This performance is inspired by a story in Calderon’s Life is a Dream: A king foretold that his unborn son would become a monster and bring disaster to the country. So he imprisoned the baby in a tower at birth. The child grew up in the tower, cut off from the outside world. Eighteen years later the child is released by the king but something terrible happens…
PhD student Linan Xian reimagines Life is Dream, in a dialogue with the poetry of Emily Dickinson, creating a sense of polyphony. It is about dreams and reality.
When the truth is revealed unexpectedly, the child who was born under a lie, who firmly believes that the lie is reality, finds that life is no more real than a dream. One cannot tell what is true from what is false, or, refuses to, because choosing either only brings pain. If the dream is absurd, reality is even more so.
‘Having dreamt enough dreams,
I thought everything in a dream was true.
But a dream
is meant to be awoken from.’
‘Who am I?
I’m a snail on the Morning Glory.’
Production
Directors // Qian Li, Linan Xian
Actor/Writer // Linan Xian
Supervisors // Jonathan Bollen, Meg Mumford
Dramaturgy // Yili Han
Choreography // Jiegong Wu
