#ResidencyInsights: From Image to Experience – A Dramaturg’s Notes on Ritual and Looking (Li Hon Ting)

In June 2025, led by Albert, we travelled to Bohol in the Philippines, where we invited Filipino artist and ritual practitioner Sasa Cabalquinto to conduct offerings to the fireflies on behalf of our team, while we filmed the process. In one of their conversations, Sasa stressed that the rituals we were doing should not, in fact, be documented on camera. Ritual functions as a channel for a holistic experience that belongs to those who participate, and recording it risks flattening it into something mainly visual or aesthetical instead of lived and felt. This pushed me to rethink my own understanding of “ritual”: visually striking, exotic, and dominated by its surface image. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, in the later stages of our work, the ritual and our experiences in it gradually became a central point of discussion within the team.

As the dramaturg and a collaborator in the team, what matters to me is how the knowledge we gained during the research process can be transformed into the work in a way that offers a shared experience, and possibly a closer understanding between those involved. I am less interested in producing an exotic, visually driven spectacle, and more concerned with how we can work through three intertwined, often overlapping yet distinct ideas: “performance,” “experience,” and “theatre”.

On performance: framing the reflexive gaze

In the process of performance-making, there is often a phase when certain performative or bodily materials appear that we cannot yet explain logically, but its potential we can intuitively recognize. Performance navigates through the audience’s attention and gaze, and with it the politics of seeing: the alignment or misalignment between the performer’s identity and appearance, the shifting dynamic between performer and spectator (who is performing and who is watching?), and the specific conditions of presence (why are we here, together, in this room?). These factors are not created from nothing at the moment of performance. They are already embedded in the performer’s everyday encounters and in the social habits of looking that everyone brings into the space.

For me, this is one way to understand why we can sense the potential of a performative material before we can fully articulate it: such material is framed out of living experiences and shared codes, even if we do not completely agree on them. This perspective suggests that, in this work, the focus of performance should not only be “what it looks like,” but also, and perhaps more importantly, “how it is being looked at”.

In the first part of the performance, Albert stands at the centre of the stage and invites the audience to pay close attention to his appearance—the colour of his skin, the shape of his body, the details of his face—and to place these observations into different imagined contexts: where he might be, and what he might be doing. As speculations gradually emerge, skin tone and facial features may be linked to assumptions about his race, while body shape may suggest particular occupations or lifestyles. As the performance shifts these contextual frames, some of these assumptions become visible and start to loosen. For me, it is at the moment when these assumptions are recognized and unsettled that spectatorship truly begins.

On experience: to get close, one must recognize distance

It is important to note that the image of the ritual in Bohol is not reproduced in the performance at all. This decision is not only to avoid exoticizing the ritual, but also to follow through on what we learned about why it should not be documented. As I mentioned earlier, ritual offers a holistic experience to those who participate and to the communities connected to it. It proposes a particular relationship between the people who carry out the ritual and its more-than-human subject—in our case, the fireflies and their habitat.

Put differently, a relationship between two subjects—for example, between humans and what we call “nature”—is formed and sustained by the many interactions that take place between them. Only through embodied experience can one begin to grasp such a relationship, and any forced interpretation or transcription of that experience can easily lead to misunderstanding or partial, even unfair, judgments. It is necessary to accept that the full depth of an experience cannot be completely shared, and that the wisdom and philosophy embedded in such practices cannot be fully translated. Instead, we chose to share it only in fragments and to openly acknowledge that these fragments are never a complete version.

On theatre: an apparatus to play with

Taking these reflections on performance and experience into account, we began to think of theatre—often seen as a visually dominant form—as an apparatus that can also work through the deprivation or reduction of vision. In doing so, we hoped to bring attention to the political question of “what is being seen, and who is allowed to be seen,” drawing inspiration from the fireflies’ subtle, flickering light, which is frequently overwhelmed by the glow of urban development and tourism infrastructure. In this sense, light and theatre lighting became tools with which to play, gradually expanding the idea of “the seen and the unseen” into a more abstract field.

In the part of the performance where Albert dances in near-total darkness and then shares personal stories about his life as a nomadic artist, the very low intensity of light does not only create a visual composition; it also sets up an experience of “not seeing”. Just as one must acknowledge what one does not understand in order to understand more, recognizing what is unseen can become a way to sharpen our perception of what is present.

Across these perspectives on performance, experience, and theatre, The Bug is On Fire does not aim to offer a definitive statement about migration, ecology, or ritual, but to stage conditions in which our ways of looking and relating can be slightly shifted. For me as a dramaturg, this work has been less about representing fireflies or immigrants “accurately,” and more about asking what kinds of relations become possible when we treat experience as something that cannot be fully captured, only carefully shared. If there is a gesture that carries through the project, it is perhaps the attempt to stay with the distance between bodies, between species, and between stories—not in order to close it once and for all, but to approach it with a different kind of attention.