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Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Keywords

island, Taiwan, theater performance, trans-corporeality, eco-aesthetic critique

Abstract

This paper explores an eco-aesthetic critique as it intertwines with island consciousness and theatrical performances in Taiwan. Focusing on Bare Feet Dance Theatre’s Tsiáh-Thóo (2020/2021) and TAI Body Theatre’s Red Earth (2019), both renowned for revitalizing Taiwanese cultural traditions, the study examines how these dance-theater productions embody and reactivate the traditional knowledge and/or practices of Han and Indigenous Taiwanese communities in a way that points to contemporary and near-future ecological crises. As an island nation, Taiwan has been dominated by successive imperial and colonial powers as well as by prolonged authoritarian rule over the past century, leading to a disconnection between its inhabitants and their insular environments, folk traditions, and Indigenous practices. Against this historical backdrop, this paper investigates how the two theatrical texts create what I term the notion of “trans-corporealizing island,” critically reclaiming the ancient ecosophy resonant with island Taiwan. The argument proposed here is that these theatrical performances reconstruct a body-land relationship, wherein the performing body relinquishes its dominant agency and instead moves in concert with multiple elements—light and shadow, sound, surfaces, smoke, fabric, nets—collectively assembling an intra-active, sinuous, and affectively charged choreography. This is the ecological-aesthetic critique embedded within the “trans-corporealizing island,” calling for a reconfiguration of sensibility and thus inviting us to re-sense and re-engage with the porous, dynamic, and entangled spatiotemporalities of Taiwan as an island.

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