Threnody For The Forsaken Daughters

Threnody For The Forsaken Daughters draws its form from the haunting silhouettes of Qing Dynasty Infant Towers—structures shaped like Buddhist pagodas, where newborn girls were cast alive and left to burn. These towers, cloaked in the guise of spiritual architecture, were meant to pacify the souls of the murdered—to silence their cries with divine authority and prevent their return. In this performance, that sacred chant mutates into a mournful dirge—a soundscape of suffocated spirits, echoing unresolved pain and spiritual violence.

This work confronts a legacy written in ash and silence: the systemic devaluation of female life, masked by the language of virtue and order. Beneath the surface of Confucian filial piety and patriarchal tradition lies a brutal machinery of control—one that rendered women disposable in both body and memory. But history, no matter how deeply buried, bleeds through. The towers may crumble, but their ideology remains—reborn in son preference, in institutional neglect, in the continued erasure of women’s suffering.

Through ritual, embodiment, and sound, this performance becomes a site of mourning and resistance. It refuses to forget. It drags what was silenced into the present. This is not a reenactment—it is a reckoning. A protest carved from flesh and voice. A cry from the charred bones that never had the chance to speak.