“You will never look at tomatoes in the same way again.”
_★★★★★Broadway Baby
"Our brain is our genitals, it controls our lust.
Lust doesn’t mean pure desire or the act of sex.
It is the thing that surrounds and lingers around sex.
And the material that lingers is our sexualized body."
Created by the gifted dancer-choreographer Chou Kuan-Jou for herself and two other performers, not to mention a few ripe and shapely red fruit, TOMATO is a cultural experience both playful and provocative. Lust and desire take center stage in a canny, capricious combination of live performance and live-camera documentation. This enticingly tasty work is an absurdly funny expression of Chou’s ongoing interest in the sexualized body from a feminist perspective. Here private manifestations of sexuality receive a rib-ticklingly public spin.
TOMATO was selected for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Taiwan Season in 2022. The production received a five-star review, the Bobby award from Broadway Baby, and the LUSTRUM award from the venue Summerhall. In 2023-2024, TOMATO was a sold-out sensation whether when it performed at the Taipei Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre or the invited performances at the Coronet Theatre in London.
TOMATO Tailer
Artist/ Chou Kuan Jou
Performers/ Chou Kuan Jou, Ng Chi Wai, Zito Tseng
Tour Manager/ Yang Shu Han
Technical coordination/ Yang Yu Chieh
Technical execution/ Lo Yu Chen
Lighting design/ Yang Yu Chieh
Music design/ Liu Zhu Chi
Rehearsal assistant/ He Yan Yu
Graphic design/ 58kg
“…every move expressing the simultaneous freedom and complication of sexuality in the modern age…Tomato moves swiftly in and out of pleasurable chaos, making the audience as complicit as the performers.” _ The Fest Mag
“…a reminder of how our voyeuristic gaze is so often mediated by screens. Indeed, it is difficult not to want to watch the screen, the edited version of the reality that is also before us. Perhaps it is a way of keeping our distance and curating our involvement.” _ The Wee Review
“…what Chou Kuan-Jou puts before us is a feast of thoughts, movement, and provocative action that is full of ambiguities in its gestures as she explores this topic thoroughly.” _ Fringe Review
“There’s something very clever about the sudden shifts of mood. Is this woman’s experience enjoyable, exploitative, funny, sinister? As in real life, it depends on an ultra-fine tuning of sensation and context” _ The Guardian
“…the audience observes three performers being stripped of all barriers as they come to embrace their desires – through the allegory of picking tomatoes.” _ STARBURST Magazine