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| Fire Fire Fire |
This was a huge, ambitious and thoroughly well run
undertaking by Chulalongkorn University’s Drama Department in the Faculty of
Arts, aimed not only at reviewing and validating research projects but also at
involving their students in a range of issues, performances and workshops.
Here’s how it was advertised:
’33 performances
13 workshops
27 panels
10 days’
Facebook led me there and I took on the challenge of the
full ten days. Chulalongkorn University Drama Department staff and students
were very welcoming to a visitor; I thank them for their friendly hospitality
and the hours of translation of Thai into English (sometimes by staff but
mostly by a tribe of highly skilled students).
The title of the forum/festival hinted at the perils of
translation; it might not have sat so well in an Australian context but in
Bangkok it nailed the issues of tradition and change that concern people
analysing and making performance in South East Asia.
The pulse of the Ramayana (Thai Ramakien) ran right through
it, as did the intrinsic nature of culture and movement. I had to scramble to
keep up with shows and workshops that referenced the stories of Rama and Sita
and Thotsakan rather than Shakespeare and the Bible (although the new and
splendidly flexible black box theatre at Chulalongkorn opened with Macbeth and
an upcoming Brecht – Fear and Misery in the Third Reich was being advertised). I’d
just decide I had a handle on all this with Surapone Virulrak’s elegant dance
drama The Tragedy of Ravana and the Ramayana characters would turn up in a
beauty parlour in the style of a Thai TV soap (Femmes Fatales in Lanka by
Parida Manomaiphibul) or they would be so grungy and street wise it was hard to
tell who was of high rank (Dangkamon Na-pombejra’s Ravanasura). Or the whole setting would be so
abstract (18 Monkeys’ Muet, directed by Jitti Chompee) that it was hard for
those of us not fluent in the culture to see the old story’s patterns.
You’d think a performance was strictly traditional and
afterwards people would be explaining just what they had to do to revive or
recreate or even freshly introduce ‘traditions’ such as Thai shadow puppets
(Bhanbhassa Dhubthien directing the young performers of The Nang Yai Players of
Wat Bandon, Rayong in the fabulous monkeys versus demons battle in Yok Rob) or
the cool Lanna dancers showing in Fawn Leb/Identity the ironically humorous
realities of dress and behaviour behind the lovely controlled dances of
Thailand’s independently minded north or Pornrat Damrhung’s work with student
performers in the Tai-Lue Lanka
Sip Ho ((Ten Headed Ravana) on preserving the warmth and inspiration of
ancestral traditions in story and performance.
Kecak master I Wayan Dibia , while giving a large workshop
group an exhilarating experience of actually doing it, explained that the
famous kecak (‘monkey dance’) of Bali was actually recreated for tourism in the
early 1930s by the German Walter Spies.
Then the Cambodian Amrita Performing Arts confounded expectations
by performing traditional male masked dance to the music of extracts from Bach’s
Cello Concertos and the nang yai (shadow puppets) started khon classical dance
moves in front of the screen so they were no longer shadows and the Pichet
Klunchun Dance company showed in Tam Kai
(Hunting the Rooster) how abstract and yet humorous some Thai
contemporary dance is prepared to be; even though it was based on a poem with a
story line it felt more like a piece that played around not so much with
performance as with warm up.
Danny Yung Ning-Tsun, chair of the Hong Kong Institute of
Contemporary Culture pointed out in his paper that the creativity of performing
arts practitioners is what keeps ‘living arts’ alive, not putting them in a
museum. Pichet Klunchun was more forthright, saying in his workshop that Thai
classical dance is dead because it is not developing; it does not change.
There were debates on the need for arts education, the
varying difficulties of censorship and approvals and the positive social uses
to which performing can be put.
What was the core of it for
a non Thai? That the world doesn't revolve around the western theatre tradition
is one thing. South East Asian countries are aware of that tradition and use it
(as was shown in the brief but fascinating presentation on the history of Thai
staging by designer and academic Ritirong Jiwakanon) but there are other forces
from their own traditions.
The language of much that was happening was what we would
term dance and the language of movement was not the Western ‘reach for the sky’
idiom but a much more earth bound language where the fingers are bent back
repeatedly from infancy and the knees are bent and workshops become very
difficult even for anyone who has had exposure to ballet and Western
contemporary dance. We were doing workshops mostly up on the 9th
floor where huge blinds meant silhouettes and time and time again it was the hands and the turned out knees that I saw. Mainly those lively bent
back hands. The few Westerners in the classes have learned a different
performance aesthetic and we clearly struggle.
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| Yok Rob |
I mostly sat down, shut my mouth, opened my eyes and ears
and tried to absorb as much as possible during this part of a month long
journey in Thailand that also included seeing B-Flor’s amiable and whimsical Survival
Games at Pridi Banomyong Institute, a lively touring play about littering
created by Sue Milne and her Akha students at Baan Ayui hostel in Chiang Rai
and a huge likhe evening at the National Theatre.
I found myself in workshops with superb practitioners and
teachers. Chinese kunqu master Ke Jun, director of the Jiangsu Kunqu Opera
troupe, showed he was equally at home in traditional and contemporary forms. I
relished watching the teaching skills of choreographer Agnes Locsin from the Philippines
and the Champa Lao Puppet Theatre, where everyone was tearing up newspaper and
making puppets. The crouching
elegant swan dance moves of the Nora Thummanit troupe from Songkhla were beyond
me but the enthusiams of teacher Nora Thummanit Nikomrat were not and the Nora
song in English raised the roof on the 9th floor.
In fact there was a whole evening of performances about
birds and animals; the stately Mon Hong Thong swan dance, the Tai Kinnara Dance
(with peacocks and the slender pantomime horse that is the mythical deer-like
lucky To) and the Nora Thummanit Thaksin University Group troupe dignified and
stylized as the swans of the south.
ASWARA Dance Company from Malaysia performed Rooted in
Silat, a contemporary piece that drew with skill and good humour on Malay
martial arts and classical dances, the Champa Lao Theatre told the story of
prince Sinxai and had an elephant puppet that was most impressive and Sujita
Goel from India presented a riveting contemporary piece called Dancing Girl,
where the lighting cleverly only let the audience see a little of her journey
at a time.
Anatta Theatre gave the elegantly elegiac ghost story The
Return of Wanthong. with Duangjai Hirunsri as the vengeful mother ghost
writer/director Pradit Prasartthong as her soldier son. Apparently every time
it is performed it has a different ending – we were treated to a very Buddhist
version where the mother is able to let go of vengeance and leave this world.
Noor Effendy Ibrahim from Singapore performed Dancing with
The Ghost of My Child, a deeply mature, moving and challenging piece that
played with gender roles and the longing for a child. And the performances
concluded with the celebratory Fire Fire Fire, where the vastly differing individual
responses of choreographers Eko Supryanto (Indonesia) Cambodia’s Sophiline
Cheam Shapiro and Pichet Klunchun to the Ramayana episode of the testing of
Sita by fire were contrasted, so that the festival ended where it had begun,
with a contemplation of the place of tradition.
Perhaps the last word should go, however, to Singapore’s
Daniel K, who in his strongly contemporary piece Q& A had the temerity to
conduct and present research on the audience, complete with shirt, tie and PowerPoint
but missing his trousers. He asked them the question ‘What do you want to see?’
Muet
Those lucky enough to take part in this forum and festival
are rather hoping that they can see more of what this event had to offer.
By Alanna Maclean
