As part of Kyoto Experiment, I watched at the black box of Theatre E9 two performers interact with an installation rich in textures and materials against a background of projections. The projections depicted collages of images, text in multiple languages, and surtitles of spoken lines that weaved together Japanese and Taiwanese legends and folk tales centering female figures roaming the mountains. Japanese dance artist Nanako Matsumoto and Taiwanese visual artist Anchi Lin (also going by their Indigenous Atayal name Ciwas Tahos) found as one starting point in their collaboration these stories in their respective cultures that portray the sparsely populated mountains as liminal places where different understandings of being (as human, woman, and more-than-human) and of relationships (with other human and non-human beings) may be discovered. Matsumoto conjured yamamba, who is a yokai (a supernatural being) in the shape of an old woman. Throughout the performance, she physically explored yamamba’s movement style, staggered and disjointed. Meanwhile, Lin/Tahos told the audience about the Temahahoi, an isolated community of women who get impregnated by the wind, bees, and phallic sticks.
The program notes indicated that their collaboration, resulting in the performance entitled Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains, began with the impulse to lift the borders between these legendary mountains of Japan and Taiwan and blur the boundaries separating folktale figures. The show seems to have grown through a practice of testing the boundaries of many interrelated aspects, from the conceptual to the material. For one thing, the project questioned the separateness between fiction and reality. What does the folktale fascination with rogue women and utopian communities tell us about our real-life desires, our wishes for the kind of societies we want to create and the kind of people we want to become? Was Matsumoto acting out yamamba, impersonating a figure, or was I watching her trying to become her? In retelling the folk story of the Temahahoi in the framework of an artistic performance within the architecture and institutional context of the culture industry in urban Kyoto, was Lin/Tahos processing before an audience the possibilities of indigeneity for the 21st century? In its exploration of borders, the production questioned identities, and the processes of identity formation predicated on instituting boundaries between what are perceived as self and others. What does it mean to be of a particular culture, to carry a certain cultural baggage? To become a person of a particular gender, with certain physical attractions, and distinct mating practices? To be human, distinct from a camphor tree, a rock, the wind, or mountains? Do these categories exist materially or just in human story-telling practices, past and present, literary, religious, or scientific? The project’s incessant questioning of the separateness of things and identities revealed its queer methodology. And, more specifically, by expressing in concrete, artistic language the queerness of its conceptual apparatus through a multiplicity of objects, beings, and substances put into relationship with each other and made to dramatically engage in dialogue, conflict, and romance, the project staged key approaches in queer ecology.
Matsumoto and Lin/Tahos scaled the above-mentioned, huge, mountain-like questions by interacting with an installation about intimacy with objects and between substances. Their actions during the show put things in relation to other things, including their own bodies, through actions such as weaving, sticking, stitching, lathering, submerging, melting, collaging, boiling, and rubbing. These actions often led to mutual transformations of things made to act upon each other. A shallow tub of water and tall screens were employed to tear dried paper, re-mix it, and re-cover the screens with paper paste again. Stacked in a pile downstage left were rolls of dried paper previously made. I got the sense that the process of pulp to paper was circular, a recycling that the two artists performed before and after the limited duration of the public performance. Matsumoto peeled a taro root, boiled it, and then rubbed it against herself and the floor. She also dipped her feet in the murky tub of water and spread the liquid around the stage. By the end of the show, water and bits of things, like mashed-up paper and taro, smeared the floor and the performers. Lin/Tahos rubbed a larger rock against a smaller rock, amplifying the grinding sound with the help of a mike. She positioned her body in relation to the rock in such a way as to suggest they, or the rock, or both together obtained sexual pleasure through these repetitive, circular, determined movements. A baby camphor tree presided over the downstage in a little enclosure. Rigged red strings visually connect the objects on stage, from the tree to the tub. Above the tub, the strings ended in two gloves, while above the tree two (phallic) sticks at one point descended to bob amidst the leaves. In their suggestive movements, Lin/Tahos tangled themselves in the strings, extending their touch and making other things repeatedly touch themselves and each other, transforming the installation as a whole into an object porn extravaganza. At a conceptual level, the strings illustrate how all matter in the world is interrelated, how we continuously interpenetrate each other, and no one’s identity can claim absolute separateness from others.
Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains greatly appeals to me conceptually. It operates with a vision of the world articulated by many Indigenous cultures of the radical comingling and mutual dependency of beings, questioning categories such as human and animal, animate and inanimate, refusing the anthropocentrism and posited ontological hierarchies that place the human, specifically the (white, heterosexual) man at the top. Contemporary science also has begun to question strict delineations between organic and inorganic, not to mention the cultural assumptions related to sex and gender. Known by such terms as ecocriticism, new materialism, or object-oriented ontology, contemporary thought (see scholars such as Donna Haraway, Sarah Bennett, Timothy Morton, among many others) has been actively exploring the themes central to Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains for the past decades. In the context of global warming and the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, it’s urgent to articulate or rediscover different ways of being in the world with others.
That being said, the version of Sticky Hands, Stitched Mountains that I saw in October hadn’t quite arrived there as a finished, artistic product. I appreciate that Matsumoto and Lin/Tahos took on such huge and hugely important themes and began a trek across challenging mountains. Yet they got lost at times in the vastness of the territory. They touched on so many things (pun intended), that many actions ended up lacking clarity. The experience of the performance often felt like watching one rushed or incomplete thing after another. The show seemed at times rather like a brainstorming session, like a quick putting together of the many things they tried out. As such, the performance lacked the structural integrity and attention to detail that comes with artistic maturity and experience. The boldness, inquisitiveness, and creativity of the two artists shone through, however, and I look forward to seeing their future work.
This review was drafted by the author during the “Critics in Residence @Kyoto Experiment 2024” program organized by the Delegation of the European Union to Japan and funded by the European Union.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Ilinca Todoruţ.
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