From Tramp to Champ-Sunteck Yao In China and Taiwan, 2011-2012
Walk out of theaters, walk into the crowd.
Walk into the beauty of nature,
and also into the misery of nature.
Historical gems
can turn into modernity.
Question the paradox of urbanization.
In traditional places,
he feels the rustic charm of life.
The division may disappear.
People get closer
more closer,
even too close.
When communicate with each other, we sing.
We perform.
Travel, in order to look beyond the dullness oneself.
Step into the crowd and feel the real world.
My name is Sunteck Yao.
The person who just moved around you.
You might find me interesting, strange or scary.
Or you just thought I'm a mime artist who made you feel awkward.
Now I have removed my makeup,
I'm standing right here with the face I don't usually show in front of people.
I'd like to talk about my performance first.
I performed in small theaters for a while after I came back from studying drama in France.
At first most of my performance was about myself.
In 2012, I produced a drama called L'Enfant.
This drama brought me back to the painful memories of childhood sexual assault.
This drama allowed me to communicate with myself.
One day after the performance, one of the audience came to me.
He looked like a college student.
He asked me, "Sunteck, can I give you a hug?"
And then he said softly to my ear,
"Thank you. You also told my story out."
At that very moment, I felt like
I was released from my own disturbance
and finally was able to breathe
and to find that there are also others in this world.
I have a desire from then on.
A desire to hear other's life stories.
So I walk out of theaters and into the crowd.
Walk into the relationship with the world.
Last year I joined Cloud Gate's Wanderer Program.
I traveled to more than 20 towns in China.
In this year, I visited many places in Taiwan with two partners.
Today I want to start from sharing my experiences and reflection of this two-year journey.
This is a traditional market in Chengdu, SiChuan. Traditional markets are rare seen now.
I like to perform in traditional markets very much
because my father used to bring me to traditional markets when I was little.
The special atmosphere in traditional markets
and the energy of the crowd shown in the hustle and bustle
actually touch me deeply.
When performing in a place like that, I like to challenge the distance between me and audience.
Sometimes it may be difficult at first.
Like this man was actually scared by me.
But slowly you let him know what you're doing.
Let him understand you. Sometimes you can trigger his smile.
Do you see the corners of his mouth lifting?
Gradually lifting.
And sometimes you trigger more than just smiles.
Maybe also their desire to perform.
He was overexcited.
This was on the street in Nanjing.
My friend and I saw a street performer.
The man was playing instruments to make money for medical bills.
My friend and I found that people passed by him without paying any attention to him.
Of course, he could earn little in this way.
So I got an idea. I put up makeup and tried to interact with the man.
Maybe because my makeup was strange,
We gradually attracted more and more people and filled the tip cup.
Several months after I came back to Taiwan, my friend in Nanjing mailed me a photo
of the man's recent activities.
The title was "Look what you've done, Sunteck!"
What have I done?
Sometimes in your journey, you bring out people's potential
and they can do even better than you.
His makeup was awesome!
During my journey in China,
to me, there's no big difference between performance and playing.
For example, once I was performing in a district out of the Dali city in Yunnan.
Here, the rate of youth emigration is high.
Children and old man are left behind in the rural hometown.
When I was performing in the alleys and lanes,
I found that a group of children were following me.
There were about more than 10 kids.
They always kept a distance from me.
When I turned over and wanted to interact with them,
they just ran away.
But they showed up together again in the next alley.
It was during the summer
and I forgot to prepare drinking water.
I was really tired during the performance
so I sat on the roadside.
And then a girl in the group
walked toward me.
She stared at my face
realizing that I was thirsty.
So she told me that she could get me some water.
I was touched.
And then she continued staring at me.
I thought, why don't you go fetch me water?
She stared at my face, saying
"Is this for blocking the sun?"
I thought, "Wow, what a modern concept!"
At that time, another girl uttered,
"No! He's a drama actor."
She's got a sense of art!
Suddenly another little boy cried out,
"He's a ghost! A ghost in the day!"
"He is so scary!"
So all the children cried out with him and ran away.
I witnessed my water left me
and disappeared at the end of the road.
My makeup sometimes scares people away.
But from time to time it also gets positive feedbacks.
One time I was performing outside of ShangHai Huangpu Theatre,
a 80ish old woman walked to me after watching me for a while.
She looked closely at my face and said,
"Ah, I know this. This is Ya Ju."
Ya Ju means mime.
"I haven't seen this in Shanghai for more than 20 years!"
I was very excited to hear this.
It's like you've traveled thousands of miles and finally find a bosom friend.
Her words inspired me to continue the journey with the face makeup.
I'll travel with the face as far as I can to meet different people
and to create sparks in their lives.
This year I came back and traveled in Taiwan.
I went to a lot of places.
I felt quite different because here is my hometown.
I defined the trip as a journey of self-seeking.
The journey gave me a valuable chance
to go through a new learning process in my 37 years life.
This is Daniao Tribe in Taitong.
There·s a basic rule of mime.
For example, I have a ball like this in my hand.
I throw it out and catch it. Basically the ball remains the same.
Usually it has the same shape and size unless you want to play some tricks with it.
It's rare that you throw it out but get a smaller ball back.
But the kids there totally changed my mime logic.
I was planting watermelons.
When I finally got a melon in my hands,
the kids waved between my hands
and said, "There's nothing!"
When I tried to give her a flower,
she said, "It's just air!"
And when I turned to another place,
trying to find other audience. The kids rushed toward me
and kept hissing at me.
No matter what I did,
they just kept doing like this.
I was a little frustrated.
Because I didn't know how to cope with the kids.
I was curious about their reactions. So I asked a kid,
"Why did you react like that?"
He said, "We are the people of snakes,"
"This is our land."
"You planted plants without getting our permission."
"You showed rudeness and disrespect."
He's right.
This time we went to several primary schools in rural areas.
We went to aboriginal tribes
and some special disputable areas in cities.
I found that respect is often ignored by all of us.
The aboriginal kid gave me a lesson
with such a simple, direct action
His words were even more effective than lectures.
In addition to the kids,
this agricultural teacher in Hsinchu
also showed me how to respect.
One day when I was performing on the street,
the teacher came to see us.
Basically he's a serious teacher.
When watching me applying makeup, he said,
Well, do you think maybe I can do some performance too?
Of course yes!
I hurriedly helped him to put on makeup in fear that he'd change his mind.
He didn't know what to do with all the makeup on his face.
So I said, "You are a farmer."
;Why don't you plant a lot of plants on this street?:
So he started to plant plants on the road,
on utility boxes, on bus stops and even on pedestrians.
He sowed countless seeds on them.
He was a professional farmer.
I looked at his great watermelons,
and a bad idea came to me,
I wanted to rob his melons.
While we were struggling with each other,
suddenly the teacher slowed down.
He held his great watermelon carefully
squatted down, and took an invisible knife from the air.
He's quick learner, wasn't he?
He cut the melon and gave me a half of it.
What a sudden turn.
I held the invisible melon and thought
;Wow, how great power sharing possesses.:
Sharing brings peaceful happiness,
which is much greater than our contention.
I had another special sharing experience in Tainan.
Through my friend's introduction,
I got to perform in Mingde Minimum-Security Prison in Tainan.
Since this was a golden opportunity,
I tried hard to perform as closely to the "gang bosses".
I tried to imitate them.
In the Q&A session after the performance,
a gang boss raised his hand and said,
"I have a question."
"When you are imitating people,"
"have you ever thought about their feeling?"
How did you feel when I was performing, sir?
"I wanted to hit you."
And then I thought,
"God, did I make my audience feel disrespected again?"
But the man soon changed his tone
and spoke like a philosopher, he said,
"Your performance is like a mirror,"
"showing the part of me which I don't want to admit."
I still didn't figure out the right answer yet.
I'm still searching for the answer.
But to have such a conversation itself,
is already a wonderful thing to me.
After my trips, a friend asked me,
"What's your dream?"
Actually I'm not a dreaming kind of person.
I think dreams are over-exaggerated in this society.
I think I saw something in these people.
Something even more appealing than dreams.
They think, and more importantly, they take actions.
It doesn't matter if the actions are small.
or no one applaud for them.
I'm a performer on stage.
But I feel I lost something
each time I hear the applauses after the show.
In theater, society seems to become an abstract concept,
which is often talked about
but where actions just don't happen.
Many people treat "actions" as slogans
or define it by the number of likes on Facebook.
If then, how exactly is the distance between us and the society?
Are we far or close?
I'll keep traveling and bring mime to the crowd.
This is my first step to turn my performance into actions.
I believe I'll keep working on this.
Thank you.
That's all I want to share today.