Against-Again Troupe was founded in 2002 in Taiwan by a group of theatre practitioners coming from diverse artistic backgrounds. Our productions range from theatre, musical performances, to exhibitions and small-scale performance festivals. Major works lie in the field of site-specific theatre, music theatre and performance poetry, implementing objects, sound, and multimedia to create performance pieces infused with collage, repetition, alienation, and non-narrative text. A large portion of our work is socially conscious and issue- related. Through art we attempt to examine the human condition in our age of globalization, in regards to class, gender, identity and survival.
The literal translation of AAT's mandarin name - zai yi tsi ju jue zhang da - is "to refuse, once again, to grow up." The archetype of the child-god is found in many Asian mythologies from China to India. In Taiwanese folk religion, Nezha is the child-trickster, embodying destruction and noted for his stories of violence and patricide. We believe that the ephemeral act of theatre is akin to the anger of Nezha, inclined to disrupt our habits of sensory perception, and to be the eternal child, forever walking between the lines of death and rebirth.
The recent works of AAT are focused on experimentation with space, objects and sound. Our biennial Apartment Showcase transforms the compact living quarters of urban capitalist Asia into a space for site-specific theatre and a playground for experimenting with performer/spectator relations. Kuroshio and Götterdämmerung are collaborative works of music theatre, redefining the execution of actions as performance and channeling the performative qualities of sound, objects and music. All that's left to happen is some deaths (my own included), created in 2012, is a performance without actors, as well as a series of ventures into the concept of micro-theatre, constantly reinventing itself as it travels through alternative venues from Taipei, Taichung, to Macau and to the World Stage Design festival in Cardiff. The same year, American Dream Factory was performed at Festival Tokyo (F/T). Through ten scenes of interwoven dreams, this show explores global capitalism as collective mythology, and how theatre art can find new forms of resistance and communication within a world of popular culture, institutions and postmodernity.