by Alanna Maclean
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| Puppets on the door. Yangon. |
Early November sees the
annual Bangkok Theatre Festival where all kinds of Thai theatre from the
traditional to the experimental and contemporary are shown across two weeks.
There are professional performers, community groups and the university drama
departments like those at Thammasat and Chulalongkorn take a very active part.
This year the central location is the Bangkok Cultural Centre. This curved
building, which clearly owes a debt or two to the Guggenheim in New York and
houses a variety of exhibition and performance spaces, sits just down from the
National Stadium station on the BTS Skytrain and just round the corner from Jim
Thompson House.
I wasn’t able to go this
year but it is certainly on the future agenda.
The original Girl X, which was awarded
Best Play and Best Script at the Bangkok Theatre Festival in 2014, no longer contains a ‘girl’ but seems to have become
a lament for the dead of all wars and revolutions and earthquakes and
recessions and Fukushima style
disasters and the awful universality of brutality. Two male performers fall and
freeze and contort continually on a white field in front of on screen text in
three languages; Japanese, English and Thai. What this does to the trilingual I
do not know but my rudimentary Thai reading caused restlessness as I tried to
decipher, then went back to the English for the sense, while at the same time
trying to take in the Intense, wry, butoh style of the two performers.
Democrazy Studio is a powerful black box venue where contemporary
theatre and debate seems to flourish. The seminar itself was robust and shot
through with a strong sense of Japanese and Thai irony and perception. It’s a
small but concentrated theatre scene where everyone knows everyone else.
And yes, there is a sense that we are not the only culture who might be debating the experimental versus the tried, true and safe in theatre. Another possible offering in town was Boeing Boeing in Thai. I passed.
And yes, there is a sense that we are not the only culture who might be debating the experimental versus the tried, true and safe in theatre. Another possible offering in town was Boeing Boeing in Thai. I passed.
In Burma I was amazed by the tumble of
Yangon and the banjolele in the markets that could be had for about $80 and the
golden Shwedagon Pagoda floating above all the holed streets and lively street
life and cinemas and dozens of optometrists shops run by English speaking
Muslims and red splashes on the pavements from betel chewing and the newly
opened KFC with queues outside and security guards on the door while outside in
the streets there was much more gorgeous street food on sale.
More excitement was to be had because they drive on the right.
One day in the space of five minutes I spoke to a one armed dwarf and a one legged monk while looking at a stall that was trying to sell me an amulet of the Thai King Chulalongkorn. Watch your head under the bridge near the hotel and carry a torch because of blackouts. I found the tomb of the last of the Mughal emperors and the house of Aung San Suu Kyi and a couple of magnificent Buddhas via obliging taxis.
More excitement was to be had because they drive on the right.
One day in the space of five minutes I spoke to a one armed dwarf and a one legged monk while looking at a stall that was trying to sell me an amulet of the Thai King Chulalongkorn. Watch your head under the bridge near the hotel and carry a torch because of blackouts. I found the tomb of the last of the Mughal emperors and the house of Aung San Suu Kyi and a couple of magnificent Buddhas via obliging taxis.
But being on a tour can limit your
options especially if the rest of the group are not particularly into chasing
performances.
However, here’s what I found.
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| Bagan puppets |
In Mandalay, which we reached by river,
I was unable to get Kipling’s geographically impossible song out of my head.
Here you can see the well established
Mandalay Puppets and also The Moustache Brothers, famous for controversial
Burmese stand up.
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| Mandalay Puppet Theatre |
The Mandalay Puppets travel and I had
first seen them at a puppet festival in Ubud in 2014, being fascinated by their
intelligent upturned faces. Again, an audience of tourists but this time in a
narrow theatre, festooned with puppets on the walls. Ramayana, Buddhism, animism
and folk tale combined and you begin to see repetitions and patterns.
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| Mandalay puppets |
When the show is about to start a
curtain is drawn across the roller door entrance, blocking the view from the
street.
The audience is a strange mixture. All
foreigners. The show can't go on for the locals. That would run it into
censorship. But it can, weirdly, run as a show for the tourists. So
there are Singaporeans, Scandinavians, Australians, New Zealanders, Germans,
all wondering what has hit them as Burmese stand up gets underway in English.
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| The Moustache Brothers |
Afterwards there are T shirts on sale that read in part 'If you have not
seen our dancing you cannot say you have been to Mandalay'. Well, I’ve now been
to Mandalay and I even bought the T shirt. Comedy under pressure but surviving.
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| Moustache Brothers - outside the theatre |
Over in Nyaung Shwe, on Inle Lake, I go
off in search of another puppet show. It’s only round the corner from the hotel
but take a torch and make sure your shoes are up to rock covered roads. This is
the Aung Puppet Theatre, and what happens there is a one man show of great
energy and versatility. The little shop front set up has a room at the back
with a bed and a woman, perhaps Aung’s wife, is helping. But Aung takes the
money, puts out refreshments and does a pre and post show running commentary. There
are three of us in the audience, again, all tourists, in a space that might
accommodate 20, but the show goes on regardless.
I’m daft enough to ask if there will be
any Ramayana episodes. Well, no, he says, there’s only me and it will therefore
be all solos. And that, excitingly , is what it is.
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| Aung's puppet theatre |
There’s taped sound - no live orchestra
here. There is no ceremony to placate the nat
spirits at the beginning as that takes two puppeteers. But there is a series
of short dances from the repertoire; the horse of the Creation, the magician, a
king, a monkey and the village simpleton with a broken umbrella all appear
engagingly. Some of the backdrops are disarmingly home made and we do not get
any reveals of the single puppeteer at work. (Only glimpses of him
energetically working the sound, the curtains, the marionettes.) He comes out
afterwards sweating, exhausted and answers any questions you might have. He
started training at 8 and it went on for 5 years. His uncle makes the puppets
that are for sale decorating the walls of the tiny space. Two shows a night at
7 and 9.
I get lost on the way home via the blacked out rock covered street complete with roaming dog packs. Thank goodness for a torch.
I get lost on the way home via the blacked out rock covered street complete with roaming dog packs. Thank goodness for a torch.
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| Aung Theatre's curtain warmers. |
Back in Yangon and I fall into
conversation with a taxi driver and am reminded that the Htwe Oo puppet theatre
is walking distance from the hotel. I go round there the first night and am
faced with the darkest steep staircase in all the world. Restaurant next door
yields no information so I go back next day to find the staircase is still
stygian in daylight but that there is a travel agency open upstairs who, it turns out, can
negotiate with the puppeteers. Who clearly, from the signage and the puppets
hanging on the door opposite, do exist.
Snag – it is low season and they will
not come out for under 5 people. By now the tour group I am with has well and
truly dispersed and in any case they were not theatre mad. So taking a deep
breath and dropping into Australian thinking I go for the other offered option.
Which is, to commission a performance for $50 at 6 pm. With an audience of one.
Too good to pass up. So that night I’m
back at the appointed time and knock on the puppet door.
Inside a tiny flat has been converted to
a small warm puppet theatre (seats about 24) and I am welcomed cheerfully as a
patron of the art by the director Khin Maung Htwe. It turns out that he too is
theatre mad, thanks to a mother who took him to lots of theatre when he was a
child and extensive travels when he was a seaman. I am introduced to the troupe
of 7, mostly family, some very young, one a master puppeteer in his 80s, and
the puppets. Manipulating multiple strings is much harder than it looks. I
think it’s about 11. Some of them are loose and not attached to a frame. The demonstration makes it clear that
the puppets have genitalia, despite wearing clothes. I realize that the puppets
with two bunches of hair, that I had casually seen as female, are actually
male, the brightly dressed court pages who show the court where people need to
go.
This is their fourth or fifth theatre space, a converted flat. They have moved around a lot. The cyclone and political upheaval did not help. I retire to the audience area, the sole viewer, feeling weirdly like some kind of potentate.
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| The pages. |
This is their fourth or fifth theatre space, a converted flat. They have moved around a lot. The cyclone and political upheaval did not help. I retire to the audience area, the sole viewer, feeling weirdly like some kind of potentate.
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| Htwe Oo. Narrow space. |
After the show there is lots of talk via
the English speaking Khin Maung Htwe. There is a blackout,
luckily after the show finishes, but we survive that with torches. They also
have Jakata stories, which we don’t see tonight. The old master has hours of
them in his head, not written down. Will they be written down? Will they be
passed on?
As I finally leave to navigate back to the
hotel they present me with a DVD of their work and a small version of a page
puppet to take home. I am very appreciative of a performance that has allowed
me to make some better sense of the traditions they are working so hard to
revive and preserve.
A pesky medical issue meant an early
return home so I did not get the planned chance to follow up on Bangkok theatre
connections when I got back to Bangkok from Yangon. An excuse to return, of
course. I’m gradually and delightedly widening my knowledge of performance in
SE Asia.
http://www.htweoomyanmar.com
Google Aung Puppet Theatre Ngaung Shwe for a good video of The Magician dancing.
Google Aung Puppet Theatre Ngaung Shwe for a good video of The Magician dancing.
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| Htwe Oo puppets. |
