Retina Maneuver

In the lecture-performance Retina Maneuver, a Taiwanese military reservist dives into his obsession with Alicia Keys’s Girl on Fire — which he sang countless times in karaoke bars. His frustration over the fact that he cannot remember where he was when the song was released in 2012 drives him to dive into his digital archives. It confronts him with a past of destruction and violence and with the disturbing reality that everything he has saved can go up in flames in an instant, consumed by forces beyond his control. When “Girl on Fire” is no longer just a pop song but a marching tune for soldiers going to war, Ping-Hsiang Wang wonders, will his fragile memories then be destroyed by the fire of war?