Peng Hsu

Marianne Lonergan

Gee Gee Gee, Deodorant, and Say Yes When You Get Married explores BBR as linguistic phenomena that has the potential to become embodied research-practice. The ensemble will explore the moving from written text and spoken word to a dancing body. It is in dance that we propose BBR as possessing a sort of affective rhythm or tempo that can be translated into a movement and acting approach. This approach moves never-ending text into the body, building a technique of on-and-on-ness in which the dancer and the actor shifts endlessly from one movement to the next, no movement carrying more value than the other.

Gee Gee Gee, Deodorant, and Say Yes When You Get Married

Gee Gee Gee, Deodorant, and Say Yes When You Get Married attempts to witness the process in which movement emerges with narrative, and how the motion of movement continues to form with a worlding that expresses in and with language. The project investigates postdramatic theater, queer dance, linguistics and Sinophone Literature and Film through the lens of BBR. The concept BBR originates from the Mandarin word 碎碎唸 (siu siu nian), which is used to describe or light-heartedly ridicule how women talk NON-STOP about daily banalities. From languaging to/with movement, we want to explore how BBR can be translated into a broader danced aesthetic. A landscape of sweat, humid weather, and queer love.

The narrator’s mother used to be Taiwan’s most legendary deodorant model, and she passed on to the narrator the perfect armpits: they sweat rivers and oceans when they fall in love. The narrator matches with a girl on tinder who looks exactly like Maggie Cheung. Maggie Cheung’s image brings forth the moisture in Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, and the water leaking in Malaysian-Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang’s The River and The Hole. A mist of water envelops this queer love – humidity maps, influences, and participates in the queer sensibility that BBR is feeling, moving, and languaging.

©Marianne Lonergan

CREDITS

Team

Peng Hsu – Director and playwright
Sasha Kleinplatz – Choreography
Heather Anderson, Liv Brake, Laura Jeffery, Brenan Dwyer, Valerie Sabba – Performance