White Rushes (Roseau Blanc)
Fili 周 Gibbons & Paloma Dawkins (artistic collaboration)
Performed at Centre PHI / Espaces Incarnés in December 28 & 29, 2024
White Rushes is a participatory ritual, sound and visual performance drawing inspiration from the Chinese classical text known as I Ching 易經 or (‘Book of Changes’). The piece was developed throughout 2024, working in close collaboration with award-winning animator and video game designer Paloma Dawkins (Apocablyss Studio).
A 2-hour performance-installation, White Rushes blends post-Classical cello, generative sound processing, and a real-time visual engine. Occupying the south-wing of PHI’s entrance gallery, an embodied performance unfolds in a square ritual-space, covered with one hundred sheets white paper, and washed in colourful hand-drawn projections:
The I Ching (also written ‘Yijing’) is an ancient system of lands-based divination with roots in oral tradition—later recorded in the early Zhou dynasty (ca. 1000–750 BCE). This text was accumulated through generations of close observation of human and life phenomena, and expresses a core idea that change observed in the environment is a mirror of change in oneself. There is an ongling and mutual reflection between the human life and that of the world around us.
Playfully embodying this concept, the performers — dressed in white — become a moving canvas for visual patternings inspired by nature and rendered through a real time engine, which themselves are in continuous flux. In so doing, the artists offer a slow-paced and contemplative space to rest and also reflect on entangled processes of nature, culture, and technology.
The 2-hour performance sequence is generated entirely from chance process — an alternating pattern of live divination with willing audience members is then interpreted live in semi-improvised performance sequences. Each reading draws two sets of eight basic images (known as bagua 八卦), allowing a total 64 possible combinations. A vocabulary of supporting sound and visual elements are prepared in advance and similarly created and recombined, allowing a non-linear ambient sequence that continuously unfolds in new and unexpected ways.
The visuals were hand drawn by Paloma and processed through live layering and digital processing techniques. The images express a playful cartoon-like and anachronic spirit, exploring the incarnation of nature in relation to ways of seeing.
The sound material of the piece blends cello tonal melodies, field recordings, and pitch systems drawn from early Chinese tuning (十二律 12 Lu). The piece also draws from a personal vocabulary of embodied movement and ritual patterns inspired through a study of Chinese traditional internal arts.
As an interactive way to connect with the piece beyond the performance itself, divination participants are offered small paintings created live on sheets of paper laid out across the performance floor. A QR code and landing page were also offered to introduce general visitors to the background and deeper meanings of the divination system, illustrated through elemental symbolism and slips of poetry:
Acknowledgements
We thank the production team of Centre PHI for their significant technical and logistical support throughout the install and performance preparation.
Special thanks to OBORO for their generous offer of development and rehearsal space as well as sound equipment, throughout the final creation and performance process.
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