t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s
by WeiZen Ho
@ Articulate project space
2018 Performances:
Thursday 22nd March,
6:30 - 8pm
Friday 23rd March,
6:30 - 8pm
Saturday 24th March,
2:00 - 3:30pm & 6:30 - 8pm followed by closing drinks.
Forum: Sunday
25th March, 2pm (panel members TBC)
Open Hours:
11am-5pm, Thur-Sun, 11th-25th March
2018 (installation-in-progress open for viewing)
Please RSVP to weiofzen@gmail.com or call 0416 038 897
t
h e s u b t l e b e i n g s is a performance
installation that is the result of WeiZen’s two years of travel in Asia to
research and witness of rituals in Sabah (East Malaysia) and Hanoi (Vietnam),
rituals that are connected to her own geographical and socio-cultural
heritage.
The work uses hair,
text, sound, reflective film, sound circuitry, movement, vocals and video.
My collaborators are Katja Handt (costume
designer), Iqbal Barkat (
associate director – film, dramaturgy,
installation), Vincent Tay (cinematographer), Binh Ta (cultural artist-guide in
Hanoi), Damian Castaldi (sound circuitry, kinetic sound-to-body designer),
Michael Touisuta (sound design collaborator + engineer). The installation
team includes volunteers Sarah Keighery, William Seeto, Louise Morgan,
Alexandra Mitchell and Naomi Ullmann.
The project was been made possible by Australia Council's Arts
Project grant for WeiZen to study and develop ‘Performances, Interpreted
& Reimagined of Asian Animistic & Shamanistic Rituals’_2016-2018.
“I am interested in the performance
of ritual-like experiences of being possessed as a transformative experience
for both the performer and onlooker. Then there is the notion of possession as
the filling in of, and mediating of, many kinds of absences. It makes me wonder
about the kinds of qualitative states that may make possession possible: mental
vulnerability, uncertainty of social identity, lack of access to deeper
communion or devotional spaces (and I don’t mean just religious institutional
buildings), the thinning veil between life and death, the need for empowerment,
unbelonging, dislocation, displacement and uprooting.
Coming from a lineage of Fujian people who migrated into Malaysia and Indonesia before the Cultural Revolution in China, the above-mentioned states are familiar. I suspect the migration process can exacerbate them, depending on the level of trauma and degree of choice involved. Migrants have to grapple with the cultural distance they have travelled from as well. I guess for some, a migrant’s world can be akin to a state of perpetual purgatory…
Possession can possibly be an instrument against despair and humiliation, where perhaps even a person dispossessed of country of origin, who is part of an invisible class in society or whose sense of identity is porous, can experience a sense of spiritual authority and communion, for example.
Part of my practice is the continual search for a performance structure that has integrity and yet is so minimal that it allows sixty to seventy percent space for improvisation and thereby hopefully, mediumship to occur. By mediumship I mean heightening my sensitivity to the guts of the performance, body imageries I am working on, and the presence of the space I am inhabiting..."
WeiZen Ho, Potus Sedere: Part of the Stories from the
Body Performance Series; Rabbit 20 - Dance (A Journal for Non-fiction
Poetry) published by RMIT in 2017
Background information:
 |
| WeiZen Ho from Stories from the Body #5 (PLATFORM 2017) |
 |
| WeiZen Ho and Alan Schacher from Hungry Ghosts and Golem 2011 |
This project has been made possible by Australia Council's Arts Project grant for WeiZen to study and develop Performances, Interpreted & Reimagined of Asian Animistic & Shamanistic Rituals (2016-2018)
