Music and Dance Theatre: Song-Scarves and the Mute River【Fringe Fest 26】

The story of this theatre piece originates from an ancient legend of a branch of the Miao people in Southwest China. The colour of their garments has remained unchanged for thousands of years – it is the colour of the last streak of clouds in the sky, witnessed by their ancestors as they looked back at the ferry crossing while leaving their original homeland.

 

Since then, this clan has migrated along rivers, traversed deep mountains, enduring the changing seasons and the transformation of landscapes. The name of their homeland gradually blurred with time, the direction of their land vanished amidst their footprints, and even their language quietly evolved. Yet, the women dyed that very hue of sunset clouds into their cloth, wearing it generation after generation. This colour became the collective memory of the people – an imprint of the homeland never lost on their journey of dispersal, a silent covenant between the body and their forebears.

 

This performance uses movement, song, and colour to retell this journey of departure, migration, and perseverance. As light and shadow flow on stage, as the dancers' garments billow like distant clouds, we seem to glimpse the silhouette of a people walking along the river of time – forever parting, yet always carrying with them that original gaze.

 

Here, we also gently ask each one of you present: Where does your family come from? Do you, too, hold stories within your heart, objects in your hand? Is there a colour, like the clouds of home, forever drifting in the depths of your memory?

 

Let us, in this theatre, use dance as our language and song as our river, to seek together those homelands we have never truly left.