Asian Bronze

When we read scripts and watch performances, we often take for granted the question of how meaning is produced, especially when a work resists narrative structure. My thesis explores the process of translating Haizi's poem Asian Bronze into a solo embodied performance. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's concept of the body as a site of cognition, Saussure's theory of the sign, and frameworks including Laban Movement Analysis and the Six Viewpoints, I translated the poem in layers, including impulse, rhythm, Chinese language, and association. Through this process, I find that meaning is not fixed in the text and not fully determined by the performer, but generated in the moment when the poem encounters the body in space and time.