“The majority of the population in Alor Archipelago, Indonesia, make their living from the sea, and it includes two types of fishing: one is more about waiting, and the other tends to search and attack.”

   

When I first interviewed Wang Yeu-Kwn in 2020, he had just returned from his Indonesia trip funded by Cloud Gate Culture and Arts Foundation “Wanderer Project,” and the beginning quote was what he told me then. During the interview, Wang talked much about time, about waiting, about nature, and human-nature relations. Four years later, “relation” remains the main tone of his practice, while time still plays a major role when he deals with and reflects on his artistic creations. Wang loves fishing. If we try to compare his artistic creation to the types of fishing he mentioned before, he is probably the waiting type, I guess.

 

 

The interview in 2020 was for his short piece Beings, one of the three pieces selected by NACF's Young Star New Vision project and presented under the same program title. The duet choreographed by Wang explores relationship as it features Wang and Lee Yin-Ying as performers. After its premiere, Beings received several awards and traveled to multiple cities around the world. It thus made us forget about the fact that the short piece created and presented during the pandemic, hence for an exclusive audience, has never been officially and publicly introduced to the Taiwanese audience yet.   

 

However, the dance piece without a “decent” appearance in Taiwan has already given Wang numerous new and different experiences as it has also opened up exciting future projects. 

 

In 2021, the following year after Beings premiered at “Young Star New Vision,” its video recording was presented at Yokohama Dance Collection due to the pandemic situations and won the Jury Prize and Encouragement Prize, which made Wang the first Taiwanese choreographer to win two awards at Yokohama Dance Collection. 

 

 

In 2022, through the recommendation of the independent curator Gwen Hsin-Yi Chang, Beings was presented at Spring Forward, a Europe-based cross-border dance performance network organized by Aerowaves and taking place in Greece that year. Later in the same year, it was invited to Tanzkongress in Germany as well. A large and diverse platform like Aerowaves opened up the opportunities for Wang to meet more people, followed by more invitations and its international tour: Germany and Japan in 2023 (at Staatstheater Darmstadt as part of the program “Fokus Taiwan”), followed by Spain, and Portugal in 2024.  

 

At Tanzkongress, Beings was described by Marcus Hladek on Frankfurt Rundschau as “a duo characterized by artistic simplicity…It reveals a subtlety which did not harm the evocative and sensual nature of it, just as the dancers play with the rice paper by folding and unfolding it with a retrained metaphorical implication to maintain its pure beauty.“

The first stop of Beings' international tour was Greece. Wang still remembered how he spent the night in his hotel room by the Aegean Sea: it was his first journey to faraway Europe, first time touring with his team and his work, first time to work remotely with his lighting designer Joanne Shyueand to work out all the technical demands with in-house technicians in Greece he had never met before, not to mention the pandemic situations. Slightly anxious and jetlagged, he woke up before dawn. 

 

“There was a small balcony of our hotel room, and I just sat there, looking up at the starry night. I heard the sound of the waves washing up on the beaches, as the sky gradually and slowly changed its hues. The Sun dyed the sky before it emerged from the horizon against a background of constantly changing colors. I sat there and told myself: how lucky you are! By dancing, you even get to see a beautiful scene like this?!” Touring with the work allowed Wang to witness an extraordinary scene at a particular moment, to meet particular people, and to have a particular experience. He thus felt particularly lucky about all these things, realizing that he now carried a greater responsibility and should work harder to deserve it. 

 

 

 

Wang's first international tour with his own work began with a lesson. 

 

At Tanzkongress in Germany, the venue for Beings was the space in front of an abandoned war-ruined church. Wang asked himself: if we are going to present our work in front of a church loaded with history, what is the best way to do it?  How should we deal with the people coming and going all the time? How should we move the work to an outdoor space? How can we find the best location with the best lighting and tree shadows at the hour of our performances?  What should we do with the paper on stage, as a major object in Beings, when the low humidity in Europe might have an unexpected effect on its quality?  

 

 

Since it was presented outdoors, there were passersby attracted and stopped by it apart from the audience who intentionally came for the dance piece. After the performance, some scattered in groups and talked to each other.  Wang noticed an old lady standing aside and waiting quietly. When Wang and his team were left alone and began to pack up the stuffs, the old lady walked toward Wang and kept thanking him and his team for performing at this place because it meant so much to her.   

 

Wang has kept the old lady's words of appreciation in mind, which changes the way he defines the creation or performance. He now sees the location of an outdoor performance, its adjacent buildings, people's relation with the place, its past stories and historical contexts, and all the variable factors of site-specific creations all important elements to link the performance and its audience.

 

“Can we find a way for more people to see our works?  It does not have to be in a theatre, but maybe we can allow the work some flexibility, to have different shapes, so it can happen at different places and reach different people. At the same time, can our work have enough publicness so the audience can place themselves within it?“  He expects his future works to be flexible and movable – to have at least two versions, one for theatre and the other for non-theatre venues.     

 

So what is such a “publicness” in Wang's mind? “When creating a work, I often begin with many questions in mind. It is the curiosity in creation motivates my creation, and the publicness I refer to is…there may be some people who share the same questions with me. There may be some people who have the same insecurity, the same sense of the unknown and the same curiosity, so it turns out that we are all the same. Perhaps at the certain moment of the work, I am also the same with the old lady.” 

 

“Asking questions in your artistic exploration may either lead you to the answers or to more questions, or for you to realize that everyone shares similar questions and there will be no answer – I guess that knowing it is simply enough.“

 

Following the challenge concerning the change of space, here comes another problem: how did he deal with the paper as its texture was changed and affected by the low humidity in Europe?  

 

Xuan paper, the one and only object on stage, can be defined as the third dancer in the dance piece apart from the two human dancers. However, this “third dancer” in Europe became brittle and sharp, making it extremely difficult and dangerous to dance with.  Its stiffness made it easier to crack and its sharpness cut. Wang said jokingly: “it is a sudden realization that your dance partner has been changed to a totally different person!” 

 

The large sheet on stage is designed and made by the scenographer Chen Kuang-Lin, who mixed white glue and water to stick two thin pieces of xuan paper together, and assembled 12 pieces of doubled xuan paper of the same size to make a larger 4m x 4m one. During the abovementioned procedure, every step took time and they had to wait for it to be ready. Even the temperatures and humidity would more or less affect the making of the paper and the final work.  “It is a business on the mercies of the elements,” said Wang. 

 

When they arrived in Greece, the first stop of their international tour, there was no time for them to fix the paper so they could only perform with what it had become at that time. After the performance, they started to work on solutions with the technical director Lan Chin-Ting testing every possibility by spraying water on it to see how much water it needed, how to control the sprays, how early (before the performance) to spray it, and how to maintain its best condition during the performance, etc. Meanwhile, they also talked about the necessary compromise due to the condition of the paper to make sure that the dancers were safe on stage and everything was at its best.  

 

During the tour, every time when they arrived at a new place, they needed to spread out the paper. Sometimes, a longer period of storage might change the glue's quality and cause some part of the paper to fall off, so it was necessary to go through the details and mend it.    

 

As the paper's texture changed unexpectedly in Europe, the sound it created somehow became more fascinating.  There was not much music used in Beings, and most of the sound you heard during the dance piece came from this large sheet of paper. It thus became an interesting fact that the physical changes of the paper's quality due to the different weather condition led to a paradoxical beauty, where dancers danced with a difficult paper partner and beautiful paper sound.  

 

Wang has admitted that the sheet of paper on stage is still less stable than it should be, but the instability is the most beautiful part. Every subtle change, such as the weight or angle, has its impact on the dance performance. When arriving at a new place, they will begin their “paper-tending ceremony” and fathom how they should build a relationship this time. During the performance, they experience “a less perfect but we-have-been-through-it-together journey” with the audience.    

 

Until now, the team of Beings has continued collecting information about paper and conducting physical experiments on paper to search for the link between its variable factors and consequences. 

 

“Paper is living,” said Wang when he was going to tell me the story about paper. Although paper is generally seen as a non-living object, does their interaction not also define how one builds and explores a relationship?

 

 

“Relation” as a major theme throughout Wang's recent creations first appeared in Beings, followed by two more works expected to premiere in 2024 and 2025 respectively to form the “Relation” trilogy, which explores interpersonal relations, the relation between humans and the environment, and eventually the relation among all human beings.    

 

Although Beings sets up the framework of the “Relation” trilogy, the idea for the second piece actually came before Beings.  

 

Looking back on his Tame first presented at the 2019 Songyan New Points On Stage, Wang said: “after Tame I had been through a serious depression – it was the first time I really confronted my creation, my helplessness, and the fact that there were so many I wanted to do but so little I could do.” Receiving a funding from Cloud Gate Culture and Arts Foundation's “Wanderer Project” at that time, he soon departed for Indonesia two days after the performance of Tame.     

 

“I wanted to look for a fish that weighs as much as me. There was a folklore in pongso no tao that every big fish has a fisher's name engraved on its back, so I wanted to look for it, to find out where my name was.”

 

Impressed by the rich and profound Indonesia culture and tradition, Wang began to ask himself:  What is Taiwan? What is the island where I grew up? What do we represent?  What is the tradition of my body? He wondered, “do I lack confidence in Taiwan and my own body?” 

 

When he was in Indonesia, he contacted and visited Danang Pamungkas, his former colleague in Cloud Gate 2. He traveled to Surakarta City, Danang's hometown, and Danang's family showed him around the area. It was a trip without particular purposes except for visiting an old friend, but later in 2022 when Wang received an invitation from Taiwan Dance Platform, hosted by the National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts (also known as Weiwuying), he decided to ask Danang to join him in the creation A Quest for Relationship: Island of _________.

 

“There was a moment in one of our performances, when we had a plastic cloth on stage, and we both should gather the cloth from the air and lay it flat. Seeing the cloth floating in the air for some time and finally descending, I suddenly had a feeling that Taiwan, a small island as it was, was pretty nice. There was probably no other island as small as Taiwan in the world that could accommodate so many different ethnic groups and religions, and celebrate gender equality. Things like this were shapeless. It was plastic and inclusive.” At that moment, Wang felt that the island had a shapeless shape and existed in its own way. Later, he discussed it with his dramaturg Wang Shih-Wei about how they could continue with the idea, which became what the second piece of the trilogy departed from.   With the support of the National Theater & Concert Hall and Weiwuying in co-production, A Quest for Relationship: Island of _________ is scheduled to premiere in the autumn of 2024.  

 

 

Wang told me frankly that the big fish he caught during his Wanderer Project did not weigh as much as him. “But in one of our rehearsals, I carried Danang and thought: maybe Danang was the fish I was looking for which weighed as much as me, and the creation process was a journey to find my name.” 

 

For him, A Quest for Relationship: Island of _________ was an enlargement of an intimate relationship. “If interpersonal relationship works this way, how about the relation between islands?” In his journey, sometimes loaded with a confusion of self-identity, Wang hoped to search for different possibilities together with the Indonesia dancer Danang who was different from Wang in every possible way. “Do we share similar difficulties or ongoing experiences, or the lack of confidence in our body, our ethnicity, and ourselves? Perhaps we are as different as how we are both the same.”

 

Why are islands called “islands?”  How do resources and cultures flow between islands? How do islands connect with each other? A Quest for Relationship: Island of _________ is such a work about two dance artists from different islands exploring the abovementioned questions. Meanwhile, Wang shares his thought that the island has marks carved by nature or time, so is our body. “Perhaps everyone’s body is an island,” and he hoped to create mirrored metaphors between islands and bodies.    

 

 

The third piece of the trilogy can be traced back to the first Europe tour in 2022, again. There was a one-month gap between the performances in Greece and Germany, so Wang decided to go to Spain for a pilgrimage tour before Beings' next stop.  

 

The famous Camino de Santiago in Spain contained several routes, and Wang chose the challenging “Camino del Norte” which ran through the coastal cliffs. Its rugged and steep mountainous terrains, climate changes, and much fewer supply stations made the pilgrimage extremely difficult for travelers. As for Wang, he carried his backpack and tent to take on the road without planning ahead.    

 

The first stop was to get a Credential Del Peregrino (Pilgrim Passport), with which the pilgrims were allowed to stay in albergues (pilgrim hostels) and to have discount for hostels and restaurants. He still remembered a conversation with the staff member at the counter: “Where are you from?” “Taiwan.” “Is it China?” When Wang tried to explain it, a European replied in Spanish: “He is from Taiwan, not China.”  That moment was a realization to Wang that his journey had really begun.  

 

During the month, Wang had been through sunny days and heavy rains. Sometimes he camped in the mountain, while sometimes he stayed in albergues. Walking with a heavy load of more than 10kg, Wang felt the physical and spiritual torture which surfaced with the question being asked everyday: how to give up? However, he did not give up but persisted. He even finished the route in 30 days, quicker than the average pilgrims for that carrying his own tent made it easier to find a spot to rest.

 

In 2023, when Beings toured to Germany again, Wang visited the memorial site of Terezin Concentration Camp in Czech. The camp was used as a propaganda to “show” (a show indeed) the “healthy and joyful life” inside.  

 

Standing there, Wang felt how the design of the buildings and its walls conveyed the suffocating stress: “If I had been here at that time, knowing that it was the last stop of my life, how scared I would have been?” He continued to walk and entered an underground passage. It was extremely narrow with some windows to the outside, but the windows were just small holes on the thick walls which separated the passage from the outside world, and there was water inside the walls. Then, he reached a different space guarded by barbed wires, and the route led him to a stairway. He walked up. There was a large wall full of bullet holes in front of him and a cross next to the wall. It was the final path taken by the prisoners before they were executed.   

 

Wang thought to himself: “Why did people have the heart to treat othes like this?  What caused it to happen?  What was the purpose of such a cruelty?” In the first week of his pilgrimage trip, he also passed through the Basque Country in northern Spain and saw many flags and slogans along the road which demanded the Spanish government to recognize them as an independent nation. He had the similar feeling at that time: “I do not know how much time, effort, or blood it should take for a nation to prove that it is free and independent, how many people or things you own should be sacrificed to prove that you are free.” 

 

During these trips abroad, Wang gradually developed the many questions he wished to explore in the third piece of the trilogy – about people, about how people have become what they are throughout the long evolution journey, and about the unsolved puzzles between people. 

 

 

After the global outbreak of COVID-19, Wang began to feel dispirited and unsure about the purpose of theatre in our contemporary life. People in today's world could easily find what they wanted for entertainment or knowledge on all kinds of media and platforms, but it took much more effort, in every aspect, to go to the theatre. So why do we still need to go to the theatre? “If I cannot find the reason I agree, I do not know why I am still doing it.”

    

In the same trip he visited Czech, Wang also went to Vienna and watched a performance at Wiener Konzerthaus. He sat beside the wall: “the person who sat in front of me might have some mental illness, and his body would move with the dance, something like he would keep tiptoeing all the time. He knew every music piece very well, because his movement always happened before the music. He was a natural dancer. It was just so beautiful that he did not do anything but only enjoy the music.”

 

“At that moment, I felt like I found the purpose of theatre in our contemporary life – we needed these experiences, physical experiences.” 

 

Just like the physical experiences in Terezin Concentration Camp, these are not things which could be felt via smartphone or computer. It is why people still want to dine in a restaurant or go to the night market. “I want to find such a connection for my future works,” said Wang.  

 

Take Beings for example: the physical experiences contain how paper creates sounds on stage or the different paper quality when they perform in different places. Imperfection is a physical experience too, so are the sound of the drip of sweat on paper and how the sweat slowly spreads. “Those physical experiences are for the audience to freely choose and to settle down with.  It is what I am looking for.” It does not have to be a strong vibration. It can be subtle.  Wang hopes that he could find these physical experiences in a more sensitive and nuanced way.   

 

Apart from theatre, Wang's Shimmering Production, co-founded with Lee Yin-Ying in 2019, has continued its “Hand in Hand, We Dance Project.” As the project title suggests, every time when they visit a different place for the purpose of artist residency or touring, they will organize workshops for non-professionals as long as they can, inviting ordinary people to co-create or to enjoy the fun of pure body-moving. The idea started with Wang and Lee's past experiences of artist residencies in different schools and cities when they were both dancers of Cloud Gate 2, where they got a chance to dance with non-professionals or for non-theatregoers. “Their feedback was straightforward, so I found the communication precious.” Wang and Lee thus began to wonder: apart from theatre, was there different ways to share their dance with more people.  

 

 

Every sharing and experience are motivation for Wang to carry on. Despite the lack of immediate effect or contribution, seeing them dancing free like children and knowing that you may bring them something different can be the best reward to keep going. 

 

At the same time, it allows Wang to reexamine his profession as a dancer: “Dance can be such a happy thing, so I should cherish the time when I still can dance.” 

 

 

After Beings in 2020, Wang began to develop A Quest for Relationship: Island of _________ in 2022, with its scheduled premiere in 2024, and according to his plan, Wang will work on the third piece of the trilogy in 2025. Meanwhile, Beings has toured to many different countries and Wang also have different ongoing creations and projects.  

 

However, he confessed that as a slow creator, he was probably “ineffective” from a business perspective.  

 

When creating Beings, Wang consulted a paper master about the use of paper, and the master told him: papermakers often said that paper was waiting for the right “heat,” and you needed to wait for the “heat” to be stabilized to use it. Sometimes it took years. Wang found it beautiful.  Waiting can be such a romantic, capricious, but beautiful thing.   

 

No matter it was during the pilgrimage trip or wanderer project, in which Wang wished to catch a big fish that weighed as much as him, he thought about giving up and even had the exit plan ready. He told me: “If you need to give up, you have to give up flawlessly and accurately.” But if you really wanted him to give up, he would tell you “if you give up now, you lose it.” For him, he did not have the luxury to give up. 

 

The fact is, Wang has never planned to give up. During the journey of his artistic practice, he has always allowed the confusion, self-doubt, and all kinds of questions to happen, while he will try to solve one after another on the way. He goes with the flow of time and cherishes the state of life as given: creating slowly, you will find your own questions or the questions of the questions via the work; touring is the way to create many different experiences; and his dance projects offer the best opportunity not only to recharge himself but to know more people. 

 

There is a folklore in pongso no tao that every big fish has a fisher's name engraved on its back. Perhaps Wang Yeu-Kwn is still on the road in search of the big fish, but he is thriving during the journey, where he has solved riddle after riddle at a slow but steady pace to search for his own name.  

 

 

*Translator: Siraya Pai