A light-hearted, warm scratch with immense potential
Why We Left Home is a light-hearted, slightly awkward comedic mime scratch conceived and performed by Taiwanese artist Hector T.J. Huang. Starting with a miniature sandbox representing their living room back home, Huang explores his journey away from home, depicting a bit shy and nervous protagonist through his improvisational skills.
The overall production feels quite floating, both for the story and for its way of telling. Other than weaving a well-narrated story, the show attempts to depict the state of leaving home and on the way. Just like the philosophy in Chinese landscape painting, where white space is a must, this show also leaves the audience with its “white space” to maximise their imagination and interpretation, other than offering precooked, intentional indication from the creator.
This could be a double-blade. Personally, I quite enjoy Huang’s presentation of the mandarin idiom ”to feel like sitting on pins and needles” (“如坐針氈”). When he arrives at a new “home”, he find himself unsettled, not knowing how to sit. Their literal interpretation incorporates with the idiom’s metaphoric meaning of a sense of unsettledness. The vibe is quite relaxed and enjoyable during the audience interaction, but it remains sceptical whether the three questions Huang asks really address the theme.
With a creative team of three dramaturgs (Chiara Scoglio, Phyllida Hickish and Jasmine Sachdev), the show occasionally feels confusing in terms of performance style. It has some traits of Lecoqian aesthetics, most obvious in Huang’s self-made mask illustrating noticeable silliness, and her body movement supervised by (Ruby Yun Er Chang). There’s also a faint implication of Grotowski, when the protagonist suffers great pain after accidentally taking something poisonous. These applications come across more like academic exercises to get points, other than genuinely adding to the performance per se. It also feels a bit cringe when hearing Chyi Yu’s song “The Olive Tree” (橄欖樹) at the end, as if the show’s floating balloon is finally popped.
As a 45-minute mime scratch, Why We Left Home demonstrates ample potential for further development. I look forward to seeing its longer version in the future, with something more solid in its content, and a more profound usage of different dramatic methodologies.