Geography: Asia > Eastern Asia > Taiwan
Year: 2015
Produced by: Nanyang Taiwan Sisters Theatre Troupe / TransAsia Sisters Association Taiwan
Creative Team: Directed and facilitated by Li Xiu-xun; collectively created with migrant women performers
Synopsis: See Us places migrant women living in Taiwan onstage to recount experiences normally mediated by television or government discourse. Suitcases become objects through which departure and settlement are remembered. The performers address language differences and the assumptions attached to women who arrived through transnational marriage. Their children also enter questions of belonging because migration has changed the cultural environment inherited by the next generation. The production challenges the label of the ‘foreign bride’, which fixes women at the moment of arrival even after years of life in Taiwan. The production also features a Cambodian-language poem developed for the production describing leaving home and putting down roots, turning language itself into evidence of continued connection across borders.
Source: TransAsia Sisters Association Taiwan, theatre archive: https://2003tasat.org/theater/ TransAsia Sisters Association Taiwan, official music video containing material created for See Us: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_cJnCB_BRE