Tung-Yen Chou is a Taiwanese theatre director, filmmaker and founder/artistic director of Very Mainstream Studio and Very Theatre in Taipei. TRAVERSING THE MIST, a multi-user exploration of gay saunas, premiered at IDFA DocLab, won the Grand Jury Prize at New Images and is now in the immersive competition at Cannes. It’s the last part of his trilogy, following the 360° IN THE MIST (2020) and mixed reality theatre piece GAZING THE MIST (2023).
TRAVERSING is a six degrees immersive experience for three people who move through the rooms and levels of a gay sauna as it becomes a surreal dreamworld.
Karen – You began your practice in theater and then also worked in film. How did that background influence your immersive practice?
Tung-Yen Chou – For theater directors, we always need to first figure out what kind of theater [space] we are using, how large or small, and where the audience is to know where the actor has to project. We are very aware of the presence of audience, while I think in the film industry, the audience is normally fixed in the auditorium looking at a big screen. To me, VR and XR are almost more similar to theater than cinema, even though they have a lot of technology and filming background that connects to cinema.
T.-Y. C. – When we put the audience inside VR, they are in the scene where everything happens. That’s really close to theater, especially immersive theater. So many site-specific performances have been happening over the past decade – which really echoes my practice in virtual reality.
K – You had some difficulties showing IN THE MIST…some places felt it was too explicit. Traversing is not the same piece, but it’s jumping off from it in terms of subject matter. I found it to be less explicit, and I was thinking that the interactive construction of this one could change perception. This is a very different piece not only technically, but also how you experience it. First in terms of form: there are multiple people involved and you’re moving through a space. And then in terms of embodiment. In IN THE MIST, you’re “in the shoes” of somebody in the middle of the experience, and here, even though I was more active in the piece and emplaced in the avatar of an Asian man, it felt less like I was embodying someone’s experience and more that I was observing a world.
T.-Y. C. – I think it has to do with the development of VR technology and what is possible with the tools available. I had experienced different embodiment work that triggered ideas for me – like Bianca Li’s LE BAL DE PARIS.“What if I have a different body – not a gaming kind of body but a human body that is not mine?” I learned the technology was available but I wondered, how can I do that?
T.-Y. C. – I made another version – GAZING IN THE MIST – for the Taipei Arts Festival. The curator TANG Fu Kuen saw N THE MIST and asked if we could do it as collective experience. We used the headsets’ passthrough black and white camera for people to walk around in a gigantic performing arts space where we made corridors of transparent fabric. What was interesting and also surprising to me is that the audience was uncertain if the performer is real in front of them. Then when they’re seated, it transitions into the IN THE MIST film [in the headset]. People, regardless of their gender or their experience, walk into a surreal experience. I started planning the final part of this trilogy, where audiences can embody an Asian men’s body, and explore and journey through a virtual sauna.
K. – You physically join the experience with two other people. There’s the moment, after you put the headsets on, when you all get in the elevator for the first time, and you notice that all of you look the same, you’re all Asian men in suits. It’s like you wipe your identity, and I think it helps to forget who you’re with.
T.-Y. C. – Wiping one’s identity happens in a space where you need to be naked. How much you hold on to who you are and where you are affects your experience in this kind of 6DoF roaming experience. I think the intriguing level of “I’m here, yet I’m not here” is exactly what I want to play with in the audience’s brain, to the ultimate question “what’s real?”
K. – But your perception is also influenced by who you’re experiencing it with. You are aware of their presence, of who they are. And the experience is likely filtered through that, or at least it is adding a layer of reflection.
T.-Y. C. – In this kind of experience, you’re your own director and you create the narrative in your head. You are also the performer; you’re performing for yourself and the others because you are being watched by the others.
T.-Y. C. – Some audience members are very aware of the others, acting as if they are in a sauna, walking around each other carefully without saying anything. Some are natural performers, as if they lived in the experience before! Sometimes they actively become a little “team” and give each other suggestions and share what they’ve found. Several audience members shared that even if they don’t know each other, when they took of the headset, they feel a certain intimacy between each other because they went through this journey together. That really echoed what I wished to share in TRAVERSING THE MIST, a kind of love without love.
K. – In a way, the piece is almost like the experience of actually going to a sauna for the first time because you don’t necessarily know the rules or expectations – Can I walk here? Should I talk to this person? You’re asking people to embody that sense of uncertainty, trepidation, excitement and voyeurism.
T.-Y. C. – Yes, indeed. In the beginning, you need to familiarize yourself with this virtual body and world. Without any instruction, you just follow your instinct to walk around. All the senses you mentioned are very important in this experience. Because even though it has a logical sense of what’s in a bathhouse/sauna, it’s not a “visiting experience” nor a documentary. [One of the viewers] shared that this is a world that is so difficult to describe. Because when he tried to describe what happened, it was actually not the experience. But he was sharing about his feelings, about what he felt, not about what he saw.
K. – Do people go on the journey together? Or are they hitting the points at different times?
T.-Y. C. – Most people wait for each other, maybe it feels safe? Or it’s the human nature? In our setup, audience members should take the elevator together. But there are users who just press the button and initiate the change to the next scene. And there will be people who enter the elevator knowing the other two are not there yet, and someone will go out and fetch the others.
T.-Y. C. – For this kind of walk around experience, some feel it’s too short. They can really be in a scene just to see, to observe, to listen, to be there longer. Others may feel they want to move on and know what’s gonna happen next! Therefore, how to give each scene the right amount of time was a very delicate decision and we learned from many tryouts. We were still learning when it was presented to the public in Amsterdam and Paris.
K. – Obviously the body is the core element in your piece, and you actually have it change throughout the journey. First, through the shedding of clothes, and then by the end, the avatar’s body is aging, finally disappearing. Why was that process important for you to express in the piece?
T.-Y. C. – I wanted to create a surreal sense of the time passing, which is not easy to “physically sense” in other media. But in VR, we can create this visceral “magic” through the changes and aging of the audience’s virtual body.
T.-Y. C. – Being young and physically attractive is probably the most important thing nowadays. For a place like gay sauna, the body is your currency. What happens when you don’t have a young and physically attractive body? This is somehow echoing my own sense of insecurity.
T.-Y. C. – The avatars don’t just age, but they also disappear, their virtual body disappears, and turns into a key.
T.-Y. C. – There are also these recurring Asian stories where a man goes into a dream world or deep in the sea, and by the time he come back to the land, he’s already an old man. This kind of folk tale we are told as children influenced this VR narrative as well.
K. – Working in Taiwan, you have access to an unusual level of funding support.
T.-Y. C. – I don’t know how unusual it is, LOL. I think it is similar to funding systems in Europe. What’s special is the Ministry of Culture in Taiwan has been supporting performing arts using technology for more than 15 years. TRAVERSING THE MIST received this funding.
T.-Y. C. – The government supports several institutions as funding bodies such as TAICCA, Kaohsiung Film Archive and National Culture and Art Foundation which support and stimulate prototypes, experiments and international co-productions.
T.-Y. C. – What’s as important as funding is actually the passionate people in these institutions who bring filmmakers, theatre makers and artists from different backgrounds to learn and play with XR and make works and share our Taiwanese stories with the world.
T.-Y. C. – What’s maybe unusual is that the Trilogy of MIST, despite its rather underground theme and explicit imagery, is governmental funded? I’m privileged to be an artist in Taiwan, where we fought for our freedom of expression. This is probably one of the best outcomes.
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