chia-fen's proposal on the pilgrimage project
Introduction
The 2003 Baishatun Matsu Pilgrimage in Taiwan has altered my life. Since then I seldom stopped wondering about its meaning to me. In this paper, I’ll frame the pilgrimage with E. M. Bruner’s analysis model – pre-tour, on-tour, post-tour, examining the anthropologist P. Steven Sangren and the Performance Studies scholar Craig Quintero’s observations about the Matsu pilgrimage in Taiwan as well as my own experiences as a local, a theatre graduate student, a pilgrim, and a tourist. The Matsu folklore and the Taiwanese national identity would be one clue, the bodily experiences of walk, pain, and loneliness another, and the performer training as a tourist (theatre worker) attraction the other.
Years passed by. When I went back to read the related materials on and off, I realized in a sudden that I was pushed to the pilgrimage because of the Poland theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. Because of Grotowski, the Taiwanese theatre workers of U Theatre started to trace back, looking for their own roots as Chinese or Taiwanese in heritages such as traditional performance and folk religion. However, what a paradoxical epistemology – why do we have to see our own culture via the Polish performer training? It seems that the performer training is also a tourist attraction, which is established through the accumulation of markers, just that the tourist attraction is fixed on a certain location but the performer training can be exchanged and consumed all over the globe. My memories of this pilgrimage are fading away, but still some images, sounds, and feelings remain. I’ll put them down in this paper, as a memento of that unforgettable bodily and spiritual journey.
Outline
I. Introduction: pilgrimage and tourism
II. Pre-tour
A. My resistance to the pilgrimage, unnamable
B. Matsu, the sea goddess: folklore and folk cult
C. Pre-departure Seminar in the Graduate School of Theatre Arts, Taipei National University of the Arts: field investigation and performer training (concealed subtext at then: Grotowski and U Theatre)
III. On-tour (Separation and Liminality)
A. Bodily Experience
a) Body as a map: the Chinese body, the “Chi” body
b) Walk: body-mind dualism, pain and loneliness
c) Another space-time
B. Social Experience
a) Basic necessities: food, clothing, housing, and transportation
b) Communitas, carnival, and class consciousness
c) Folk cult network as social network
C. Religious Experience
a) Ritual and performance
b) Conversations with the Goddess: I and thou
IV. Post-tour (Incorporation)
A. Grotowski’s Objective Drama and U Theatre’s “Plan of Tracing Back”
B. Pathology and healing/ structure and anti-structure
C. Invisible city: my resistance as a local and the rosy lens of the Western anthropologist and Performance Studies scholar
V. Conclusion: Birth of a Tourist/Performer Training Attraction
A. Grotowski’s performer training as a theatre worker-tourist attraction
B. Post-modern or post-colonial epistemology: establishing and exchanging markers to know the self
C. My own writing as “tracing back”