蕭壠文化園區

Terry O’Reilly (易光海) is a playwright, performer and director originally from Memphis, Tennessee. His work ranges from dancing in the companies of Trisha Brown, Simone Forti and Meredith Monk to directing minimalist opera in Belgrade and Brooklyn Academy of Music to directing and co-writing (with Simon Wong) a children’s puppet play in Hong Kong based on US and Chinese folk stories.  A 2014-2015 Fulbright Senior Scholar in the area of aboriginal ritual and theater in Taiwan, he is based in NYC, where his primary artistic work for more than four decades has been as an artistic director of Mabou Mines.
2014-2015    Fulbright Senior Scholar Taipei National University of the Arts. Ritual and Theater/Aboriginal Studies
2007-2009    Guangxi State Government to work with the Guangxi Puppet Arte Troupe of China 
2007-2009    Grant from the Hong Kong Municipality for work with the Ming Ri Company 
2006       Production support for Violet Fire, Belgrade

To amuse myself one day I began imagining what the birds were saying to one another, and what they might think of a house flying or floating in the air. The love and audacity of talk between friends, the idea that you can be contentious and friendly as you learn your way through the world, those were the words that came - because that is what I wanted to hear. There are hints of the dialogues of the Wayang Kulit clown characters, commedia dell’arte, South Asian and Chinese comic characters but really mostly it is just kids. It’s a story of home told by a traveler. I am becoming a patriot of Taiwan, a land not of my birth, where, as the Atayal people say “the god of millet is a woman and she likes it quiet.”  Using media to talk about a time before media, cell phones to record endangered languages, I have told and retold this simple story in some of the many languages spoken in Taiwan.