3 Rooms is the year-end showcase developed and devised by members of Practice Lab 2014. This year, the question of “space” was the primary stimulant that led these lab members on a creative journey. As these lab members toggled between directing, script-writing, devising and performing, lab Director Liu Xiaoyi mentors them throughout the process to arrive at these three pieces of Chinese-language original work.

Living in an increasingly crowded city, what does space mean to you? A house? A room? Or a virtual fantasy world?
Three performances, three spaces, three different predicaments.
Bringing you on a journey through perseverance against letting go, through desire against fear, and through patience and persistence.

1. Anahata
A woman, a room, a dialogue with oneself.
Who has not loved, grieved, hated? If the heart is sealed, can it be protected from harm? Will it then be kept pure and robust? Can we then attain happiness?
She, the woman who sealed off her heart, and yet not attained the happiness she desires. In the end, she sealed herself in as well. Why is that so?

2. The Nude
She is the subject of a nude painting.
Someone once quipped, “Nakedness is a dress which you cannot disrobe.”
What kind of story lies beneath this “dress which you cannot disrobe”?
And the truth; how will it be cruelly peeled, layer after layer?

3. Immovable
Nails are used to hold things up, to build things, to join things together. But they are also used to hold things down, make things immovable and embedded for eternity.
An old person desperately builds up a dream in her rickety old house, filled with holes from a life before.
Two ghosts hold on to long-forgotten promises, in spite of the inevitable.

What is more foolish, to wait or to let go? To hold on, or to give up? What makes us stay embedded in the ground even as the world threatens to shift beneath us?