Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture

Comments on the Finalists

“When we sing in the KTVs, we can’t deny that it is me who is singing although there is not a thread of my emotion in the voice.” Singing other people’s songs and repeating other people’s words is similar to the conditions such as “the loss of speech” or “unable to sing one’s own songs.” This is a very generic and common concept. Love Song 2010 amplified this usual experience and turned it into the performers’ sense of time and body on the stage while treating voices as a formality. Without the structuring of a storyline and dialogues, the actors in this play abandoned the burdens of playing fixed roles. It allowed nameless characters to sing other people’s songs and repeat in turns all kinds of formulaic phrases, advertisements, and speeches. Through this approach, the audience could re-experience “listening to a play”: a means to have the “plots propelled by listening” instead of “having the songs for the plot’s sake.” The actors’ bodies became the agents of all types of speeches and songs; no matter they were speaking or singing, the actors could not depart from this body encoded by voices, music and the speech system. Also renouncing lines and narration that have usually restrained actors in theater, Love Song 2010 transmuted the expressive techniques related to subjective expression such as speaking and singing into the theme of the work. As a matter of fact, what the play contemplated on was how to narrate when there were no “romance” and subject but only songs and speeches. (Commentator / GUO Jau-Lan)

About the Work

The “Love Song” series created by Lo Da-Yu includes “Love Song 1980,” “Love Song 1990,” and “Love Song 2000,” and the lyrics and melodies all convey romantic feelings and moods. However, not only do the content of the long songs, the situations of different time period that they describe, and the chronological publication express concern with society and implicitly comment on reality, but they are also infused with sentiments toward this land and its people. 

Love Song 2010 draws inspiration from Lo’s love song series, and utilizes the social atmosphere and various events taking place since the year of 2000 as its theme to highlight the invisible social truth through the approach of collective creation. Stringing together various non-narrative actions and imageries from everyday life and developing a route of theatrical creation based on the physical space, the production aims to communicate people’s routine habits and a pure temporality informed by change and repetition.

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.