- Date 2014.09.12-14
- Venue Songyan Creative Lab
2014 Taipei Fringe Festival—Leave it rotten
LI Ming-Chen
Comments on the Finalists
Leave it Rotten wittedly adopted a popular phrase, which was strongly contemporary, and transformed it into a dance in an elongated space, which was about the simultaneously growing and rotting time, as well as the growing but rotting body in time. It not only effectively deconstructed the formal discipline of the body in traditional theater or dance training, but also successfully deconstructed the restraint of the body as an agent for narrative and signification. By doing so, the body fully submerged in wild contortion, and through interlacing solo and group dances, released the collective hysterical energy, allowing all to be simply manifestations of movements, changes, speed as well as the strength and action of the body. Leave it Rotten was a theatrical dance that amplified the senses, intensely impacting the audience with its bodily force. (Commentator / CHANG Hsiao-Hung)
About the Work
Leave it rotten is an invited production performed at the 2014 Taipei Fringe Festival. It is inspired by both a popular catchphrase – “leave it rotten” (擺爛), commonly used in everyday life, and the literal meaning of the phrase and an everyday experience – “to leave something alone and let it rot” (e.g., a rotten apple), which is then extended to the things, emotions, and states that we might be unwilling to face in life.
The performance starts from the configuration of the Songyan Creative Lab, and appropriates the physical gesture and visual imagery of the trending “Ice Bucket Challenge” to weave together and transform the different unproductive feelings into the creative theme: restlessness, anxiety, boredom, embarrassment, frittering away, waiting, squandering, waiting in vain, emptiness, self-depreciation, tiredness, exhaustion, and the feeling of unbearableness. Through embodying the theme of “leave it rotten,” the piece unveils a wide range of imageries and audiovisual possibilities.
About the Artist
LI Ming-chen is the key figure of Style Lab Theater Company, which organizes its personnel and required teams according to different subjects of performance and the condition of production. Their works are usually developed from objects and sites, adopting a method of collective improvisation to juxtapose and embed the performing texts with a kind of relationship between the texture of the site and the people. Their performances often use visual images and atmosphere to narrate elements of a story, and they are active in trying out different creative means and methods, hoping to find new possibilities of expression in site-specific theater.
