Enacting Sawmah, an urban Indigenous woman, Ihot Sinlay Cihek’s solo play appears to channel her own experience navigating between her Pangcah roots and millennial city life. Her lines, delivered in Mandarin Chinese, alternate between a polished urban accent and one that reflects her Indigenous identity, pulling the audience along with each effortless turn. Like many urban Indigenous people in Taiwan, Sawmah’s connection to her parental heritage is fragile. In the play, the focus remains on her immediate family, with no extended relatives included. This sense of domesticity is mirrored in its minimal set—a sofa and a table—framed by a well-placed pillar that shapes the space into an intimate proscenium.
On Sawmah’s birthday—shared with her grandfather but now overshadowed by his funeral—she makes a quiet act of remembrance, secretly keeping his hunting knife, a relic her city-dwelling family intended to discard. Their bond was special, sharing a birthday that the grandfather would celebrate just for her, a rare gesture in his culture. As Sawmah prepares to travel to interview for a job that could change her life and take her to New York, her suitcase bursts open in her Taipei apartment, sending the hunting knife tumbling to block the doorway—just as she receives an unexpected call from her father and learns of a Pangcah taboo: women are forbidden from touching hunting knives.
All photos: Ihot Sinlay Cihek, The Knife, 2024. Performed at the Prologue Center For New Plays, Taipei. Photo by Aaron Liau
Despite her cosmopolitan upbringing, Sawmah is suddenly bound by a rule that seems patriarchal. Scholars might argue that Pangcah society is matriarchal, but in Ihot’s The Knife, her mother waves it off: “Only in the domestic realm.” The play follows Sawmah’s failed attempts to find a man on a dating app to move the knife, interwoven with flashbacks of her ties to the tribe. At sixteen, she was barred from a ritual due to her gender while Han-settler male tourists participated, deepening her alienation. Yet, in another memory, her love for wild game led her to fabricate a dream omen, prompting her grandfather to hunt. When he returned injured, her family’s subdued emotions sparked a reverence for the traditional knowledge.
As Sawmah invites a few of her Tinder dates to come and remove the path-blocking knife, it becomes a stage for us to understand her sense of alienation from both settler and Indigenous communities, including an Indigenous decolonial hetero, with whom she engages in a heated argument. Before her anger fades, Sawmah accidentally injures her father, who shows up at her apartment to surprise her for her birthday. After rushing him to the hospital and returning home, she is shocked to find her mother using the hunting knife in question to cut her cake. As this dramatic climax resolves, the theme of ancestral taboos for women lingers. Later, when Sawmah finally begins her job in New York, she finds herself performing the Pangcah Mifetik liquor-offering ritual before sipping a whiskey. It’s at that moment that she suddenly understands her mother’s feelings: “The farther you leave the physical tribe behind, the more the tribe’s presence grows within you.”
Throughout the play, Ihot subtly tests the cultural sensitivity of her audience. In one instance, she casually pulls a stanchion belt before us and succinctly murmurs, “The frontier line.” This gesture, reminiscent of institutional critique in the vein of Andrea Fraser, helps to remind us of our predominantly Han-settler gaze. Yet as Ihot fluidly shifts between direct audience engagement, theatrical exposition, and, above all, a compelling performance, she effectively allows us to forget that line and its reminder.
In the post-performance Q&A, the artist shared that the eloquence of the play seeks to disrupt the stereotypical imagery of Indigenous performance art in Taiwan—often confined to dance and song under the government’s cultural funding system. While the two goals behind the play seem interconnected—critically reflecting Indigeneity as an urban Indigenous feminist while critiquing the settler gaze—at times it also erupts into bifurcation. This is especially evident in a scene where Sawmah’s quarrel with the young man escalates into an argument rooted in their differing upbringings, exposing the stigma of urban Indigenous identity as “inauthentic.” They trade insults, using pro-China Indigenous legislators’ names as curses in a moment that sparks laughter across the room.
Upon reflection, however, these names are often used by Han-settler moderates to alienate certain Indigenous political allegiances such as land back advocacy—it’s especially so when Indigenous activists challenge nationalist ambitions to create a Taiwanese identity explicitly distinct from China. So, while the stanchion belt reminded me of my own gaze, without taking intellectual responsibility as viewers it could easily have provided us with a comfortable detachment, the same zone of alleviation the settler-colonial state upholds when facing its own dark history.
