has passed away.
[1] In her review, On how we might miss someone without photographs, and why we produce theatrical play, A few suggestions on disappearance III,” WEI Wan-Rong considers A few suggestions on disappearance III as a site-specific play at the HORSE theatre. LIAO Yu-Hsuan mentioned “continuous articulation” in her article “If you still hold it dearly, then don’t forget: body and sound in A few suggestions on disappearance III.”
[2] While she takes off the t-shirts, a projector projects images on YU Yen-Fang’s body.
[3] The act allows specific places which her father frequented to be projected onto YU Yen-Fang’s “internal space”, or to say, the memory space. Under these circumstances, these places cease to be ordinary reality. This might be signified by the beaming of the motorbike’s light, which breaks through the twisted reality towards the end of the play. I shall come back to it later.
[4] “For those already present, people don’t recall it, they represent it.” Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, translated by PAN Lu, published by University of Beijing, 2016, p.280.
[5] During the first five minutes there is a narration of family history; the artist does not intend to construct any blurry or fictional imagries.
[6] In a passage of La Chambre Claire, in search of his mother’s photo, Roland Barthes wrote that there is an absence of himself in some of those photos. As a contrast to himself, the existence of his mother cannot be defined solely by the social construct of “motherhood” or by any “familial” identity. Even though we may live after our mothers pass away, we cannot live without the “special one which is meaningful to us,” and what social constructs might define as a ‘mother’. Thus, Roland Barthes attempts to rekindle his mother through photographs. (ref. Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire, t1997, translated by Xu Qiling, published by Taipei, Taiwan Photography Studio, p.82, 91-92)
[7] Referring to Douglas Hofstadter’s theory in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, he points out that there are always spaces within different worlds (such as internal and external worlds), regardless of their hierarchy (such as higher or lower hierarchy), in which a “strange loop” could be inserted to confine those unlimited possibilities of logical format and to create a closed circuit.
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English translation: Renyu
English proofreading: Ariana Lombardi
Image credit: Etang Chen, Dark Eyes Performance Lab.
* This essay is supported by The Visual Art Critic Project, sponsored by The National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan, The Winsing Arts Foundation and Mrs. Su Mei-Chi.
