K BODY AND MIND: Subverting Cyberpunk
Written by Jasmine Chen
“I was writing a thing that I had never seen, I wanted to see it. ”
Over the last three years, Donna and I have been busy lending our voices and bodies to K BODY AND MIND. What began as a stage show, was most recently adapted into a miniseries, and will soon return as a live performance.
K BODY AND MIND is set in a fictional Asian city named New Silica. In 20XX, a security specialist named Kawabi wants what everyone wants: to leave behind the scars of sickness, hunger, and war… and lead a new life in a new body. She joins The Grove, an idealistic start-up with a fleet of bioengineered and shareable bodies. But when a hostile entity hacks The Grove’s network, colonizing the minds and bodies of its inhabitants, Kawabi must rescue her new home… by reckoning with a ghost of the past.
What makes this project special, is not just that it’s a hybrid of film, theatre, and movement, but that it pushes the boundaries of how we define representation itself.
Let me start by saying, Donna plays Kawabi, and quite frankly, she kicks ass. Donna Soares is a gifted performer who expertly handles emotional vulnerability with disarming depth. Often during our scenes I’d completely forget what I was doing, because I was so caught up in what she was experiencing as her character. Donna’s work ethic and ability to stay focused even when we’re trying to learn frustratingly hard bits of choreography, has always impressed me.
The thing about K BODY AND MIND that makes it unlike anything Donna and I have ever done before, and we’ve both been actors for over a decade, is that what you see and what you hear are completely different. Performing this piece is a thrill and a gruelling challenge, because we play so many different characters while “operating” our bodies mostly disjointed from our dialogue. Imagine a radio drama overlaid on a silent film, or a bad English dub over a foreign film.
I can say quite confidently that this piece is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done as an actor, which was entirely intentional from writer/director Conor Wylie. In our interview he spoke about how rarely he saw Asian-Canadian female actors have the opportunity to stretch their full range, and play characters far outside their physical appearance. With this in mind, he crafted characters that he knew would challenge Donna and I. In his words, “I knew you were both pros. I felt like I hadn’t had a chance to see you guys really push the limit, I wanted to create roles that were like, let’s see someone get the chance to kick ass, do all the things you can do, or more. Let’s put a challenge out there.”
I recently sat down with Conor to ask him about how his Chinese heritage and his first trip to Asia influenced the creation of K BODY AND MIND.
New Silica, the fictional city that you've written, it’s never explicitly said that it’s in Asia, but there are many embedded cultural references. Why did you choose to set this piece in Asia?
Conor: I think early phases of the project, the city and situations were more inspired by references through media and sci-fi. The city was more generic. At the time, it was based on the city I pictured, or the city depicted in Ghost in the Shell, which is actually based on Hong Kong. Pretty dingy, classic dystopia, overrun by corporations. Then, in 2019, I went to Hong Kong.
I’m half-Chinese, and my family is from Guangdong Province, like in a little remote village outside of Guangzhou, and my Gong-Gong lived in Hong Kong for a bit. All to say is, when I was going there, I was excited it was going to be my first time in Asia, and I was like, “This is going to be a great time in a really cool city”, but I wasn’t anticipating any kind of familial cultural homecoming feeling that some people [experience].
People make plans. You're like, “I’m going to go back to where I am from.” And because I wasn’t going to Mainland China or to Guangzhou, I didn’t anticipate that experience. And then, we got on the Metro at the airport, and when we came out into Wan Chai, I was overcome with emotion. I was just utterly struck by, first, the sound, second, the smell, and the climate. It’s so funny, I’m a person who wears three pairs of socks, and two sweaters. My fingers and toes are always cold. And everyone’s like, “You're going to go to Hong Kong, it’s going to be so hot, so be ready for it.” And I got out there and I was like, “Oh. Whoa, this is what I’m made for.” All my other friends are sweating and hydrating, and I’m like,
“Actually, I can feel… I feel home here.”
I felt the sounds, the chatter, the noise, and the smells. And growing up with my Cantonese grandparents, just hearing the language, hearing Cantonese spoken around me, I actually had this unexpected homecoming feeling, where I was just overcome by emotion. I can’t believe how foundational that felt.
Over the course of the next week or so, I thought, “I have to come back here, I have to experience this place more” To recontextualize my conception of [New Silica], and just sensorially what I imagined this world to be. For one thing, the heat and the humidity. I can’t depict heat and humidity in the piece, but I feel like you kind of feel it too. It’s very much embedded in Nancy’s soundtrack. I said, “Nancy, we’ve got to get some field recordings to use in the soundscapes.” A lot of the city sounds that are in the piece are recordings directly from places in Hong Kong, from a little amusement park by the seaside to busy intersections.
“Part of the joy of performing this piece is that we’re not expected to represent the people that we’re playing visually.”
The tastes, all the food that’s referenced is from there. The biggest thing too, is that there’s jungle right in the middle of the city. It’s just overrun by rich plant life that is pushing at the limits of the infrastructure. Banyan roots are just rolling over the sidewalk, roots are ripping up the sidewalk. It’s just bursting with plant life, and wildlife, inside of the city, that has a different kind of aliveness than I get from North American cities or European cities, that also shaped who the people of the piece were.
Why did you choose to cast two Asian female actors?
Conor: This protagonist, Kawabi. It’s not a real name, but it certainly has a Japanese sound, or an Asian sound to it. I think there was a question of representation. What is it to cast two white women for this role? I always knew it was going to be performed by women. I’m not sure why exactly, but I just knew that.
[In sci-fi], we see neo-Tokyo all the time, or we see cities that are based on a neo-Hong Kong, but we almost never see performers of Asian descent in the lead roles in those same stories, right? You've got Ryan Gosling, or you've got Scarlett Johansson, of course.
I wanted to inverse the thing in which Scarlett Johansson played Motoko Kusanagi, who’s one of my favourite characters ever. If we truly believe, or want to believe in an ideal situation in which anyone can play anyone, which we know is complicated, then let’s invert the power structure and make it actually interesting and compelling. I was writing a thing that I had never seen, I wanted to see it.
“I knew you were both pros. I felt like I hadn’t had a chance to see you guys really push the limit, I wanted to create roles that were like, let’s see someone get the chance to kick ass, do all the things you can do, or more. Let’s put a challenge out there.”
Listening to Conor, it struck me that even in anime made by Asian creators, too often the protagonists have light blue or grey eyes, with blond hair. So, to see Donna and I, starring in this miniseries with no modification to our appearance, and the emphasis placed entirely on our performance, I couldn’t help but feel incredibly proud.
We are inviting the audience to imagine what the characters of K BODY AND MIND look like. Those characters can take any shape, because each viewer is going to imagine something different. Part of the joy of performing this piece is that we’re not expected to represent the people that we’re playing visually. We’re only representing them vocally. I don’t have to worry about being a large imposing man as the Boss, I just put on that voice, and people believe that I’m him. In that way, it feels so liberating. And then, watching it, I think, “Cool. Isn’t that fun that Donna and I could be anyone?
Watch K BODY AND MIND online at the Open Ears Festival from June 4-6.
About the writer, Jasmine Chen