Shuwen Tan

Some Kind of Bliss is not a performance you watch. It’s a zone you enter. There’s no stage. Only presence. No protagonist—only fragments. Rooted in the lived experiences of the Pan-Asian queer diaspora in London, this piece reclaims small acts of transgression—stealing an onion, leaving a broken speaker, a fake eyelash in the sink—as gestures of survival, desire, and self-making in the face of urban alienation. Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the Rhizome, the work builds a post-linear, anti-hierarchical structure. There is no fixed center. No clear start or end. Each performer generates their own territory. Each audience member, by entering, reshapes the space. It’s self-organizing. Nomadic. Improvised. We don’t just talk about queerness—We queer performance itself. The structure, the temporality, the syntax. In Act II, language breaks into what I call a divaricate tongue—cursed, forked, overflowing with semantics but void of clear meaning. When we speak in the borrowed tongue of another’s system, our words crack. Our grammar glitches. But grammar never saved us. Only gesture does.