A dance troupe, a tribe
This is the day that Watan’s dance company, Tai Body Theatre, is formally opening the Gongliao Rehearsal Studio in his hometown of Hualien. As a member of the Truku indigenous people, Watan is drawing on a traditional ritual to celebrate this day that is so important to himself and to all the members of the Tai troupe.
For the ceremony, Watan’s father—who has not slaughtered a hog in over a decade—agrees to come especially from Taipei to Hualien to do the ritual killing on behalf of his son’s dance studio. Few of the male troupe members were aware that the ceremony (which is open only to men) would involve the slaughter of a pig, and most are downright weak-kneed at the prospect. But Watan insists on going through with this ceremony. After the killing Watan’s father asks the troupe members to directly drink the “fresh” bile, because “It will make you fearless!”
Meanwhile, after the carcass is dissected, Watan’s mother teaches the female members of the dance company how to make zhutongfan (rice and other ingredients steamed inside a tube of bamboo) and how to clean out the pig’s intestines and other organs. Seeing everything about the ritual done authentically in accord with tradition, Watan has a very satisfied tone in his voice as he says, “By going through this baptism, Tai is no longer simply a dance troupe: we are a family, a clan, a tribe.”
Watan had long been looking for a suitable rehearsal studio ever since his return to Hualien. Some spaces were too expensive, others too small, but he finally found this abandoned factory. In the rear of the building is a stretch of farmland, so that besides rehearsing together the members of the company also spend some time each day in the fields cultivating vegetables and rice. They are truly an organic whole—working, dancing, and creating art together side by side. Watan himself covers most of the costs by racing all over the place teaching classes and lecturing, with the company’s income supplemented by paid gigs.
Tai is a Truku word meaning “look!” or “watch!” Watan explains that when he was small, when out hunting or farming with his elders, he was constantly pestering them with questions: “What’s this?” “Why is that the way it is?” His elders—never much for long explanations anyway—would just tell him “tai!” He says the elders wanted young people to master skills by observing how things are done, rather than continually hassling them with questions. They believed in the motto, “Keep your mouth closed and your eyes open.” The rest of the company’s name, “Body Theatre,” reflects the fact that Watan sees the entire human body as a performance medium. “What we want to do here at Tai is not merely to perform dance gestures, not merely to do tribal chanting, not merely to move rhythmically…. We want to do all these together as an integrated whole.”
A late starter
Watan’s interest in dance was sparked when he happened to go and see a joint performance by Taiwan’s Formosa Aboriginal Song and Dance Troupe (FASDT) and a company of Maori performers from New Zealand. “Right then and there I just broke down crying, it was so amazing!” Recalling that event, Watan remembers very distinctly thinking to himself: “So this is what Aboriginal dance can be.... So powerful! So moving! So beautiful!” He really felt that he had been cheated, because he was brought face to face with this art form only late in his youth. “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me about this?!” But late starter though he may have been, his passion had been ignited, and in his final year of high school, when the FASDT was holding tryouts for new performers, Watan was selected as a “student member.” From that point on, his life changed completely.
Watan tested into a department of history for university, but admits, “I spent virtually every day at the dance company’s studio.” The studio was in Xindian, the southernmost suburb of Taipei, while his school was on Yangmingshan, up on a mountain at the northernmost edge of the Taipei metropolitan area. At that time there was no Mass Rapid Transit system, making it a long, time-consuming journey back and forth each day. And “student members” received no salaries! But Watan never tired of it, and in fact was having the time of his life.
“I’m an Aborigine, but I grew up as a city kid,” he recollects, “so I didn’t have that sort of flexibility and freedom of movement that rural kids get just by playing in the fields, climbing trees, and so on. In other words, I had never experienced much variety or gotten much entertainment just out of trying out all the different ways you can move your body. So when I started training at the FASDT, I found it completely absorbing, or maybe intoxicating is a better word.”
Even then, this unpaid student had decided that his future career would be in performing—singing and dancing. But his parents were not at all pleased with this idea. With indigenous people being generally a disadvantaged group in Taiwan, many Aboriginal parents want their children to follow a stable career path that offers lifetime financial security, such as the civil service or police. Watan’s mom and dad were no exception. But he had already made up his mind: “For me, there was no turning back.”
While still in university, Watan became a full-fledged member of the FASDT. Besides receiving dance training for performances, he also served as a production assistant, handling costumes and props. This experience proved to be a valuable foundation when he later went out on his own and independently founded Tai Body Theatre.
History through dance
By 2010, Watan was director of the FASDT, and in that year and in 2011, respectively, he created two important new works related to Aboriginal history: Memories of a Mango Tree—Puyuma Dance and Lalaksu.
Mango is built around 23 songs written by the Puyuma musician Baliwakes (who is considered a “national treasure” in Tawan) for his native community, Nanwang, incorporating oral histories collected from Nanwang elders. It recreates tribal memories dating back to the 1960s, and is especially poignant in evoking the homesickness felt by the countless Aboriginal youth who left their homes, families, and cultures for better educational or work opportunities in the Han Chinese mainstream.
Lalaksu, meanwhile, is the story of the Tsou intellectual Uyongu Yata’uyungana. Watan, who has a deep love for the study of history, took personal responsibility for the script. “I got to know Uyongu as a person through the large amount of writings and letters that he left behind. Then I tied these together through song and dance with the historical events of his lifetime and the environment of the time and place in which he lived.” Watan invited Bulareyaung Pagarlava, an internationally renowned choreographer of Taiwan Aboriginal descent, to do the choreography.
Uyongu was an outstandingly talented member of the Aboriginal Tsou tribe, renowned as an educator, statesman, thinker, musician, and poet. He was fortunate enough not to become a victim of the period of repression set off by the February 28 Incident of 1947, but not lucky enough to escape the White Terror. The authorities believed he had hidden a member of the Communist Party, and he was executed.
Watan’s script, which describes the fracturing and disappearance of Tsou culture, works through the role of a girl portrayed by Yinguyu Yata’uyungana, Uyongu’s granddaughter, whose dreams are contrasted with Uyongu’s ideals about the continuity of his tribal culture. Lalaksu is the Tsou name of a mountain (known in Chinese as Mt. Dujuan), located in the Tfuya indigenous community, where the land traditionally worked by Uyongu’s clan is located. “Lalaksu” is also the name of a song Uyongu wrote while in prison, expressing his extreme heartsickness for his distant homeland. “Some people say that ‘Lalaksu’ is a ‘reversal of verdicts’ for Uyongu Yata’uyungana, that it ‘clears his name,’ but in my mind he has never been anything but a hero to us.”
The company one keeps
It was in 2012 that Watan decided to leave the FASDT and form his own troupe. He wanted to go back to Aboriginal communities to gather “field material” at a deeper level.
The members of Tai include indigenous people from a variety of tribal backgrounds, and each group has its own precious traditions that Watan felt would be worth exploring. (There are currently 16 officially recognized Aboriginal peoples in Taiwan, most of which include various subgroups living in separate communities.) One member of Tai, for example, is from Laiyi, a Paiwan community that was devastated by Typhoon Morakot in 2009, after which two-thirds of its residents were relocated to “New Laiyi.” However, ancient Paiwan melodies and many other traditions have only been preserved among the elders who chose to remain in the original Laiyi, and some are gradually being forgotten even by them.
Watan studied the Paiwan language with Paiwan members of Tai, and then took a group to the old village to stay for several days. On their first day they gathered together and began to chant ancient Paiwan melodies. At first it seemed that no one was paying the slightest attention to them. But gradually some male elders began to approach them and join in the singing. “This process lasted for five hours the first time.” The elders, listening, chanting, at times with tears streaming down their faces, told Watan, “We haven’t heard these songs in a long, long time.”
Watan says that on the day when they had planned to leave, someone came before 7 a.m. to wake them up, because everyone wanted to hear Tai sing one last time. Moreover, they told Watan that they wanted to record the performance. This request, while gratifying, left Watan a little nonplussed. He felt that Tai wasn’t qualified to be doing this kind of thing, because they were still far from having mastered the traditional melodies. As if to emphasize how important recording these melodies can be, one village elder brought out a whole box of tapes and said: “I have recorded all these songs, I’ve got so many tapes here, but nobody wants to learn them.” (Watan had the material on the tapes transferred to CD for preservation.)
Step this way
For a long time Tai had no fixed rehearsal space, and none of the eight members received a fixed salary. They begged and borrowed rehearsal space wherever they could, roaming like a nomadic tribe. After two years of this, in March of 2015 Watan found a large enough space for a studio. But how would he pay the NT$18,000 monthly rent? “I had just gotten paid NT$15,000 for a corporate gig, and I scrounged up the other 3000 from friends and relatives, making just enough for the first month’s rent. So I just went ahead and rented the space.” As for what he would do the next month, Watan gave a phlegmatic reply: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. There’s no point in worrying too much.”
Watan decided to call the space “Gongliao,” which roughly means “workers’ shed.” He says that workers’ sheds once played a major role in the lives of indigenous peoples. “It was where they would collectively rest after a hunt, after working the fields, after coming back from jobs. Everyone would eat there and relax, chatting about how the projects they were working on were going and sharing their thoughts.” Watan says that in fact the “workers’ shed” was more like a “story house” where people exchanged the anecdotes of their lives. At the Gongliao Rehearsal Space, the members of Tai are like workers who use their own bodies as the tools to hammer together their stage performances.
Watan sees one of his most significant roles as writing up “step charts” for Tai Body Theatre, which are composed of symbols indicating the instructions the feet must follow during a dance piece or routine. They include the ways in which the feet are to be moved; the directions in which they should face or move; and the weight, emphasis, or pressure for each step. Watan stresses, “Aboriginal song and dance have a definite ‘methodology’ to them, so I take the task of writing up the step charts very seriously, because in this way I can codify the dance movements into specific techniques that can be passed along.”
So how has the company been faring? In August they were invited to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe, a major arts event with a global reputation, to which they brought pieces combining tribal traditional dance with modern techniques, such as the troupe’s signature work The Sigh of Body. The critic at the Edinburgh Spotlight had especially high praise for the company’s abilities.
It’s no doubt quite an arduous task to start a dance company from scratch, but Watan likens the process to a demanding dance, in which the performers’ gasping for breath only shows that their bodies are strong enough to be pushed to extremes. For him, pushing through even when you are tired “actually makes things simpler for the body,” because you reach a state where you are moving automatically, without thinking, following all the fundamental training you have invested in yourself. Tai Body Theatre is ready to take that next step.
The Sigh of Body, one of the signature works of the Tai Body Theatre, the dance company founded by Watan Tusi.
Watan decided at age 17 what his mission in life would be: to explore Aboriginal dance, song, history, and life. The Tai Body Theatre, founded in 2012, has created a new performance model integrating “body” and “voice,” starting from the traditional and advancing into the modern. (photo by Jimmy Lin)
Memories of a Mango Tree—Puyuma Dance, a work created by Watan around a framework of the compositions of the Puyuma musician and “national treasure” Baliwakes, brings to life tribal memories dating back to the 1960s.
Comrades, if you feel happy, then dance!
Watan has devised and written up 66 unique “step charts.”
Come on everybody, hey! Photo from That Dance Beneath the Bridge.
Tai Body Theatre got a very positive response to their performance at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe, a globally renowned event for non-mainstream artists.
