Loose contemplation on Woolf
Conceived and directed by Xiaonan Wang, Woo Woolf is a loose contemplation on gender, immigration, and the profundity of human connection. Presented as part of the 2025 Voila Festival, this Ensemble Not Found production draws its initial inspirations from Virginia Woolf, but is ultimately fuelled by the team’s own reflections on the meaning of womanhood across cultures.
While the agenda sounds promising, the piece presented appears as too chopped up. While the primary through-line, if there is one, seems to revolve loosely around three girls (Wency Lam, Francesca Marcolina and Chien-Hui Yen), the performance surface only in disjointed fragments, hard for the audience to piece up something more solid, whether it is a coherent narrative, a conceptual framework, or even just an articulate-able thematic arc.
For a piece “about” Woolf, I would expect some intentional tethering like how to connect her with migration or gender. Such connections do not arise automatically and it is problematic to assume so; instead, it needs to be sketched out through research and dramaturgical curation. Currently, the work is consisted of several vignettes but the guiding thread, hidden or explicit, is ultimately missing. Thus, it leaves the audience uncertain about what the piece ultimately wants to express.
These vignettes per se, however, are often beautifully crafted. Under Lam’s movement direction, the ensemble displays an elegant, fluid yet bold physicality throughout. There is one poignant scene of giving birth, where a long silk cloth is dragged out from a performer’s lower body. The other two performances dance a delicate duet while gently wrapping themselves in this fabric, conjuring a mystic, even erotic aura with certain degree of intensity within its gentleness.
Another memorable moment occurs when a performer dreams of being shot by a gun, but continues to live her everyday life – meeting friends and eating in a restaurant – until the very “moment” of sanction is about to come. This could be a rich exploration to the overall theme of unsettledness and the desire/anxiety of feeling settled. But again, without a clearer thematic grounding, the delivery overshadows its potential, and scene feels much tiptoeing than sensually overwhelming. Similarly, a scene discussing the gendered pronouns in English-speaking contexts hints at thoughtful philosophical contemplation, but it too feels disconnected from the show’s central focal point.
At the moment, Woo Woolf still reads like a R&D project for its bare stage and minimal lighting. As a piece of physical-based devising theatre, I’m looking forward to watch it evolved into a more mature piece with more well-considered narrative/conceptual structure, a more integrated well-round design to fit that structure, and the same high-level of ensemble physicality.