Director: Xiaonan Wang
“Is it possible for human beings to understand each other?” This is the question at the heart of Woo Woolf, a multimedia stage-show that uses dance, song, video projection and spoken text in five or six different languages to explore the nature of communication in all its complexity. It digs into dreams, prayers, poetry, translation, and quotes from a range of literary sources, including modernist writer Virginia Woolf.
Woolf herself provides a series of well-known quotes for the final surtitles. But she mostly serves as a model for fractured female narratives. The novelist’s experimental studies of her characters’ interior lives may well have inspired the show’s stream-of-consciousness style. In terms of stagecraft, Director Xiaonan Wang and dramaturg Kiki Ye might also have been influenced by The Years, a powerful theatrical exploration of womanhood based on Annie Ernaux’s hybrid memoir, which tells us: “Memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.”
Woo Woolf is a surreal and slightly disjointed piece of dance-theatre about three migrant women. The women are all called Mary, highlighting perhaps the everywoman nature of their individual tales. One is a successful fortune teller, asking the “higher powers” for advice with the invocation “hey sis?” Francesca Marcolina’s fragile power and versatile talent come through in this slightly underused role. Another (a luminous Chien-Hui Yen) is a translator, troubled by the problems of language, but noting down everything she hears and writing poetry in a new language.
The third, played with childlike vulnerability by Wency Lam, is a dancer who communicates through the medium of movement. Lam also serves as the ensemble’s movement director. There are several extended sections of physical theatre, representing birth, childhood, restless sleep, cooking, picking fruit, and a trip to the shops in a noisy war zone (whether actual or psychological is not completely clear).
Jovienne Jin’s sound design is beautifully eloquent in its ambiguity. The noise of water becomes one character’s shower and another’s rainfall. A birdsong-rich forest near the end is full of cuckoos and other birds now only rarely heard in the English summer, transporting a redemptive picnic into a fairy-tale realm. Music, composed by Jin, complements the action while Sanli Wang’s strong lighting design and minimal set create evocative spaces for Woo Woolf’s fleeting scenes. A bathroom is marked out by strips of loo roll; in a stage-wide bedroom full of nightmares, a dreaming child clutches at a coat and chair leg for comfort. From under a red cloth, Francesca Marcolina uses a dancing to hand to explore the nature of parenthood to a soundtrack of baby-cries from the other performers.
Ensemble Not Found is currently run by a group of East Asian creatives who explore new ways to make theatre and collaborate across cultures. Sections of the script are spoken in Cantonese, Mandarin, Italian and other languages with surtitles in English. There’s an interesting, but inconclusive, discussion about pronouns in different languages. Little animated sequences are projected onto a screen at the back of the stage, as is a picture of braised tofu with shiitake mushrooms, the dish that Mary-the-dancer plans to cook. In the following scene, a soundtrack of cooking and a lyrical description of the recipe serve to ground what is sometimes an unsettlingly abstract show. Woo Woolf is part of 2025’s Voila! Theatre Festival and fits perfectly with the festival’s aim to showcase intercultural and experimental works.
This series of barely-connected heartfelt vignettes, devised collaboratively by Ensemble Not Found, makes up in soul and passion what it lacks in narrative drive. There is both comedy and sadness to be found in its exploration of mishearings and misunderstandings. An underlying thread examines the idea that failures of communication lead to hostility and violence. If we don’t speak the same language, the show suggests, perhaps we can communicate non-verbally and share a piece of mandarin cake? A sense of possibility and community shines through the work of this interesting ensemble.
Reviewed on 9 November 2025
