Some performances ask you to sit back and observe. Embarking on a Drift to the Unknown asks you to listen, as though the past is breathing in your ear.

At Nexus Arts, Taiwanese-based performer Cheng Shih-Yung opens her 75-minute solo work with the low rumble of an ocean journey and the blast of a ship’s horn. She enters from the back of the theatre, speaking softly about fate, cosmic structures, and the Chinese astrological system Zi Wei Dou Shu, not as mystical fortune cookie fodder, but as a philosophical map of how circumstance and choice tangle together.

Cheng instructs the audience audience to slip on wireless headphones and the world contracts. Her voice moves from stage to being intimately inside your head. Through this sonic cocoon, Cheng first introduces herself: Malaysian-born, now living in Taiwan. Then she introduces her grandmother, the real centre of the story.

Born in rural China in 1938 and given away because she was a girl, Cheng’s grandmother survived invasion, famine, and political upheaval before boarding a smuggler’s ship to Malaya in 1957. There, she entered an arranged marriage and a life of servitude, only to be abandoned after Malaysian independence.

Cheng moves between the roles of granddaughter and grandmother, shifting from clear narration to raw, memory-soaked embodiment. With the slightest tilt of her head or tremor in her voice, she transports us through war, migration, marriage, motherhood, and loss.

Sound and movement become emotional language. Dropped jewellery lands with amplified violence, breath becomes wind, a small gesture feels overtly resonant. Projections flash quotes from A Doll’s House and Medea, reminders that across cultures and centuries, women’s stories have been controlled, contained, erased.

Yet this is not bleak theatre. It is reclamation. Cheng doesn’t present her grandmother as a myth or martyr, but as someone who navigated impossible circumstances with resilience and quiet rebellion. Zi Wei Dou Shu frames her life not as destiny fulfilled but as a constellation of pressures that shaped her path.

As the headphones come off the audience was left with a common understanding. A private history, once untold, now sits inside us.

Embarking on a Drift to the Unknown is one of those rare festival works that doesn’t shout to make an impact. A moving highlight of this year’s OzAsia Festival, beautifully suited to the intimacy of Nexus Arts and Adelaide audiences hungry for stories that reach far beyond the stage.

There’s still plenty more to see at OzAsia which is running until November 9, 2025. Check out the program here.