watching WORLDS COLLIDE
Most dance and theatre audiences seem to prefer the classics to the avant garde and that’s probably why “Swan Lake” and Shakespeare plays are included in many regular season programs of dance and theatre companies around the world—and of course nothing’s wrong with that because seats need to be filled.
Nevertheless, when it’s time for international arts festivals, organizers look to present some genre-defying works that urge the audience to venture into the unknown, and often uncomfortable, territories, at least for a few weeks, out of a year, and to take a few peeks at some of what may develop to become future trends of performance.
Melbourne-based Chunky Move is known as
Entering the Arts House Meat Market, the audience chose between two doors that lead to two opposing stands. Two stage actors and five dancers shared the stage, which was divided right in half by a large set of blinders partly obstructing the audience’s view of the other side. One stand saw more theatrical actions, the other dance movements, while both were hearing dialogues and background music through the same set of loudspeakers. Towards the end, the performers, who had been crossing the border throughout, stopped the show and invite the audience to switch sides.
Apparently, while some artists and audiences today are still steering clear from one genre and staying confined with the other, their co-existence is inevitable and inarguable. This “Bastard” also questions performance criticism, reminding us again that after all it is one audience’s perception and reception of it and any reader should never deem it more than that.
In British performer and playwright Tim Crouch’s “An Oak Tree”, in which a stage hypnotist who had killed a girl in a car accident confronted her father, he questioned the liveness as well as the reality of theatre. As a local actor takes turn performing the father, unrehearsed yet strictly on script and occasionally guided by Crouch via earphone, the performance is thus created afresh every time, probably like what’s happening in the spectator’s mind when one watched the world-renowned conceptual art piece of the same title. As the audience was taken in and pushed out of the story, we had more time to think, instead of being lured by theatrical magic.
In “England”, staged as a site-specific performance at National Gallery of Victoria Ian Potter Gallery at Federation Square’s special exhibition called “Look!: New Perspectives on the Contemporary Exhibition”, Crouch and his acting partner Hannah Ringham recounted the story of an English woman, whose boyfriend was an art dealer and who had her heart transplanted and later found that it was actually transacted in Africa. As Crouch and Ringham, dressed casually like volunteer museum guides here, took us to a few corners of this exhibition, repeatedly saying “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be here” and “Look!”, the audience did more than looking and experienced dramatic arts and visual arts simultaneously.
Another British performer Wendy Houstoun, in her “Desert Island Dances” used a piece of white chalk to draw up coconut trees on the black back wall, before performing short episodes of monologues and movements.
In one intriguing and hilarious moment, she departed from the stories and offered an evaluation of her performance up to that point, by drawing a graph line that reflected the audience’s level of attention and validated our presence.
Having watched these performances, I recall a comment made years ago by a Thai performance artist friend that theatre always attempts to tell a story, while dance and performance art do not. I could not argue then but, given these examples, I could now. Rather than conventional style of storytelling, contemporary artists seem to prefer engaging their audiences in unique and subjective experiences, and each differs from the other.
In the end, these contemporary performances succeed not only in questioning challenging and defying the artistic stereotypes, but also in bringing different kinds of artists and audiences—some of them may go on to create and to watch other genres they have not been familiar with afterwards. And that’s probably one direction into the future.
If you plan to go to Hong Kong next February, check out Tim Crouch’s three works, “An Oak Tree”, “
written by Pawit Mahasarinand
published in The Nation on Friday, November 14, 2008
all photos courtesy of Melbourne International Arts Festival
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