Peng Hsu + Esteban Donoso – BBR 碎碎唸: When Trivialities Might Move
14 ⇾ Oct. 16 2026 (Wednesday – Friday)
09:30 to 12:30
Weekly rate:$75
Drop-in:$28
English
#Creative process #Interdisciplinary #Toolbox
© Alvin Sauerberg
Objective
In Mandarin, 碎碎唸, Broke Broke Recitation, is commonly used to describe how women (or men who are deemed a bit loser-like) chatter nonstop about mundane trivialities. We are drawn to this kind of language, because we believe that BBR happens when an experience has no keyword, and to say it requires saying what surrounds it, what surrounds its surroundings, and what surrounds the surroundings of the surroundings. In this way, BBR gives rise to an ever-expanding landscape of experiencing, a landscape formed through constantly missing “the point.” This workshop is curious about experiences that require such a way of talking, and what kind of performance method such language invites, or demands.
Content
In this workshop, we invite participants to bring an experience or story of this kind: one that cannot be made short, a story that, in order to be properly explained, requires extensively explaining what surrounds it.
We will turn this experience or story into a text, and together discuss the possibilities of its continued expansion, and of course, why it expands in this particular way.
Then, using objects, through guided collaboration, acting and movement improvisation exercises, we will explore different ways of moving and performing that suit the different grammar of the experience’s proliferation.
Workshop Rhythm
Accessibility Features
Biography
Peng Hsu 許芃, is a Taiwan- and Montreal-based theatre director and playwright. Her work explores excess, bad taste, and a Taiwanese perspective on queer humor. Since 2020, Peng has been developing a playwriting style, directing method, and acting aesthetic centered on BBR. Short for “Broke Broke Recitation,” BBR is Peng’s translation of the Mandarin term suì suì niàn 碎碎唸, a phrase used in Taiwan to describe the way women chatter incessantly about daily, banal trivialities. Peng sees BBR as a technique of queer narration that traces queer experience by hoarding insignificance, thus compulsively looping the aside and the too much. Peng’s recent directing and playwriting work in BBR includes Great-Grand Rat-Po-Tai (So Old) Is Sleeping Next to a Landscape Painting, Diligently and Stingily Snoring—But There Is No Landscape Painting! (White Carrot, Rat Teeth, Her Child, and Her Child’s Child), which won the 2025 Taishin Arts Award for Performing Arts.
Esteban Donoso is a researcher-artist from Quito, Ecuador, currently based in Montreal. He holds a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies from York University and is a member of LeParc. His practice moves between dance, performance, and video, deploying research-creation methodologies, oral histories, and auto-theory in order to reconstruct personal and collective histories and narratives. Esteban’s work has been presented across Latin America, Europe, and North America. His writing has appeared in journals such as Post(s), Performance Research, and Canadian Theatre Review.
Partners
This workshop is supported by the Conseil de la formation continue arts et culture de Montréal (CFC) in collaboration with Studio 303. The CFC’s continuing education activities are supported by the Intervention-Compétences program, thanks to the financial participation of the Quebec government.
