The Circle Unbound is a multimedia performance exploring ritual, repetition, and transformation through movement, sound, installation, and moving image. The work brings two circular worlds into tension: the devotional cycles of Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage, in which bodies prostrate through repetition as an act of endurance and spiritual progression, and the fractured, glitch-like rhythms of modern industrial labour. Within this encounter, contrasting temporalities and energies collide, dissolve, and attempt to co-exist.
The choreography moves between meditative repetition, chanting, and disrupted motion, holding both spiritual grounding and the dissonance of contemporary life. Developed in collaboration with sound and moving image artists, the work reimagines Tibetan visual symbols, particularly cosmological forms such as mandalas: square palaces enclosed within circles, functioning as both ritual pathways and visual structures. This symbolic logic mirrors the work’s central tension between spiritual flow and mechanical order, cyclical time and industrial linearity.
Rooted in my own training in Chinese classical and folk dance, and in a long-standing fascination with Tibetan cultural energy, The Circle Unbound is also a deeply personal inquiry. Rather than attempting to represent a fixed culture, the work asks what remains when cultural signs are peeled away. Near the end of the performance, the removal of costume becomes not a gesture of loss, but one of self-questioning. What emerges is a search for how cultural energy continues to move through the body and through space: how it can be carried, transformed, and held, even as forms disappear.
Project Details
- Year: 2025
- Role: Created and performed by Yuxi Jiang
- Type: site-specific, installation-performance
- Commissioned for the 2025 Hidden Door Festival
Credits
- Choreographer/dancer: Yuxi Jiang
- Moving Image Artist: Siyao Li
- Sound Artist: Yilei Li
- Costume designer: Lanqi Li
- Technician: Olafur Breidfjord
- Space Design: Siyu Chen
- Lighting: Ross Blair
