Part wedding satire, part love letter to creative collaboration: a playful exploration of creative partnerships through the lens of marital commitment.
There’s a familiar joke that finding the right creative partner is much like finding a romantic one: from the initial matchmaking to the demands of a long-term commitment, sometimes finding the right collaborator feels even harder than finding “the one”. The Radical Wedding Engine, a show in which five members of Ensemble Not Found (Xiaonan Wang, Kiki Ye, Ting-Ning Wen, Vivi Wei, and He Zhang) get married to one another in front of an audience, takes this premise to the extreme. Through a series of familiar wedding rituals and processes, the show gradually moves beyond the framework of the wedding itself to explore the nature of creative partnership, and what it takes to sustain such a partnership.
The show opens with a charming sequence that blends movement, comedy, and clear storytelling to give the audience an “insider perspective” into the team’s rather draining process of preparing an application: one in which they pitch the idea of their wedding. The music design by Jovienne Jin really sets the tone and pace for the opening, making the sequence both funny and relatable. The scenography and costume design by Nefeli Kentoni lend the show an almost Wes Anderson-esque quality, which sits beautifully with its shifts between the contemplative and the absurd.
What makes the piece especially interesting is how it deviates from a conventional narrative structure, blending a variety of theatrical languages and meandering instead through a series of vignettes. Yet this approach also raises questions about the show’s overall theatrical language and thematic coherence. Some vignettes offer clever commentary on artistic relationships; others feel more like loosely connected strings of thoughts, with intentions or deliveries that can be difficult for the audience to grasp. Some vignettes seem to use the wedding as a framework for exploring creative relationships, while others seem more interested in satirizing the conventions of marriage itself, as the first half leans more heavily towards poking fun at East Asian wedding traditions and rituals, and the latter half explores their own individual perspectives on love, creative collaboration, and the nature of relationships, whether romantic, creative, or marital.
The piece lands in a soft place. The five performers, dressed in wedding gowns, take turns singing the classical Chinese love song “The Moon Represents My Heart”, a truly tender moment which seems to reveal something special about their relationship – how they have each other’s backs and play off each other – that speeches could not quite capture. Much like a romantic marriage, their commitment is offered up to those present to witness and, in a sense, bless. Having spent the show questioning what a wedding might mean beyond its conventional romantic framework, the ensemble seems to arrive at an interpretation of artistic partnership that feels particularly fitting to the form of the show: that perhaps, like any relationship, it is a work in progress, continually negotiated, renewed and chosen time and time again.