About
Taiwan-based performing arts company Sun Son Theatre presents Lament of the Wandering Head, one of the most representative experimental works of the company's signature practice of integrating performance, music, and movement. The work draws its inspiration from a supernatural legend widespread across Southeast Asia—the flying human head, found in the folklore of China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, and Malaysia, said to detach at night in search of human excrement and women's menstrual blood. Sun Son Theatre takes this image of bodily rupture and transforms it into a metaphor for the collective trauma and individual dislocation experienced by Chinese diaspora communities across the twentieth century and beyond, caught between nation, bloodline, and land.
The work imagines a condition of "flying heads" that occurs only among women—a mythic inheritance whose descendants have scattered across countries and cities. At its centre is the story of a Malaysian Chinese woman studying and living in Taiwan, tracing the currents of this restless, displaced history. Like many marginalised and little-known communities, the Flying Head clan exists between myth and memory, ghost story and lived history, suspended between imagination and reality.
"My body is a headless train. My body is a legless boat. How do I find my way East or West?"
Performed by Taiwanese artists alongside Penang-born performers long based in Taiwan, the work weaves together storytelling, live music, physical movement, and chants to trace the ghostly, wandering fate of women in migration and displacement. With a spare stage, the full physical presence of its performers, non-linear poetic language, and a sound world carried by live music, the work is at once a ritual of summoning—invoking the lingering ghosts of colonial history—and a moving inquiry into the politics of identity today.
Now in its 27th year, Sun Son Theatre is a distinctive voice in Taiwan's music and physical theatre scene, known for the seamless integration of performance, musicianship, and movement within a single performer. In this production, the performers play live music featuring Taiwanese gongs, cymbals, and drums alongside Southeast Asian gong ensembles and flutes, while the text weaves between Penang Hokkien and Mandarin. Through these elements, audiences are invited to connect with experiences that resonate far beyond any single community—migration, colonialism, and the ongoing search for identity and belonging.
Lament of the Wandering Head has been nominated for Taiwan's prestigious Taishin Arts Award and shortlisted for Best Independent Spirit at the 2nd Taipei Theatre Awards.
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