- Date 2024.01.19
- Venue Hsu family's traditional sanheyuan-style residence （No. 88, Ln. 291, Sec. 2, Guoling Rd., Zhongli Dist., Taoyuan City 320010 , Taiwan (R.O.C.)）
Great-Grand Rat-Po-Tai (So Old) Is Sleeping Next To A Landscape Painting, Diligently & Stingily Snoring—— But There Is No Landscape Painting! (White Carrot, Rat Teeth, Her Child, (And Her Child’s Child.))
flowers bloom on the dead end x HSU Peng
Comments on the Finalist
Great-Grand Rat-Po-Tai (So Old) Is Sleeping Next To A Landscape Painting, Diligently & Stingily Snoring—— But There Is No Landscape Painting! is a remarkable collaboration between flowers bloom on the dead end and HSU Peng. HSU’s script skillfully refines everyday trivialities into surreal black humor through the magical power of words and imagination. Co-creating with flowers bloom on the dead end at the historic Hsu family home in Guolin, they weave legends from history and craft a fable about women featuring the “Rat-Po-Tai (Mouse Great-Grandma)” within the ethical context of a Hakka village. This immersive performance blends text, visuals, and actors’ performances, successfully incorporating the surroundings into the performance text while providing a re-interpretation of this environment. Through humorous and sharp, other-dimensional imagination, the heavy reality is transformed into a questioning of the patriarchal order framed within feminist poetics. (Commentator: Jen-Hao Walter HSU)
Artwork Introduction
In Hakka, “Rat-Po-Tai” refers to the wife of your great-grandfather’s younger brother. At this very moment, Rat-Po-Tai is likely over 130 years old and is at death’s door. On the night her soul departs, rising above the half-moon pond, family members from Taiwan and abroad gather at the sanheyuan (three-sided courtyard home). That night, they observe fish flying in the sky, chickens speaking Taiwanese, and preserved radish omelets spiraling into the universe.
Playwright-director HSU Peng and “flowers bloom on the dead end” collectively visit the Hsu family. They collect oral life histories—conveyed through the “sui sui nian” method—as the X-axis, the playwriting’s fictional techniques as the Y-axis, and an immersive experience alongside Hakka cuisine as the Z-axis, bringing a multisensory experience to the Hsu family’s sanheyuan in Guoling, Zhongli. In Rat-Po-Tai’s final moments, the audience enters the ancestral shrine, side wings, bamboo grove, and pond of the sanheyuan. Through the perspective of a fully Taipei-ized lesbian descendant who speaks no Hakka, they observe how the Hakka women of the Hsu family navigate the arrangements of life and death: marrying into a conservative Hakka village while alive, and after death, joining the spirits of their husband’s family. Meanwhile, they witness the younger generation of urbanized youth awkwardly returning to their hometown, where they go unrecognized—and in turn, roll their eyes, no longer recognizing the hometown themselves.
About the Artist
“flowers bloom on the dead end” was established by four female theater professionals who graduated from the Department of Theater Arts at National Sun Yat-sen University. Their productions primarily consist of original plays, collaborative creations, and adaptations of classic literature. The group’s intimate performances often take place in non-theatrical venues, challenging the traditional proscenium format and transforming forms of audience engagement while exploring the boundary between fiction and reality.
HSU Peng is both the playwright and director of Great-Grand Rat-Po-Tai. She employs “sui sui nian” (碎碎唸), a recitation style based on murmuring, as a distinctive technique in her works, exploring the humor found in excess, poor taste, and the Taiwanese queer experience through this unique lens. Hsu regards “sui sui nian” as a method for interpreting new texts—one that is intrinsically linked to Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese language. She is captivated by how “sui sui nian,” with its meandering redundancy and inefficiency, can loosely connect marginalized experiences that lack defining “keywords,” creating an ever-expanding landscape of experiences that resist being anchored to a single core idea.
Production Team
Playwright & Director: HSU Peng
Performers & Co-creators: LU Ming-yao, LI Wei-cih, HUANG Ke-chuan, CHANG Mien-mien, CHANG Chia-chen, TSAI Pei-ju, LIU Huan, Louis CHIEN
Live Musician: WU Ya-hsuan
Set Design: CHUNG I-fang
Lighting Design: CHIEN Fang-yu
Music Design: LIU Wenchi
Costume Design: Hikky CHEN
Video Design: WU Pei-shan
Animation Design: Kyungwon SONG
Graphic Design: TSAI Jui-mei
Graphic Illustration: Kanki Sawako
Producer: Huang Cheng-yu
Associate Producers: NIAN Hsinyu, Kellin HUANG
Stage Manager: HUANG Yung-chih
Sound Operator: CHANG Ke-hsin
Production Consultant: Angelina JIAN
Stage Design Assistant: LIN Ming-te
Stage Technician: HSIAO Ya-ting
Lighting Technicians: LIEN Ssu-yun, CHANG Ting-ting
Wardrobe Supervisor: LEE Hong-jun
Video Documentation: CHEN Chun-tien、LIANG Shao-wen、YANG Chen-yu
Photography: WU Yu-ying, LIU Chien-yu
Supported by: National Culture and Arts Foundation, Hakka Affairs Council
Special Thanks to:
TUNG Wei-ko, HSU Ying-chu, LIU Chi-fang, HSU Ying-tsai, HSU Ying-shao, HSU Ying-ti, HSU Shu-yuan, HSU Shu-min, HSU Yu-chiao, HSU Shih-yen, HSU Shih-keng, HSU Ling-chih, HSU Li-hsiu, HSU Ming-ting, CHANG Hsun, HUANG Ching-ho, Ginger HUANG, Tang Tang's Family
