Jury’s Comments for the Annual Grand Prize

Transforming the heaviness of White Terror archives into a fluent, profound sound theater, Against Again Troupe’s White Clear Song is an artful blend of story-telling, folk songs and reportage theatre. The work recounts the stories of victims through monologues, dialogues and singing on a makeshift stage with effective symbolic images and flexible mise-en-scène by four performers. It unadornedly restores the original perspectives of the archives to convey the complex and entangled realities of our past. White Clear Song revisits history to relieve the individual's grief after decades of silencing, to clearly summon the power of oral history, and to resist oblivion and apathy. As the sound lingers, the work materializes a difficult narrative of history with an amazing light touch.

Comments on the Finalist

Before the invention of scripts, human beings record history with sounds, whether in music or language, which can connect to the audio memory of our body. In response to the ambiguous, unclear White Terror history, the two musicians and two performers in Bright White Song, with their brilliant storytelling and music, traverse the historical perspectives of the past, present and future. Moreover, the stunning textual narrative based on music/sonic performance has incorporated blues, folk singing and Hakka folk song to create a collision with the oblivion and silence of sealed archives with variegated yet straightforward power, not only touching people hearts but also giving flesh and blood to history in a way that is distant yet close, magical but realistic. Through every revisit to historical scenes, Bright White Song candidly evokes the power of legacy inherited through the history of sonic narrative. (Commentor: Siraya PAI)

Artwork Introduction

The theater troupe works with the Transitional Justice Commission and reconstructs the untold historical memories from the White Terror period through various narrative approaches, such as monologue storytelling, traditional folk singing and folk songs that recount history through verbal narration. A large number of historical archives was referenced in the writing of the script and the performance. The dialogues between and singing of musicians and performers were based on the experiences of a fictional underprivileged worker, and followed the storyline of his life – “family of origin, choices in life, arrest, trial, self-correction statements, searching of a victim’s remains and the undelivered letter” – to portray and discuss the victims’ testimonies and accounts of incidents from different times, enabling the audience from around the island to empathize with the victims as real “human beings” and the situations of their lives. The theater troupe performed in seven key towns in the history of White Terror, and incorporated real cases that had taken place in these locales. In addition to combining folk songs and “sound theater,” respectively representing the traditional and the contemporary, the work created a diversely dialectical narrative perspective belonging to the people while bringing stories back to where they first began. Apart from the theatrical performance enriched with singing and storytelling, the entire project also included parent-child workshops and after-performance talks, which invited the public and the victims’ family members to share their stories. Through this theatrical platform, historical memory and justice have been reinvented in collective discussion.

About the Artist

Founded in 2002 by artists born after the 80s and specializing in different fields, the name of the theater troupe originates from stories about the child-god, Nezha, in Asian mythologies that adopt the ideas of “death and rebirth” and “the concept of transformation” to depict his journey from birth, life challenges and returning to divinity. The name of the theatre troupe therefore indicates that theatrical endeavors should aim for shattering old practices to break new grounds while bringing together sensory perceptions enabled by different media to create fresh aesthetic experiences. The troupe has steadfastly realized “sound theater” and interdisciplinary work foregrounding non-standard theatrical space in hope of fostering more experimental theatrical imagination for contemporary theater arts. Their works include Against Again Apartment Showcase, All That's Left to Happen Is Some Deaths (My Own Included), Götterdämmerung, Dictionary of Chaos: Addendum and more.