Kaxabu! A Language No Longer Spoken?

2017 Kaxabu! A Language No Longer Spoken?

Songyan Lab original production, 2017. Director: LIN Cheng-Tsung

A poetic approach to contemporary circus, bringing bamboo and rattan into the circus body. Performers enter and exit from both sides of an open stage, drawing a flow between past and present towards the roots of our culture.

The Kaxabu are an aboriginal people of central Taiwan whose Austronesian language is listed by UNESCO among the critically endangered languages of the world. Despite being marginalized, they have not lost their language or culture, nor the windings of their memory. When modernization seems unstoppable, how can silence and cries be told from the folds and echoes of the soul?

With bamboo, the show leaves an existential trace and voice.

2018 Taoyuan Land Art Festival; 2018 George Town Festival, Malaysia.