Category: physical theatre

Performer: Tan Tan

Assistants: Hu Jialiang, Lu Desheng

Photographers: Hao Peng, Jiang Junjie

Duration: 30 min

Place Cement Park LIVE HOUSE, Shanghai

Performed at Cement Park Performance Festival VOl.39, October, 2018

This performance attempts to illustrate the illusions and journeys inside the mind of a prisoner of a society/one’s life, it talks about the infinite loop between imprison and freedom, reality and dream.

Under confinement, the reality and the illusion become unbounded to me.

Even if the door in the reality is open, which direction will it lead to?

Gradually, I become prefer to look forward to the door in another dimension.

Once, once, once again, chasing, fleeing, smashing, looping.

Let’s go to a universe outside of this reality.

＊Some part of the video projected in this work was extracted from Tan Tan's film "Positive"

The following is an experimental film created out of the live performance:

At the beginning of the performance, a pure white image appeared on the wall. Suddenly, a mosquito flew in the white, and the unbearable buzzing of the mosquito began to loop...

From nowhere came a loud noise of human palms hitting the wall, and at the same time, not the mosquito but Tan Tan fell to the ground!

With that sound, the mosquitoes in the video disappeared, leaving only a space of white.

After a while, this white square began to move randomly in the space.

Tan Tan came back "alive", and started to chase the white light and attempt to catch the imaginary mosquito again and again.

The white light moved to the audiences everywhere in the exhibition hall. Tan Tan rushed to them and "slap mosquitoes" very close to them. Then the audience fled around, trying to avoid the white light, but the white light often enveloped them by surprise...

Suddenly, the loud noise of a palm beating the wall reappeared again. This time, the entire space turned instantly dark.

In the darkness, with the attraction of a very psychedelic ambient sound, the onlookers found that the projection of a white mosquito appeared on the ceiling. Unexpectedly, the same mosquito appeared again, and then two, three, dozens, countless...

They came and went faster and faster overhead, forming a group of meteors in the universe.

A hand suddenly appeared and slapped on the ceiling, and the "mosquito meteors" disappeared without a trace.

Immediately, the audience saw another white light lit up in a corner, and under that light, Tan Tan was sitting in a large cage with her back facing them.

She was facing a door outside the cage, which was actually a shadow.

After a while, the door began to move slowly. Tan Tan ended her meditation and start to look for ways to get free from the cage.

Eventually, Tan Tan never reached the door. Instead, the "shadow door" slowly moved away and disappeared, leaving a tragic white square on the wall.

When the white square moved back to the wall where it was originally projected, the real door of the cage opened by itself.

Tan Tan walked out of the cage and stretched out her arms in the white light.

Suddenly there was another loud noise, and an axe from nowhere smashed the white image!

Tan Tan fell into the darkness again.

After heavily breathing, she stood up again.

The sound of the mosquito came back, it seemed that everything was back to the original point.

But this time, the white light changed direction and moved to the other side of the exhibition hall, which was in front of the door.

Tan Tan walked into the light and began to chase the mosquito desperately, but the mosquito became like a shadow in the whole space, so it was even more unattainable.

Tan Tan tried to hit this mosquito with her own shadow. At the moment that she tried to use her hand shadow to open the door, the axe smashed the light image into pieces with a loud crashing noise!

Tan Tan opened the door and ran out, and closed the door heavily behind her.

The end.