GEE: Hi. Good morning everybody. So since…I’m told that the word in Japanese for queer is queer. So I hope that it will translate the political aspect of what that term symbolizes in English. I will try to speak slow, if I’m moving too fast could you please moderate me?
LHN: I will moderate you.
GEE: Okay. So I would like to start by questioning if there is really such a thing as a queer or gender dramaturgies because it raises the question of whether other dramaturgies are not gendered. In fact I feel that dramaturgies is always already gendered. In terms of the conception, the process, the staging as well as the reception. And so if Haiping Yan or Barbara Friedman did not talk about feminism and theatre, would gender not exist in theatre? So do these concepts have to be summoned through language into our understanding? So with these basic questions, I would like to move on to the fact that gender dramaturgy or queer dramaturgy is relegated to the periphery whereas the universal unmarked dramaturgies you can think of Aristole to Ibsen to Miller. You can name any dramaturg who's well known and who we refer to and who has had many adaptations as the dramaturg and the feminist dramaturgy or the Chicano dramaturgy or the African American dramaturgy or the queer dramaturgy is relegated to the periphery where the centre is universal and unmarked. So this creates a problem of whether the centre can be displaced or whether our relationship to the centre will always be in terms of peripheral relationships to the centre. With this, I would like to give a brief summary of one of our recent performances. We have been asked a set of questions, a suggested list of questions, so I'm going to follow that model. So our recent performance was called “Colour of Trans” and it basically had three actors on stage. Initially, I was asked to script a few episodes for the play and another person was doing my part but after I saw it being staged, I felt that the person, the character was not doing justice to the script that I had written so at which point I joined as an actor in the play. So there are…The play is structured in terms of episodic structure with no real narrative coherence and yet there is a singular thread that connects it. If you would like to think of it as a disjointed montage that would not be far from the truth. So in terms of form, we used mixed media, we used stop motion animation and the stop motion animation bit in fact opened the play because it talked about much like Judith Butler's theory of performativity and gender, it talked about how all of us perform gender on an everyday basis and the ways in which gender has been codified is through the repetition of that performance. So I would like to show you the stop-motion animation with which we began the presentation because it places the burden of performing gender on everybody and not just the trans performers on stage.
[Video]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be girls and girls will be boys]
[Girls will be boys and boys will be girls]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Girls girls boys boys girls girls boys boys]
[Girls girls boys boys girls girls boys]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be boys and girls will be girls]
[Boys will be girls and girls will be boys]
[Girls will be boys and boys will be girls]
[Boys will be girls and girls will be boys]
[Girls girls boys boys girls]
GEE: Okay you can close that if it's disturbing the audience to see my naked bum. [Laughter] It's an opportunity. Not at all. Okay. I hope at least some of the queer people are feeling turn on seeing that especially the gay man. So you see there that the self and the performer collapses, and the self and the other collapses, and really like in most of the meet-the-artist sessions everybody would ask us more details of our lives rather than about the theatre that we did. So it's really that the narrative does not give you closure in terms of fully knowing the characters or the performers and so you're always asking for more even in terms of offstage interactions with the actors. So you would see that we have used a lot of music in the play from popular culture, from popular cinema and the aesthetic of the performance is really more plebeian which pushes against the more classical and codified kinds of performance. In terms of language, the pronouns ‘she’ and ‘he’ shifts throughout the performance and it really depends on who the speaker is. So when I play my mother on stage, I would use ‘she’. When I talk about myself and when I come on stage as myself, I would assert that the male pronouns. So you see here that this identification and identification as a tenuous relationship in queer performances, the way that we are seen and the way that we see ourselves, and this really derives from W. E. B. Du Bois, the black historian who wrote about double consciousness, how you see yourself and how the world views you, and that tension is there throughout the play. So if you were to ask me to give a summary of the play, I would be unable to do that because it is a continuum of textual readability. There are as many ways of understanding the play as there are the number of audience because for some it will be a play on trans experiences, for others it would be a play on power relationships, and yet for others it would be a play on the politics of body and governmentality so there are multiple ways of reading the play. In terms of process, this play was devised together, so we scripted parts of our own lives and we functioned as critics to each other and we also called in a few of our friends and theatre professionals to give us criticism, and with each performance based on the audience responses as well, we kept changing the play, so the play had multiple variations you know. It started with “Colour of Trans” and then it went to 2.0, 2.1 so it was almost like you update a software and you add a number at the end of it. And the people who saw the first version and the latest version, they said that it was completely different so it is constantly in process, it's not a completed work, and I think no work is complete in that sense because all of us are doing works-in- progress. In terms of dramaturgy, it's funny because there's no one single dramaturg, all of us collaborated in this. So at different venues when the dramaturg would be called onstage, a different person would go and receive the award and so it was really confusing for people because we wanted a more horizontal structure where there is no one dramaturg or director and we wanted to recognize the contributions of everyone from the person on the lights, to the sound, to the actors. So even our lights person would go up on stage and be the dramaturg at some of the performances. And as subaltern groups that do theatre, I think that our political goal is democratization, social democracy and so in the practice of theatre as well, we try to bring that social democracy. So in terms of dramaturgy, I would say that we created something, an art that is inseparable from the condition or the subject position of trans people, and much like feminist dramaturgies, we tried to deconstruct sexual difference and undermine the patriarchal power that is inherent in most social relationships. So in terms of the gaze, you know Laura Mulvey talks about the male gaze in cinema studies and Barbara Freedman talks about the disruptive gaze. I would say that we succeeded in performing two disruptive gaze and also a disrupted gaze, because in the last scene there is a scene where one of the actors comes onstage and she strips, and much like the ways in which disruptive gaze works in the sense that it is not an erotize body of a woman put there for consumption. If that is the male gaze that was viewing the performance, it would be disrupted by what it is receiving from the stage because you cannot erotizes that body or even if some people erotizes the body, there are other elements that disrupt that gaze. In terms of understanding this performance, I think it is important to briefly touch upon the dominant narratives around trans representations in the Indian subcontinent. Most representations eroticise or sensationalize or victimized, right, so this performance really questioned the process of who speaks for who, or who constructs who, and in terms of humanizing yourself to an audience that sees you as the ‘other’. You know that was really the crux of what we were trying to do in terms of a political goal. Of course, in terms of marketing, a lot of newspaper reports covered us as the first transgender theatre group in India or the first transgender play and this was limiting because it again relegated us to the periphery as a marketable object which is given a space in a liberal multiculturalism which is both oppressive and enabling at the same time. In terms of strategies of portraying the gendered body, which is another question that was posed, a lot of narratives on trans experiences centred on the body or transition, and in terms of the way that we try to portray the body. Of course, body was central to our performance but so was the relations of power between the police, who you would see between the medical establishment, between family and the people whose lives we represent. So in terms of the popular depictions of trans people in Indian cinema, in regional cinema, there's no such thing as Indian cinema because each state is almost like a country. If anybody has been to India, you would be amazed by how vast it is and how different each culture and each language is, and so you would see that there is a push against the popular depictions because one of the videos that we use in the play are clips from cinema that represents trans people, and you would see in terms of gesture and performance, you would see the juxtaposition of those stereotypes against what those trans people embody on stage, so there is a tension between what you see in front of you on stage as well as the depictions that you see in the backdrop. And this really calls into question the audience in terms of what your consciousness around trans people is structured around. And of course, it is structured around popular depictions in cinema and in popular academic writings where it's always you know the third gender, the people who are neither male nor female. So these are the kinds of ways in which we try to break out of that, we used the grotesque body exaggerated and expressive gestures as well as satire but we also mixed it with realism, because if you make it completely rooted in fantasy then there is a problem of alienating the audience because these are real lives that we are depicting. So I would like to briefly touch upon this identification as a theory that was put forward by José Muñoz. He says that it is the refusal to make oneself legible in terms of minoritarian identity positions and he uses the example of (16:21) -- who in the case of the Spiderwoman, there is this character called Valentin, who tells the gay cellmate “Be a man” and then this the cellmate turns around and says “A man? Where do you see a man?” so it questions what the assumptions around the gender roles are rather than feel ashamed at a failure at performing a masculine gender. And in 1991, González-Torres did a series of installations where the billboards were put off in New York City with a bed a pillow and the indent of two absent heads, and this is for me a good example of this identification because it does not mark you as the other but shows what your identity positions are because you nobody belongs to a singular identity, it shows your multiple identity positions in terms of absence, and I think that there is a possibility of freedom in performing this identity, and I think that this is something that I would like to explore in the next performances that I do. And in the last scene, in terms of a problem that we had which is another question that was asked, a character walks up on stage as I said before and she strips each plaster and talks about each scar that she has got from childhood till present and some of the scars are of course from the experience of being trans but some of the scars are not, and so it shows that a person who has a trans experience is not just a trans person. And in terms of problems, we again were afraid whether a woman's body being naked on the stage would be a consumable object and whether it would be rooted in victimhood, and one of the strategies that we used was to use a photograph as the backdrop, where you see a scar that I have received as a trans person in the background and you would see that there is a tension between this picture and what is enacted on stage, which is how we try to solve the problem of whether the woman's body is the commodified body rooted in victimhood, because you do not see a victim here, you see a stylized representation of someone who claims power and claims resistance. And in terms of dialogue, she tells the audience… [Referring to the picture on screen] you can close that they'll be traumatized I think…[Laughter] In terms of dialogue, you see that the character says that this is the story of my survival and my courage and this is the story of your hatred and it transforms the audience as passive spectators into active participants of that oppression. So I think the time is up, there's a lot more to say, I hope some of the points come up in the discussion, but I would like to conclude by saying that good dramaturgy is like good sex, you know it when you experience it. Thank you [Laughter/Applause]
LHN: And here we are talking about organic and inorganic. It's all sexual. Thank you so much Gee. We'll move on to Alfian now. I think we need some technical help again. Just for the ease Daniel, I think it's fine to leave it on. Really, I don't think it's that distracting.
AS: Thank you very much. So first of all, I'd like to thank the Asian Dramaturg Network as well as Japan Foundation for inviting us here today. So what I'm gonna talk about today is queer dramaturgy with a specific reference to a play that I've written called ‘Asian Boys Vol. 1’. I've written a whole series of gay plays. I retired from writing gay plays in the year 2007, for specific reasons actually, that being that for a very long time the gay play or gay theatre and Singapore seemed to be the only arena where we could potentially discuss certain issues, so we do have a state-controlled media for example in Singapore, and therefore theatre has always been tasked with that burden of representing the community giving a voice to a community, giving visibility to it. But in recent years… I have to slow down because I was… I'm sorry… I see steam in that booth, stressing out inside there. Okay, I will slow down because we have got simultaneous translation okay…So I wrote this trilogy which is called the Asian Boys trilogy so there’s Asian Boys Vol. 1, Vol. 2 and Vol. 3. So I stopped in the year 2007 because that was the year when people started to talk about gay rights, especially in Parliament, so what happened in Parliament was that they raised the issue of removing this law which is called section 377A which is a law that criminalizes homosexual acts in Singapore. Okay and also in the year 2009, we had what would be the equivalent of a gay pride event in Singapore which is called the Pink Dot event and I think that also was about this eruption of the gay discourse in a public spirit, and I think in that sense as theatre-makers we felt, okay you know, all those attempts to make the discourse public is finally entered into the national conversation and maybe we can sit back and watch what happens rather than be so invested in raising these issues. Okay so this is queer dramaturgy, I'm gonna talk about a play that was done in the year 2000 actually and we restaged it in the year 2013 and this is called ‘Asian Boys Vol. 1’. So how the play, the genesis of the play was that I was asked by the director whether I would like to adapt August Strindberg's ‘A Dream Play’ and I really liked it because I found it to be quite campy actually, the play by Strindberg, and very melodramatic and with elements of fantasy so we wanted to do this play called ‘Dream Play’ but the director said “Okay, the title I'm not sure where they could appeal to gay men…‘Dream Play’ what does it show you... rename it so he suggested why do we call it ‘Cock Show’ or ‘Dick Flick’.” and then I decided no, let's give another name, and this is ‘Asian Boys Vol. 1’, for me suggested I mean in a very literal manner what the play was gonna be about, it's gonna be about boys who happen to be Asians but by putting volume one there it also sounded like a DVD porno, porno DVD and if you google ‘Asian Boys Vol. 1’ you might stumble into one of those titles. So let's…[Projection] so I want to start with this map actually, it's a very interesting map. Does anyone know what this might represent? All those red areas? Well done, yes, this is all the parts in Asia especially East and Southeast Asia where homosexuality is illegal right or criminalized. As you can see, it includes Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, Bangladesh, India, and what do these countries have in common? Yes, the damn British give us those laws. So it's very interesting that as you can see…oops…in Indonesia, which is like a Muslim majority country, there's no anti-gay law and parts of East Asia and Indochina. Those darn British, okay. [Laughter] So I mean this is the law in the Penal Code, it's called section 377A, basically I mean it's a whole lot of legalese there , but to summarize, basically if you are caught for having gay sex in Singapore, specifically male gay sex, you can be sent to prison for two years. So how does that translate and how is that operationalize into certain censorship codes in Singapore. So we have this thing called the Media Development Authority in Singapore, most artists in Singapore will call it Media Destruction Authority because if they seem to be more obsessed with regulation than actually development. So this is this is the code, one of it…one of the things that that is stated is “Recognition of generally accepted community values and prevailing public sentiments”, so this is a way in which they try to rationalize the kinds of censorship that happens, and also you see there, “Content should be sensitive to prevailing community standards of morality and decency” how do they know what are community standards, they will once in a while roll up…kind of poll for example, which is supposed to reflect societal attitudes towards homosexuality. Okay, so this is the MDA guidelines, talks about social norms, I'll just look at the bits highlighted in pink so homosexuality is described as a non-mainstream lifestyle and also an alternative sexuality. So the classification includes this thing called ‘Restricted 18 & Above’ and this is the interesting thing about censorship in Singapore. The censors don't like to say that the censor instead there's this euphemistic language where they say they classify so the burden of censorship is always displaced onto the artists or theatre makers. So ‘Restricted 18 & Above’ would be for, as you can see there, explicit references and depictions of issues or lifestyles, number two, strong sexual verbal references, number three, three and four would be interesting because it will reveal to you a certain double-standard yeah, simulated heterosexual sexual activity…I have to slow down… simulated heterosexual sexual activity is kosher, you can have people pretending to have sex as long as it’s straight sex it's okay, but occasional sexual gestures, which includes kissing and caressing which sometimes isn't even that sexual in a homosexual context is seen the same degree of taboo as simulated straight sex. Okay, so when we take this play, ‘Asian Boys Vol. 1’, I think one of the things that I had to think about was, given this kind of censorship regime in Singapore, how do we sneak something under the censor’s noses and so in looking at a Strindberg’s Dream Play, the main protagonist is this daughter of the god ‘Indra’ so Strindberg was very influenced by Hindu philosophy and mythology and he named this particular figure ‘Agnes’ after the god of fire ‘Agni’ so I wanted to begin the play actually with a woman because I think this was one way to subvert the expectation, this is gonna be a gay play but how come the main character is actually a woman, but that was done strategically because to recognize that actually with a lot of gay people there's this idea of the queer icon right who is this woman diva goddess person known for theatricality, authenticity, strength and suffering. So, this is that particular woman, she is played by an actress called Jo Kukathas, I think that Natalie has also mentioned her, which makes us seem like the only actress available in Singapore and Malaysia to keep on playing all these roles but she's a very good actress that's why she keeps getting cast. So this is our ‘Agnes’ the daughter of god ‘Indra’. In Strindberg’s play, she has all these lines which she says “Human beings are to be pitied” which is very melodramatic and therefore in our play, in ‘Asian Boys Vol. 1’, we queered her as a figure of camp. Now and the recognition of camp relies on a coded language so gay people will be able to decode or interpret this camp. So, actually in our play, this ‘Agnes’, this woman, she's homophobic, she's an imperious entity, she believes her mission is to actually save gay men from themselves, and by doing this we're hoping okay to disarm the censors, when they look at the play and then they like oh this woman she's actually echoing some of our own beliefs, hopefully they don't see what the rest of the play is about, so it relies on this kind of secret language right, a coded language. So gay people recognize her as something that's quite opposite right, instead of being this homophobic woman, they will see her as this over-the-top tragic gay icon. So this is something that Richard Dyer has written about, “The gay sensibility holds together qualities which are otherwise antithetical: theatricality and authenticity. The sensibility holds together intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a deprecating sense of its absurdity”. So in talking about the gay icon, we also wanted to locate what is the Asian gay icon and we were looking at specifically cinematic icons. So we realized that these people were…had lives that were marked by tragedy, in their film personas, they will play roles of courtesans, concubines, prostitutes with hearts of gold, and they also had very complicated relationships with sometimes married men, which in many way mirrors gay men's own complicated and masochistic relationships with sometimes straight men. [Projection] So I'll give you a few examples, now if you see these images and then you feel something inside you, a feeling of adoration or a tendency to worship, you might be gay. Actually you are gay, so yeah. [Laughter] So this is Meena Kumari, she's an Indian queen of tragedy right and she died at 39 of alcoholism, so she died after a few weeks after this movie was made, this was her classic movie ‘Pakeezah’. We have Siput Sarawak from Singapore, Malaysia, she’s a screen villainess and the mother of this child actor also called Anita Sarawak so in many ways her life was almost like Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli as well. This is Ruan Lingyu, she had the saddest eyes in silent Chinese cinema, and she committed suicide at 24, so there's another movie made of her by Stan Lai, a gay director, so obviously such a gay icon, and then she's got the scene where she's committing suicide, she's put like opium into a bowl of porridge and then she spoons it into her mouth and she's being played by another gay icon Maggie Cheung, and as she's spooning the porridge into her mouth she goes “I'm happy, I'm happy”. If you are a gay man, you will understand this. [Laughter]. This is from Thailand, Petchara Chaowarat, known for elaborate hairstyles and her doe eyes and also for almost having gone blind, because on the film set there were all these bright lights, so she gave her life up for cinema. Okay, so this Agnes figure and I think how I wanted the state or the censors to read her, yeah. So she comes in and one of a few lines, this is what she says as she appears in the play, she was…she says “I will show them the way to true happiness. I must lead them from their false glory holes where they are looking for counterfeit crystals and dazzle them with the real diamonds of my tiara. I must teach them not to use the blood of their ancestors for nail polish and the placenta of their descendants for foundation. For I am Goddess. I am Diva. I am mother!” So how does she actually appear in the play, she actually appears in the form of a drag, of a beauty pageant, yeah, and I think gay man really have something about beauty pageants. So this is the Miss Tiffany pageant in Thailand which is specifically for transgender contestants, a very famous one. These are Filipino fans of beauty pageants and I believe they…Filipino fans of beauty pageants are in a class of their own, the kind of hysterical fervour that they watch beauty pageants is really amazing, it's almost like straight men watching soccer right, and it's the same kind of passion, is the same kind of nationalism, the same kind of fandom is involved. This…I can’t play this video but please look for it, it's absolutely hilarious, they just break down when Miss Philippines becomes the top ten. So this is Bugis Street which is a famous drag area in Singapore, very happening in the 70’s, and every year they would have this drag pageant called the beauty contest in Bugis Street and of course this was during a time when Singapore was not so sterile, when I did believe we were the drag capital of Asia before that crown was snatched away from us by Thailand. Okay, so Agnes comes down to earth in a form of beauty pageant, she even has a sash that says Miss Universe and as she comes down…so we recreate the entire format of a beauty pageant and she even requests for an interpreter because this is what you do in the Miss Universe contest, she speaks English but then the interpreter actually translates whatever she says into a weird high sounding kind of gibberish , so she comes down to earth and then she meets these transgenders and then she realizes that there are half-half and then she freaks out and she says “No. This must stop. I must reform. I must change all these people.” So we get to the next part of play which is about queering myths. So in dealing the Asian-ness and all that, I wanted to look at certain myths that we could queer in Singapore and one of them is the ‘Journey to the West’ right as a parable of enlightenment, so she's gonna bring the people, the gay people, she meets to a state of enlightenment, so she's configured as this goddess Quan Yin, also the Goddess of Mercy. Now in the story of a ‘Journey to the West’, Goddess of Mercy meets the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and in one way that the monkey is controlled is, she passes a headband to him and every time he misbehaves she will say a mantra and that headband will actually contract. So in our play, what happens is that she meets this boy and the boy becomes his guide and instead of a magic stuff, he’s got a dildo and then she passes her tiara to him instead of a headband which is a way of controlling him. So they go on this adventure, she said “Okay. Take me throughout Singapore history and I want to find the points when homosexuality appeared so that we can stop it. We can prevent it.” Okay, so one of the things I looked at it was also queer symbols. This is the rainbow flag and this is what all the colours mean but I think if you asked gay men they won't know at all, it's become sort of just a signifier. She goes through history, she goes to a gay bar in Singapore and it's all about following the colours of the magic rainbow. So she goes to a gay bar and she tells all these gay men to change and she invokes certain divinities in the process. So one of the other things that we did in the play was to also queer Singapore history, so she time travels and where does she go, she goes to a time when Singapore had rickshaw coolies. Yeah you can see rickshaw coolies, all men in a very homosocial situation smoking opium, so it was gay men smoking opium back then and these days gay men smoking crystal meth. So this is a scene in which we queered the rickshaw coolies, we suggested that they were gay and this is the massage scene and there’s this dialogue about, okay the continent is China and then the guy in front asks “So where is Singapore?” and the guy runs his finger down, and then in the script I remember writing the stage directions was “and then he fingers him” and this is interesting how the censors was so innocent, I don't know what they thought fingering meant but I guess they meant…they thought it was something innocent. So we go back also to this other figures in Singapore history, the samsui women, and we also queered them, we turned them into fag hags who were in love with the rickshaw coolies. So Agnes and the boy tried to convert those rickshaw coolies by seducing them. Okay and this was the Japanese occupation, so this was another time period, so it's an episodic structure, they went through different time periods trying to so-called stop homosexuality. We sort of queered this as well because in Singapore-Japanese occupation, the narrative is one of victimhood suffering but we had Japanese soldiers who were called (38.17) Sergeant Sanrio and Lieutenant. So another period in Singapore's history, the 1980s, so we want also to look at the enemies of the state and there was this…In Singapore, we have this thing called the Internal Security Act where there would be occasional enemies of the state whether they were communists or Marxist or in some cases even homosexuals. So we create an interrogation room setting as a way of solidarity between gay people as well as other kinds of politically persecuted figures in Singapore history. So we wanted to also dramaturgically not look at the Aristotelian kind of form but interestingly I would say a kind of a dream logic where actually Agnes undergoes a kind of transformation which isn't psychologically explained actually. Along the way she changes her mind and then she goes to…So this is actually gay app, she goes to a gay app and she finds all these characters with nicknames that are from “Journey to the West” so there's a character called ‘Pixie’, a character called ‘Sandy’ and ‘Monkey’ and then she meets them and she realizes that her task is futile, she can't change them and she gives them this mantra which is “I will not find heaven in an orgy room. I will not find hell on an empty bed. There is no goddess in the sky. There is no other goddess but I.” So this is very long so maybe we'll have to skip because…but basically what she's saying is…or maybe I can just go through this…very short, we are near the end anyway…okay so she asked “Why does the magic rainbow have six colours? And why do you have to keep searching for that missing colour? Because it is your soul that is looking for that colour. Before you were born, your soul was looking for certain lessons from life in its journey from body to body. Maybe the lesson it wanted to learn was about truth. Nobody knows more about the dangers and the agony of telling the truth than a gay man. Or maybe it wanted to learn about loneliness. Or fear. Or confusion. So it chose this body that will teach it all these important but painful lessons. It chose your body.” So I'm gonna go into this thing which might be a provocation, might be a bit problematic, because in trying to look at Asian notions of queerness, what Agnes was offering inside this, was this idea of a…was a challenge to this idea of an essentialist, authentic gay self and by talking about theories of rebirth, about a soul that migrates from body to body, she passes a possibility of multiple selves and sexual fluidity, so she talks about the negotiations between an authentic self and a theatrical self, and I think it's a way of grappling with this idea about, are there Asian ways of being gay that's different from certain western models with its emphasis on let's say being true to yourself, the authentic gay self, right, the idea of coming out. I think in Asian societies coming out is very problematic and I would like to contest the idea that one is a lesser gay man by not coming out. Now, because they're issues about performativity as well so there is roles that you actually play in Asian societies, you are an authentic gay person but you are no less an authentic son or brother or all these other identities and roles. Yeah so I'm trying to deprioritize that moment of coming out as a way of coming to terms with an essential gay self so I'm basically talking about gay liberation from identity politics rather than gay liberation through identity politics. So I’ll skip those other points and I'll just show you this last scene. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. [Applause]
LHN: Thank you. We’ll move on quickly then to Takao. We don't waste time. You want to switch places? Sure.
TK: [Video] Pardon the self-introduction [Laughter] This video clip was made in 2008, precisely for TPAM presentation which was not in Yokohama but it was still in Tokyo…and I…and talking about coming out you said coming out, maybe I thought I would coming out to the performing arts community but that was not true because I had made a gay theme dance performance in the year 2000 with four other gay girls and boys to make dance performance. Which started, when you go into the theatre, there's a big curtain that says ‘I would never masturbate again’ in Japanese with a character…one character, one letter, one (45:20)mirror large so it's really big, and audience just come from this ‘I would never masturbate again’ which in Japan, as well as in other countries as well, that talking about sex so explicitly is almost taboo. So people were saying they pretended, they were coming into the theatre and they pretended not to see and they quietly sit themselves in the seats and then when the show started, the huge wig drag queen came out from the behind the audience seats and going down the slope introducing the…thank you for coming etc…and then she…he gets to the stage, whistles, and this big curtain with the manifestation dropped and the race started. So, well talking about coming out and talking about gay and homosexuality in Japanese performing arts scenes, the most notable performance and piece of work, piece of performing art, undeniably (46:40) ‘SN’ by -- in 1993 I think, and coming out was big, and this piece…I'm not going to into details because you can…probably you have better knowledge than I do, so I’ll skip it so… Since then I have been making here and there some gay related or some performances with some gay elements talking about gay or sexual life or my…Because I have been making a series of performance called ‘A Perfect Life’ which is to talk about myself, personal things, and in which inevitably this sexuality and issue come up. For example, ‘A Perfect Life – vol.3 Omotesando’ which depicted about my relationship twelve years before which broke up and I told the story of how I break up with my then boyfriend John. So probably everybody in this, in the performing arts community, know, must know my sexual preferences and sexual identity. Then last year in January 2016, I made another performance in Tokyo. But prior to that in 2014, a friend of mine, he is a American professor in Los Angeles who specializes in Japanese experimental cinema in the 60s and also he teaches queer studies, came up with this idea. Jonathan said there's this interesting manuscript in the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian archives which is the manuscript by the sociologist Laud Humphreys in the 60s, who made a close and sociological observation and research on male to male sex in public toilets, and he wrote a book called ‘Tearoom Trade’, and this manuscript, there are 50 valid samples, so there must be lots of other invalid samples in which he puts diagram of people moving inside the toilet, A went this etc, so in a way very choreographic and also the minute detailed description of the actions that took place in the space were detailed. And so we wanted to make a performance based on that and then we made a work-in-progress presentation in April 2015 and another short version performance in 2018 and August 2015 in Los Angeles which we made a full length performance in Tokyo on January 2016, which I would like to show a slideshow of the photographs that he did. The music was done by Onda Aki who is here now. The performance was quite long, almost 2 hours and were in two parts. First part, I think you will see parts of the manuscript in the photos if you keep looking at it and…this is rather in the second part, but we start the slideshow in the second part of the piece. The first half…So I’ll briefly explain how the performance was, The first part half was the re-enactment of the systematic observation sheet from Laud Humphreys’s manuscript which the actors acted out the manuscripts, what was written in manuscripts, like a person A goes into the toilet and you understand that the urinal, the man O goes to the window and looks out the window and then B comes in and X goes into the stall so A’s eyes, B, and X and goes, follows into the store and start sucking, stuff like that. So we put the text on the screen and I read out all those text instructions so that people, performers could follow the instruction and act out what was…what must have happened in the 1967 March 14th in the afternoon from 3:15 to 3:30 p.m., the weather was fine, the temperature was this, etc. In this re-enactment, we also invited the public, the audience to come up on stage and experience this, and the cast was a mixed mix of boys and girls and also the audience was invited no matter men or women and followed the instructions to move in the space. The space was here, we made a transparent…how do you call transparent…these…to make the walls to represent the space, and there were some holes in it to represent glory hole which he mentioned. And the second part, we then imagined this as the…how to say…construction of queer bodies and rather more freer interpretation of the image of clear bodies and gay sensibilities and behaviours. While these things are going on in the back, we projected the slogans, gay slogans, which were really broadly circulated especially in American fights against AIDS, a lot of them from ACT UP and going from 2016/15 when the gay marriage was legalized, back in time to the 1969 when Christopher Street riot happened. So all these gay slogans were projected so that…okay… so that is the rough structure of the performance, there were a couple more other scenes but more sort of an imagery scenes. I'm not so familiar with gay theory so I cannot really put this in correct terms but I’ll try to explain what was the agenda in this performance. With the legalization of gay marriage in the United States in 1915…was it…1915 wasn’t in…1916…no no sorry 2015, I'm sorry [Laughter]. Okay so in the same year, the same-sex partnership act were passed in some of the local governments in Japan including Shibuya-ku, and Setagaya-ku, and Naha in Okinawa prefecture as well. Then we could view this as one goal that has been achieved in the history of gay liberation that we have reached a coming out - the peak. And then we...but at the same time, I have been feeling that the gay community or gay men have become really conservative in their taste, and in their way of life, and in their way of thinking, and this world ‘shiny gay’ in Japan is being said now, shiny means rich, educated, stylized, stylish, and a very respectable being. There's this thing, when gay men, and same-sex marriage, and gay rights are approved, the gays are becoming proper citizen having a good place in society, but isn't it at the same time that the gays are…I know…(58.40)(He speaks Japanese here)
LHN: Takao, I’m so sorry. The trouble is that…
TK: I know… yes
LHN: So we will have to run and get this…can you try
TK: It’s okay…I will speak in English.
LHN: Thank you
TK: Okay, so the gays are becoming proper citizens but it could also mean that gays are giving up the identity and becoming a member of heteronormative society, yeah simulation. But a long time ago, weren’t we really being renegades against this heteronormative society and how can we…we have developed all these subcultures and rich history of abnormal actions and tastes and so I really wanted…so that questioning was the main point. But the problem of doing that is that the society at large, the audience at large in Japan, did not necessarily have this knowledge of gay identity. When I said gay is becoming conservative, they went ‘Huh?’. You know gay is liberal, gay is something new, gay is etc. So many people really confused why is gay becoming conservative so it was okay… the dramaturgy…By the way, this is the observation sheet with the lines and stuff. The producers said, the venue producers said this has to…because the venue Spiral Hall put some money too and they said we don't want this to become exclusively for small community of gay men, and my production producer said now we are in the gay age with the same-sex partnership acts being passed that we LGBTQ, term which I didn't like, was being used in the publicity materials, and so that lot of press attention came, and a lot of people really helped support financially and with publicity, we have gotten grants from Arts Council Tokyo and another grant which I cannot really remember the name in English. And so, we had to make this performance understandable to larger population and we cannot take for granted the gay history, so we had a lot of problems and questions on how to deal with this situation, since we put up a lot of materials on the foyer so that people can read and people can look at and I think the best option that we chose was to invite the audience into this re-enactment. And from now on, I would like to continue working on this project because the mission, if there's such a mission, has not been completely fulfilled, so and rather than…probably I would like to continue on this project with creating the queer bodies, what is a queer body is a big question, but more sort of series of queer bodies what can be queer bodies, reflecting upon what has been talked about in this toilet story.
LHN: Thank you. [Applause] We have about 20 minutes for questions and propagation so I'm not gonna waste time. Here we go. Mics please. Zihan.
AUD: I guess Alfian's point really underscores certain kind of focus that we could probably invest in for today. Listening to Takao’s presentation, I'm just thinking what is the…was there an evaluation or I guess turn that happens in a performance asking why all these asian bodies are performing the gestures and choreography of white male people in another space, in another country, instead of something that belongs in Japan, which thus even though I'm not Japanese, like I have a long kind of culture or history with queerness. At that time, would be like Matsumoto and funeral parade of roses, you know.
LHN: You caught the question? No…We are just going to go straight to address the question first, sorry. I'm gonna be quite a militant about trafficking.
TK: Okay so, I understand the problem and we…there's this thing, we have a long tradition of homosexuality and in the long history in the theatre, in the arts, in the whatever, but in modern Japan, the piece of art that talked about gay sexuality or sexuality in especially homosexuality it's very few, very few and almost non-existent in the performing arts except for 1:05:53(--) and some that I have done, and apart from that I don't really know. And traditionally in Japan being homosexual wasn't being regarded, not so bad, as far as you fulfilled the norms in heterosexual society which is getting married, and having children, and succeed the family, and but… and as far as you keep quiet. So what if you start thinking not getting married, not having children, but live with another person of same-sex and pursue that kind of lifestyle, which have been probably deeply influenced by Western culture especially American after the war and the US occupation. Once we get that idea and pursue the gay ‘gay’ lifestyle, you really have to make manifestation of your position in society. If you want to go and not really subjugate to heteronormativity. Plus there's this, this in Japan, the sexual nationwide sexual harassment where all the posters in TV videos and commercial films are filled with very cute, sweet woman's smile waving at you and the…you know. So in that context, I thought I would stand up and go ahead, ask for it but…
LHN: Does that answer? I think it went a bit off track if I… I think let me try and paraphrase Zihan’s question. I think the question, the simplified question was, why are we as Asians choosing to look at this sexual behaviour from the western world, basically yeah. Is that correct?
AUD: More specifically, like Western queer archives.
LHN: Western queer archives.
AUD: Because I've been guilty of doing too.
LHN: Sure. Is there another way to ask it? Are there Japanese queer archives that you could have done research?
AUD: Like constructing our own archives instead of tapping into…
TK: There is no one place where everything is archived. There are lots of literature, there are lots of magazines, but I don't think this toilet research, somebody has done a little toilet research I have heard, but nothing substantial came out as a result, and I personally have not been able to find any resource for that kind of material in Japan, but I…So my approach was to bring that as a catalysis into Japanese audience, and for them to…because toilet cruising is not alien in Japan either. Yeah.
LHN: Okay thank you. (1:09:51) Pang and then…okay thank you Shintaro for disrupting.
AUD: Because sorry…I just wanted to make one comment to Takao’s show which I attended with great pleasure, and the performance…the use of those archive documents from the United States was justified one on one hand because that Takao was always one of the most westernized figure of the Japanese performing arts, and another thing that welcome Takao is one of the few English speaking performance artists in Japan, and then a second, Jonathan M. Hall, Takao was talking about who teaches at UCLA, ya, no in LA, in the university, he's an academic and that…and in the show it was quite clear that it was taken out of the American archive and we…you know and there was nothing that suggested that we were using it as our own documents or as our own history or something…
LHN: Great! Okay thanks Shintaro, moving on! Sorry, back to (1:11:20) Pang.
AUD: Hi. I'm very excited by the title of this panel queer dramaturgies and I want to see in it the potential of a dramaturgy that is…I mean of queering dramaturgy as opposed to dramaturgy for queer bodies and I think I hear hints of it in some of your presentations, the way you talk about different models or dramaturgy impact, (1:11:52) visuallizing your dramaturgs as well on stage and your resistance to not create any more gay plays, and I recognize that as a strategy of understanding how a space contains his voice and content. A space proposes and limits the kind of voice that’s possible in it and so sometimes we want to get out that. And of course your whole resistance towards heteronormativity and also therefore homonormativity, right. However I want…I'm thinking based on the book I've recently read on an anarchism and sexuality, an essay by Gavin Brown, proposes that queer is not about identities, queer is about challenging binaries, about opposing gender fixities and things like that right, and in fact queer proposes ethics, the ethics of a sex positive non-hierarchical relationships. So given that idea that queer is not just about bodies and identities but a proposal, a new manifesto of ethics, can there be queer dramaturgy for non queer bodies or for all bodies in fact. In fact, so even for Alfian, can you return to…can your theatre that you write bring queer dramaturgy to your non queer place, you know. And this question applies for everyone as well.
LHN: Would anyone like to start first? Or Gee?
GEE: I agree with you which is why I began by a questioning whether there is such a thing that's distinctly separate as queer dramaturgy and I think there can be because queer as you said is a proposal, it is a call and it is a universal call and across sexualities people can be queer and I believe that, and I think there is an easy link between gay men and queer which I'm seeing on this panel as well, and I think that we should note this because the absence of any women, I mean I'm a man of trans experience I come from a different history but the absence of any women on this panel really shows the conservative masculinist impulses in queer politics and I know that there are a lot of…
LHN: (1:14:22) Inaudible I am [Applause]
GEE: I cannot forget…I really cannot forget where I come from so I thought that it is my political duty to point that out, and I believe that a lot of my cisgender heterosexual friends are in fact queer in terms of queer as practice, and in terms of dramaturgy I think that a lot of feminists dramaturgy talks about the transfer… the Aristotelian model where there is a transformation of the self on stage, a recognition, a movement from ignorance to knowledge if you will and I think the possibility of queer dramaturgy is not the transformation of the self on stage but the transformation of the audience from a position of not knowing to a position of trying to grasp and not fully knowing. So I think that is the potential.
AS: Actually I wanna address something that Zihan has mentioned actually which is about in doing queer theatre and maybe specific Asian queer theatre, why are we not somehow reclaiming some of our own histories and I want to say that sometimes we try but then we cannot decontextualize those particular moments right, so I know like within Asian histories, within Chinese culture, Emperors had concubines for example and there's a bushido code in Japan, but though I think there's always a danger of importing those kinds of discourses and also inevitably importing also the kind of feudal structures that exist and those kinds of power asymmetries as well right, so to be careful about that in researching let's say in instances of gay moments and in Singapore history, I came across this account of brothels in Singapore where there were Hainanese prostitutes who were servicing British gay men yeah, but I am a bit wary of using that in the play because you don't know whether it's gay for pay, you don't know whether they're elements of coercion involved, there's definitely some kind of a power relation there because British imperialists and these Hainanese Chinese boys who are serving them right, so I think we have to be careful about that, what were those actual relationships like, within what particular structures of exploitation or asymmetry yeah, and I think it's very dangerous to somehow idealize those and say that there is a very direct continuity between that and our contemporary gay identity and existence. As to your queer dramaturgy thing, I would say…okay so the thing about stopping writing gay plays and then having something like pink dot for example supplanting it in the public space, it's interesting though what you mentioned because I also now see that sometimes those acts of visibility and representation fall into this rubric of respectability politics right, and I think that's where theatre still has a role to play in proposing an alternative, more radical politics to that. I think in Singapore especially this desire, anxiety to be accept that has resulted in a lot of a mainstreaming of gay identity so the image of the gay person and in Singapore is Chinese, male, middle class male. Yes, I hear you, yes women are invisibilize in queer discourses, it is true. So yeah so that's true and I think theatre can hopefully (1:18:08) posed a challenge to that.
TK: I don't know if I'm going to answer that question but I thought this queer…if queer originally belongs to gay but not really, but I know, but maybe they not so relevant now but the…in Japan, the gay, homosexual sexual, homosexual erotics have been consumed by largely consumed by women also, and women write and draw all the comics and literature in which boys have extreme sex and large number of women read and consume and produce that. Also I've been directing lesbian and gay film festival from… I was a director from 95 to 99 and there were the audience number was growing large but non-gay, male-female couples, a lot of them come to watch gay films and women they also come, and which is very peculiar if you look at other film festivals in other countries, and I don't really know how to read this in terms of queer dramaturgy applied into non-queer bodies, but kind of thought would be interesting to mention.
LHN: We have a question there right.
AUD: Hi. Sorry I'm based in Brooklyn, New York where even there I guess where it's supposedly more progressive even in the art scene, the contemporary art scene and also the drag and nightlife scene are still primarily male-dominated which is I think interesting and not to talk too much because I'm a white presenting gay male again but um… and thank you for acknowledging that the voices heard today are primarily male as well but if I may, I'd actually be interested to hear from a woman or a woman identified person in the…who's here about where you may be feel there are gaps and opportunities for expression and also…in especially in Japan at least access to traditional forms that as I understand are still barred from women.
LHN: Do we have someone who could actually address that or here who can address or who would like to address that. I'm afraid … there we go. Not exactly Japan but…
AUD: Not Japan but I feel very strongly about adding something to this. A couple of thoughts that went through my head as you spoke about actually the legislating of queer bodies, one of the things that has happened in the Sri Lankan context is that while we have the unique kind of…Oh we have…we share the common penal code that legislates against the male body, interestingly I saw the word male in the laws, in section 365A in the Sri Lankan Penal Code. As the feminist lobbied for three kinds of rights in Sri Lanka in the 1990s, speaking about abortion, speaking about domestic violence, and also decriminalizing homosexuality. One of the things that happened was 365A was they kind of took out male and they included any person which interestingly quote/unquote equalized the law to criminalize a body, so suddenly the woman's body became present in the law, and so for me that that kind of regressive step asks a different kind of question also about how that kind, that particularity of the body is absent and present, legal and illegal, made visible and invisible at the same time, so it's quite interesting to hear this conversation in terms of how we make ourselves present and how we make our voices present in particular kind of spaces, and what queer dramaturgy kind of affords us and this idea of transfeminism in terms of how alliances are formed to create context for certain voices, and this is a conversation I was having last night at the dive, the dodgy bar that we went to, which is that I was on a performance-art platform recently and I kind of observed the women and I was one of the woman who were sort of on the street creating performance art pieces, and where the male bodies are able to kind of, and I'm sorry that I'm also speaking in certain kind of binaries as well, there's a way in which a man performance artist can stand on the street and take his clothes off, iron his underwear, in a more kind of conceptual space whereas the body that signifies differently still can't do it. So when the women were kind of creating performance art pieces, they were still talking about standing at the bus stop or walking on the road and trying to figure out what the violence of eve-teasing is or you know somebody saying something to you. So sometimes…
LHN: Sorry, I’m just gonna really stop you right there. Could you just explain to the rest of us eve-teasing?
AUD: Okay so the kind of catcalling and all of that that goes on the road, when you occupy a body that's not normative right, so that was as basic as what our project was right, we just want to stand in a public space and occupy that body and I think more and more of an awareness and I'm really glad you went into that, more and more of an awareness of occupying that body politics and seeing how that can actually queer our way of seeing and our way of thinking about the work we're making might be something that's interesting for us to think about. So I'm sorry I'm not Japanese but I felt very strongly about that.
LHN: No, no, thank you so much for that comment. One…I'm gonna push it as a one last burning question…and might be…yeah it might be…no really…yes Charlene.
AUD: It's a very simple question but one I've wanted to ask in different contexts but now particularly this question. The difference between gay and homosexual in relation to the performativity of it, because sometimes you were using the word interchangeably and sometimes it wasn't interchangeable, and I was reading my own interpretations of that which I'm not sure are the kinds of interpretations you meant, but they seem to be differences and they seemed to be slippages that came in and out of, so then that pertains for me too then the question of queering and queer in relation to genders and then sexualities, because that's another layer that emerges in this question and questioning.
LHN: Well Alfian has been going umm or Gee would you like to take that. I’m out of my depth here so…
GEE: So I believe that the difference between homosexual as a term and gay as a term would be that homosexuality is rooted in a medicalised history of having criminalized same-sex relationships specifically after the AIDS epidemic, so to speak, hit and then the new imperialist guilt of the first world of course resulted in the pumping of resources to the third world to stop this epidemic. So homosexuality is rooted in that medicalized pathologized history of same-sex relationships, whereas gay was more a term of self-identity that was asserted and pushed against something that was used to describe the community. So it's more…it would be useful in to think of it in terms of what people were called and what people call themselves, and queer also is a term that was asserted initially it was used in a derogatory sense to refer to people and then fag, queer, all of these terms have been taken back, reclaimed in a certain sense, yes we are queer, yes we are fag, so what you know, so it was a strategy to assert using the very terms that were used to insult. And similarly you would see a parallel between the word transsexual and transgender, transsexual is rooted in the medicalised history, the pathologized history, of having a psychological disorder so to speak, I have two psychiatric certificates that say that I have a gender identity disorder and till today we are pathologized as having some kind of disorder and it was rooted in whether you medically transition or not, so what your body looks like. Whereas transgender has been used as an umbrella term, regardless of whether you go through any interventions in a more deep pathologize sense by the community ourselves, so we have abandoned the use of the word transsexual and taken on the use of the word transgender. Thank you.
LHN: On that very very informative note, I'm afraid I have to call the close to this session. Please big applause for our three speakers.