Body Text
Both groups also investigated creating performance vocabulary to support what they wanted to convey.
For instance, Nobody Asked! shared they employed a selection of references to memes and contemporary issues as a strategy to evoke particular feelings of familiarity and frustration in the audience, and also to provoke introspection.
They also deliberately redacted the context of one of their key characters, Woman X, allowing her to escape the failings of the author and audience. An audience member shared that they found it hard to connect with the characters of Nobody Asked! with little information, to which the creators remarked that the ambiguity was precisely to further elude characters beyond simple definition.
Fragments relied on two conventions: Butoh and puppetry.
In order to restore some historicity to Madame Mao’s Memories, they employed Butoh to communicate the pain and anguish brought about by the Cultural Revolution. Embodiment was important to their investigation of intergenerational trauma, so choosing an appropriate form like Butoh to evoke those physical sensations and stark visuals was necessary.
Ci Xuan mentioned they used their massive puppet to do what the human body cannot, such as represent violence. It also communicated otherness, a metaphor for their relationship to and distance from the difficult subject matter. “We’re talking about something that is not like us. Our interactions with (the puppet) were clumsy and awkward; (it expresses that) we’re still trying to grapple with it,” she adds.