Time stretches and collapses in Xiaoyi’s work. It demands that audience members walk their own paths in the thick, dense labyrinths of performance. FOUR FOUR EIGHT will last 5½ hours (audience members are free to come and go as they please); his previous two pieces at Huayi, Offending the Audience (2017) and Einstein in the Carpark (2018) ran for 1½ hours each but felt substantially longer, largely because of how the audience experience is scaffolded.
His productions are equal parts frustrating and fascinating. The audience often has to make their own map of the work from a handful of opaque and oblique clues – perhaps a tongue-in-cheek director’s message in the programme booklet arranged as a series of questions or a glossary, or a glimpse of the work’s direction in an open rehearsal.
Xiaoyi tends to use a performance score instead of a script, timing every emerging and fading image and interaction down to the minute, and sometimes to the second.
Within these strict rhythmic structures is also room for the performer to improvise and respond to their environment and spectators. He revels in slow, careful movement and almost cinematic freeze frames, arranging and sculpting the performers both on stage and off stage.
During rehearsals for the 2018 Southernmost festival, he told the featured artists that he preferred slow movements to a rapid, virtuosic display of the performer’s abilities, “You need to leave space for an active audience. If you pause and slow down, if you stop, they see you, and not just your technique.”
Each of the productions in the Huayi trilogy has taken a significant post-dramatic work from the 1960s to 1990s as a leaping off point, and while they are strange new creatures in their own right, it’s often tempting to call Xiaoyi’s pieces radical reworkings, reinterpretations or responses to Peter Handke’s Offending the Audience (1966), Robert Wilson and Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis (1999-2000).
Xiaoyi’s fascination with post-dramatic theatre has also seen him toying with when a piece begins and ends, and what constitutes engagement with a work such that it doesn’t only occupy a specific moment in time or history:
Theorist Sarah Bay-Cheng argues that performance is a mode rather than a discrete event; a performance may begin from the moment you search for it on the internet, or one might be “haunted by the memories, recycling, and ghosting of performances past”.3
As part of FOUR FOUR EIGHT, for instance, the audience is invited to correspond with Xiaoyi over email in the weeks before the physical performance.
One might see Emergency Stairs itself as a durational performance. “The plan for the next few years is to search for an alternative way to...” Xiaoyi pauses, “uh... should I say ‘survive’? ‘Survive’ is so passive. I see Emergency Stairs as a project, as an experiment. If the theatre company is also one of my projects, then how am I going to deal with it not just within Singapore’s linear model? Are there any other ways to do it?”
The heart of Emergency Stairs isn’t just the performances and projects it creates, but how the company interacts with its environment: partners, patrons, audience members, policymakers, government.
At the 2018 Southernmost festival, its cornerstone production Journey to Nowhere responded to and critiqued the SG Arts Plan 2018-2022 unveiled by the National Arts Council. Xiaoyi said of this,
“I guess this is the script that has been given to
me. And this script has a duration of five
years. How can I respond to this script? How
can I negotiate with it and challenge it? […]
Who takes initiative? How can we empower
ourselves? I think that’s why I see One Table
Two Chairs as a project, not just a production.
I’m looking for any alternative ways of art
-making. Right now, I’m following the script.
But can I write the script in another language,
on another piece of paper?4“
