“You will never look at tomatoes in the same way again.”
_★★★★★Broadway Baby
TOMATO is a performance exploring lust through the sexualized body and its fluid expressions. Using tomatoes as a symbolic material, the piece questions how desire and gender perception are performed and destabilized. Tomatoes, bodies, and gestures interweave in scenes of resistance, play, and abstraction. The three performers work from non-reproductive, non-insertive, and autosexual frameworks. These bodily premises resist mainstream sexual scripts, allowing for a transformation of sexuality into something fragmented, performative, and shifting.
Throughout the piece, live camera projections and onstage TV screens capture and display the performers and audience. These interfaces blur the lines between voyeurism and participation, between virtual and physical presence. The viewer’s gaze is continuously redirected, highlighting how power and cultural context shape the act of looking.
The work also reflects on non-mainstream youth cultures in Taiwan and proposes alternative visions of intimacy and desire—intimate, mediated, and destabilized.
The show received five-star reviews and several awards at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, selling out every performance and receiving widespread acclaim.
● 2022 Premiered in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival -Taiwan season
● 2023 Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre, Taipei
● 2024 The Coronet Theatre- Taiwan festival, London
● 2024 Dance House, Melbourne Fringe
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