THEATRE REVIEW

MARCH 2024 | Volume 237

 

Production image

Photography: Colton Curtis.

Jade Circle
by Jasmine Chen
Rice & Beans Theatre, Richmond
Gateway Theatre, Richmond
Mar. 6-17
$30
www.gatewaytheatre.com or 604-270-1812
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Jade Circle is an elegant 45-minute solo performance by Jasmine Chen about culture and legacy. Chen narrates, in Mandarin and English, not so much a story as an homage to her mother and maternal grandmother, and to their Chinese language and culture that she is attempting to preserve.

Under Derek Chan’s direction, this Rice & Beans Theatre production melds Chen’s narrative, singing, and Tai Chi-style dance movement with Chinese music (Sapphire Haze’s sound design), Daniel O’Shea’s beautiful video design, and Jonathan Kim’s kaleidoscopic lighting in a classy synthesis, a feast for the senses.

As Chen speaks, her words appear projected in both English and Chinese characters (Johnny Wu is the translator), offering tributes to her mother, whose recorded voice sometimes appears, presumably in interviews with Chen, and especially her grandmother, her Waipo, whose life was both mysterious and inspirational. Chen says she learned Mandarin so she could speak to her Waipo in the afterlife and learn her history.

She has gleaned something of her grandmother’s experience in World War Two and the Chinese civil war, her escape to Taiwan, her father’s suicide, and her subsequent imprisonment as a Communist sympathizer. Chen’s act of imaginative identification also draws her closer to her mother.

Chen has a lovely singing voice and her movements are precisely crafted. But the linguistic nature of the show required me to spend most of my attention reading the projected surtitles. And whatever dramatic tension or conflict the narrative contains takes place in the words on the screen more than in Chen’s embodied performance.

One of the more enigmatic projections reads, “Some stones cannot be translated.” Despite the beauty onstage, I felt that much of the story of these three women’s lives remained hidden from me behind walls of linguistic and cultural difference and diffidence.

 

 

 

 

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Vancouver's arts and culture website providing theatre news, previews and reviews