VENUS rises again
Five years on, the social issues explored in "Venus Party" remain unresolved.
Sineenadh Keitprapai, actress, playwright, director and artistic director of Crescent Moon Theatre, is the latest recipient of Ministry of Culture’s Silpathorn Award in performing arts—and the first woman. It’s quite fitting then that Bangkok Theatre Festival 2008 will next week revive one of her most critically acclaimed works “Venus Party”—stories of contemporary women, co-created by a group of actresses.
Some of us may not have heard of the production when it premiered in 2003, but now that Sineenadh is back in the limelight, it’s our chance.
“The production started as a collaboration of Crescent Moon, B-Floor, and WOW companies whose members had been frequently working together and became good friends,” says Sineenadh, the director of “Venus Party”.
“We brainstormed, improvised and developed scenes from the same concepts revolving around the problems of women in Thai society today.”
“For example, one of our actresses and collaborators Sumontha Suanpholrat, a relatively full-body woman, was passionate about the beauty myth, which was strongly affecting people’s, especially women’s, lifestyle. We’re increasingly concerned with how we look, and it comes back to hurt us. Based on a true story, we show two university friends who’re trying every possible way to lose weight, refraining from eating rice and desserts. They’ve been having nothing but boiled vegetable for two weeks, and then they can’t take it anymore and suddenly gobble all kinds of food.”
“We also took as our inspiration what’s in the news then, when there were many news stories on plastic surgery gone wrong. In the end of this scene, we question whether women are really doing all of these for the sake of themselves.”
“We’re presenting these stories in non-melodramatic ways, which is quite unlike what you may have read, heard, or watched in other media, which usually re-present how women have been taken advantage of. There’s a scene, for example, when a woman walks alone along the street and a man is trying to steal her handbag, and they fight. We know that, physically, she cannot fight with him, and so, in a dreamlike state perhaps, we’re reversing the situation by multiplying the number of women and giving her a stun gun, and the battle is won.”
“The most discussed scene," says Sineenadh, "is the one about domestic violence, which for us doesn’t mean only physical abuse or fight, but also the distance between the couple, the silence and stress. Here, we use a rope as a symbol of their relationship.”
“Even though Thai women are deemed to have better status than those in many Asian countries, yet there are many angles of their problems which we have not thought about, and this physical theatre production, like these problems, is the same as it was five years ago, except for a few cast changes.”
Apart from
“[Besides their physical movements] The performers utter sounds, but speak no single word, only gibberish, so language isn't a problem for foreign audiences.”
“Venus Party” runs from Tuesday, December 2 to Friday, December 5, 8:30pm at
written by Pawit Mahasarinand
published in Daily Xpress on Friday, November 28, 2008
photos courtesy of Crescent Moon Theatre
¾ÔÁ¾ì˹éÒ¹Õé