Beyond silence and sound, hear the heartbeat of life.

“I write only because I want to hear your voice.”

Da-shu is a deaf high school student who dreams of becoming a writer. Yet he finds himself suspended between sign language and the written word, unable to fully cross into the world of the hearing. Through his friend Yi-en, he meets Yi-xiang, a gifted yet disenchanted writer.

Their connection begins with literature, but soon deepens as Yi-xiang draws Da-shu into the fervor of social movements and the tremors of lived sensation. In a youth steeped in cigarette smoke and moonlight, unspoken emotions begin to stir beneath the surface.

As Da-shu and Yi-xiang grow closer, Yi-en begins to worry that Da-shu may lose something essential of himself, and tries to hold him steady in the name of love. From that point on, the three find themselves drawn into a shifting constellation of attachment and desire.

Through Yi-xiang, Da-shu comes to see that those in the hearing world are no less burdened by creation, by longing, and by their own vulnerabilities. The distance between the two worlds begins to dissolve. In the end, he lets go of his need to grasp the language of others, and begins to write, in his own way, a life that is wholly his.

The Voice challenges a speech-centered perspective by bringing sign language and spoken language together as equal modes of performance. Through Performing Arts Interpreting, the aesthetics of sign language are intricately woven into the stage’s visual imagery, no longer serving as a functional translation but unfolding as a fluid visual language of the body, one that co-creates the performance’s own theatrical vocabulary.

For deaf audiences, it offers an experience that reaches directly into the core of the senses. For hearing audiences, it becomes a point of departure for reimagining what it means to listen and to understand.

The Double Theatre
Founded in 2014, the company takes its name from Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double, defining the “public stage” as a site where everyday life is reflected and re-examined. Its work consistently engages with human relationships and social realities within a globalized context, grounded in an approach that brings together archival research and diverse technologies.

Representative works include Daqiao 1988, which integrates landscape and technology, and Dance in Silence, an exploration of disability aesthetics. The 2022 production The Way Back was nominated for the Taishin Arts Award and was selected for the Taiwan Season at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2023, where it received wide acclaim across 23 performances.

Through its ongoing creations, the company invites audiences to reconsider what has long been taken for granted, encountering reality from new and shifting perspectives.