Jury’s Comments for the Performing Arts Award

Wang Shih-Wei’s Masses is a collective performance featuring abundant creative energies of four outstanding artists. The production fully exploits the spatial potential of the venue. Watching from afar or immersed in close range, the audience is invited to bravely face the nuances of personal life amid street protests. Caught in between fierce confrontation and solitary repression, the sole protester calls for hope to persist. The performance sincerely examines the self-awareness, passion and alienation of individuals in the mass, without falling into the cliché of blatant political statement or self-indulgence. While responding to the global unrest, Masses takes the audience to re-experience and re-think the personal and the social of being in a street struggle.

Comments on the Finalist

The solitary but determined figure of the dancer appears in blurriness, contrasting to the still mass (audience) in the space—a scene of individual existence and collective awareness as well as resistance and repressiveness. It echoes the unstable global situations and seems to ask: how should we situate ourselves? Every link of the performance – the dance, the sound, its lighting and the smoke – is prominent yet unobtrusive, properly unfolding an encompassing sensory impact and dialectic thinking. Masses reveals no political statements; neither is it a self-revealing monologue. Instead, it employs what happens in the performance as material to evoke the implicit, residual body memory, resonating through the peripherals with both passion and aloofness. In a new way, the audience is therefore able to re-experience the unsettled scenes of protests in the outside world. (Commentator: Siraya PAI)

Artwork Introduction

With theatre director Wang Shih-Wei as the leading creator and collectively completed the work with choreographer Tien Hsiao-Tzu, sound designer Li Tzi-Mei and lighting designer Helmi Fita, Masses delineates the passion and chaos of social movements, responding to the conflicting feelings of the masses with solo dances that explore the complex emotions within the minds of protestors to interpret individual frustration and solitude in crowd movement. The smoke constitutes an uncertain ambiance and poetic visuality; the sound creates a sense of oppression and impact. Step by step, the performance questions the encounter and separation between individuals and the masses. As performers meander and move around the audience, who is turned into active participants from passive onlookers, the diverse theatrical effect of the work transports the audience back to the “psychological site” of social movements.

About the Artist

WANG Shih-Wei / Creator, Director

Wang Shih-Wei graduated from the Department of Theater Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts, and later received his MA and PhD in Theatre Arts from the New Sorbonne University Paris III, France. He has focused on European theatre culture, delving in writing, translation, academic research, cultural exchange and artistic creation. His translation work includes the Mandarin version of Avec Joël Pommerat: Un monde complexe and Le Petit Chaperon Rouge，Pinocchio，Cendrillon; and his theatrical works include Blossom of the Fallen Flowers, Le Balcon and Masses.

TIEN Hsiao-Tzu / Choreographer, Dancer

Tien Hsiao-Tzu holds an MA in Dance from National Taiwan University of Arts, and is now a professional dance instructor, choreographer and dancer. She has collaborated with important choreographers and dance companies from Taiwan and abroad, and has taken part in various major arts festivals. Her works have been published in numerous occasions and programs, among which are National Theater & Concert Hall’s “Mix Program”; Taipei Arts Festival; Young Stars, New Vision; Next Choreography Project; and Century Contemporary Dance Company’s program, “RAM.”

LI Tzi-Mei / Sound and Acoustic Field Designer

Li Tzi-Mei is a theatrical music designer, music producer and DJ, who has endeavored in interpreting Taiwanese culture, history and society with the texture of contemporary sound while striving to shatter the limitation of using music to further narratives. By breaking the semiotic use of sound, she aims to create different experience of listening and understanding. She has worked with L'Enfant S. Physical Theatre, Bare Feet Dance Theatre, Assignment Theatre, Performosa Theatre and more.

Helmi Fita / Lighting and Smoke Designer

A theater professional, Helmi Fita was born in Singapore, where he received professional training in performance, art education, lighting and other stage techniques. He has changed his role from being a devoted performer on stage to a designer that works off stage to create elaborately designed setting and atmosphere. He has engaged in theatre and education for twenty-nine years.