Dramaturgy in Asia: Of Roots & Traditions | ADN Meeting 2017

PE: Good morning everyone and thank you for coming to the second day of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network Symposium. My name’s Peter Eckersall and I’m the – I come from Australia originally but I work in the City University of New York where I teach theatre and performance studies. I’m also working as a dramaturg for the Not Yet It’s Difficult theatre group based in Melbourne, the artistic director of which is David Pledger. David will be speaking this afternoon on one of the panels. We are going to, in this session, run it more as a roundtable rather than as a series of presentations, so each of the speakers will have between 5 and 8 minutes to introduce some of the questions and themes around the topic today which I’ll introduce in a minute. Then we’ll move into more of a conversation among the panellists, and then we’ll move out from that into a conversation between the panellists and the audience – there’s a kind of three-part dramaturgy planned here. We are recording this event for documentation purposes, so just remember that please if you speak from the audience, if you’re going to ask a question, please use the microphone so that we can capture your thoughts and words of wisdom. 

[inaudible question from TM about translation]

PE: No, no. Q&A – you can, if Kentaro has any questions, he can ask you what that means and you can just, but no, you don’t have to translate this section. So, we I think have a really exciting topic this morning, and we also have a very distinguished panel of speakers – quite a remarkable panel in fact. 

[TM clarifies something about translation – that she wants to convey that there will be no translation until the Q&A]

PE: Ok, there will be no translation till the Q&A, where there will be translation available for Japanese speakers. We will have some whispering going on for one of our speakers, Kentaro Matsui, who will have assistance from our translator so he can, if there’s any bits of the conversation that he doesn’t follow, it won’t be simultaneous translation, so, dozo.

[TM translates this into Japanese.]

PE: Arigatou gozaimasu. Ok so let’s begin. Before I introduce the panel, if you’ll indulge me I just thought I might offer one or two introductory comments around the theme of the panel. Mainly to frame perhaps a series of questions that we can address in the panel today, which is going to run for two hours, so we’ve got lots of time. Now, this panel comes to us with a theme, probably quite a difficult theme of “Asian Dramaturgies”. So we’re essentially I think interrogating here two fairly difficult terms, neither of which have a precise definition. Of course ‘dramaturgy’ is a term that we’ve been discussing both in the last meeting and this one. And I think we’re all aware of the fact that the term has multiple meanings and is in many instances an ambiguous term. But I also wanted to I guess raise the spectre of the term ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian’ because of course this is also a term that could be subject to quite a serious critique I think in terms of what it actually means. And then how the relationship between these terms inflect is going to be one of our I think key questions. I’d just like to pose a few questions in the introduction. 

What is to be gained from trying to, or attempting to dislocate the term ‘dramaturgy’ from its historical connections to western theatre practice and/or modern theatre practice, because in dislocating the term from a western history I think we risk assuming that that term has a comfortable relationship to western theatrical practice to begin with, and I would suggest that in fact it doesn’t. The term is contested within western theatre traditions. And of course the term is not an English term, it’s a term that is associated with Ancient Greek language. It comes from a language that is now dead. So it’s a dead language term. Of course it comes with historical baggage, and it comes to us with a set of provocations I think that we’ll address. Much of the interest in dramaturgy in this conference and indeed in an organization like TPAM, I think, is not to do with so-called traditional dramaturgical practices. But it’s very much to do with what I would term ‘new dramaturgy’, dramaturgy that is associated with processes of making contemporary performance as opposed to script-based dramaturgies a la G.E. Lessing and the improvement of the text or the play, instructions to the playwright to write better plays. I think we’re dealing with a much more complicated and interdisciplinary use of the term ‘dramaturgy’. So we have to acknowledge the fact that when we’re dealing with the term ‘dramaturgy’, we’re dealing with a term that is already dislocated from its own theatrical traditions. It’s already in a sense rejecting a certain kind of normative western theatrical history. In bringing the term into this context, I think we need to be very precise about what we mean by dramaturgy and how we’re using it. 

Of course, I mentioned that ‘Asia’ is also a difficult term. It’s perhaps a more problematic term than ‘dramaturgy’, in that it is a term that has a lot more currency in many, many different contexts and locations, be they political, economic, cultural, historical – and an attempt to discover a kind of ‘Asian dramaturgy’ might risk certain kinds of homogenization. It raises a lot of I think very interesting questions about cultural politics, about ownership of terms, it has all sorts of interesting contexts to do with locations of production and locations of dissemination of the term, vis-a-vis perhaps Singapore and Japan, two countries that are very much involved in, in a sense, promoting discussion around this term. There’s no money from China, there’s no skin in the game from China around the term at the moment perhaps. So what are we actually doing when we’re thinking about ‘Asian’ in relation to ‘dramaturgy’? We could, if you’ll indulge me because I am a trained scholar, someone who... I can hear the ghosts of my professors saying, ‘you have to immediately deconstruct the term “Asian” as your first operation’. We could turn to some interesting cultural theory: Inter-Asia cultural studies perspectives perhaps, or the work of a Chinese scholar who talks about the need to decolonize Asian studies. Asia as Method proposes an idea of a decolonization or a process of critiquing understandings of Asia through an enlarged conversation among Asian scholars, Asian artists, Asian cultural practitioners and so on and so forth. So one could argue that what you’ve proposed here in your dramaturgy of this forum is a kind of Asia as Method context. That might be an interesting thing to consider. 

Finally, we’ve got the question of flows, and I think most of us are familiar with the way that perhaps Japanese popular culture flows through the region and becomes very prominent in relation to contemporary culture. Popular cultures, not theatre cultures so much. There’s a lot of work on how these kind of ideas circulate through the region and create new communities of people who gather around a relationship to a particular cultural form or a particular artist or a particular fanbase or a particular set of cultural practices that start to define themselves not so much as citizens of a nation but people who are members of a certain community, a community of people who like manga, a community of fans of Hatsune Miku, a community of people who are butoh practitioners, a community of people who do Augusto Boal style performance, so on and so forth. So maybe that’s something to consider as well. 

Anyway, that’s enough of the theory, it’s a bit early in the morning for that kind of very serious stuff. I’d now like to introduce the panel. First we have Anuradha Kapur, who’s an academic and theatre practitioner. She was a Professor of Acting and Direction, and Director of the National School of Drama, New Delhi until 2013. She’s continued teaching and publishing and making work, she’s co-founder of the theatre group Vivadi, and a very distinguished arts worker and scholar. I won’t read out the full biographies, but they are her in English and Japanese. Charlene Rajendran is a theatre educator, researcher and practitioner who currently works at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and is also very well-known for her work, both artistic practice and theoretical work and pedagogy as well. Kentaro Matsui on the end is Director of the Cultural Centre of Fujimi City located in Saitama prefecture, which is a very interesting location for an arts centre outside of Tokyo, in the north of Tokyo. For those who are not familiar, it’s a location that has a long history with small industries, farming and rural communities. This is an area where the arts are coming into contact with perhaps communities of people who are not necessarily expecting to be involved in the arts in their daily life. And then finally we have Marion D’Cruz, who choreographs, performs, produces and teaches full-time at the dance faculty of ASWARA, the National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage in Malaysia. Marion is, as you all know, a pioneer of contemporary dance in Malaysia and a founding member of the Five Arts Centre. The biography would go on for pages if we had time. With those introductions, I’d just like to invite the contributions from our panel, 5-8 minutes, and then we’ll open it up to a wider discussion before turning to the floor. We didn’t decide this – would anybody like to volunteer to go first?

[laughter from panellists and audience]

PE: [to Anuradha Kapur] You’re on my left and the microphone is here, so.

AK: Some of the disadvantages of the names starting with ‘A’, it’s like what happens in school forever. Thank you very much. I’m going to present a sort of wilful history of some of the practices that have happened in India over the last some years. I’m going to try and annotate some of the works that are here, or something which for instance is in discussion all the time in India: ‘roots and traditions’. Dramaturgical thinking, the action of translating and materialising ideas, the effect and affect of staged geometry, architecture, costume, colour, the shape of the body, the attributes of heroes and heroines – are part of ancient manuals in India. The Natya Shastra supposedly between 2000 BC to 2000 AD, and the [unclear] around the 10th century. Now clearly they proposed, for instance, that nearness and distance, colour and shape, produces a scheme of relationships between actor, spectator and play materials. In countries that have long traditions of performance such as India, the need to critically annotate these continuities becomes the need, actually, to point to ruptures and interruptions and disalignments. Otherwise, we tend to make a history which says that what happens or what is described in the ancient texts is how it materialises in today’s world. To put a performance in the discursive field as also the body as figuration in the discursive field would be possibly one of the annotations of dramaturgy as we might know it. This interruption that I’m trying to make with notions about tradition and dramaturgical thinking becomes all the more important when the past as memory and the past as transmission becomes something that gets given to a student, a pupil, a shishya without any mediation. This is one part of the belief of the guru-shishya relationship to which I’ll come just now. This interruption that I’m trying to say is like pulling the brake, as [Walter] Benjamin would say, to stop and see why we need to critically annotate certain historically sort of ‘read’ terms. I don’t think that the ancient texts – some of them are called texts on dramaturgy – but I think the important thing is that we try and see where they become important to us in contemporary practice. And it looks to me that one of the important breakages with a kind of history about how to read modern theatre comes at a point when in the 1980s or so, when a corpus of work develops that has been done by women directors. And I think it develops because the work of certain women or certain kinds of practices come in collision with what is seen as ‘dominant’ modern Indian theatre dramaturgy. 

So let me put out what some of these ideas of theatre practice in the 1980s brings forward, and I would hazard saying there is a kind of tradition of that that comes into being about what is material on stage, which I’ll come back to that. So this, in the 1980s, questioned several sorts of roles. Roles in theatre-making, and the sort of rematerialisation that happens about roles, and a counter-narrative of sorts is put in place. As I said earlier, this is wilful re-reading. One of the counter-narratives is about the relationship of pedagogy. The guru, the shishya, the disciple and the teacher – this kind of teaching methodology gets into some kind of questioning. And the notion of reproduction in teaching. There is a questioning of family lineage, of patronage, of inclusion and exclusion. And I want to just give an example that a very dear friend of mine and a music scholar gives often, this is Vidya Rao. And she talks of a particular music tradition which is a tradition of music that was actually primarily that of the courtesans of the 19th century. The music tradition called thumri is now a very established tradition. It was not allowed into the Indian radio till about the 1930s. You had to say when you entered, even directly after independence in 1947, when you entered the radio station you had to show a paper saying that you were not from a courtesan family. Anyhow, this music tradition was learnt by many men, and sung by many men, but nobody in the lineage is marked as being, having been taught by a woman. So I’m just marking this, understanding that this kind of guru-shishya, this teacher-student relationship, also began to be rethought of in the 1980s. One of the things that therefore the 1980s and the women’s work mark out at that point is that there is a field of knowledge that a spectator must navigate and negotiate. It doesn’t come to the spectator unmediated, and without interruptions as well as well as without questions. Therefore this, a certain kind of narrative in Indian theatre which says that since we have talked of dramaturgy, what happens today is exactly the same. I’m trying to actually mark out to say, that one of the things that actually makes a difference is what does this kind of dramaturgy make the audience do? So putting the spectator centrally into argument. 

A fast-forward. Some of the work in the 1980s and then onwards has an interest in mixes and hybridities. It has an interest in bringing up the idea of figuration, especially that of women, as the example that I gave you of thumri as well. The idea of the production of gender is brought up and therefore the idea of identity, and therefore the idea of India, and therefore the idea of Indianness, and therefore of the nation. I would suggest with these kinds of questionings, in the 1980s, many sutures about the nation are opened up. And they are not, they remain undone till today. They don’t get tied. What is left undone is then a notion of what is Indian theatre, what is Indian dramaturgy. And it opens it out to say, we can’t talk about it as “Indian” dramaturgy, dramaturgy about roots or dramaturgy about tradition. What also then destabilises the position of the guru, the transmitter of knowledge, is collaboration, devising, multi-authorship, which would be very much a part of some of the works that have happened with women directors who have worked with collectives. The guru lineage that I wanted to point to earlier, that I pointed to earlier, then questions pasts, memory, embodiment and that there is a continuity about what is truly Indian that passes through the body from the guru to the pupil. Therefore, an idea of reimagining the role of the pedagogue comes in, both in the classroom as how to first work with teaching without actually taking on yourself the burden of too much knowledge. I want to just annotate this slightly. When I began directing and we were working a lot with devising, and I’m sure all friends here would have the experience, I remember at the drama school I was asked, have you done your homework? Do you want us to do everything? Why wouldn’t you tell us what to do? So there is a relationship about how you want to transmit certain kinds of work and what is seen as collective. There was an interest, at that time, in popular forms, between questioning the categories of high and low art, and there has been an interest which is continuing in melodrama, in the baroque, in excess, that is excess in costume, colour and objects, bringing in objects of the everyday for instance cooking, for instance working with actual everyday material, the material of labour in a woman’s life – so producing a certain kind of poly-dimensionality, and involving touch, smell, taste, in and on the stage. And that material then, in that time, began to be seen as subversive to a certain kind of austere modernism that was part of the 1950s of the theatre post-independence. This excess, it appears to a certain discourse, like wrecking a certain moderate organisation of knowledge on stage. And perforates illusionism, but also in some senses by introducing melodrama, questions of trope that is very common in India about the theatre of roots, that there are roots which take you down to an authentic resource to which you can relate at any time. There have been lots of arguments specially with women about the theatre of roots and whether what roots the women directors of the 1980s had. I am therefore putting forth a claim on the past in order to recompose it, and in order to say that there are certain pasts that become more official than others, and that we need to question why certain pasts are more official. So gender destabilisation and masquerade, spectatorship and a reading of what happens to the spectator in the play, the material that is brought on to stage – become markers of something that as I think is now very much a part of the debate of what is contemporary and what is modern in Indian theatre, and I would mark this position as being part of some of the practices that begin in the 1980s. I’m not marking the 1980s as some kind of originary moment, but I am marking it as a moment that brings together certain questions. And one of the questions, as I said in the beginning, was of figuration and something that we joked about a very common quotation, which when we work with bringing the figure of woman, an Indian woman on stage, is that we know that the emperor has no clothes, but the empress has no body. So with that, we begin and we end. Thank you very much. 

[applause]

PE: So we’ll move straight on to our second speaker, and I think we’ll ask Charlene, is it alright for you to speak? Thank you, over to you.

CR: My name does begin with C, so I will accept, although it is very hard to go after Anuradha. However, there’s some nice synergies so I’m quite happy to go after Anuradha. I want to talk about multiplicity and negotiating difference, because I come from Malaysia and Singapore. I think it’s fair to say I come from both, now. Because even if Marion glares at me, I have lived in Malaysia most of my life, but the last 15 years of my life I’ve been in Singapore, and when I was born, they were both one country. That tells you how old I am. I had a strong relationship with Singapore growing up, because my aunt with whom I was very close was there. Anyway, these two societies are a particular kind of Asia. They are Southeast Asia, but within Southeast Asia as well, they operate with a certain kind of plurality, mixture and difference. Officially, both countries have this similar multiculturalism policy, where we are all defined by our race. And if you’re Malay or Chinese or Indian quite clearly, even if you’re mixed, there’s a certain notion of some sort of originary culture that you come from. But then there are some of us who are ‘Other’ – I point to Natalie, I think you are ‘Other’ too. Although I have an Indian surname, because my grandparents are from Sri Lanka, at the time there was a political process in which the Sri Lankans in Malaysia said, ‘We’re not Indian’. There was a certain snobbery about it, but as a result, I am officially ‘Other’, although now that’s become a lot more porous. And these things stay with you obviously because when you fill in a form, you still have to fill it in, and in Singapore I have to fill in these forms as well, and in Malaysia you also have to fill in a form about which religion you belong to. So you’re officially of a certain race, and of a certain religion. In Singapore you have the option of being a ‘free thinker’. In Malaysia, there isn’t that option. So the kinds of performances that emerge in these contexts are imbued with these kinds of official negotiations of difference, classifications, parallel streams that officially don’t intersect, except in food and sometimes clothing. Where you are allowed to have mixes and fusions, but otherwise in the official arena, you present Chinese culture, modern and classical, or Indian culture, as separate. 

So two theatre practitioners, pioneers who consciously in their work questioned this and sought to rethink how the nation needs to resist this way of thinking by offering on stage live performances that reconfigure these ideas of rigid, fixed, essentialized difference – were Kuo Pao Kun from Singapore and Krishen Jit from Malaysia, both of whom sadly are no longer with us, passed too soon within a couple of years of each other. And I think they offer frames for thinking about how contemporary work has tried to navigate through this notion of difference. And interestingly, the 1980s I think was also a moment, or a decade where certain things were marked, certainly in the work of Krishen and Pao Kun. For Krishen, Five Arts Centre was formed in 1984, he made a shift from doing Malay-language theatre completely because of a certain nationalist ideal that he took on for a while, towards doing English-language theatre that allowed for that mix. And in Singapore of course, Pao Kun’s detention and then release and then shift towards doing theatre that was less socialist Chinese-language oriented towards a different kind of hybrid emerged. Which then led to the flourish of the 1990s, and I think we look nowadays at the 1990s as this golden time. But really, what happened in the 1980s was foundational towards that being allowed to happen. Of course the financial boom that occurred in the 1990s made a big difference in terms of how funding could affect that. So one of the things that both Krishen and Pao Kun did is they created work, Pao Kun was also a playwright and a director, Krishen wasn’t a playwright but he was a theatre critic who wrote regularly. They both wrote about work. Not necessarily their work, but about what they were seeing, what they were thinking, and they were dramaturging performance in relation to society, nation, politics, culture, the region. They were making links, because they saw a gap in a certain kind of scholarship. There weren’t theatre studies departments at the time in Malaysia and Singapore. And they recognised the need to have discourses that were emerging from this contemporary frame. And in their writings, there’s constant reference to this question of how to navigate difference differently, but nonetheless. And so two ways in which they talk about it I think offer frames, if not lenses, for understanding how new dramaturgies are still present and still being built upon these ideas. So Pao Kun talked about something called ‘open culture’. And for him, open culture is defined as being rooted in one specific culture, but not necessarily the culture that you are racially defined by. It can be any culture of your choice. But being rooted in a culture is not about going back to an originary moment as much as it is about learning the vocabulary, the philosophy, the ethos and therefore being deeply soaked in one culture, whatever that culture may be. And from that position and groundedness of being, in a way, then being open to all other cultures and taking them on with the capacity to negotiate. Pao Kun talked about how it’s not about bilingualism as about biculturalism. Multiculturalism then is not about having separate things that exist in parallel, but intertwine. And open culture I think you talked about the open dramaturgy and the nation getting opened up and remaining open, these sutures. I think that’s in many respects a push that Pao Kun was making towards acknowledging that, yes, there are these very strong entrenched cultures that operate politically, socially and personally in people’s lives, be they Chinese, Indian, etc. Because the ‘other’ doesn’t really work as an ‘other’. But nonetheless, there is so much more at work and operating. And as a result, the neglect of these things leads to a very authoritative way of understanding culture. Authoritarian. So Pao Kun’s Mama Looking for her Cat, in which he writes and directs a play where different languages are present and no surtitles are offered to assume that there’s one dominant language with which to navigate through this, is significant. Also, at the time English is gaining prominence, and the two main characters speak Chinese and Tamil to each other and they don’t understand each other. These are two older citizens who are engaged in displacement from their families and their societies because of the English-language policy, and they speak to each other in – one speaks Chinese, the other person speaks Tamil, and they understand each other. So there’s a metaphor, there’s a symbolism obviously about the human being’s capacity to navigate difference despite linguistic distances, you might say. Krishen offers the notion of multiculturalism within the body. And talk about how his work had been persistently trying to excavate this. And for me that’s very interesting, that it’s excavation rather than layering on, like another patina. It’s so distinctly not a melting pot. And I think that’s a way in which Singapore-Malaysian Southeast Asian kinds of difference are being navigated in Krishen’s work. So excavating this multiculturalism in the body for Krishen also involved issues of language. But not just language as Malay, Chinese, English but the different Malay and the different Chinese languages and the different Englishes, plus within Hokkien, different kinds of a Hokkien. Within Malay, different kinds of Malay. Formal, non-formal, street, Kelantan, Penang, etc. And Krishen consciously learnt Malay in the 70s, became more fluent in it than most Malaysians, read it like a scholar, spoke it like a scholar, wrote in Malay as well – and learnt the language as a politic of becoming Malaysian that I think is very, very significant. He has been criticised for endorsing a certain kind of elevation of Malay rights, but in the 70s it was a very different period where I think being someone who grew up in a Punjabi-speaking home, having education in English, probably having spoken bazaar Malay or street Malay, but then realising ‘if I’m going to be viable I’ve got to have language that I can wield, so I’ll learn it, no big deal – in fact, it gives me more power’. Language for him is not just something you grow up with, something that’s just natural and something that’s just there. It’s also a political choice. So the multiculturalism that is excavated I think relies on this intent and discipline. And for me that’s a dramaturging of life that then translates into performance-making. It’s not separate. It’s intertwined. And multiculturalism within the body is exemplified in a range of Krishen’s work. But the one that perhaps stands out for me is something called A Chance Encounter which happened in the late 1990s. It was a devised work with two actors, both very strong, confident, talented women, Faridah Marican and Foo May Lyn, whose life stories intertwine with two fictional characters, who meet each other at a cosmetic sales counter in a busy shopping mall. And I think these kinds of stories that emerge like Mama, the old Chinese lady and the Indian man meeting, and the Chance Encounter of the elderly Malay woman and the Chinese cosmetic salesgirl, are the kinds of stories that emerged when these dramaturgies informed choices and options for performance-making. Thank you.

[applause]

PE: Who will speak next? Will we stick with the alphabet or will we go in order of the line? Okay, Marion, would you use that microphone over there? Kentaro will speak last.

MDC: Hi, good morning everyone. So I see here you have the academics [gestures to her right at CR and AK] with the academic language, and here you have the practitioner [implying herself] with the non-academic language. I thought I would talk about what I call ‘strategies of invisible dramaturgy’ in the work of Five Arts Centre. And I use the word ‘invisible dramaturgy’ referring to the lack of a designated person who acts as the ‘dramaturg’, but dramaturgy is going on, which we’ve been talking about a lot yesterday. I have two examples. The first is co-direction. So Five Arts Centre was formed in the 1980s, and right from the 1980s there have been a number of significant projects that have been co-directed. One of the first was Ong Keng Sen and Krishen, co-directing in the 1980s, so I guess Charlene, this business of what was happening in the 1980s which then created a certain kind of ground for the next levels. Krishen and Keng Sen co-directed in the 80s the first project was Three Children, and Claire is here. And during that time, I don’t think Krishen had ever co-directed. But I think what was interesting looking back on that process right now, is so they co-directed. It was a Malaysian play by Leow Puay Tin. And the discussions that went on between Krishen and Keng Sen into the wee hours of the morning in Krishen’s hotel room, where I would be a fly on the wall, would be what looking back now would be that process of dramaturgy. And there were more hours of that discussion than there were hours in the rehearsal, on the rehearsal floor. And it was a fascinating dialogue that went on between the two. Which should have been recorded but unfortunately only sits in my memory. And Krishen went on to – Three Children was done in 1988 and then remounted again in 1991 when it toured to Japan. Krishen also, so Krishen was very particular in who he would co-direct with. But in 1995 he did a big project called Skin Trilogy which involved six visual artists, and to get that project going, he worked in collaboration with a visual artist. This was not co-direction, but he brought in Wong Hoy Cheong to sort of curate the visual arts section of it, and Krishen was directing. So the visual artists had installations in the gallery and then the performance happened all over the National Art Gallery of that time. And having established that relationship with Hoy Cheong in 1995 they went on to co-direct Family in 1998, which was a site-specific event that happened in an old abandoned house in Kuala Lumpur. Again, a Leow Puay Tin play, which was performed all over the house and had multiple scenes going on at one time, parallel texts so that the audience had to choose where they were going and so on and so forth. And I think Family was recently done here in, yeah, Ken? Last year? Yeah. Here in Japan. So that also was, and again, many many discussions and hours of these discussions between Wong Hoy Cheong and Krishen, which, again looking back now, seems to me like a dramaturgical process that was going on. And the third example was something I did in 2012 called Dream Country as part of the Singapore Arts Festival at that time. It’s a very long story, how the project happened, but [Low] Kee Hong was responsible for that. And it was based on a piece that I had done in 1988 called Urn Piece, and the Singapore version, the original version had three dancers coming out of three large urns filled with water, and the Singapore version had 35 performers coming out of 35 urns, an outdoor performance. So when we did that, we had six directors working. And three of them are in the room – four of them are in the room! How bizarre is – how bizarrely wonderful is that? [laughter] So what it was, was I came up with a scheme where four directors were picked in Singapore, all women. The performance also had all women. And each director worked with a group of seven or eight performers. And then there were two of us from KL, myself and Anne James. And there was a scheme given and a kind of structure given and then they would work and then we would come down and look at the material and eventually the six of us put the performance, a 45-minute performance, put it together at the Esplanade – outside, outdoors. The directors who are in the room are Claire Wong, who’s at the back, Natalie, who’s right there, Charlene is here, and myself. So again, looking back at that whole process, the amount of discussion, negotiation, fights, tempers, tears, alcohol – all of which went on that process I think. So I was trying to think this morning – was I the dramaturg in that process? Which I will leave that, maybe Natalie and Claire will say, was I, or was I the ‘negotiator’ to keep the peace and to keep everybody safe? [laughs] Ombudsman? [more laughter] I can’t even say that word! But okay, so, but again it was six directors working in that collaborative way. So the idea of co-direction for me is a scheme that has been happening within Five Arts Centre and I’m sure in many other places, and inbuilt into that is the dramaturgy. 

The second example I want to talk about is something new that’s been developing in Malaysia and I think especially in Japan, and maybe other places – of the creative producer. So, in the past, the producer sort of served the vision of the director or the choreographer, so you know, choreographers and directors jump, the producer says ‘how high’. At least that’s how I’ve worked as a producer, and you just deliver, deliver, deliver and you try and make the vision of the director happen, as a good producer. But in the last few years, the idea of a creative producer, who’s not just the person who’s going to make your work happen, but is going to in a sense work with you and give you creative input, is not a co-director, but is a creative producer. And I have worked with June Tan as a creative producer, and she’s in the room as well. And the first piece, and it would not have happened without June. It was a bizarre thing that came up called Two Minute Solos, which entirely describes what it was. But I had this kind of idea and I said, ‘Eh, June, I want to do this’, you know, and it was that discussion with June and her asking me all those questions and saying, okay what about this, what about this, no let’s do this and let's put these people and not this person and so on and so forth – that eventually led to the event happening in 2013 and 2014. So I think that also is an interesting strategy that’s happening. The creative producer and then the question would be then, is that creative producer also doing dramaturgy in that process? Thank you.

[applause]

PE: And we’ll hear from our final speaker now, Kentaro Matsui, but Matsui-san is going to speak in Japanese and there’ll be translation for this, so. 

[KM speaks in Japanese while TM does consecutive interpretation into English. Sentence breaks indicate breaks for translation.]

KM: I’d like to start from my experience serving as a producer at Setagaya Public Theater.
In 2005, we created a piece called Hotel Grand Asia with artists from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore and Japan.
In the two-year process of this creation, we had two ways of workshops, where we shared different stories and myths from different countries, and from this experience we started to realise that we share in common these different stories of myths that had animals as the characters.
Also, even if there may be differences between Southeast Asia and East Asia, if we look closely into it, we share the same influences from China and India, before BC.
As a result, we decided to have excerpts from Mahabharata, the Indonesian version, in the piece.
And other participants from different parts of Asia, did not know this version of the Mahabharata from Indonesia.
So now we are moving a little bit to the Japanese theatre. As you must know, we have traditions of Noh theatre, kyogen and kabuki.
Noh and kyogen developed inside Japan, but before it became Noh and kyogen, the influences, the stories actually came through the Korean peninsula from India and China, and these stories didn’t really change, but were incorporated to become Noh and kyogen.
And this is not something that I researched, but this is something that I read.
So the Japanese theatre, not only theatre, but Japanese culture actually, was a continuous sort of translation of things that came from the continent, and it was a process of translation and also appropriation of the influences that came from the continent.
If we look at kabuki, we use the instrument called the shamisen, and this instrument came from China through Okinawa, and without the shamisen, it wouldn’t be kabuki. So it’s not only theatre but also musically we have these influences from the continent.
In the Meiji era, which is about 140 years ago, now we shut ourselves off from the influences of Asia and we started to take influences from the west and translate these influences.
So in the 20th century we started to translate plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen, and these plays started to be performed and this became modern theatre in Japan.
So what we do here through translation is actually to come up with new ways of expression, but by translating foreign materials.
Also when we started having this modern theatre in the beginning of the 20th century, not only did we translate these plays but also this concept of ‘actress’ was born.
One of the founders of modern theatre in Japan, Osanai Kaoru, worked with kabuki actors to realise Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman and there, the female character was performed by the female impersonator of kabuki actor, which is basically a male playing a female role.
And then later we have an actress called Matsui Sumako who played Nora in Ibsen’s piece or Ophelia in Hamlet, and this sort of became the prototype of an actress in modern theatre in Japan.
So the starting point of this was a play of a Japanese woman playing a western woman.
And this process of making your own theatre by appropriating western theatre continued on until the 60s.
In the late 60s, as Peter must know, the underground small theatre scene started to blossom. Actually the main cause of these underground small theatres were very much influenced by western theatre, but they were the ones that decided to go back to pre-modern theatre in Japan, so they started to study, take the forms of kabuki and Noh and kyogen, for example.
By the 80s, this sort of attempt to create new forms of theatre by studying or translating foreign theatre started to be less – it started to be less.
Just like the example that I shared with you in the beginning about this collaboration project we did at the Setagaya Public Theatre, since the 90s the ways for us to create new, to search for new ways of theatre in Japan has been more to collaborate with people from overseas, to sort of revolutionize.
Also, we had in the closed discussions yesterday about this concept of specific expertise for the dramaturg, so that’s sort of also another way where we try to incorporate methodologies from overseas, and then revolutionize ourselves. 

[applause]

PE: Thank you all for your really wonderful presentations, I think each of the presentations opened up on the question of Asian dramaturgical practices in some quite remarkable ways, and in the discussion now we need to try and find some threads, I think, that might possibly link some of the experiences of dramaturgical practice or indeed do something quite opposite to that, and identify quite different contexts and quite different practices. Just to stimulate the discussion, I’ve tried to make some notes of some of the perspectives, and one of the things that I was really taken by was this very powerful relationship between history and memory here in the panel, because all of you were talking about theatre histories that are very associated with the identification of nation, the identification of culture, the identification of tradition and indeed the identification of modernity. But those histories were all inflected through memory, and memories of particular artists, memories of particular works and indeed memories of particular collaborations that you, in some cases, participated in to make those works. I think there’s a really interesting point there between the kind of more narratological understanding of history that is something that may well create a certain kind of notion about dramaturgy as a structure that is authoritarian perhaps, or that is imposed upon us by the weight of history. But then that’s interrupted, I think, by the possibility of memory and very subjective and personal experiences that you might relate to. Second one is this relationship to foundational figures and foundation histories. Each of you spoke I think very powerfully to histories of theatre within particular societies, cultures and communities, and particular times. And I think that there’s something very important about these relationships to figures such as Kuo Pao Kun and Krishen Jit and Suzuki Tadashi and Terayama Shuji and Rendra and so on and so forth. But this also takes us down the path of the guru figure as well. To what extent do these figures align us to a history that we can’t escape from? Personal anecdote, I’m very struck as an Australian who moved to New York three years ago, by how much the theatre there is overwhelmingly controlled by the memory of the 60s. I feel that young artists are really trapped by that constant recirculation of these memories. On the other hand, many of the figures you’ve mentioned have been very influential in your own theatre communities and have inspired the next generation of artists and so on and so forth. So there is a dramaturgical lineage of work that you can trace through the work of certain artists, but there’s also I think a question to be asked about how those kinds of lineages become the singular authoritative voice and how there’s a need to work against it as well. The third one was a concern with language and the ruptures of language. All of you talked about languages, I think not just the language of a play text or the spoken languages in the complicated multicultural environments of your communities, but you also talked of the need for theatre to move into an awareness of other kinds of language, perhaps vocabularies of the body, vocabularies of gender, vocabularies of an awareness of who is in the theatre and who is not, and also the audience and their literacy and their understanding of theatre and the way that theatre has to engage with and perhaps develop a certain kind of literacy among audiences. So there was a strong emphasis on gender, there was a strong emphasis on cultural politics, there’s a strong emphasis on identity politics, which is interesting because a number of you pointed to the 1980s as a crucial time, which is also the time of the rise of cultural politics in international terms and the rise of identity politics that gives us some of the kind of theoretical perspectives that lead to much of this kind of critique. Japan is a kind of exception here because their deeply radical time of the theatre was the 1960s, and as Kentaro said, all of these ruptures happened in a very deep and profound way, whereas the 1980s was the period of the bubble economy, the time of economic excess, and this also brings us to the relationship that a number of you mentioned to economy, and how there is certain kinds of connections between periods of theatrical activity and a cultural context and also an economic context that produces that are very important I think in relation to maybe the question of whether or not dramaturgy will be co-opted by state institutions seeking to reframe dramaturgy as a kind of cultural industry modality: “Bring in a dramaturg to train the artist to produce successful outcomes” kind of mentality. That’s something we might consider. Of course as a dramaturg myself I’m very much keen on notions of reconfiguring, notions of rupture, notions of remaking histories, notions – that you all mentioned certain kinds of interruptions to narratives, certain kinds of possibilities for making some kind of new intervention, some kind of new point, through the active understanding of how theatre engages in social, political and cultural debates. Whether it’s didactically engaging with themes that are unfolding in those communities, or whether it’s making visible people in the theatre who were invisible before, making new kinds of relationships to traditions, such as traditional theatre in Japan did in the 60s. Or whether it’s creating hybrid contexts for theatre and performance. And finally we, I think, Marion mentioned the cultural producer, was it Marion who mentioned the cultural producer? Creative producer, apologies. And I think on a certain level, when we’re talking about dramaturgy and the contemporary era, we’re always talking about this relation to a cultural production, whether it’s a cultural producer who activates this. Matsui-san was talking about a collaboration within the Asian cultural sphere in the 1990s and this also reminds me of the fact that this was the great era of intercultural theatre, where this was not just a process that was happening across Asian cultures but also it was in a sense a period where the monumental artists from the 60s in the west came to Asia to discover their oriental other side or something, and made those performances that we all know about, and if Rustom Bharucha was here he’d be critiquing them furiously as he’s always done. So they’re just a couple of points I think we’ve, that have been raised in this really rich series of presentations. We’ve now got – our task is to try and unpick a little bit this idea of an “Asian dramaturgy”, I don’t know whether you are willing or wanting to go to that concept in some way. How might we address the possibility, the potentiality of that term? I think moving from your individual examples into a conversation between the examples, and how might we also engage in a kind of critique of that term. Because critique is another important word that was mentioned a lot in the presentations. Would anybody like to begin the conversation there? Perhaps with a question about, perhaps maybe you have a question of another presenter about their presentation or – yeah.

CR: Inadvertently we were talking different pedagogies that emerge. And I want to go back there to ask Anuradha this question about – in the specific tradition of Indian work that you talked about, there is a guru-shishya space. And Kentaro is also referring to certain ways in which teaching occurs about Japanese tradition, if I heard it correctly. Which provides some kind of very solid base that, say, we in Malaysia-Singapore don’t have the claim to, in the same sort of way. And so we’re not considered “Asia” sometimes because when people are looking for Asian culture from a western or non-Asian perspective, even within Asia, it’s too much of a mix for it to be really “Asian”. We’re not exotic enough and we’re not pure enough, thank you. So, what happens to the role of pedagogy, even if we don’t think about guru-shishya, in these spaces that have these strong things to contend with and oppositions therefore to also percolate in what you’re doing, which I think really in Malaysia and Singapore, we’re relatively free from. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I’m not going to say, but I think it affects the way dramaturgies emerge and so yeah, I just wanted to ask you both to...

AK: I think one of the positions that could be, one of the areas that somebody like myself both as a practitioner and as a pedagogue would think is to constantly underline the fact that authenticity is actually quite recent in most forms. Particularly the form presently that is seen as “the” Indian form, that is bharatanatyam, is sort of late 1930s-40s. And other forms that are seen as “Indian” heralds are in the 1950s. So it’s an invention of tradition at a particular time. And I think as a pedagogue that would be important and as a theatre educator or as even a practitioner to say that there is not one resource from which you draw, but I think the other part would be that authenticity as even a notion – in fact has to be cut every time by the fact that all Indian bodies don’t perform in the same way. And that is an experience that I as a director or as a teacher have had non-stop. So for instance something that is in any theatre teaching institute, which body are you creating? Is this an “Indian” body? Primarily North Indian body? Primarily Hindi-speaking body? It’s an ongoing problem. And I think the problem has to be addressed by not making it invisible. And constantly saying that there is no one way. I just want to move a little to say for instance, Hindi as spoken now in India, one part of Hindi is Sanskritized, never spoken ever. It’s a constructed language that runs on the radio. So there is hardly anything that’s written in that Hindi. Hindi as we know it is a mix of various dialects, and in the way that we’ve constructed this all-India radio Hindi has pulled out dialects totally. And so what we now have is a dead language. Nobody writes in it, the Hindi that’s spoken is popular, and I think that’s important. That we should say that that’s the popular one. And there’s another little thing which is part of a kind of notion of Hindi being “Hindus speak Hindi” is another sort of interesting typographical thing that has been introduced to the 1980s – again, 1980s – is that there is a dot in the writing of Hindi that produces the word “hruh” which is part of Urdu. Now after the right-wing movement, it was removed. So you don’t say, you’ve forgotten, young people have forgotten to say “hruh”, so it’s become that you’ve taken out the Arabic sound, the Urdu sound, out of Hindi. So you have a construction once again. So I think these parts of historical ruptures and manipulations or translations I think would be part of a pedagogic relationship I think.

MDC: I think inevitably, the pedagogy changes. The context is different, the time is different, the number of hours you have with the student is different. So for example, I learnt classical Malay dance in a particular way, and when I teach the exact same dance, I’m teaching it differently from the way my guru taught me. I break it down - because I have x number of hours to get that, whereas with my guru, there was, you know, 4,000 gazillion hours. And you have a syllabus, and you have 14 weeks and so on and so forth. So you break it down and you make it into little nuggets that a 19-year-old can grasp. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. Because I’m not sure, especially - very specifically let’s say classical Malay dance - I’m not sure how much embodiment then there is because we are forced to change the pedagogy. And we have got to do it in the 14 weeks etc, so when I look eventually at what the student has achieved, and think about my own embodiment of that particular dance, it’s like okay, so that’s - but, inevitably the pedagogy has to change. The context is different, the time is different, everything is different, and if we’re still going to - at least in Malaysia, if we’re going to maintain that, it’s impossible. So that’s why it’s very interesting for me to see how when mak yong is being taught, you have the guru and the young lecturer teaching together. And that’s a very interesting dynamic going on there, and how much then the students gain from both systems. 

[KM speaks, TM translates]

KM: The names Kuo Pao Kun and Krishen Jit were mentioned as some of the gurus. Also I’ve met them in the beginning of the 80s and I was very much influenced by them as well. Especially in the aspect that we tend to think that Japan is a much more monocultural compared to other parts of Asia which is much more multicultural, but by meeting them I was taught that at the root of the Japanese culture we have multiple cultures, and that they are basically sleeping, but by meeting with them, I was inspired to be aware of this multicultural aspect of Japan.

So I was encouraged by them to go jump into this sort of new sphere of open culture that Charlene, for example, mentioned.

Also if we were to talk about a very specific situation about this sort of issues of pedagogy or training in Japan, in the 70s and 80s we can say that we have very strong basis of these different theatres, which trained the actors and the artists within these theatres, so in these theatres if you belong to a theatre, then very much your elders would train you really rigorously, and your body - the whole body transforms through being part of this theatre group. But as Peter mentioned, in the 90s we were going through this sort of bubble economy, and also this concept of postmodernism, so - it no longer these theatre groups became the body of theatre-making necessarily, and the sort of system collapsed and now we don’t have any sort of official educational institution for theatre training, so we don’t have this opportunity to really train the whole body of this sort of transforming bodies of the theatre.
I was a member of the Black Tent Theatre Company, and so in the 80s we had a lot of exchange with PETA from the Philippines. So before meeting with Pao Kun or Jit, I actually had these opportunities to encounter members of PETA, and that was very much inspirational for me, myself as well and I feel that I was very lucky because I was really in the middle of this Philippine theatre company somehow negotiating the different methodologies in the theatre and there was a lot to gain from this.

MDC: I just want to go back to something that you mentioned, Peter, on the foundational figures. I like that term, the foundational figures. I think it’s changing, and in a healthy way. It really depends on who you have sitting here. So you have us. I’m 63. I won’t reveal the ages of the rest. So yeah, my references are what happened in the 80s, because that’s when I started making work. But if you have a different group of people here, their references for Malaysia would be Mark Teh, Jo Kukathas and Loh Kok Man. That’s happening, and that’s good. So I think in Malaysia at least, yes, there’s a certain amount of deification maybe of Krishen, but I think we’ve let him die already. [laughter] It’s been 11, 12 years and - he’s dead. [laughter] I think we’ve let him go. June is like cringing there, but I think we have! At least in Malaysia, I think, really, we have. I don’t know about the rest of the world. And it really depends who is up here and who then the reference points - and I just want to ask Charlene to, before I go to the loo, [laughter] yeah I’m an old woman. I’m a pee queen. [more laughter] Cha and I were talking last night, and she talked about the history of the word ‘Asian’, which I really think you need to talk about Charlene, because then, that’s the end of this whole symposium. [laughter from everyone] Sorry, I have to go to the loo. [MDC leaves]

CR: So when I was trying to think about this panel, I’m the kind who has to write things down, so that’s why I have to look at this. I looked up the word “Asian”, which I don’t think I’d ever done before, and I was quite shocked at what I found. I didn’t go very deep into this, but basically, it seemed to suggest that the etymology of the word is Greek – uncertain, but most likely Greek – going back to 440BC and Herodotus. I think that’s how you pronounce his name. A Greek philosopher who was trying to mark out people and places towards the east that were not quite Egypt and Greek. [laughter from everyone] There be dragons, Peter says. I’m born in the year of the dragon. Me be dragon. And so then I thought, what are we asking ourselves, because is there an Asian dramaturgy? So dramaturgy is not quite an Asian word. Then “Asian” is not an Asian word. [laughter] So we’re shooting ourselves in the foot by going there. But having said that, my next point to myself was, I’m not going to deny the currency of the word, and the fact that we’re here operating within a certain framework that has a more recent history of Asian values, Asian food, you know, a currency that we’re buying into - I’m not denying that, I’m complicit in that attractiveness of a something that is defined as “Asian”. And yes, I am “Asian”. But a lot of that has to do with my context, and I think that for me again was a reminder, that even the origin of the word is about “where’s this place?” And the fact that we still struggle, as I was saying yesterday, with “west Asia” being “Asian” - they’re not even here, because there are difficulties in proving that they’re a valid part of Asia. I ask my students sometimes, when we do work that has to do with this word “Asian”, is Israel in Asia? And if you’re in Singapore, that’s a huge question to ask, because there are very specific politics about that. And they go, “no, no, no”. Then I ask: “Is Palestine in Asia?” “Uh....” then they know, okay, it’s nearby, so if we say no then it’s a bit difficult. And it’s complicated. I’m not saying I know exactly where Asia begins and ends, and of course now there’s Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and all that Central Asia which we also don’t acknowledge and admit and perform as Asia. So the dramaturgies that can be even admitted into the question of - we’re still asking, what’s east and not Greek and Egypt? So the provocation for me in my head was then, alright, I’ll go towards a kind of particularity that I understand and can speak to which is the multiplicity of Singapore, Malaysia or Malaya in the old-fashioned sense of it. And I think this question needs to not deny that “Asian” is a word that we use and we use intelligently, I’m not denying that, but sometimes our ignorance allows us a bliss that is dangerous. Really, really dangerous. Myself included. 

PE: Thank you and I think you've raised a very important point. I’d add to this complexity of terms two other factors. I think that the contemporary understanding of dramaturgy assumes a certain kind of cosmopolitanism both in its and positive and negative – I’m thinking of Nikos Papastergiadis’ use of cosmopolitanism as a very progressive idea in the arts, as a way of understanding and progressing and not just negotiating difference, but celebrating difference, I think in a very important political way. So there’s a certain kind of cosmopolitanism that is associated with the use of the term dramaturgy because it is theoretically open to those kinds of thinking about pluralities and possibilities and diversities and also ruptures and difference. Dramaturgy takes us to those questions because it makes us - reminds us of the potentiality of art to be at the side of negotiating those differences. I guess the other side of that is globalisation and the critique of globalisation. Because as we’ve not really interrogated here, and perhaps we don’t want to, there is a kind of cultural industry imperative around the term dramaturgy now that I think we need to be alive to. And perhaps we could do a panel on that specifically as a topic, because I don’t know that it needs to impinge on the richness of the political positionings of each of the speakers today, because I think in some ways that kind of debate overrides the complexity of individual situations. But I’ll just put it out there. We have 25 minutes left now, because being an academic I speak too much, and we’re going to turn it to the floor. So we invite questions from the floor in English or Japanese, or I guess we could probably deal with other languages as well and translate them. Please wait for the radio mic to come over to you, and perhaps if you could identify yourself when you - 

[Off-mic, TM has a clarification to make about translation; MDC returns to her seat]

PE: Well, [unclear], you wanted that to happen didn’t you? Yeah. So, just before we take the questions, if there are people in the room like yesterday, Japanese speakers who would like to hear a translation of the question, it’s going to be a little bit interesting in terms of ability but if you could come and sit and gather around this corner of the room, anybody who wants to do that, if you could just move there quickly now with your chair and just sit there, and you’ll be able to have a translation.

TM: So I’ll be whispering? Ok. [she translates the above into Japanese]

PE: Ok, so we’ll take the questions please, thank you.

AR: Is this switched on? My name is Anurupa Roy and my question is, really I was, it’s wonderful to hear about all the nuances that we sort of heard about within the word ‘dramaturgy’ and that we choose to question it and re-question it. I’m just wondering about the inclusion of form within the word dramaturgy. Because all the cultures, the histories, the backgrounds presented, of course I’m not talking about one single form, and since there are so many various forms, the masked actor, the actor, the dancer, the mover - I’m specifically interested in the puppeteer and puppet theatre - would dramaturgy then change from one form to another? And what would be the dynamics of that? It would be very interesting to hear a little bit. 

PE: Do you have a particular speaker whom you’d like to direct the question to, or should we just take it to the panel -

AR: - anyone who, anyone who would be open.

AK: Thank you Anurupa. I think it would change, and I think that perhaps addressing one part of what was just said about a cultural imperative about dramaturgy as something that seems to be able to address all things at all times. I think perhaps that it shouldn’t become something like that. One would have to see it as a series of strategies, which deal with particular material. And then also - make a decision in which way that material and the performance and the spectator are going to relate. So I think it would be important to factor in the fact that they are not one kind of action, but they would be several kinds I think.

UP: Hi, my name is Ugo, and I’m very interested in the, since yesterday it feels like an ongoing conversation and we become more and more specific and at the same time, at the end we have again Peter put it well, in terms of how we think about Asia, this is more like a comment rather than a question, but I keep on, because I keep on looking at the words “of roots and traditions”, and Peter talked about rhizome yesterday. What is rhizome - an interconnecting root - and also within the panel you talked about pedagogy a lot, you talked about transmission a lot, which is the etymology of the word ‘tradition’, is it? I like that possibility, the two possibilities of thinking through rhizome and thinking through tradition not as a fixed point but as a sense of movement, sense of - because it’s transmission. Marion talked about “it has to change”, the pedagogy has to change, which is that kind of question that we’ll need to think about, whether now - our fixed point has to change, right? We have to have a fluid fixed point rather than a fixed point of origin, so to speak. We talked about the possibility as Asia that is something that is being constructed but also I think it is good to remember that globalisation is not made by colonisation. It was taking place before that. Asia has already experienced globalisation before the arrival of Tomé Pires from Portugal in 1511 in Singapore. So it’s already way, way beyond that. Global exchange had already been taking place before that. In that sense, Charlene talked about not being exotic enough - I think seeing something as ‘exotic enough’ is very much perpetuating some kind of colonial gaze rather than the real, so I think this is the kind of struggle that we have to do when thinking about dramaturgy in Asia, like where to put that notion of origin, where to put that notion of exoticism, so on and so forth. We talked a lot about the dramaturgy that we do, and I’m also thinking mostly about dramaturgy that takes place on us. The dramaturgy that Peter talked about, the whole shape of the world post-world war. I’m not trying to expose my age but I keep on thinking about the 1950s as the point of origin in theatre in Asia somehow. And then the whole reconfigurations of global politics in the southern part of the world, right? Post-World War II, in the beginning of the Cold War, because within one region, we have communist genocide in Indonesia and communist murders within Southeast Asia, so two sets of extremes, and how it clearly shaped performance history that I know, I think. In Indonesia it clearly restructured our dramaturgical ideas. And yes, yeah. That’s my uh -

PE: It’s a series of comments, and I think they’re very interesting. Would the panel like to address any aspect of that? Touching very widely, I think, on histories, globalisation, traditions, transmission of traditions -

AK: Your comments are very interesting, and something that I just want to add, that there is a history we all know of the Bandung, which is something that India has completely forgotten. [noticeable murmurs of assent in the room] Right? And it’s something that the fact that the Bandung actually was an active movement talking about international, an international platform, and it had something to do with the fact that for instance, post- that, India never makes a relationship with either Africa or other countries. And that there was a magazine that was edited by the Pakistani great writer Faiz Ahmad Faiz while in Beirut. It’s a history that’s been totally erased. Very quickly, very quickly. 

CR: As you were talking, many things are happening in my head. But one of the things that struck me which I just want to mention is, it’s almost as if we have to start incorporating into our consciousness a dramaturgy of tourism. Because that’s impacting us more than I am willing to admit, I’ll be honest. It’s huge. From festivals to performances to funding, to as well as how we apprehend the dynamics and the in-between spaces, even. And I don’t think we sufficiently raised that. So, it comes out of that cosmopolitan, globalisation discoursing which tends to underrate, I think, how tourism has become, you know, I mean on the one hand insidious but on the other hand - enchanting! [she laughs] 

P: Hi, I’m Pang from Malaysia. I’m not a dramaturg, sort of apologise for this question, I feel like I’m an ally who has stepped into a support group meeting for dramaturgs. [laughter] But I’m very charmed by it, so thank you for allowing me to ask this question. I’m very fascinated by the point you made earlier about how the state may adopt dramaturgs. But to some degree I think it might have already happened, right? And whether consciously or unconsciously, I think for example when some dramaturgy focuses too much on notions of, I mean exploring notions of race and ethnicity, they end up reinstalling the traditions of the creation of these categories by states. And I think part of our roots and traditions is also, in Asia particularly, is roots and traditions of authoritarianism, dictatorship, you know and all those kinds of things that have created these categories that we are now deploying in our dramaturgy, you see. So I’m wondering in what ways sometimes dramaturgy reinforces some of this, you know, the state. And, on the other hand though, I’m thinking, those of us here who have been actually - sorry for using the word ‘assimilated’ - who have been employed by the state in various degrees to maybe, you know, organise festivals, how can we use dramaturgy within the state’s logic. Can it disrupt the state? Can the state be the audience? What tool can dramaturgy be for the state?

CR: Yeah, I was just going to say, actually Keng Sen addressed many of the things that you are talking about, so when that becomes available online, it would be very valuable to watch it. But in brief, no it’s a valid question nonetheless, I’m really saying seriously it would be valuable to watch it. But in brief I think, yes, the politics of whoever is doing the dramaturgy can make the state very much the targeted audience of sorts, in which the intent is to surface a dialogue, a performance, that would otherwise be invisible. Sometimes of course the politics of the dramaturg or whoever’s doing the dramaturgy is to reinforce. And to carry out the syllabus, make sure the curriculum is completed in 14 weeks or less. And yeah, so whether one is employed by the state or not, I think these things are very real, but I don’t think we sufficiently make them transparent, so that’s another thing that came up in the discussion yesterday with Keng Sen. To what extent can we make them transparent, whoever “we” are, and to what extent is there even interest in that transparency. Because sometimes you make them transparent, people go, “I don’t want to know, because you are making my life unhappy”. And so transparency may be this ideal and this utopia for some of us who feel this is all very important from a certain political left non-neoliberal point of view, but then for other people it’s, it’s an unpleasant rupture, undesirable rupture.

MDC: Yeah, but, at the same time, there’s a lot of subversion that can be done in 14 weeks. So it can work in so many ways. At the end of the day, the individual or the company or - there are so many ways to use whatever systems you have, systems of the state, to subvert the state. Even things like censorship. There are many ways - yesterday there was an example of how people dealt with censorship, who was it who was talking about it, Ruhanie I think, or Keng Sen. And Ruhanie. We’ve done the same thing, when there’s censorship and then you display the censorship. And in one, in a very quick example where again, the state made us cut a lot of material, so what we did was we put in the lobby of the theatre all the pages of the script which had been censored and said, this has been censored. And we had a Q&A after that to explain the whole process of all the meetings with the authorities. And the authorities came and were so happy to see that their work had been carried out. [laughter] No, no really. Really. Because they said, you know, we did it! We said yes, we will do this. And this is what they’ve - so they were pleased as punch! So there was like, triple layer of subversion going on there. And just very quickly I want to go back to form. I just want to go back to form. I think, yes, of course I think the kind of dramaturgy changes, but when one says that then we have to think about form, then one presupposes that we know that this is a particular form. But more and more so, I think, practitioners are making work which is so inter- and multidisciplinary that there is a blurring of form. I know for my own work I really don’t know what I’m making any more in terms of form, but I do know I’m making performance. So it’s a little slippery there, because we know exactly, oh, this is film, this is dance, this is theatre, this is music, when there’s just so much. And in all the traditional theatre, not just in Asia, but in the west as well, that weaving of dance, theatre, music - was very fluid. And this kind of separation that here is dance and here is theatre is something that we need to think about. 

[KM speaks, TM translates]

KM: Just to go back to Kuo Pao Kun, he was talking about the, he mentioned this thinking by Edward Said, about the role of intellectuals. And that the role of intellectuals is not to stay in the centre of society, but always to put themselves in the margin or apart from a society, and never to belong to anything and never to represent anything - represent anything as authentic. For myself, I think that’s the role of a dramaturg. And, for example, in Japan I’m also a part of selecting sometimes, sometimes I do selection, I’m part of a selection committee for funding in Japan. And I realise that it is very difficult to put myself in that standpoint of that side mentioned.
Also just one more thing, yesterday in the closed session that I mentioned, I don’t feel comfortable calling myself a dramaturg or even using the term dramaturgy for what I do. And if we take the Aristotelian, in his theory or in his study of Greek theatre, he even, when he takes on the subject of Greek tragedy, he actually skips many of the aspects of Greek tragedy, including the issues of colours for example, or the use of masks. And if you actually closely look into the origin of Greek theatre, we have a lot in common, for example, with Noh theatre. So when this sort of discussion that’s going in the west about how do we define not only maybe dramaturgy or dramaturg, but also in the wider sense of theatre, it’s very much sort of, it’s very limited and it’s very skewed as well.

PE: Well, I think in some ways you’ve taken us back to the beginning, the idea of roots, the idea of tradition, and connected it to the possibility of a dramaturgy that is shared among many places and times and is certainly something that is always existing within all aspects of performance, whether it’s performance in India, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan or elsewhere. I also think that there’s something very important about this question of dramaturgy enacting its own sense of visible politics through the form. The form speaks to an audience in certain kinds of spaces, and you have all spoken to that point very powerfully I think. And it’s my personal opinion at least that the importance of dramaturgy is that it makes that form visible within the theatrical production. It makes things visible, and you’ve all spoken about that importance. I think of theatre making things visible for the audience. Dramaturgy reminds us of the power of theatre to do that, it gives us certain techniques and technologies to do that, and in a way, it gives us a role within the theatre that might be called a dramaturg, it might be called a director, it might be called a cultural producer, who enlivens that process in the making of the work, and delivers that to an audience. So, if we were to think about that I think then we have, a certain point that is, we’ve all been talking about in some respects. We are out of time, so it’s my pleasure now to thank our very distinguished panel today, and such a wonderful discussion. Thank you very much.

[applause]