Cover British actor Tilda Swinton will perform ‘Embodying Pasolini’ in Taipei this August (Photo: Getty Images)
British actor Tilda Swinton will perform ‘Embodying Pasolini’ in Taipei this August (Photo: Getty Images)
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‘Dr Strange’ actress Tilda Swinton pays tribute to Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini in the play, which will be on show in Taiwan this summer—its first and only Asia stop
Oscar-winning British actress Tilda Swinton is coming to Taipei to perform Embodying Pasolini, her celebrated play that combines fashion and movies. This will be Swinton’s first performance in Taiwan.
Running from August 23 to 25 at the Taipei Performing Arts Center, Embodying Pasolini is imagined by Swinton and the show’s co-creator Olivier Saillard—the director of Palais Galliera (Paris Museum of Fashion)—as an ongoing exhibition of Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s (1922-1975) atelier. Pasolini, who was a poet, playwright and actor, was thought to be one of the most influential figures in Italy in the 20th century.
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In Swinton’s show, she will put on, recontextualise and thereby “embody” 28 costumes featured in Pasolini’s films, including Oedipus Rex (1967), The Canterbury Tales (1972), Arabian Nights (1974) and Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1974). As well as giving the costumes a modern interpretation, Swinton and Saillard depict the outfits as an alter ego of the bodies that wear them.
“Pasolini was expressing something responsive to the culture and society and there’s this sense of fire and, of course, outrage in him,” Swinton said in a media interview in the UK in 2023. “What has been so thrilling for us is to take a piece that might have had only one gesture, or maybe two, and to give it another gesture. They feel like sculpture.”
Embodying Pasolini premiered on June 25, 2021, at the Mattatoio in Rome and has had a few reruns in Rome and Paris.
Tickets to the Taipei performance will go on sale on July 24.
Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
