Writer: Qi Wang
Adaptor and Director: Xiaowen Xu
While Shakespeare’s seven ages of man in As You Like It have been culturally imbibed due to its perpetual presence in GSCE English, a woman’s evolution, identified by Simone de Beauvoir in her seminal 1949 text The Second Sex, continues to be more obscured. This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Han Kang, a South Korean writer whose powerful novel, The Vegetarian, deals with female identity in an Asian patriarchy and heralds an East Asian wave of poetic but determined feminism.
A Woman’s Life might be seen as part of this movement. Billed as an immersive, interactive multi-sensory performance, it does what it says on the tin and explores a woman’s life from adolescence to old age from an Asian perspective. Drawn from writer Qi Wang’s own experience and observations in China, there are ups and downs, challenges, and triumphs of being a young girl, worker, lover, wife, and mother.
Protagonist Xiaxiao, performed by former Punchdrunk dancer WenHsin Lee, travels with the audience through a series of episodes that are physical in form and conception. Beauvoir’s original thesis, one of biological slavery and women as other, finds new expression here. The synopsis may be vintage, but the injustice of being a woman in a man’s world remains undimmed and is translated through spoken word, physical theatre, and dance.
As an adolescent, Xiaxiao has her face pushed onto a freshly cleaned floor by her father to ‘cure’ her of her germaphobia. As a young woman, she’s instructed by her partner’s mother not to hang her underwear in front of her boyfriend’s; women must know their place. And as a wife, even though her husband prefers her on top, custom dictates she must assume the missionary position.
It is these cultural insights that make A Woman’s Life an intriguing watch. WenHsin Lee’s most memorable dance is a sliding doors moment as she examines a pregnancy test. As the blue line appears, her freedom years, embodied by music and movement, threaten to disappear. Stark lighting by Yunqian Lyu and contemporary, abstract sound design by Anqi Deng capture evolving female psychological landscapes and includes the tick of a clock that becomes progressively louder.
Where A Woman’s Life works less well narratively is around childbirth and later years. There is clearly a difference between the experience of lived reality and these ‘projected’ realities. As a result, the second half feels rushed, less developed and engaging. The immersive element is broken many times by distracting latecomers and light seepage into the performance, and the promoted ‘smell’ element did not reach further than the front rows. While more development and refinement are needed, the central premise – that inside every innocuous-looking woman with a tote bag in a gallery rage many battles and a lifelong war – is one that will speak to many.
Reviewed on 29 November 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
An intriguing watch
