Translating Time
into Bodies.

Here is the move I value most: I suspend its divination. I keep the entire symbolic machinery of Qimen and remove its truth-claims. I do not need to believe that the stars govern human affairs — I need only that it is a complex, deterministic machine with a grammar of its own. Disenchanted, it is functionally of a kind with the twelve-tone row, or with any formal constraint, only far richer, and natively coupled to time. I am not mystifying the body; on the contrary, I drain a mystical system dry and use it as a machine tool.

這裡有我最看重的一個動作：我懸置了它的占卜。 我保留奇門的全部符號機制，抽掉它的真值主張。我不需要相信星象左右人事——我只需要它是一台複雜、確定、自帶語法的機器。去魅之後，它與十二音序列、與任何一套形式約束在功能上同類，只是遠為豐富，且天然與時間咬合。我不是在神秘化身體，恰恰相反：我把一套神秘系統抽乾，當機床用。

This substitution gives the work two things the dice cannot. The first is singularity: each night's chart belongs only to that night; the work is no longer a "repeatable object" but a sequence of events, each unrepeatable — in an age when anything can be copied without limit, I use a deterministic machine to manufacture the un-copyable once more. The second is dramaturgy: a Qimen chart arrives with its own direction and tension — the march of its sovereign, the inward lock of its stillness, the crest of its energy, its single point of irreconcilable conflict — none of which I impose; the chart grows them itself. The generator hands me not only chance, but rising and falling action.

這一替換，讓作品獲得兩樣骰子給不了的東西。其一是一次性：每一場的盤只屬於那一夜，作品不再是「可重演的物」，而是一連串各自獨一無二的事件——在一個萬物皆可無限複製的時代，我用一台確定性的機器，反而重新製造了不可複製。其二是劇作法：奇門盤自帶方向與張力——主帥的行進、靜滯的伏吟、能量的峰值、全盤唯一的那處衝突——這些不是我強加的，是盤自己長出來的結構。於是這台發生器不只給我偶然，它給我起承轉合。

But I never lose sight of one thing: a score is not a dance. The machine supplies the necessary — a material that is here, now, and beyond doubt; the dance happens in the body's response to that necessity: how it interprets, refuses, even defies it. The more precise the system, the more I guard against letting the structure dance in my place. I build constraint to provoke a freedom I could not myself have invented — not to substitute it for freedom. Nor do I pretend the mapping is a truth of the universe; it is made of many well-grounded choices, and its objectivity is the objectivity of rules, not of fate. When a performance moves us, the credit is not that "Qimen got it right," but that a constraint charged with its own tension happened to force a good body into being — and a good performer happened to realize it.

但我始終清楚一件事：譜不是舞。 機器負責給出「必然」——一份此時此地、確定無疑的素材；而舞，發生在身體對這必然的回應裡：如何詮釋它、取捨它，甚至違抗它。系統越精密，我越警惕「讓結構替我跳舞」。我造約束，是為了逼出連自己也想不到的自由，而非以約束取代自由。我也不假裝這套映射是宇宙的真理——它由許多有據的選擇構成，它的客觀性是規則的客觀性，不是天意的客觀性。當一場演出動人，功勞不在「奇門算准了什麼」，而在這套自帶張力的約束，恰好逼出了好的身體，又恰好被好的舞者實現。

In the end, what I am building is a machine that translates time into bodies, and a way of working that wrestles with what that machine produces. It begins from a grammar of quality, passes through a disenchanted set of ancient symbols, and lets every moment — one that can never come again — grow, deterministically yet only once, the rough form of a body. What has interested me is never prophecy, but a contemporary posture of making: the artist no longer arranges each movement by hand, but designs a machine with taste, and then stands before it, and begins to dance.

歸根到底，我在造一台把時間譯成身體的機器，以及一種與它的產出搏鬥的工作方式。它從一種關於質感的語法出發，經由一套被去魅的古老符號，讓每一個無法重來的時刻，確定地、卻又只此一次地，長出一具身體的雛形。我感興趣的從來不是預言，而是這樣一種當代的創作姿態：藝術家不再親手安排每一個動作，而是設計一台有品味的機器，然後站到它面前，開始跳。