Created by Eve BEGLARIAN, NGUYEN Boi Co, Treva OFFUTT, and VU Thuy Ten
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One of the four precious creatures of ancient Chinese culture, the kylan merges male and female and represents beneficence and fecundity; its Western analog is the unicorn. Based on stories from traditional Vietnamese Cheo theater and from the Mahabarata, Ky Lan is a cross-cultural (Vietnamese, Indonesian, Indian, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, German, and American) collaborative exploration through movement, music visuals, and poetry, of the tensions between society and the individual soul, and the transformative power of love.
Oh this animal is the one that never was.
They didn’t know that; unconcerned, they had
loved its grace, its walk, and how it stood
looking at them calmly with clear eyes.It hadn’t BEEN. But from their love, a pure
animal arose. They always left it space.
And in that space, radiant and bare,
it raised its head and hardly needed to
exist. They fed it, not with any grain,
but always just with the thought that it might be.
And this assurance gave the animal so much power,it grew a horn upon its brow. One horn.
Afterward it approached a virgin, whitely—
and was, inside the silver mirror and in her.Rilke—"Sonnet to Orpheus" II:4, adapted from the translation by Stephen Mitchell