How Beautiful When We Dream Together - Hagay Dreaming Builds An Enlightening Forest For All To Roam

Written by pupulin

A digital culture scholar emerged from Hagay Dreaming, amazed and surprised.   Expecting a performance that might verge on kitsch or excessive spectacle, he was instead guided into an unfamiliar world beyond known individualistic aesthetics – “the laser light bridge connecting to the spiritual realm is an outstanding expression that combines indigenous local culture and futurism, erasing the boundary between them… as it challenges the existing binaries of genders, past and future, or nature and technology.”

It refuses to fall into cliché, or simply because it cannot – just as a dream never repeats itself.   

The creation of Hagay Dreaming originated from a dream.   In 2020, Dondon Hounwn and his fellow artists walked into a forest where they experienced a state suspended between reality and dream. This led to their creating a dream in the theatre -- Hagay Dreaming can be a forest in the dream, or a dream in the forest.  

But a dream is like flowing streams, mountain fog and falling raindrops.  It is nearly impossible to replicate a dream, let alone capture its nuances and textures.   What if we can all walk into this dream?  How beautiful can it be when we all dream together?  

Based on the script by Dondon Hounwn, the dream is brought to life through artist Shu Lea Cheang’s sophisticated digital technology-based directing skills in  combining post-colonial thoughts, tribal turbulence, and scifi techno fantasy to create an immersive illusion where forest moves and butterflies dance across the immaterial stage setting.  Applying laser lights and digital technology to render the traditional indigenous life as cultural landscapes. A spiritual bridge is built to guide the performers into the realm of “gaya”  while walking the audience out of the forest dreamscape.     

The spiritual bridge serves as a significant metaphor.  It is both the beginning and the end, linking the tangible with the intangible, here with there, performers with the stage, the stage with the audience. 

Visual artist Aka Chang is the perfect bridge maker here.   He juxtaposes his study of the Truku myths with an image evoked by Dondon Hounwn’s remark,   “the laser beams show how the Truku people see the spiritual realm in the dream”  and sculpts a bridge toward the spiritual realm. Performers traverse a path of undulating colors and energies  to interpret the cosmos’ law and order of Gaya as practiced by the Truku people.

As the project of Hagay Dreaming evolved, Chang visited the tribe in search of a reflective material as a projection medium for the laser beams, utilizing its internal crystalline facets to create unique light effects.   Drawing on the diamond-shaped pattern as the metaphor for ancient spirits’ eyes in the Truku tradition, he developed a large-scale physical reflective installation that forms a part of the lighting structure for the performance.    The light beams reach the audience’s eyes and minds and convey the blessings of the ancient spirits to all living things.

When the stage production of Hagay Dreaming had its first presentation-in-progress in 2023, Chang enhanced the laser lighting installation in the conventional theatre space, using light to visualize both natural landscapes and abstract concepts.  20 kinetic laser modules  were installed on the the stage, creating a dynamic momentum of light beams that vividly transform the natural scenery and the craft of weaving.

The space speaks for itself, where laser light flows like streams, swings like draping fog, and falls like raindrops. 

Within the boundary of the stage, artist Hsien Yu Cheng expands imagination to infinity, like poetry in a trance.   A cave emerges in the rhythmic interplay of light and shadow in the forest, offering shelter for the huntress from the storm, rumors, and human indifference – a place to rest weary legs.

If the performance plucks the heartstrings and evokes a deep resonance, it is made possible through the whole hearted, engaging dedication of music producer Sayun Chang, vocalist and spiritual messenger Kumu Bashaw, lighting designer Ting Tsung Ho, costume designer Shao Yen Chen, choreographer Wei Yao Chiu (Dahu), and dancer Temu Masin (Chih Wen Hsu).

With a versatile background spanning contemporary music, world music and more, Sayun Chang joined the creative team of  Hagay Dreaming in 2022, enriching the dreamscape with emotional depths and nuances through her music.   Known for her spontaneous singing, Kumu Bashaw transforms songs, culture and everyday life into a prismatic landscape where tradition and modernity coexist.

Lighting designer Ting Tsung Ho has been an active figure in theatre.   He sets the chromatic tone and envisions the lighting moving with the forest, creating an organic space where light interacts with the performers.   For the costume design, Shao Yen Chen draws on the structures, patterns, colors, and symbols of traditional Truku attire, employing diverse textures such as lustrous fabric, gauze, and lace to add rhythmic variations, while diamond- and X-shaped cuts convey a minimalist contemporary aesthetic.

The unrestrained artistic vision of choreographer Dahu integrates bodily vocabulary with culture and contemporaneity.  Meanwhile, young indigenous dancers from various tribes and ethnicities gather under the guidance of Elug Art Corner to learn traditional Truku songs and dances.  Their performance is a combination of contemporary theatre and performance art, offering a unique interpretation of Truku rituals and song-and-dance tradition, and bringing a new and profound perspective to traditional/contemporary indigenous bodily image and expressive language. 
 

With their diverse life experiences and artistic specialties, the director, dancers, sound designers and visual artists converge within this dream, shaping Hagay Dreaming into a curving  flow of collective subconsciousness rather than a straight, smooth path.   It reaches beyond time and geography to celebrate the presence of myth.  In the end, the audience may follow one of the branches toward the dream-like dream, where they find their voices and continue flowing.