theater performance, 70 minutes
* Photography：Lee Hsin-Che
Synopsis |
Having had a role in K's film, Ponti was a folk story K had heard when he was a child. K created Ponti. Ponti is aware that she has disappeared from K's memory. To prove her existence, she chases her own shadow and discovers spirits wandering among memories, history, legends, and oblivion. Slowly descending from cracks in a rock, spirits embark on an unknown journey that takes them from one party to another. Who created who in this journey?
The story starts with K's final moments. Within interwoven real and imagined emotion-inducing memories are hidden narratives of history and identity, Southeast Asian mythologies, and unfinished tasks. This work seeks to question the conflicts, losses, and dialectics of solidified identities and liquid identity boundaries. Who is the one that is forgotten? Is it the apparition wandering between history and fiction, hidden mirror of the others or is it the self that escapes through the cracks?
Those names that have fought history ultimately cannot escape the fate of being archived as codes, gradually isolated in the echoes of memory. Together, we will enter the séance and confront the incomplete fate codes. K, could be Malayan film tycoon Loke Wan Tho, or a Nepali Gurkha soldier; Ponti, once, and perhaps still, is the lovely and beautiful ghost Pontianak, or simply an extension of longing.
Concept |
The concept of A Curious Séance of K and Ponti was first incubated in 2023. Now more than two years have passed, and the title and texts have also gone through multiple reincarnations. During these reincarnations, we have continued focusing on the “Other”, “Mirror”, and “Rock”, thus becoming the spiritual pillars to the production.
French historian Pierre Nora, in his book Les lieux de mémoire (Realms of Memory), explored the concept of a “mirror of nonself”, which does not reflect the same because it is the difference that we are seeking. “In the image of this difference, the ephemeral spectacle of an unrecoverable identity […] we seek […] the decipherment of what we are in the light of what we are no longer.” For us, the “non-self” isn't necessarily the “other,” but rather the “other” as a part of the identity of the non-self. In the turbulent apocalyptic times, each of us may be the other in various undercurrents. Those seemingly distant objects, stories, and time may in turn reflect our realities. Mirrors, in addition to being a crucial part in such technologies as the history of moving images, are also seen in the Malay Archipelago as the instruments of ghosts’ projection. As for rocks, history, and even identities, they appear to carry solidified imaginations and aspirations. However, the seemingly stable, solidified rocks are impacted by time, leaving invisible scratches and cracks within. The forces that quietly chisel and crack rocks from within are perhaps the ghosts of colonial power, identity politics, and inner desires that we are reluctant to confront, unable to see, or perhaps unwilling to face.
How are we defined by others, and how will others define us? If a legend is passed down from one person to another, what happens in between? Do we care about it? If history has become an archive, what secrets lie underneath its stories that we might overlook? If characters in a play are never mentioned, will they simply remain code names tucked away in a book forever? As the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano writes in Espejos:Una Historia
Casi Universal (Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone), “Mirrors are filled with people. The invisible see us. The forgotten recall us. When we see ourselves, we see them. When we turn away, do they?”
*Mixed medium performative installation or any other curious forms or versions are open for discussions.
*A Curious Séance of K and Ponti is a production of Her Lab Space, premiered 17-19 October 2025 at Experimental Theater in National Theater and Concert Hall (NTCH), Taipei. Incubated and commissioned for the 2025 Artquake In Autumn festival, organized by NTCH.