Webinar: Ya-Ling Peng dialogues with Julia Varley

→Conversations about the Nameless – Oral memory
Ya-Ling Peng dialogues with Julia Varley

Webinar in English (simultaneous translation into Italian available)
Moderator: Claudio La Camera

Participation is free of charge, attendees’ registration is required at the following link: bit.ly/3VhBj3c

Ya-Ling Peng and Uhan Shii Theatre Group focus on oral history theatre with people from all over Taiwan. Ya-Ling Peng has travelled throughout many towns and villages to find, interview and invite ordinary people to tell their stories. Once Ya-Ling asked a woman to tell her story in her mother-tongue, the Shen-Tow dialect. She refused. It was not true she had forgotten the dialect. It took four years to do the interview. Finally, the woman told her story on stage in her mother tongue. Ya-Ling Peng searches for everyday objects to be used as metaphorical props. In the Hakka play “We Are Here”, a blue scarf represents Hakka, a migrating people who used blue scarves to wrap things in when they left a place. The dialogue will concentrate on stories of this kind. Ya-Ling Peng says that choosing and rehearsing the stories is also her own journey of self-discovery.

YA-LING PENG (Taiwan) works as actress, director and playwright. he founded Square-Round Theatre in 1981, studied acting in London with Animate Theatre and London School of Mime and Movement in 1988-1991, and joined the theatre company Tragic Carpet. In 1993, she founded the first elder’s theatre group, Modern Form Theatre Group, in the south part of Taiwan. In 1995 she founded an oral history group, Uhan Shii Theatre, in Taipei, and directed a reminiscence project, Echoes of Taiwan, interviewing old folk artists and rehearsing their life story together. Since then the group has toured in Taiwan and worldwide. Ya-Ling works with many different ethnic groups developing her own reminiscence ceremony theatre.