| director / composer: Zen Lu
| playwright: Abai
| actor: Abai, Qiu Qiu
| festival: Macau BOK Theatre Festival 2015

In March 2015, I was invited to participate in the Macau BOK Theatre Festival, where I transitioned from being a musician to a director, completing the directorial work for “Black and White Life.” Additionally, I led the installation design for the play, responding to the festival’s theme of “Installation Live,” and I was also responsible for the entire musical composition of the drama.

“Installation Live” presents various imaginations of theatrical space, allowing the audience to engage with demonstrations that can break the traditional binary opposition of theater space and performance. It was an interesting experiment, providing an experience of different perspectives in work thinking and creative approaches.

The experimental music poetry drama “Black and White Life” is a cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration between independent theater director ABai and sound artist Zen Lu. It integrates poetry, experimental music, physical theater, stage installations, and live multimedia art, presenting a poetic confrontation, the division of humanity, Eastern mystique, and the unknowability of time and space through a long-lost poetic drama format in modern theater.

“Black and White Life” is a miniature epic that uses a dualistic poetic approach to express and explore themes of life and death, yin and yang, laughter and tears, joy and anger, desire and morality, as well as the path of human numbness and ignorance in modern society. On stage, the reciter, music creators, and physical performers are divided into three distinct performance areas, creating a unique dramatic alienation effect. As the poetry drama progresses, these elements gradually merge, ultimately bringing the theme of black and white life to a climax.