Dramaturgies of Female Performance | ADN Meeting 2017

LHN: Hi there, thank you very much for coming to our first open session under the first Asian Dramaturgs Network. We’re going to be hearing from four female artists on dramaturgies of female performance. I’d just like to make a very quick announcement and a quick apology that unfortunately this session will be conducted in English; all four panelists will present in English, however during the Q&A session we may have time for Japanese interpretation, so please feel free to ask questions in Japanese so that our interpreter Tomoko-san could help. In the interest of time, I will just be introducing our four panelists, I will not go into detail of their great achievements, there is a leaflet that you could pick up, it’s both in English and in Japanese and please feel free to stay after to talk to them if you like. 

Very quickly, my name is Hao Ngean and I will be moderating this particular session. Originally it was supposed to be Charlene Rajendran, there is another session that I really need her to be in, so I’ll be filling in for this one. 

Very quickly now from my left I’d like to introduce Natalie Hennedige, from Cake Theatre Singapore; next we have Eisa Jocson from the Philippines - we have fans, we have many fans! It’s okay the fans will have to wait. On Eisa’s left is Ruhanie Perera from Sri Lanka, and last but not least, Shinta Febriany from Indonesia. 

So without further ado I’d like to ask - I guess it’s going to start with Natalie - to start the presentation. Take it away.

NH: Okay - I might stand a little 

LHN: Please go ahead, do whatever you need to - again in the interest of time, try to stick within -

NH: Okay it would be great if - just nudge me, just say stop

LHN: The timekeepers are there

NH: Oh cool okay good. So I should speak into a mic, yeah? 

LHN: Yes please, we’re recording the session

NH: Hi everyone, I’m Natalie, thank you all for being here. I’m from Singapore; I conceive, write and direct for the theatre. I haven’t yet worked with a dramaturg. I was invited to come to this and it’s of great interest and it has been very invigorating for me already to be part of this. So I’m going to share, in the only way I know how - I shall hone into a work that I created and by sharing as honestly as I can the process maybe that will open things up for discussion. 

Cake is a 11-year-old contemporary performance making company. And in the last year or so I had gone into a trajectory that I had wanted to do for a long time, which was to engage with the classics. I spent the first ten years of the company quite serious about doing original work; moving into the classics, I feel, doesn’t take away from that but I first wanted to hold off the thing that I loved. So I’m going to talk about a re-imagination of Ophelia, and talk a little bit about that process, and maybe that will give some insight into the artistic process. 

Now Shakespeare’s Hamlet spends much of the play talking about madness and suicide. None of those things happen to him, and both happen to Ophelia. The first thing I wanted to do was to give Ophelia - to have for her - her version of the “to be or not to be” question. Which is to live, or to die. Now Hamlet is given the “to be or not to be” question, which is linked to choice. Ophelia, different story, right? And so for me, to find that for her, was important. And I did that by thinking about the twin metaphor of drowning and swimming, which is linked to her, because her life ends in a pool of water. 

One of the most striking images was an oil painting created in 1852 - Sir John Everett Millais’ painting of Ophelia - and she is encapsulated, beautiful and quite dead, in a pool of water. Young and beautiful. Now we know that the drowned dead are bloated and there’s something that’s rotting that’s not really depicted in this picture. To begin my process, I wrote. And so I’m just going to share the very first piece of writing that I did, to kind of solidify this concept, the idea of the swimming and drowning metaphor, which again was Ophelia’s version of the “to be or not to be”. So I’ll just read it -

Ophelia says: “Be willing to put your head under water. I do so. Panic sets in. Can’t breathe, can’t see, lungs tightening heart exploding, fear and more fear, the sensation of drowning. I’m submerged and no one will hear my voice or know how badly I’m dying. I come out of the water, choking and gasping for air. A moment after, relief. A moment after, calm. A moment after, the dreadful feeling that nothing has changed. Desperate for change, I make my mouth into an O, suck in as much air as my lungs can hold and go back under. As I do so, water shoots up my nose and burns. I worm my way up again into false freedom. In a few moments everything begins to normalise, I’m breathing quick and easy. A moment after, I’m bobbing about in shallow water. A moment after, the dreadful feeling that nothing as changed. The change I have longed for, languished after, others have fought for, for years, has not come. And something tells me I should have remained submerged a little longer. Chickenshit. The fact is, in order to swim, you must be willing to put your head under water.”

My first - the first thing that I did, was to cast this role. And it was very important who embodied the role. And I knew it couldn’t just be anyone who could act. I wanted - well, there were a few people I thought of - and the person that was very close to what I was trying to find in this work was a Malaysian actress, Jo Kukathas, who’s middle-aged and embodies certain energies that I felt was important in the work. I casted her against a young Hamlet, a young virile Hamlet, and that was important. Remember I talked about that painting, and she’s a beautiful pale young thing that’s dead and beautiful in a pool of water. And I wanted for our Ophelia to have gone through more things. I wanted - that was the imagination, that she needed to go through these other journeys, so we imagined different things for her. In the end of the play, I return her back to Shakespeare, and she dies. 

So there again, I talked about that twin metaphor of drowning and swimming, and that’s one of the key images that I would say encapsulates that. The other thing that I did with the piece was to set this Ophelia in the space of the theatre where Hamlet is the writer-director, the auteur, and Ophelia is the actress. And part of this is - Hamlet is the all-consuming head, isn’t it? Isn’t it? I mean in some ways we’re all Hamlet, isn’t it, those of us who - we’re all little gods, right, that need to speak and be and be heard. And he’s allowed to be, because that’s who he is, right, and so I put them in this - in the context of the piece, where Hamlet is the writer and director and here you have Ophelia in the centre. They also - Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Ophelia are lovers, and we do that too. They are lovers in this piece, but the disconnect - the apparent physical and age disparity between the actors will do something in the way that you perceive the work. 

So we created a miniature - the set was inspired by the model of a set, and there you have Ophelia - you notice she pokes above the set, just the way the model of a set is slightly of a different scale. And she awaits the entrance of director Hamlet. And the first words he utters are, “I am Ophelia, and these are my instructions on swimming.” And the door opens, Ophelia is up there, startled at what she hears. Of course, the director Hamlet - he’s the writer-director and he’s also the performer, he is the world of the piece, and so we have here him creating these tremendous dramatic effects. We involved the crew in this piece, and this is his scene where he’s talking about how his - well he’s lamenting his father’s death, and this is where he has the crew kind of create the theatrical effect for him, with water, and in that way he’s able to express the magnitude of his grief, the magnitude of his madness. 

Again too, here, Ophelia talks a lot about being in to the side; let me read another portion of the piece that I wrote in relation to their relationship. Ophelia says to Hamlet, “Hamlet, you rant, mope about in black, mourning your father, your existence. Everyone frets, everyone fears for your mental state, your well being, your melancholy takes centre stage. Why does he talk so, behave so, is he mad or just acting so, is he stable, will he kill himself? You have everyone’s attention.”

Hamlet says, “We are lovers. Inextricably linked. When my life is dissected, my thoughts scrutinised, my words studied, you too are part of my picture. We are together.”

Ophelia says, “Sure. But it’s not good for me. You remain the whole picture. I only part of something. You dazzle everyone with your misery while I remain to the side, partially in your shadow.”

Hamlet says, “I write you. The main character I cast into being is you. Flawed but pure, fierce, tragic, beautiful.”

Ophelia says, “You’re lying to yourself. You’re not writing me, nor do I desire you to. You write for yourself only.”

Hamlet insists, “No.”

Ophelia says, “You cannot see it. That’s why you suffer and are a fool. You cannot see past yourself, Hamlet.”

This here is another image of the theatricality of Hamlet, where he has a fan - like I said it’s a rehearsal of a piece, and so with the theatrics he goes out of control. I think what was very important for us too was not to diminish this magnitude of the character, you know. When I was working with the actors there was an anxiety - why is there so much of Hamlet? Why is there so much Hamlet in this piece? Well Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the engine of the piece; I didn’t want to diminish that, right, but I wanted Ophelia to rise through that. I’m not going to create a piece where I diminish Hamlet and therefore Ophelia rises. I’m going to place Hamlet as he is, big, bold and wonderful, right, and then have Ophelia work with that tension. And that way you can really look at a very true kind of power dynamic and a struggle. 

There he goes again, right, sort of blaming her - there’s this wonderful thing he says where - he has trouble eventually with Polonius, her father, so he does the scene where he calls the crew member up and says, well come on put on the beard, and then questions her about her father and about her loyalty to him. And saying, well you know, “a woman must submit to just one man but you choose to submit to two, you allow him to spy on me.”

And I think what was intrinsic was that they loved each other. He had to love her, and we built that, and that he needed her, and in many ways she was the centre of his life, but privately. We’re not talking about something privately; Ophelia wants to be publicly strong and wilful. 

What we did in the piece too was we reversed some roles. So the imagination of the piece took her away from obviously - the starting of the piece was very close to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, but she was also in our imagination and we were able to do this because of the role-playing, because we had set it in a theatre. Because they were theatre-makers, they were creators, right? Hamlet was the creator and here was Ophelia the actor-creator, trying to wrestle away from the all-consuming auteur, so with that we were able to do these - able to give her these other lives. So she was a revolutionary fighter in one scene, a little scene - of course he breaks the scene quite quickly. Here we have Ophelia as the writer, Hamlet here being quite distraught about a bad review. And I think many of the small scenes stemmed from this one scene that I wanted to do, which was Ophelia - in this scene where they’re both political people, and they’re there and they both believe they’re worthy of the vote. And you have Hamlet on this tall umpire chair - as you can see it’s a very minimal set so that chair has a lot of significance - it’s a director’s chair, it’s a chair where Ophelia gets to sit occasionally, when she’s resting, when he’s elsewhere. And so in this particular scene, when they’re convincing the public that they deserve the vote, Ophelia sort of looks to that chair, raises her hand at it. And just before this happens actually it’s apparent in the scene that she’s saying these things and she’s earning the respect of the public and there’s a lot of - there are these sounds that seem like the people are for Ophelia. And of course as she walks towards that chair, he topples it.

I won’t talk about that previous image; there’s a bunch of other things I could talk about the piece, but I’ll get to the end of where I’m going with this, and for me again I spent a lot of time building Hamlet in the rehearsal room. Because I had to fall in love with Hamlet. When you create - when I create and the title of the piece is Ophelia, I’m the defense lawyer for Ophelia. But in creating good theatre, I need to fall in love with the person that’s causing both Ophelia and me grief too, this figure of this man. And so I had to fall in love with him and so I worked a lot with him, sometimes to the frustration of Ophelia. I just told her, the actress playing Ophelia, I just said, trust that you’re amazing. But I am going to spend time with him, don’t come into rehearsals for three days, I’m going to spend time with him. She was very upset about that, I said trust me on this. And I also casted someone I genuinely loved, as a human being, because I feel that that was important, that makes it a lot more complex. And here you see, you know, who wouldn’t want to give him a sweet. 

But of course this is also the scene where she leaves. Of course that’s the imagined scene, right, she says, “I’m leaving. I’m leaving. And he is weeping.” And he says, “I’ll die.” And she says, “Die.” And then he comes back in a little while later with a nerf gun. And a nerf gun’s not going to kill you, but it is rather humiliating, to be publicly shot with these plastic bullets. And he rains these toy bullets at her. Like I said at the end, I return her to Shakespeare, and she has a little moment there, but it’s a choice she makes, I think. What’s happened at the end of the piece is she articulates her “to be or not to be”, and so choice is returned to her. Thank you.

EJ: Hello - so hello everybody, I’m Eisa Jocson, from the Philippines, my background is in ballet first, then in visual arts, then pole dancing and macho dancing, and I’m currently - was - Snow White princess. So that is my background. I got propelled into the field of performance essay through my practice as a pole dancer. And it was ten years ago, maybe - eight, ten years ago - that this had happened. It was in the beginning of this pole dance fitness craze which was coming from the red light district and appropriated by the fitness industry. So it was an interesting time for the social-economic function of pole dancing, where in the red light district you have women getting paid to perform for men, and in the fitness studio it’s women paying to learn pole dancing for themselves. So in my biography there I think it says that I won this competition and this is the competition clip - it doesn’t have sound though - 

So I’m interested in the movement of the body, both in micro and macro space - in which micro I mean movement language and macro space meaning movement of the body into certain geography, let’s say, migration. And it’s grounded on socio-cultural economic political conditions, and historical formations. And I’m specifically interested in the Filipino body in the service industry. So my first work that comes out of this practice is called Stainless Borders: the deconstruction of architectures of control. It’s essentially public interventions using guerrilla street pole dancing combined with graffiti tagging, using vertical urban fixtures. So I’m actually going to structure my talk by going through my trajectory of work from 2010 until now, and speaking briefly about the motivation, process, and production. 

So this work was done in 2010, was invited in a contemporary art festival situated in the town of Sint Niklass in Belgium. So the impetus of this piece was first to further dislocate the practice of pole dancing from the red light district into the fitness industry, which still both exists in a private space and catapulted into public space. In a way it explores vertical potentials in public space as well as pushes the visibility of the gendered body. Okay let’s move on.

Death of the Pole Dancer. So Death of the Pole Dancer was done in 2011 and interrogates audience perception during the act of pole dancing. It was commissioned by In Transit Festival in Berlin, created by none other than Mr Tang Foo Kuen and the theme back then was spectatorship. So Foo Kuen asked me to make a work around this theme, and this resulted in this piece called Death of the Pole Dancer. So essentially the impetus for this piece is to dislocate or disrupt the usual position of the spectator in a pole dancing act, and in terms of process, a lot went into exploring preparation or practical rituals in pole dancing, such as setting the pole up, wiping the pole, testing the strength of the pole, testing the capacity of the pole, as well as physically exploring the relation between pole and the pole dancer. So for example the strength of the pole against the body, the strength of the body against the pole, as well as materiality of steel and flesh. So this goes into the sound of flesh on steel, the different dynamics that this creates. 

So in this excerpt you don’t see the beginning, which was me coming in with a portable pole in the bag. I guess some of you have seen it live here in TPAM two years ago. This work was commissioned and premiered in In Transit Festival, and was created in residency in Brussels near [inaudible] during that time. 

And in 2013 I created the work Macho Dancer, and essentially it’s an act of rebellion from my practice as a pole dancer. I was resisting to be labelled as a pole dance artist or an artist that is solely working on pole. For me it was on a personal level to further challenge my own body politics, basically the history of my formation as an individual, so it was a confrontation between my gender formation, social class, education, educational capital and body labour as well. Macho Dancer is a solo piece of a woman performing a macho dance. A macho dance is exclusively performed by young men in macho clubs for male and female clients. So this is an excerpt of the piece. 

[no audio from to 32:36 to 35:29]

…balance or groundedness. I was basically a walking kind of tripod, with the pole as my third leg. So it took me - it was a quite challenging time, to actually reformat my body to actually stand on both feet in a grounded way. It was a whole system of body reformatting. This was, in terms of production, the research or field work was one year in Manila, and the creation and work in progress was supported by Workspacebrussels in Brussels, technical creation in Antwerp, and the premiere in Brussels.

The next work is Host, which I’m performing tomorrow. Basically Host is a one-woman entertainment service machine. This work is motivated by hybrid identities of Filipina entertainers in Japan, so the body becomes a host to a database of female body representations. I’m not going to show you more because you’re supposed to see it. So the main impetus or motivation for me was the first time I went to Japan and asked the question, what was the relation between Philippines and Japan? And I realised that it was these Filipino entertainers that kind of mediated a certain relation, and they’re actually called “chapayukis” which is entertainers or people working in Japan, basically. And this has a very negative stigma, both in Japanese society and in Philippine society, which is quite - not so interesting, in the sense that they’re actually - these Filipino entertainers are repositories of hybrid identities that perform and negotiate their Filipino identity in relation to or in negotiation or in appropriation of the idea of femininity in Japan. So the challenge here for me was to place my body in a foreign context, with foreign movement languages. And basically, as opposed to macho dance or pole dance which are singular vocabularies, here in Host, there is an exploration of multiplicity of female representations, relating to the subject. So there was this learning of tradition Japanese dance, new Japanese dance, American pop, and of course K-pop, which is kind of the new mode of Asian or global femininity. So it’s kind of a mapping and trajectory of certain female representations. In terms of production, the research residency was in Saison Foundation and then moved into work in progress showing and creation in Brussels, with the support of Workspacebrussels, and then a work in progress showing in TPAM, creation and work in progress in Manila, and technical creation and premiere in Tanzhaus in Dusseldorf. 

I say all these things in terms of production and the places they were passing through as I think that it’s an important part of the process, an important part of how the work manifests itself. So it’s part of the dramaturgy - the location in which the work is created is part of what goes into the dramaturgy of the work. 

And so moving on, 2017 - after three solo works that kind of formed a trilogy, I told myself, okay I don’t want to perform on stage alone anymore. So I’ve tasked myself to challenge - to work with another person or in groups, and the next series of projects is called the Happyland, which refers to Disneyland, and in the local context an infamous slum in Manila called Happyland as well. This is the uber title of the project, which is about Filipino labour, performance of happiness, and production of fantasy within the global entertainment empire of Disneyland. It’s a three-part series, the first one called Princess just premiered in Mousonturm Frankfurt last weekend, February 11 and 12, and it’s basically two Filipino performers hijacking the white-skinned princess, or the archetypal model that dominates narratives of children while excluding their context, bodies, and histories. These two Filipino performers basically programme her movement and speech into their own bodies, hijacking the narratives of this princess, and using this narrative to speak their own context. So I give you the trailer – [video plays]

So that was the trailer. Actually this clip is from the very first work in progress showing in Hong Kong, so the production - I’m just going to list it down - the first research residency was two years ago in Parasite Gallery in Hong Kong, and then as an extension of the research I did a kind of Snow White exploration inside Circus Project in Germany, so that was more of exploring the potential of Snow White, the figure of Snow White, in relation to an audience. And then it went into another creation period in Mousonturm, and another creation period in Manila, and creation work-in-progress showing in Pianofabriek in Brussels, and then back into Mousonturm again for the technical creation and premiere. So it’s a long process of research and trying out, again and again, and this feeds into the manifestation of the work.

So I guess maybe to open up the discussion, or maybe not, but what is interesting in this project is that I actually worked with almost three dramaturgs, kind of? I mean they were all not called dramaturgs in the work, but they were giving very valuable feedback and kind of a soundboard, they were all operating in different levels of feedback giving, and not at all conflicting but actually addressing several spectrums on different layers of the work. Foo Kuen over there, a producer-dramaturg, aside from the dramaturgy of the piece, he’s also the dramaturgy of production, if you can - if there is such a thing as that. The support system of the work actually is coming from a spectrum of contexts that is vital to the work’s manifestation.

And time is up. So wait - I think the recurring critique or comment we were having during the work-in-progress, during the creation period, was that we were too much respecting the material. So people - outside eyes, or people coming in - were having this desire that we break this form because it’s Disney, but you have to see the work to see why it’s such a recurring comment. Thank you. 

RP: Okay so I’m Ruhanie, and I live and work in Sri Lanka. I work primarily as a performer and I work with a theatre company by the name of Floating Space. Interestingly in the theatre company one of the things is that it’s a performer-driven company, but we also have researchers and activists who form the core of the company. In a way, Floating Space has done work that has been reflective of a particular landscape, so very particular socio-cultural landscape in Sri Lanka, which is the war and the complexity of that war story for everyone of us as individuals. We didn’t start out as a company that was a political theatre company but more to reflect - the company kind of evolved in its articulation and its responses to, at different times, censorship, the abduction of journalists, displacement as an issue. And we are still five sort of people who are grappling actually with our war context more than our post-war context, so some of the work I will talk about will reflect that. 

One of the other things also, and we are much more aware of it when we talk about dramaturgy now, especially since I was here last year, is that we’ve never really defined the role within the company but because we are performers, at different times we kind of influence each other’s processes. And as we become more and more aware of that influencing that we do, we’ve sort of created this space of conversation and negotiation, really, that I think has really become for us the space of dramaturgy that we are always open to conversing with each other, and we’re always open to a particular kind of negotiation that takes place that’s not always very friendly. But it opens the space for the performance to grow but also for the performers to grow. 

Having said that I actually wanted to focus on vulnerability, because in this space of negotiation and conversation, I have found myself quite vulnerable as a performer, in my own body, and so there’s nothing quite as frustrating, sort of being a performer sitting in a rehearsal room and knowing that your body is just not going to work. And that’s kind of the process that begins the questions of the why of your performance and the how of your performance. Especially in terms of its making, but also I think in terms of its possible potential failure that we also grapple with in the rehearsal room. And sometimes I have felt that I stand outside of my body, so my body stands in its own materiality, and it becomes estranged from my intentions for it. And in that way your body tends to kind of refuse you and knowing that it exists only to be read, it also refuses to speak. So in that sense it has been interesting for me to start thinking about - especially in a panel that is about women, that is about sort of feminist agendas and the provocations we have, or invitations also, the way we invite people to look at our bodies - my struggle with my own body is kind of the preoccupation that I’ve had, and that sort of is going to be the thread that links the performance examples that I will talk you through. 

So I’d like to start talking about a particular performance by the name My Other History that we performed in 2011. The company was invited to create a performance around the idea of reconciliation, you know the way in which people do, they throw a word at you and they ask you to create a performance, so we were given reconciliation. Because it was 2011, the war was over in 2009, and it was about time that artists could start making performances on the theme of reconciliation. And we weren’t the only company, there were two companies that were granted this Young Theatremaker’s award, and we really had to sit there and try and figure out what we wanted to do with it. Interestingly I entered into the process as the performer, and my co-founder in the company entered into it as the writer and the director of the work as well. Others filled the other roles, like research and production and other actors as well. 

But the structure of My Other History was the story of a boy who had lived in the north of the country in Jaffna, had then moved to Colombo, and then left the country. And he posted his story on Facebook. And the talked about this complexity now with the country opening up, of what home meant, and of what the possibility of going back home means for different people at different times. And he also talked about a mango tree, and eating the mangoes that grew in the house in Jaffna, and in this particular arid landscape of Jaffna there’s a particular mango that comes from there, so it exists as a kind of signifier. So naturally the writer of the piece was honed in on this, and said, “This is where we are going to start, this is the structure.” And interestingly for him it was a visceral experience because he had been to school for a while with this boy. And the fact that they had shared four years that one had assumed were very kind of parallel years, because of the posting of this story, opened up another question of an entire life that was completely differently constituted, but is kind of sitting in English class together kind of context that had also become diluted. And with that an identity had become diluted, the story had become diluted, a history of a people had been diluted. 

Perhaps I should contextualise also that in Sri Lanka the imagined homeland, if you like, exists in the north of the country. And when we talk about movement from the north of the country, people coming into Colombo, more often than not you came looking for a kind of sanctuary, if you were not leaving the country also. And so I don’t know if he started out to create a story about displacement, but this became the story that we wanted to speak about. But as I go back to this performance I always found that there were three kinds of silences that existed in the performance. One was the silence of the context, in terms of - so in order to make the story speak, the predominant choice somehow that we made, was to perform it in a very naturalistic fashion. And this was because we wanted audiences to “believe’ the story; we didn’t want any kind of estrangement from a story that was coming especially at this particular time, in our lives as just people, but also in our lives as a theatre company, we didn’t want the abstraction of form to kind of put anybody off. And so I couldn’t work. I was suddenly, you know, sitting there, bawling my eyes out, finding ways for tears to communicate, to create certain layers of affect, that I struggled with. I knew the choice and I knew the necessity for that choice, but in myself I struggled about what was I doing with a particular story as I created a particular kind of affective trajectory for it. 

The other silence was the silence of the character, because actually there was no woman in the original story that was posted online. But there was a female actress in the company and we had to use her. So as the writer-director was writing the story, there was this big absence of a woman and we struggled with who she was going to be, and how she was going to articulate herself as a character. And then somewhere I got frustrated and I said, okay I’m gonna go out and start doing interviews. And I started working with women who were living in Colombo, who had experienced displacement in terms of having left Jaffna and moved to Colombo, and now lived in Colombo. I started with one woman, and then I went to another, and then I went to another, and then I went to another, and eventually I had something like seven or eight stories that informed my character but also in turn actually informed the script. The script picked four particular stories of one woman that I interviewed. One, a film roll, a woman who said that the last photographs of her father was in a particular film roll, and when they had to leave, they left so fast they left the film roll behind and she went back, not because she knew it was going to be the last photographs of her father on it, but because it was her daughter’s sixth birthday photographs on that film roll. And she went back because she wanted it. And she picked it up and she came back, and eventually her father didn’t make it through the process of moving to Colombo, and so it ended up that this particular film roll had the last photographs of her father on it. This story made its way into the performance. She talked about also constantly praying that she would get good water, because she needed to make milk for her baby. And she didn’t - she thought, whatever happens to the rest of us, as long as we had good boiled water to make milk regularly, and so that kind of constant living in trying to make sure you had good water, became the undertone also of the performance. 

The third part of the story was her walking. The story of displacement also means that there are particular junctures at which you stop, and between those junctures that you stop there are ways in which you walk, and we all know where the shelters are, where the spaces of refuge are between the north and the south of the country. So it became important to then start actually bearing witness to these places, and so the names of the refugee camps kind of started entering into the text. And then finally she talked about the last day when they left, about the air raids in Jaffna. And she talks a lot about actually what it destroyed, and how it made them leave. And this becomes the third part of the silence of the story, because when we finally sent in our script for a performance license and I think maybe all of us know this structure, when you send - in Sri Lanka when you send in a script for a performance license, the censor board is worked into this performance license organisation, so the script is also censored, and at different points censoring has always been arbitrary, there has never been a particular regulation or anything sort of published on what grounds scripts will be censored. 

So the third layer of silence we grappled with was when we were told, sorry you can perform this script but you have to take all the references to the shelling, the air raids, out. Which was particularly interesting because this was born of the lived experience of people, but at this moment in the country we couldn’t yet talk about what was this lived experience. So there was now this third layer of silence that we had to deal with in performance, where the director, the producer, and the performer had to sign against the script to say, okay these lines we will not speak in performance. What happened then actually was how to deal with the fact that our play had been censored. Did we want to dig our heels in and say, no we won’t perform unless you give us the rights to perform the whole thing? It was not an easy negotiation but it made more sense to actually perform with the censored sections rather than not perform the piece at all and wait for an eventuality. And then the question become how do we artistically indicate that the performance had been censored? So we actually - we didn’t rewrite anything - we actually left the gaps, so that the script was stilted, and at some points you knew there was text that was clearly missing because the certain jumps that went from one section to another meant that something had been taken out. And we did inform the audience before we performed that they were watching a performance that had been censored so that there was a way in which you knew as you engaged with the performance that there was always a silence that we’re speaking through. 

Oh my goodness so soon? So I was dealing with these three kinds of silence when I started to try and articulate it differently through a piece that took about two years to develop, which first was titled as Between Truth and Its Telling, and then eventually ended up as Absence, and Keng Sen saw a part of it when I was working on it. Because I became more and more concerned about the trajectory of the female story, especially when it is displaced, and the kind of - the face of it, what the face of it looks like. 

So I just started creating an archive of women’s faces, because for me I was dealing with what I had kind of created, and this was my archive of faces that I had manipulated in some ways my own face to look at, to look like. And I started looking for any news report that talked over and over again about mothers looking for children, missing children, missing in the process of movement, missing in the process of staying, and these faces became something of an obsession for me. And that led me to create this piece, where I started working with manipulating my own face, for what initially was something like eight minutes and now I can go on for about twenty minutes to half an hour as well, to kind of really work with what I am doing with manipulating my face. What kinds of faces it creates, what kind of affective layers it invokes in an audience, whether it invokes the same kind of affect when you make the structure evident to an audience. And as I was doing this work - so one of the things is the consciousness that led to this kind of work, and to look at this idea of the female body that’s constantly in process, and then I started actually opening my practice to also start working with and looking at other work by artists and this one particular image which I really like became an interesting kind of sisterhood in some ways, in terms of the work. This is a visual artist’s work, her name is Anoli Perera. And she also works with the idea of the female body and the way in which the gaze kind of co-opts the female body. It’s called I Let My Hair Loose, and Protest Series is the subtitle. And her protest is actually - I’m sure we all have these in our homes, these old black and white images of our grandmothers sort of sitting to be photographed - and the fact that she actually puts her hair over her face every time she arranges meticulously these photographs to look exactly like it did thirty years ago, the hair over the face kind of displaces the gaze once more. So in my own practice I think it has become more and more interesting for me to go back to my original starting point of dealing with the different kinds of silences I dealt with, and then to start actually looking at my own body, where it gets stuck, what problems I have with my own manipulations as a performer, and then to start kind of opening up that trajectory to look at a larger collective of women struggling with their own bodies, and looking at ways in which you refuse a gaze or you create sites of resistance at least through different strategies as we place our body in a particular space. Thank you. 

SF: Hello everyone, I’m Shinta, I’m from Makassar, South Sulawesi. It’s another island in Indonesia. I was supposed to speak on the last day of this meeting but there is a wrong schedule but it’s okay for me, so I’m going to share my work in theatre as a director, but I think I need (my translator) to help me here. It’s a patriarchal society - the patriarchy remains strong in Makassar. That’s why making theatre was still very hard for women in the beginning. So the involvement of women to perform on stage at the time was still considered as showing her own sexuality, so the audience still expected to see young beautiful women, with big breasts. 

This is my work titled My Name is adam, adam without the capital A. It talks about the construction of the male as the head of family. This is back in 2003. Part of this society still believes that - this myth - this is part of what man should be. What I would like to express here is that the myth was not really actual for people to hold on to. Because based on our research targeting male artists who married and who were poor, they could not hold this position (as head of family) anymore.

I started to write the script and I thought it was the first dramaturgical process that I did because I start imagining the scenes. So I start making a structure of the performance, and start thinking about all the elements in detail. I’ll show you the video - it started with all the actors giving the audience one letter and one sparkler. The letter is written by Adam, the male actor. The content of the letter is that they express how sad they are to become the head of their family. 

There is a scene where the female actor makes a penis made of butter and flour, and puts the sparkler at the top of the penis at the end of the piece, because we think that whether male or female they have to be happy, be content, with the gender inherent in them. There is another scene where the male actor is mopping the floor - because it was in my childhood that I started learning to recite the Qur’an, because normally before and after we learn how to recite the Qur’an the female teacher would ask us to mop the floor. Both female and male students did the same assignment, the same task. So I keep that piece of memory as something that (shows) how both genders should share the same task. 

When it was first restaged, it got a lot of very strong reactions, especially from the organisation of Islamic students, this very powerful organisation nationwide. They said that such a performance should not be here, it’s pornographic and indecent. 

The other work that talks about the relation between male and female is titled Story of Body.  The actors - male and female - “leak” the body, as in they show parts of the body that they previously wanted to hide. For example, like scars on the belly, post-operative scars, and scars on the arm, birth mark on the buttocks. And such things were not really - still not perceived well by the audience, because they still felt that it’s not appropriate to show such things to other people. But for us it was important to create theatre that makes an audience understand what they had experienced. 

It was always said that the male body and female body in theatre has a distinct difference. But for me, I think both male and female body has the same similar opportunities to speak about the same thing. For example in the first piece, My Name is adam, there is a scene where a male actor is running and doing push-ups and sit-ups while saying “I have to train my body so I can be loved.” In reality the female also sometimes thinks that we have to beautify ourselves so we can be loved. So there is a perception that weakened the female body on stage. That’s why I and my colleagues at Kala Teater are actually very interested to explore the male body, it’s very seldom done because the male body on stage is perceived as something - as performed prowess, while the female body is the opposite. 

So I’ll show you the trailer of My Name is adam. [Trailer plays]

Okay, thank you. 

LHN: Thank you very much, to all the four panelists here. Due to my inability to count and to add simple numbers, we actually do not have time for question and answer, I’m afraid. I’m so sorry about that. But I could take one or two questions very quickly, if we have some burning questions out there. 

Right, great we’re all still processing, which is fair enough. I just want to quickly wrap by perhaps giving a bit of context because we do have an open audience - the first session today we did have a lively discussion about dramaturgy and the figure of the dramaturg, and one thing that emerged time and again was that perhaps we’re not even ready to talk about the figure of the dramaturg yet. Perhaps we’re still talking about what I term or what we’ve been sharing of the dramaturgical sensibility, or dramaturgical thinking that’s involved in a work. Which is why, specifically, I invited these artists, who I think engage with dramaturgical thought very actively in their work, even though the figure of the dramaturg is missing. And I think that is going to be evident for the other few sessions also, where the figure - the person - may not actually exist, but I think the makings of that sensibility is carried through in the performance and in the process of making the performance. 

Carrying on to the next session - we’ll be taking a break very soon - but carrying on to the next one at 4pm, I think we’ll be expanding again on the idea of the dramaturgical sensibility that will then expand into dramaturging festival, where we will have Ong Keng Sen in conversation. But for now please put your hands together for the four artists. Thank you so much.