Betty Apple (aka Cheng Yi-Ping) is at the forefront of Taiwan’s millennial generation of avant-garde artists.
The thought-provoking performance artist and electronic composer – who explores body politics, digital culture, consumerism and all manner of philosophical topics – brings her new experimental work, ‘IT-ME TIME Traveller Beta Live x Social Dis Dance’, to this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Check out Melbourne’s latest stage shows and theatrical events here.
A mind-expanding exploration into existentialism, time travel and industrial techno, Betty’s show poses the question: if a machine mermaid from the Metaverse gave you a message from the future, would you listen?
Betty has long been interested in the Metaverse, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the deeper questions of how and why we believe what we believe. “Cyber mermaid is a topic I’m always thinking about because I’m really interested in internet culture, especially during the COVID-19 time,” says Betty. “You can have one cell phone and you can stay with it for the whole day. So you don’t need to move and you just stay in the digital world, but is that good or bad? It feels like we’re going into a circus and we stay inside and we do it again and again.”
The ground-breaking artist collaborated with choreographer and media artist Choy Ka Fai last year in the performance series ‘Cosmic Wonder’, which explored Asia’s shamanic dance cultures. The performance combined gaming elements, documentary, motion capture ritualising, digital dance streaming, deities, celebrity cults and ghost mediums while exploring themes of democracy and individual freedom.
“I perform a digital psychic in the game, so I was really inspired by all these things,” Betty reflects. “In my opinion, I think it’s a way to find humanity or find something we don’t have. That’s my feeling and it’s kind of symbolic to think about my feeling of my state in Taiwan right now – really unstable, not sure who we are.”
A new project is her live industrial techno rave band where she works with two friends who are architecture and new media artists. “I love DJing and love going to rave parties, but nowadays almost everyone can do many things easily and is there another way to reproduce rave?” Betty asks.
“Because rave and ecstasy are also talking about humanity – machine cannot rave, but as a human being we are emotional. When we are struggling, we want to be free and this is the thing I’m thinking: why do we want to be free and what is it we believe post COVID-19? Sometimes it’s not a direct way of performance, but that’s my style. I use a space blanket and use AI video to recreate the cyber mermaid. People only need to come and feel it – to get together to feel the sound and vibration.”
For Betty, techno is akin to architecture and noise represents a personal and spiritual space. Betty uses her art to capture the violence, emptiness and destructiveness of modern society in relationships, the environment and in politics, and as a means of critiquing capitalism, colonialism and consumerism.
“I think it’s all about feeling from freedom – in my opinion, I don’t like to be against something and I’m trying to not make myself really black or white,” Betty muses.
“That’s why I like noise or chaos. In Taiwan the history is quite blurred for us, so that makes me think about the voice that I want to express. The body politics is more about self-freedom. The identity is focused on who I am with this society; it’s not I am in this society. I think my way is trying to find the freedom, like a balance of self-peace, but through violent way.
“Why violence? Because I think in this really chaotic generation and digital time, everything is possible. Everything is noise. That’s why I feel that if you’re really quiet and peaceful, for me it’s not going to happen for everyone.
“My performance is a little like shaking. If some people feel sleepy or really anxious, if you are really busy and you cannot think, and if people shake you and say: ‘wake up, we’re here – we can think about this together’, then maybe you can breathe and think ‘oh, that’s why’.
“I think that’s the important part of art. Since facing the COVID-19 time, everything has changed. That’s what I’m really thinking about – what is that change?”
Drawn to performance as a child, Betty completed a BA in theatre and performance and a MA in new media art. For the past 15 years, she’s been creating art in theatre sound design and directing solo shows and live performances, inspired by the limitless power in the intersection between sound and theatre.
“As an actress, I use my body to do the performance and I’m quite interested in how the sound can reproduce in the stage or how it becomes theatre,” says Betty. “In this capitalism world we always want to be rational and correct, especially in theatre – there are very strict practices for us. For an actress and actor, you need to rehearse again and again to make sure everything is fine. When I start making music by computer and machine, I start to think about ‘what’s the difference between me and machine?’
“We humans always want and think there should be a ‘right’. We don’t want to be wrong, but many creative things come from accidents. I start to discover in doing solo show performance, I can try and not prepare, but it’s really hard for me because I have a lot of training, so I always think: ‘what can we create when an audience is together and with one topic how do I create it viva sound and performance?’ If I practise every day all the same, sometimes I will ask myself: Who am I? Why should I correct every time?”
Taiwan’s art, music and performance community is flourishing. The Taipei Performing Arts Centre opened in July and new centres, musical styles, clubs and themes are sprouting across the city. “I think because of the internet generation, the community is growing more than before and it’s quite multidisciplinary,” Betty enthuses. “There are several new styles of music. There’s a band called Mong Tong – they play guitar, but they cover their eyes to play the music, and there are several new ways of making music or performance in Taiwan – they will start to sing in native language, Aboriginal language, in rap. A band leader has gone on to create a political party (metal band Chthonic leader singer Freddy Lim is a member of the Taiwanese Parliament). It’s more avant-garde and more new styles right now.”
Betty’s show is a thrilling component of Fringe Focus Taiwan, which is supported by The Ministry of Culture in the Republic of China (Taiwan) and the Cultural Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Sydney. The innovative artist has performed her work in Berlin, San Francisco and Mexico City, and collaborated with Melbourne experimental art organisation Liquid Architecture on her previous trip to our city.
“We are all islands and in different parts of this earth, but we live in the same capitalism and consumer system,” says Betty. “So I’m trying to understand how we will face the future – as an island, how do we face global warming or environment change? I bring a question from my point of view, and I will keep changing the topic to do the performance discovery, but I will use some symbolic object in the performance to communicate through that way.”
IT-ME TIME Traveller Beta Live x Social Dis Dance – presented by Melbourne Fringe as part of Fringe Focus Taiwan – will thrill audiences at Runaway Festival Park – The Vault from October 13-15. For tickets, visit IT-ME TIME Traveller Beta Live x Social Dis Dance – 超時空人魚夜總會 x 社會交流電死舞 | Melbourne Fringe
