2012

A spiritual trip through times, voyage initiatique…

Alex Cheung, inspired by Buddhism, imagined a spiritual show mixing live performances such as traditional drums, musical ballade, acrobatic dance and comic acting including workshop and meditation.

The show talks about 2012 and the tragic prophecy revealed by many prophets who said this year will be apocalyptic… Does it mean that it will be the end of humanity? That is what asks us the show through the story told by a mother to her daughter : the audience can see a scene with buildings fallen into pieces but the arrival of the fish man, incarnate in a very funny way by Alex Cheung, opens our eyes on the possibilities of happier future for human beings… If men can change their way of being and living, they could make a better future comes true… They just have to follow Buddha or a spiritual guide, embodied here by Akash, the master of ceremony, and meditate, concentrate themselves on their own self to reborn peaceful and love full in order to be able to help their fellows, trying to show them the path to peace and love…. From this point of view, every man -who can live old enough and have a good master- can become a Buddha… explained us Alex.

The Show begins with an acrobat playing with fire, an hypnotic performance of his skill, then the audience has to participate to the show, throwing into the fire a symbolic material- little pieces of earth- as if they had to forget their past and reborn again, a kind of catharsis through the fire purifying ourselves… From this very moment, we will learn how human beings could be united and act altogether for a better future, by meditation and faith that can give us the strength to be in peace with ourselves and the world…. It reminds the Tai Chi philosophy: when one practices Tai chi, one needs to focus and concentrate on the Qi, the energy. As Tai chi is a peaceful martial art – the masters never fight like in other martial arts -, the soft and elegant movements of Tai chi allows you to feel more quiet, gentle, good and peaceful inside… liberating bad energies and balancing good ones.

In this show, we are guided by a master of ceremony who shows us how to feel this good energy coming from love by breathing and meditating…. And the audience follows him in the labyrinth of these scenes showing out different suffering beings – the tortured woman or the singing one… The show sounds as an initiation to Buddhism thought and one could feel like a student following his master towards the light… One thing has to be noticed here is that everybody enter completely in the show, enjoying the drum lesson trained by a very good musician whose soft voice contrasts with his rock and roll look- and following the instructions given by Akash… And that is what can be dangerous with this kind of show: by saying so directly things, one can confuse it with propaganda or demagogy. Especially the audience did not have really the choice not to follow the instructions of the master of ceremony…

For my part, I think that this kind of show can be better interesting if the goal of the art direction was no so obvious and directly showed, art is a way to make people questioning themselves about life and being and even one would like the audience to experiment a ritual feeling, it has to be done in a different way, more like at the end of the show, when the audience learned how to play drums in very traditional movements and gestures. But the actors and the audience seemed so fully involved in their faith and shared it with so many love and empathy that one could really be touched by such emotions… whatever is his faith, and it appears more like a gift…

That half performance half workshop show presents how Art is connected with Belief; even I prefer talking about Humanism or Philosophy… Art is an emotional way to express your philosophical questionings, help the others to understand better our world and give them a chance to try and find a way to create a better world, by showing the reality of things. It does not have to give us a complete answer to our questionings; it can just give us the possibility to see a path towards the light and has to give us the choice to follow one or another way, depending on the balance of all things… So even I quite agree with the importance of spirituality in life and the philosophical ideas this creation deals with, I have to admit that I found too religiously oriented… May be because I only believe in humanism and philosophy more than in any kind of religion that tends to make us thinking in one way and does not encourage our own free thinking as philosophy… DVDM

Presented at Huanshan Creative Park, july 2010, Taiwan