Detective Deduction
CHOU Man-nung
Artwork Description:
Detective Deduction begins where most immersive works end. Audiences don't enter a completed world — they rise through it, carried on a freight elevator that shakes and exhales smoke, ascending from the theater's loading dock into the stage itself. This entry is not a metaphor. It is the work's first statement. Theater has always been a machine — an ancient technology for mobilizing perception. Detective Deduction takes this literally. Rather than concealing the Grand Theater's infrastructure behind illusion, the work makes the building's skeleton its primary creative material: freight lifts, acoustic shells, curtain lines, fly systems. The theater itself is the largest performer. Without this machinery — integrated with custom-built automated walls, multi-layered projection, spatial sound, and installation — these rooms could not exist. Ten fictional detectives' rooms inhabit the theater's full spatial range — stage, side stages, backstage, and auditorium. As platforms rise, hidden spaces are revealed; as rigging shifts, objects recombine. Audiences are carried — ascending, descending — through the spatial narrative. Mechanical movements sometimes occur in plain sight; sometimes, audiences discover the space has already changed. This designed uncertainty is not atmosphere — it is structure. It places audiences in the epistemic condition of a detective: the scene has been altered, and only activated perception can reconstruct what happened. Without tasks or mysteries to solve, audiences move through a dreamlike world of machinery, image, sound, and installation — becoming investigators of their own responses, memories, and associations—the search for what is real leads inward.
Project Collaborators:
2021-2022 National Taichung Theater(NTT) Artists-in-Residence Program CHOU Man-nung Commissioned & Organised Production: National Taichung Theater Production: Baroquemachine Lab Concept, Director, Scriptwriter: CHOU Man-nung Space, Mechanism Design & Overall Planning of New Media Technology: CHANG Huei-ming Assistant Director: WU Zi-jing Composer: LIU Wei-chih Music Design: LIU Wen-chi Lighting Design: WU Hsia-ning Graphic Design: YANG Shi-ching Costume design: LIN Hsin Overall planning of Space Furnishings & Model Making coordination: TSAI Chuan-ren Performers: Yang Qi-yin, Fly WU Stills and performance video: TANG Chien-che Producer: LAN Hao-chih Executive Producer: HSU Pei-ching, LIU Tung-yu Stage Manager: CHEN Cheng-hua, WU Zi-jing Stage Technical Director: CHEN Ren-shuo Lighting Technical Director: Phoebe CHEN Sound Engineering: LAI Wei-yu Space Furnishings & Model Making/House Peace
