KHL: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Now we’ll come to the second roundtable. And well, this roundtable is about difference or deference, and of course, we are talking about the question of culture. And I think just now, when Charlene, in her paper, talks about when we look at intercultural, then are we looking not—is it the intercultural that happened within the body or between bodies. And I think it’s not—then there’s one more reality, which is actually then there’s another culture that may happen in the external environment that we are working in and with. And I think that’s the other kind of culture that we are probably also looking at here. And I’ve been thinking about the word “culture” also, because I went for the Cultural Leadership Forum, and the idea of culture there seems to be very, very related to a product, where it’s culture as a product. However I think since yesterday and today, we’re really looking at culture as a kind of action—how we do things. I think that then that becomes again, you know, another study of the dramaturgy of the culture in a sense, where culture then embodies and encompasses an object, whether tangible, but it also includes other intangibles—whether the economics of it and how it operates, whether we’re talking about ethnicity, or we’re talking about the environment. And they are all part of this culture. And somehow, arts become that very, very important language to talk about all this. That’s why today, I think it’s really, really interesting that we actually have to have three people here, and they will be talking about the idea of how this culture is actually mediated in performances, and especially the differences that come with it.
I will do a very quick introduction, and I think some of the friends here are of course familiar to from wherever you come from. So I will use this [REFERRING TO HANDOUT] as my intro. We have Annette, who is a writer, an actor, a broadcaster and a producer, and she’s Executive Producer of Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (CAAP), the professional company dedicated to work that gives voice to the contemporary Asian Australian experience. So she has co-directed five theatrical storytelling shows for CAAP with photographer and master storyteller William Yang, most recently The Backstories for Adelaide Festival. They have also co-dramaturged In Between Two, which is now on the Adelaide OzAsia Festival, right? This week. OK. So if you can, catch it. So Annette will be the first person to speak.
Then after that, we have Alfian. I think Singaporeans are quite familiar with—very familiar with Alfian. Resident Playwright with Singapore theatre company W!LD RICE. He has been nominated 10 times for Best Original Script at the Life Theatre Awards in Singapore, and won three of them: Landmarks, Nadirah and Kakak Kau Punya Laki, OK, and then 2016, with Hotel, which has just finished its showing here on Saturday. So Alfian has also published as a poet as well as writer. And so today, I think it will be very interesting to hear his stories as well as experience.
Next, Edwin. Edwin is a South Australian theatre-maker and Artistic Director of ActNow Theatre. His work focuses on interactive theatre and participatory storytelling, exploring social justice themes. As a community arts practitioner, he works with people with disabilities, prisoners, LGBTQ communities, young people, refugees and migrants.
So if we look at the kind of work that they do, we’re really dealing with a lot of differences and of course, in these differences, are there actually deference in the way it is actually being presented, you know, as a performative, you know, piece at the end. So I’ll now invite Annette to start. OK.
ASW: Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. I’ll like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners, traditional custodians of the land on which we meet, the Kaurna people, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
So thank you for that introduction. Contemporary Asian Australian Performance, that’s the name of our company, and that, I think, immediately signifies to you the kind of stuff we are trying to grapple with, which is totally about cultural difference, at the core of what we do as a theatre company. And for me, after listening to David and Charlene, my whole body is sort of resonating with stuff that I have heard and thinking I have not yet done. But thank you for opening a million doors for me to go down. To think about what I have done, even before taking on this company, working in the media—my background is actually in radio and television, a presenter of music programmes and experimental art and film programmes, before I then finally myself became an artist of sorts, as a writer and as an actor. So I realise that my entire professional career pretty much has been about contributing to the dramaturgy of Australian society. So thank you for that, David, and you’ve given me a sense of, you know, why I do what I do, because I love this idea that we are contributing to a dramaturgy of the place in which we live.
And using that as a context, let me tell you a little bit about the place in which we live here in Australia, coming from the perspective of a person of Asian background. Contemporary Asian Australian Performance started out as a company called Performance for A, and it was actually started by two artists, Rick Low and Paul Cordeiro, two actors-dancers-choreographers. And they started it up because they and their colleagues couldn’t get work. They wanted to create opportunities so that artists of Asian background were not excluded from the work that was being made in Australia. And I joined that company a couple of years after it began just on the board. I didn’t actively get involved in the company until Rick, who ended up being its Artistic Director, went back to Hong Kong, partly for personal reasons, but also largely because he couldn’t make headway, and his own artistic practice was suffering because he couldn’t get the kind of work that allowed him to develop as an artist. I don’t think he’s not worked a day since going back to Hong Kong. So this is a sort of industrial issue almost, the thing about finding opportunity for people who desire to work in this space and are being kept out, simply because of their—the way they look.
But for me, it’s always been about a lot more than that. For me, it has been about presenting work that reflects who we are, the substance of the work, not just the face that presents it. Coming also from television and film, you know, I sort of, for a while there, was probably one of the few Asian faces on television, and immediately had to become the face of, or the champion of, you know, representation—greater representation onscreen. And I was uncomfortable with this because to me, just having the faces there is not enough. And people sort of tried to deal with that by having so-called colour-blind casting, but we’re still playing the same sort of stereotypical roles, shallow sort of representations that have always been there. So for me, it’s always been about bringing authentic stories and deeply thought out stories and characters to a public forum, whether it be a stage or screen or whatever other ways in which art is expressed.
So that’s the sort of work that I’ve tried to do in the last four or five years, and which I’ve been leading this company. And we began with storytelling shows, which William Yang and I have co-directed together, using people from the community and helping them, facilitating, dramaturging, whatever-ing them, to tell their own stories. And this has been fantastically successful in many ways, in that people who go to the theatre all the time have found some stories that they’ve never encountered before, told in voices and perspectives that they have not encountered before. And the people themselves are bringing into theatres people who’ve never been to theatres before, because they didn’t think there was anything there that related to them. And there is that sense of empowerment of course, when you hear a story that is similar to your own being told in the public sphere. That’s incredibly powerful.
So that’s the sort of context in which we work. But we not only make work. We also have a number of programmes and initiatives which are about skilling up or providing opportunity for artists of Asian background, because we still have felt ourselves closed out from a lot of arenas like major theatre companies, for example, whether as actors or as directors or as writers. And one of the exciting things we have done, which is pertinent to the dramaturgs’ network is that with Playwriting Australia—and Tim Roseman is here from Playwriting Australia—we had an initiative about three years—we started three years ago a programme called Lotus, which was about identifying and nurturing a new generation of writing for the stage, because there were a lot of people who were not formally training in this area. We found people who had the ability to tell stories and had an ability to write, and fast-tracked them. And already this year, we have had four productions reach the stage, three of them by main stage companies. So it’s been extraordinary in that before that, there were barely a handful of plays written by people of Asian background.
So that’s the sort of work we do. And cultural difference to me always—personally speaking, difference to me has always been a virtue. That’s how I operate. I think difference provides that sort of grit and friction, the roughing up that Shawn talked about yesterday, that makes life interesting, that creates the conflict and drama that give our lives a kind of dynamic, and that’s very much what Australia is about. But unlike Singapore, where I think there’s been much more critical thought about this, in Australia, we’re still coming to terms with difference. Difference is always talked about in terms of tolerance rather than an embrace or even using it as a virtue, as a positive, as something that gives rise to so many possibilities., certainly in an artistic sense, it gives rise to all these stories that, because of racism, basically have never been told. So yeah, I see only positives in difference, and that’s how we navigate what we do.
So as an example, I’m just going to show you a little clip of In Between Two, which is the show—here it is, go ahead, watch it first.
[CLIP OF IN BETWEEN TWO SHOWN]
So that’s a little taste of the show. So In Between Two is these two hiphop artists. Joel Ma is Eurasian. His father is Chinese, his Chinese is Anglo-Australia. And James Mangohig, his mother comes from a Dutch reformist family here in Adelaide, his father is a Filipino preacher. And so the two of them are hiphop artists who have had quite a bit of success in the hiphop scene, but felt always like outsiders because of their background. So this is a show that combines storytelling with beautiful personal photographs and home movie footage with hiphop. And it is about the experience of racism, of being outsiders, but it’s also about how they have come to reconcile with that and with their family stories. And it’s interesting, this is the third iteration of the show. The first was more or less a gig, with a little bit of storytelling in it. The second was one that we premiered last year in Sydney Festival, which iwas more about the sentiment of family history and the importance of that. But this show is about—is the next step, where they have really come to understand their own stories and why it’s important for them to tell it, and put it within this context of how they deal with racism and the whole politics of being mixed heritage. And so that’s the way really our company is navigating difference, and this show is an example of it. And if you are here Thursday and Friday, or if you are in Melbourne next week, Melbourne Festival, you’ll have a chance to see the show. Thank you.
KHL: Thank you, Annette. I will go to the next speaker, because I think we need to percolate and think a bit about what she has. And I’m sure you already have some questions because I also have some questions I would like to ask Annette. Let’s go to Alfian, and then I think when Alfian’s narratives happen, we actually will have, you know, intertextually we can actually have more conversation over here. Alfian.
AS: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Heng Leun. Thank you, everyone, for turning up a public holiday for this conference. OK. So I got this title from How Ngean, and those two words there really intrigued me. I remember sending How Ngean an email. So I decided to frame this two words according to certain definitions. So “difference” I understand. “Deference” was a bit problematic. I was asking How Ngean, do you mean like Derridean difference? Do you mean deferral? Why deference? But anyway. So I—what’s that sound? OK. Oh, press down. OK. Sorry. OK, there we go. OK, so I looked at “difference” basically as the rights of the individual, non-conformity and radical subjectivity of the artists as well as art-making. But I also looked at “deference” as a case of majoritarianism, communitarian ideology, ‘Asian’—question mark—forms of social organisation, including junior/senior as well as elder/younger dynamics. So I’m looking at “deference” as that kind of submission or respect for authority.
Majoritarianism is a big issue, I feel, in various Asian societies because it often bleeds very easily into this kind of the collectivism. Also, majoritarianism is a feature of a lot of Asian country where we practice what is known as “illiberal democracy”. So we have, on the surface, free and fair elections. I mean, you have independent election observers who see that, OK, you are going through the motions, yes, it’s free and fair; there’s no ballot stuffing, not so many phantom voters. But it’s a kind of hollow democracy, right? And you are not very careful with that kind of purely electoral kind of democracy, what happens is that you don’t nurture the spirit of democracy. So it’s the kind of democracy that has the letter of democracy—and of course the danger in that is majoritarianism, because when people are, you know, when they vote, they always think, “Oh, what this means is that we are exercising the will of the majority.” But I think when you are talking about the spirit of democracy, you’re also talking about the need to protect the most vulnerable minorities in society. And I think that’s missing in a lot of these illiberal democracies, which also happen to be authoritarian states. Yeah. And Singapore is an example of an illiberal democracy and also authoritarian capitalist state, which is something quite odd to a few political theorists, because you don’t capitalism and authoritarianism. You always think democracy and capitalism go together. But authoritarian capitalism is a situation where there is a free circulation of goods and services, but no free circulation of ideas. So information is really very tightly controlled. So both Singapore and Malayia would be those kinds of societies.
OK, so I want to talk about in Singapore, I want to talk about Islam today actually. And I want to talk about this space in societies like Singapore as well as Malaysia. So we’re talking about majoritarianism, and I would like to talk about the Muslim community specifically in those countries, and this hostility actually to these minorities, seen as minority issues, progressive strains of Islam. So I know we are aware of conservatism in Islam, and people talk about Wahhabism for example. People talk about the Iranian Revolution in 1979 as a kind of export of Islamic revolutionary ideas. But I think there’s less focus on how these ideas are actually distributed and circulated in society. So I think this idea that you have Saudi Arabia, you have Iran, and they are in some kind of Sunni-Shiite rivalry, that’s only part of the picture. Of course petrodollars are responsible for the export of certain puritanical forms of Islam. But also I think within the community, certain ideas spread as well. And a lot of that has to do with, unfortunately, anti-colonial sentiment. So in many ways, your rejection of, let’s say, liberal Islam is also a rejection of what they believe is Western liberalism or things that are emanating from the West that they feel are threatening the core of Islam.
So this is a book—it’s more of a screed actually— against liberal Islam. It’s published in Malaysia by the—down there, you would see this thing called the Persatuan Islamic Malaysia, the religious authority organisation of Malaysia. And it says, “Liberal Islam: Issues and Challenges”. [REFERRING TO SLIDE] This is basically, in diagram form, what they think of liberal Islam. So you have a brain there, and it’s replaced by a doughnut. I’m not too sure why, I don’t—I think, yeah, you don’t get many clues there. So semioticians in the audience who would love to unpack this, yeah, mush, I suppose. Mush. No nutritional value, exactly, maybe junk food, right? The idea of liberal Islam is associated with materialism, no nutritional value, I suppose, which is associated with spiritual values.
OK, this is in Malay [REFERRING TO SLIDE], but I found this very interesting. So this thing circulates, not necessarily at an elite level, but you know, popularly as well, these warnings against liberal Islam. So I’ll translate that first bit. “Liberal Islam is a kind of deviant understanding that has its origins in its origin in this attitude of low confidence, of inferiority complex, and it valorises the thinking of the West by a small group of Muslims.” So we can see that kind of anti-colonial hostility being expressed in antagonism towards liberal Islam. Here, they are looking at the features of liberal Islam. They say: “The foundational features are freedom of thought,”—scary, right? Freedom of thought is seen as something dangerous—“pluralism”—“pluralism” up there, that’s defined as this idea, the ecumenical idea that all religions, you know, share certain features. Another feature they claim is “criticism of the Qur’an, criticism of the Hadiths”—which is another source for Islamic jurispridence—“the rejection of Islamic law, as well as emancipation of women.” These are considered dangerous things. Other features: “Homosexuality is allowed, there is a mixture between Western philosophies”, the—“mempejuankan”—“the championing of human rights, and influence, Orientalist influences”. The bit on the right. So it goes into the conspiratorial very fast. So you can see: “Sponsored by the United States”, “university foundations”; it talks about “the pluralism project in Harvard University”, and then it also—on this box, it talks about “sponsorships by both Christians as well as Jewish foundations”, and they have identified for you. They’re including Asia Foundation, I don’t know which one. Number one? I don’t know what this is. I know Japan Foundation has got Asia Centre. I don’t know what this is. Anyway, yeah, all these acronyms including CIA of course, favourite whipping boy, and all these acronyms. So this is something that is emerging from Indonesia. So within what we call the Nusantara, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, we have these kinds of discourses.
Next, this is from a Malaysian newspaper [REFERRING TO SLIDE]. It says “Secularism has never had a place in Malaysia”. This is a lie, a bald-face lie. It appears in the Malaysian media, you know. So it has a level of respectability, yeah, and it is a very right-wing, conservative media, especially the Malay newspapers in Malaysia. So these things circulate. And in Singapore as well, which otherwise recognises it is a secular state, we have, for example, this person, who is an Associate Professor in the Malay Studies department, and then that’s his name—Syed Muhammad Khairuddin. “Question: Dear prof, could you share about what we should do with this development called ‘liberal Islam’, which is now supporting the lesbian movement?” So, I don’t know why specifically “lesbian” and why not “gay” or “LGBT”, etc. But yeah, you know, even in Singapore, at sort of the elite academic levels, people you would assume might be a bit more sympathetic to liberal causes, these ideas have penetrated. Yeah. But like what I said, it’s really tied in with anti-colonial ideas. And this makes it very difficult to critique Islam within Islam, without being seen as a Western stooge.
So there’re glimmers of hope. It’s not all doom and gloom. This is in NGO in Malaysia which is called “Sisters in Islam”, a feminist Islamic group. So that’s the lawyer Ratna Othman, the one with the turban; Marina Mahathir, who is the daughter of an ex-Prime Minister of Malaysia; and Zainal Anwar there. Sisters in Islam, one of the more progressive bodies in Malaysia. There they are. [REFERRING TO SLIDE] “We’re all Allah’s children”, “We’ll answer to Allah”. So it’s interesting, the organisation spearheaded mainly by women, and they look at reform, Islamic reform, within areas like family law. This is Imran Tajuddin [REFERRING TO SLIDE], Singaporean, also heads this NGO, a liberal Muslim NGO which is called The Reading Group.
OK, so I want to talk about [how] given this kind of background, what are some of the challenges that are faced by people who do Malay theatre in Singapore, people who try to push for certain progressive ideas in Singapore. So this is one of the playwrights [REFERRING TO SLIDE], and she’s holding a book, an anthology of her published Malay plays. She’s been in a lot of controversies and I really respect her for that. All the way back since, I think, in the year 1990? So she did a play called Kosovo, which looked at the Bosnian crisis as it was unfolding. And in her play, there were these characters who were nuns. And she had Malay actors acting as nuns. So no problem, right? it’s acting. You’re putting on another character and the character’s habits, and that’s OK. But she—they also made the gesture, the sign of the cross on their bodies, and this was a huge controversy. The idea of that to perform this gestures is in a sense to exit Islam and to take on another religion. And this has always been a big debate within Islam, mimesis and representation. So a lot of Islamic art, for example, you see there’s aniconism, which means that, you know, it’s non-representational. There are big issues with representing the human figure, with representing, for example, even the Prophet in Islam. So you see a lot of Islamic art, it’s either calligraphy or geometric patterns, plants, foliage, but not representational figures. So how acting is located within Islamic art has always been very contentious, yeah. And some people don’t necessarily—more conservative factions among Muslims don’t actually see a separation between the actor and the character. So if you do certain things on stage, you sin. That’s that. Because it is your body. There is no way in which you can dislocate yourself, even if you are playing another [character]. So that was a big controversy.
Another controversy happened in ‘97, she did a play called Ikan Cantik. It’s a feminist Muslim play, and she had her six actors—all women, so it’s a girl power kind of play—to shave their heads bald. And in the publicity, they were bald. And then again, that was a big controversy, because apparently according to some of the Hadiths or the traditions, women who are bald are harbingers of the Apocalypse, of Doomsday, you know. And then, of course, you know, Sinéad O’Connor has been around for the longest time, the world has not ended yet. So I don’t know why they were specifically picking on these six women. So that’s Alin Mosbit.
Next is this—he looks so serious there—but this is Noor Effendy Ibrahim, also another Malay-Muslim theatre-maker in Singapore. In the year 1990, he did this very interesting play called Anak Melayu. So these are the people who have been pushing from the start. And Anak Melayu means “Malay child”, and it looked at delinquency within the Malay-Muslim community. And I think it’s one of those first few plays where we looked—where the language that is used, for example, broke from the usual convention of having literary Malay. So it’s really vernacular, street Malay; there were lots of swear word used. For his efforts, the Criminal Investigation Department, the CID in Singapore, was despatched to interview him, for the use of a few very coarse Malay words in this particular play. And that’s of course because licensing was handled by the police at that point of time. So they received complaints from the public, you know. And I think the Malay-Muslim community, because it is a minority community, there are all these questions about self-image. There are questions about performing under a majority gaze. So that space for diverse representations is always very limited. You always want to, in a sense, project your best selves, because it is a minority community that is often pathologized in Singapore. So you are a problem community; you are the most economically depressed community in Singapore, you know. And that’s a fact. So you have the Indian and the Chinese communities, the Malay community is the one that is seen as an underclass. And also there are these social problems as well. So the high prison population; there’s a drug problem. Of course, with Islam, there is also the affiliation with terrorism. Yeah. So this is Effendy Ibrahim. So from that experience, which was a play which was done in the mode of social realism, he’s moved on into a bit more abstract works. And I think those are ways for him to try to evade some of these controversies. Yeah. So he’s got a play called Ahmad for example, where there are six men, and they are all called Ahmad. When they say “Ahmad”, you don’t know who the hell they are referring to, but apparently all of them. It talked—in a way, it talks about the homogeneity of the Malay community that needs to conform. And in the whole play, as they are having dialogues and conversations, they’re just feeding bananas to one another. Yeah. So there’s a whole… what do you call that? Banana no bigger than a bunch that you carry on your shoulders in, like… “Sitanggang”, right? I don’t know what’s the English collective noun, but anyway, that’s a huge banana, and they were just feeding each other, like maybe 10 bananas throughout the whole play for each of them. So this is Noor Effendy Ibrahim.
So I want to also talk about this particular play, which became a flashpoint in Singapore. This play was done in the year 2000, and I think the term “crisis of representation” best describes it. “Talaq” is a term used in Sharia family law if you want to divorce your wife. The rights to divorce almost rests purely in the husband. So if you want to divorce your wife, you say “Talaq” one time. So if you say “Talaq” once, you can remarry. If you say it twice—so it’s three strikes and you’re out. If you say three “Talaqs”, that means you can never remarry that wife. So it’s a kind of Islamic divorce law, etc. So a playwright in Singapore, an Indian, but also a Hindu, wrote this play based on his research with this particular actress. Her name is Nargis Banu. She’s an Indian Muslim. And the play was performed in Tamil. So he interviewed her, and she talked about the domestic abuse that she suffered at the hands of her husband. She also talked about how her husband was trying to use certain Islamic verses, etc., to justify this abuse, some of which would include a Hadith which says if you are riding on a camel with your husband, and your husband wants sex at that very moment, you have to give it to him on the camel. I don’t know how that’s done. I don’t know what position is that. I mean, there’s a hump, right? So I don’t know how they do it. But you know, this is—this has been used to justify marital rape, for example, that once you are in a marriage situation, the woman has no autonomy to say no to the husband’s demand for sex. Elangovan did this, and it was done first in Tamil, actually to little fanfare. It was well reviewed etc. What happened later was in the year 2000, they wanted to translate this work into both Malay as well as English. And that’s when all hell broke loose. So again, as I mentioned just now, the idea of performing for the majority gaze, the idea of, in a sense, airing your dirty linen to a wider public. And what happened was that the license was not granted for this subsequent performance, and it was the National Arts Council actually that came in and tried to stop the performance from happening, even to the extent of telling the theatre company that had booked a theatre, “Oh, you can’t go into the theatre. If you do so, it’s considered trespassing.” There was a huge confrontation with the police. So what happened, I mean, it was a whole series of mishaps, I feel, because what happened was that—so, yesterday what Rachel said about consulting elders is very interesting. So another issue of crisis of representation, they brought in so-called “advisors” or “consultants” from the Indian-Muslim community, without knowing that this particular organisation was one of the more conservative organisations within the Muslim community. And despite this being a play about, you know, a woman, and about family and marital violence, there were no Muslim women whom they consulted at all. So it became really a case of elders within the Muslim community exerting or trying to police, you know, in a very patriarchal way what the womenfolk from the community could say. So in a sense, the National Arts Council became complicit to this kind of censorship of the more progressive voices within the community, and also women’s voices. They were complicit in the oppression of women within the Indian-Muslim community. So even before intersectionality became, you know, something that was invoked, you could see how gender as well as race and religion intersected in this case. Yeah.
So this gives you sort of a backdrop survey of what we are dealing with in Singapore. I just want to discuss a play that we did in Singapore in our attempt to carve out a space for progressive or liberal ideas in Islam. And this play is called Nadirah. We did it in 2009. This is the publicity image for the play [REFERRING TO SLIDE]. You see a woman in the middle. She’s flanked by two other people. One is a Muslim, her daughter, and she’s holding up her hands in prayer. The other man is saying grace. So this play was actually inspired by a filmmaker from Malaysia who’s called Yasmin Ahmad. She passed away very suddenly in the year 2009. And in my grief, I thought, OK, I really needed to respond to this in some way. I thought I would look at her back catalogue of films and try to write a play based on each of her films, you know, as a kind of giving them an afterlife. And she’s also an interesting figure in Malaysia. I think she’s also one of those who’s been trying to carve out a space for both multiculturalism as a response to ethno-nationalism in Malaysia, and also liberal Islam. So this is her film [REFERRING TO SLIDE]. It’s called Muallaf. “Muallaf” in Arabic means “the convert”. So this is my riff on that film, which is Nadirah. So even the… yeah, the publicity quoted the image. So the play begins with the mother and daughter praying on stage. So already, it gave the audience the sense that, OK, this is a play that’s going to be about Islam. So the dramaturgical choices we were making was: what kind of a play could we do to reach certain sectors of the Singapore audience? It was very deliberate to go to choose social realism, you know. And I know some people will say, “Oh, but that’s such a conservative form. Why are you trying to communicate to conservative audiences with a conservative form, you know? Why not challenge them? Why don’t you use more formally experimental…?” But I—we really did feel, with our understanding of the demographics of the audience, that this was something that they were familiar with, something that would not alienate them from the start. They still responded very strongly to narrative, for example. Yeah. So this is an image from the play [REFERRING TO SLIDE]. I just want to talk you through some of the characters that we have in the play. I don’t want to over-explain, but maybe you can see how they would represent certain—there’s a whole constellation, you know, of issues in the Muslim community.
So who’s Nadirah, the main character? She’s the vice-president of the university’s Muslim Society, and she plans all these inter-faith meetings with the representatives of other faith organisations. So in the play, when the play starts, the upcoming meeting that she organises, she encounters problems because the topic of on-campus evangelism is deemed too sensitive by some, especially the Christian organisations. So this is Nadirah [REFERRING TO SLIDE]. So it was important for us to go from the public—where she wears a hijab—and then to the private, to the domestic sphere, where she takes it off. And this was important for us, because again, the idea of mimesis and acting in Islam, right? And that if she doesn’t wear the hijab, it means she’s a bad Muslim. But we wanted to show that within a domestic setting, it’s just her and her mother. This is realistic. Yeah. OK, so this is her again without her hijab. There’re issues also about performing Islam, performing Muslim-ness in private as well as public contexts.
So let’s look at the mother, which I think is the crux of the story. Oh, I think I missed out a slide. Sorry. OK, so the mother there [REFERRING TO SLIDE] wearing the hijab, she’s a convert to Islam. So she’s actually a Chinese woman. She married a Malay-Muslim man, and then she converted to Islam. And then the Malay-Muslim man happens to be a Malaysian. So she went over to Malaysia, she lived a Muslim life, and then she had Nadirah, she gave birth to Nadirah, her first child and only child. The thing was that the Malay-Muslim man—so it’s not this man [REFERRING TO SLIDE], this man is later someone else who she falls in love with—the Malay-Muslim man decides to have a second wife, which is allowed within Islam. So that becomes a kind of critique of polygamy within Islam. So he wants to have a second wife, she says no. She wants to have a divorce. And under Sharia law, automatically, because Nadirah, her daughter, is less—below eight years old, she gets automatic custody. So she brings Nadirah back to Singapore, and she raises Nadirah as a very staunch Muslim, sends the girl to madrasahs etc., because she’s afraid of losing her daughter. She’s afraid of losing custody because when she first gained custody, the judge was basically saying, “You are a new convert. I don’t think you can raise your child in the Muslim manner.” So we have a situation where the mother is not so Muslim, but the daughter is very Muslim. Yeah. And then she meets this man called Robert Goh. He’s a general practitioner. He’s a Christian. And he does not wish to convert to Islam. So this becomes the inciting incident in the play. It’s an inter-faith relationship that we’re looking at. And we find Nadirah actually struggling to reconcile this idea of the inter-faith in public, and then in private, she has to deal with her mother’s inter-faith relationship.
And there’re other characters as well. This is Farouk Haji Osman [REFERRING TO SLIDE], who is the president of the Muslim Society, and he wishes to mediate, persuade Robert to either convert or Sahirah—who’s Nadirah’s mother—to abstain from civil marriage. And then lastly, we have this other character, Nadirah’s best friend. So she’s the one in red there [REFERRING TO SLIDE]. Maznah Kamsani. She’s a liberal feminist Muslim. She researches Sufi literature as a way of getting romantically close to a Turkish exchange student, and then at the end of the play, she actually wears the hijab. Yeah.
So the different characters, I think, representing different aspects of the debate. And I just want to focus on this character of Nadirah, Sahirah, and how, in our dramaturgical thinking, when we thought we wanted to play out religious freedom, but we always knew from the start that to do a play about, let’s say, a Muslim person who denounces the religion or wants to convert is really going to be a very sensitive flashpoint. We would be seen as advocating for something that was very unacceptable to the wider larger community. So we had to be very strategic. We had to really dramaturg this play. You know, and that’s why I really like today’s topic, which is social and cultural dramaturgy. What dramaturgy, for this particular audience and their particular cultural sensitivity? We knew it was going to be very taboo. We knew that apostasy was one of those taboos in Islam, it was blasphemy, etc. So the figure of Sahirah became a kind of liminal figure because she wasn’t Muslim, and then became Islam. So in a sense, you had one foot in and one foot out of the religion already. And that became a bit more palatable for our audience. Of course we have also been criticised for not pushing the envelope hard enough, if this was a kind of cop-out compromise. But we felt that this was really the only way for us to initiate that kind of dialogue, rather than have people sort of like getting defensive from the start. And also within the play, to have someone who’s a so-called liberal feminist Muslim to suddenly have this change of heart and put on the hijab was also another way for us to not appear so strident and mono-dimensional in trying to advocate for a kind of liberal Islam. It was very important.
And I think—we mentioned this yesterday, Heng Leun, when you said that you found the monologue form very political, because basically one person on stage who’s talking, and that it’s just one person. You know, in a sense, it could be an imposition of a very singular viewpoint. And I think the issue of Talaq was that you had that. You had this one woman individual with unfettered space to tell her side of the story. And of course she deserves that space. But I think important also for a play like Nadirah to sort of show the other viewpoints and give the audience a sense that their viewpoints were also given that space on stage. Yeah. I think I’ll end here. Thank you.
KHL: Thank you. I think a lot to unpack afterwards also, in terms of the representation within a body, and of course the dramaturgical choice and tools, linguistic choices, character choices, even the form itself, whether it is a monologue or it’s actually a play with—a few handers’ play, actually inform how we actually want to bring the message out through the piece. And I think that is something that—when you are, you know, dealing with this kind of space whereby at the same time, there are certain taboos that you need to challenge, you know, you have to ask yourself how far do you want to go. And so the question is: is there a self-censorship which, does it mean that if there is a self-censorship, that you are being not honest to the work, to the community that you are working with. I think those are things that dramaturgs as well as the makers have to negotiate, you know, in the process.
Let’s go to Edwin and hear his sharing. Thank you. Edwin.
EKA: It’s on? This is on? Yes, great. Thanks. Yes, so my name is Edwin, I’m the Artistic Director of a company called ActNow Theatre which is based in Adelaide. I’m going to talk about the company. I’m going to talk about three of the guiding principles that we use when we create work, and I’ll talk about two projects that we’ve created. One is called Responding to Racism which is a forum theatre show about racism, and the other was another interactive project using mobile phones to explore virtual intimacy by queer artists.
So, I think I’m going to start—I think it’s good to start by saying that I think art is not real, in the most kind of obvious way that—in the same way that the Mona Lisa is not a woman smiling; it’s a painting of a woman smiling. A performance is not—A performance about domestic violence is not domestic violence. And in the same way, our projects don’t solve problems. Our projects can signal the solutions to problems or can generate the solutions to problems that hopefully get used in the real world, but our work or art in general is not real. And I think that the unrealness of it is what is useful about art, that art takes something from the real world and places it into an unreal space, and then in that unreal space, you can look at it from different angles and talk about it, and see it for what it is, so that when you go back to the real world, you can see it differently to what it was before.
So I might just go to the next slide, which is our first guiding principle, which is “imagination”. So for us, it’s: “Creating a better world starts with imagination. We use art as a bridge between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’. Our work creates spaces for audiences, participants and artists to imagine a better world and build it.” So yeah, that’s very much about trying to create an unreal space, so that people can have conversations about something that is real, and then go out and kind of apply it to the real world. A lot of the way that we do that is through a style of theatre called forum theatre, which is basically where you show a short play that has a number of problems in it—no solution, no resolution, and you show it twice to an audience The first time, you present the problems, and you say we don’t know how to solve it. And then you go back to the start of the play, and you present it a second time, and in the second time, the audience members can come up on stage and replace characters to try to deal with the situation. So it’s very much about us not telling an audience, “This is what you should do to deal with the particular problem,” but it’s us saying, actually saying, “We want to learn from you, we want to hear ideas on how you can solve this particular problem in the community that you’re in.” It was interesting hearing some of the artists from Singapore talking about the way that forum theatre was banned in the ‘90s and is kind of starting to become more popular now, because I think it seems like there was a kind of flip in Australia, where it was really popular in the ‘90s in the kind of theatre in education movements, and then it kind of—it trailed off and became no longer—was no longer seen as being contemporary, or was kind of pooh-poohed as being this community arts practice, which I think, often, community arts now has become a lot more bourgeois and gentrified, and forum theatre is kind of being left aside. Which I think is really interesting because I think there’s a good case for the resurgence of forum theatre in Australia and all over the world because of the way that the world is changing for industries like education or politics or media. All these things like Wikipedia or Uber and social media and all that kind of stuff is all about the power structure changing from a hierarchy to a network. And that’s globally what’s going on. The biggest changes that are going on globally is yhat change in power structure, and I think the really interesting question is how art—what is the journey that art will go on to incorporate that power structure of a network.
So I might go to our next guiding principle, which is “participation”. And that is that: “Empowerment starts by taking part. We believe that in theatre, as in democracy, representation isn’t enough. We need direct participation in political processes and universal access to arts as part of daily life. We break down barriers to participation by creating work in schools, workplaces and in public spaces. Our work is participatory democracy in a theatrical form, and we want it to help make education more engaging, activism invigorating and citizenship empowering.” And to me, the thing there is representation isn’t enough. The representation is really flawed in political processes as well as in art or on stage, and that it’s not—I mean, yes, we do need much more better representation, and representation is important, but also we need direct participation and for people to actively get involved.
So I’m going to talk about this project that we did in January this year called Zero Feet Away, which was a—we described it as “an experiment in virtual intimacy”. It was a project that—It was originally commissioned by Gay Men’s Health to look at safe sex. And they had seen a show that we did around homophobia. And they thought, “Oh yeah, this is great, we want to do a forum theatre show on safe sex.” And I don’t want to talk to an audience, a bunch of strangers about their sex lives, and also, it was like, “Stop! Put a condom on!” It seemed very strange. So we did a couple of developments and designed a mobile phone app that enabled the audience to have anonymous communication with us on stage about their sex lives. And the structure of the performance was basically the artist in the space sharing their own stories about being on Grindr or having sex or what it means to be gay or queer in Adelaide in 2017. And then we would ask questions to the audience through this app, where we’d say, “What’s the best sex you’ve ever had?” or “What’s the worst sex you’ve ever had?” or “What’s something that you’ll never tell a stranger?” or you know, whatever the kind of—the questions were. And I think that project as well as the forum theatre stuff that we do and all the things that we do really looks at difference through focusing on diversity and similarities. So we’re asking questions, even just simple questions to the audience of, you know, “What’s your sexuality?”. You get this feed of responses that shows the diversity and the similarities between the people in the space.
I’ll go to the last guiding principle, which is “openness”, which is: “We are open to learn, open to share, open to collaborate, open to conversation, and open to uncertainty. We don’t know the future or hold the answers. We see our work as building the conversations that matter to people, not ending them.” Which kind of brings me to this other project, which is called Responding to Racism, which was originally commissioned by Reconciliation SA, which is a state-based organisation that focuses on aboriginal people and non-aboriginal people working, walking and learning together. They wanted to create a forum theatre show about racism, and the kind of caveat of the commission was that we also had to co-deliver a full day event that they ran, and that was structured around conversations about racism. And so that project was really interesting in terms of, it’s a forum theatre show—it’s like 90 minutes and a bit—that we do in the middle of the day. But then the three hours before and two hours afterwards, how we can structure conversations with the audience, or play games, or do exercises that are about, again, it’s about diversity and similarities, and so will—in terms of the kind of nitty-gritty stuff, we start by playing a game, “Have You Ever?”, which is a kind of modified drinking game, and people all move around if they’ve done the activity that somebody has called out. And we get people to break off into small groups, and then they find three things that they have in common with these strangers. So they might say, oh we’ve both got blue socks on, or we both go for the same football team, or whatever it is. And we kind of—we structure the days so that there’s these—it’s kind of like the concentric circle type stuff that was talked about yesterday. Well, it’s—we go from the personal to the interpersonal to the social to the group discussion and then back down, so that the conversations are kind of starting out small and getting bigger and bigger, and then going smaller and smaller again.
Yeah, so that’s—I think that’s all that I kind of wanted to talk about, and then I’m happy to go on to the Q&A part of it.
KHL: OK, thank you. I think Edwin raised the issue [of] whether art is not real, then we—Yesterday actually, we talked about the authenticity and roughness, and of course there is the idea that whether art is just representational. So if it’s representational, what’s the politicis behind it and the purpose of representation. And then of course, what is the critical distance that, after when art is being presented, you know, how does one mediate, you know, what is being represented and what is being perceived. I think those two are very important things that actually he has actually raised. I’ve actually asked the three speakers here to do this: that they actually ask each other questions, because in a way, their work resonates. I think it’ll be good to hear them asking questions of each other, after they’ve heard each other. And then from there, we extend our conversations, you know, to the audience, and then let’s hope that we’ll have more interactions in this process. Any questions from… Yes.
ASW: I’ll attempt to do that. Yes, the idea that art is not real is something that really jumped out at me because it is contrary, as you’ve rightly put it, to some of the ideas that were talked about yesterday, and also the phrase that’s come out quite a lot, talking about how art is intrinsic to everyday life. And if it’s not a real thing, how can it be intrinsic? And I guess it does come down to some degree to definition. What is an artwork? Is it the picture on the wall with the pipe? Is it the play we’ve just seen on the stage? Or does art involve everything—all the thinking and the life experiences, and the episodes that have led to the creation of that object or that moment in time? And the implications that come after the performance or exhibition of that artwork, is that all part of the art? And to me it is. Art is all of that, and for me, therefore, art is real. So we’ve heard Alfian talk about the making of this work, Nadirah, and about all the risks that are taken, real risks that are taken in presenting this work to an audience, and all the compromises, artistic decisions, dramaturgical decisions that are made to keep people safe from the law, to keep the work from being closed down, to keep from igniting a massive public response or outrage to the work. That is very real. So to me, to say art is not real doesn’t hold water. And I don’t know how you can have that parameter, art is—how you can start from that point, “Art is not real”, and make anything that can have any meaning.
EKA: Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I think you’re totally right that the relationship between art and the context in which it is presented is real, and especially in community arts, but also in other contexts. There’s real implications, and there’s real people, and there’s real meaning and all that kind of stuff. But that—it’s like, I think also play is not real, and when you have in within play, you can kind of bully people in play. But when it stops being play and starts being bullying, it’s bullying, and then it’s not play. And the play is the unrealness of something, even if it’s a play about, or playing about bullying. So I think, yes, I think you’re right. But I think it’s important that art isn’t—I think definitionally, art is not real, and it is a representation of something. But those examples are really interesting examples where it’s totally blurred. And also in forum theatre, it’s totally blurred. When you get someone that comes up, that’s kind of representing someone standing up for something, or expressing a view that they have. And on one hand, it’s a representation. But also, the magic of that kind of stuff is there is a realness of it, that this person has actually got this thing that’s going on, that they’ve come up and the act of performing it is also doing it. But I still think you are doing it in a non-real space, which is the stage.
AS: I just like it if people disagree on a forum actually, I guess. It makes things more interesting. I feel like an umpire sitting in the middle.
ASW: We’re different.
AS: Both good points, great points. Yeah, so I mean, I agree with both, I suppose. But I think, yeah, the idea of the real also brings me back to a perennial debate about representation within Islam. And you know, I’m not sure how far we’re going to push it within Singapore. The idea that the character is not the actor, the idea that if you are showing a bit of flesh on stage, it’s not really your body, it’s the character’s body. So these are things that I feel are being constantly negotiated. Yeah. So I think the issues about representation are huge, huge ones, when it comes to Islam and art and performance.
KHL: Just an observation that I had, I think along this line here, was that I was at the South Australia Gallery on Saturday. I was going through all the paintings, the portraits, especially when it goes all the way to contemporary art. Especially in the portrait part actually, you would see the portraits of usually the whites, and they are usually big portraits. But when there are portraits of, drawings of First Nations, they are usually smaller. However, as you look at the entire gallery, when it comes to the contemporary time, because of a lot of the First Nations artists start to express themselves, you find the work that they created are actually symbolic, which is very much in the culture of actually how the First Nations represent themselves. Then from that moment, you actually don’t see the faces of the First Nations in the gallery, in the art history. And that is actually a very interesting observation because then, in a way, if you look at the art history then, or visual art history, the faces of the First Nations don’t appear in those representations. So where are they and how they—how do people get, you know—Again, we go back to the visible and the invisible, the representation and the symbolic, and how do we actually negotiate what we see every day with what is being represented through art? And I think your question of whether art is real or not, or Annette, your thought about art actually go(ing) beyond the object that you see and how is it—if it’s beyond this object—how is it mediated with the reality that we have. And a lot of times, I think the power of art is that it’s not just about that object; it’s about its impact, you know, that spreads across. And how do we actually, again, look at our art and see, and how do we evaluate, especially for dramaturgs, what makes a work meaningful and real, or even authentic, or even of value?
Yes, Shawn.
Q: Sorry, just to develop that point and to, I guess, use the language of “roughness” to introduce some granularity about thinking of this discussion about representation, I mean, I’m thinking a lot about Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, right, where his proposition is this is a society of spectacles. You know, it’s not that everything is spectacle, but the fact that our relations are mediated through the spectacle, right? And so, taking that proposition, right, and insofar as we have this, you know, provisional separation of the real and representation, or the real and mimesis, I guess my provocation or my kind of curiosity is then: how is representation also kind of performative, right? So what is this representation doing? How does representation mediate reality, right? Rather than just something that floats above reality. So I mean, it’s precisely I think what you’re also trying to get at, about this mediation of the representation and the object. And I think I’m curious about the kind of specific strategies that each of you—because I see each of you have mentioned or talked about this notion of representation as well. So I’m quite curious about how each of you might have employed representation in a performative way, right? Trying to intervene into a particular kind of situation.
EKA: With some of the stuff that we do that’s more forum-focused, we’ll often say, “If you can identify with the struggle that this person is going through, then you can come up and you can represent that person, or you can be that person on the stage and try out some kind of solution.” So that, to put that ask on someone—to only do that if they can identify with the struggle is useful way to avoid people representing something that they don’t have the kind of authority of the place to represent. Yeah. But more broadly, I’m kind of not sure. Like I think with a lot of our stuff, it is just about design a space for people to be able to represent themselves, and then we just learn from them doing what they are doing. We just learn from that, and it’s just creating a space for them to do that, and then we have the conversation.
ASW: In the context of Asian Australian performance, as I think I might have mentioned, many of the roles that our actors had the opportunity to perform are largely stereotypical or very shallow. Like, when I was working as an actor, I remember I got an award for a role I played, and for the first time, I got an agent, and four opportunities to audition came my way fairly quickly, which really surprised me, given there’re so few roles for people of Asian background. And they were all very different kinds of productions. But in every single one of these four productions, the role was to play a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. And in fact, the Australian Council did a report about this issue way back, like in the year 2000, I think it was published and it was called—it was about representations, it was about the kind of roles that people of non-Anglo background had, you know. So not just Asian people, maybe Greek people and Italian background, people in the Middle East and whatever. And it was called The Greengrocer, the Cook and the Taxi Driver. That was the name of the report. So those were the sort of roles that Muslim men of non-Anglo background would be offered. And these days, there’re many young actors in our database. We have a database of about 200 actors of Asian background. And whenever you talk to the beautiful, talented, young women in particular on that database, 80% of them will tell you that the only roles they get are to play sex workers. And I thank my lucky stars that I’m not acting anymore, because one, I’m too old to be cast as a sex worker, and two, I’ve never been the sort of sexy body image, sex worker kind of thing. But there was a period two years ago when I got offered some roles to play the embittered brothel keeper, ex-sex worker still trying to keep it up! So this is really disillusioning for an artist, but also what does it say about our society or the artists in our society who can only imagine us as sex workers? So that’s an example of the sort of stuff that we’re trying to deal with. And so, for me, to try and subvert the act of representation, we’re not up to that yet. We’re trying to give a true and full and meaningful representation of the characters that we have in our works. Yeah, being able to pervert it and subvert it, well, that’s a stage yet to come.
EKA: Can I just ask, I think you said that colour-blind casting has problems in terms of it kind of reinforces stereotypes?
ASW: No, I mentioned that a lot of people think colour-blind casting is the great answer to the problem of representation. And of course as actors, you want to be able to play any kind of role. You don’t want to be limited. You want to be able to play Macbeth, even if you are Malaysian or whatever. You shouldn’t be limited if you have the ability and the skill to bring something to that role. And so colour-blind casting, I guess—but it’s not the answer and the be all and end. And it’s not enough that we are able to play roles out there. We need to have a variety of roles that also reflect our lived experience and our stories.
AS: Yeah, so that’s a good question, Shawn. I think this issue of representation, you can’t divorce it also from something, which is socially situated practice, in the sense that when you are performing a representation, you’re performing to an audience. And I think that’s where this kind of cultural and social dramaturgy comes in. It’s a very important question, I feel, because it’ll be different performing Nadirah in Singapore than to perform it in Malaysia. And in fact I didn’t want to bring it to Malaysia at all because I always had a sense that it’s a much more conservative audience out there that’s going to raise hell if we bring that work there, because it touches on certain things that, you know, that they find unpalatable, the idea that a Muslim woman can marry a non-Muslim man under civil marriage. So civil marriage is something that’s allowed in Singapore but not in Malaysia at all. You cannot have a civil marriage in Malaysia. So I thought, oh, hmm. But so then it became about then, how do we frame this work? And so one of those things that we did was to have talkback sessions with Sisters in Islam in Malaysia. That I think helped to facilitate the appearance, the emergence of this work in Malaysian society. And also I suppose that there theatre audience is already somehow a more liberal audience in Malaysia. The space is important. We performed this in Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre. So even though we had a Malay audience coming down, but already the space, you know, it’s quite a liberal space. There’ve been lots of liberal sorts of works there. Another thing was also—and this was something I realised much later—was that we are a Singaporean theatre company. So it’s easy for them to engage with some of the ideas by sort of dismissing, like, “Oh, they are Singaporeans, they’re like that. Oh, they’re not really very good Muslims.” They’re like, “They live in a secular state, so that’s why they are capable of these kinds of ideas.” So that, for some of them, it was their way of engaging, yeah, with the work. So our reputation preceded us, and I think gave us some degree of protection also. Yeah. And it was sort of in both languages, yeah yeah yeah. So that was also quite important that some of these ideas—So it was a mix of both Malay and English. And we were aware that to do the whole play in Malay would be very transgressive. I think there’s certain things that is so difficult to address in Malay. We don’t even have a term for “homosexual”, for example, in the Malay language. All the terms are slurs. So to be able to discuss homosexuality given that kind of a linguistic background is very difficult, yeah. If there’s no word for it, it doesn’t exist.
Q: Hi. I just wanted to give a personal response to Nadirah. So actually, so I’m a Muslim convert. I married a Malay boy. I actually went to watch Nadirah at quite an interesting point in my life, when I just got married. And obviously before that, you know—so sorry, indulge me a little bit—so before that, I went through the whole “Oh, why can’t we just get married because you love me? Why can’t we have a civil marriage?” You know? So I went through quite a bit of that. And then I met his family, and realised his family are really kind, nice people. And prior to that, I watched Talaq and I was like, “Oh my god, this society is crazy”, you know, when I was in my early 20s. So obviously still a slight sense of fear, even though we live in Singapore. So anyway, I mean, I met his family and realised his family was really kind, and that was really the thing that attracted me to the family, and understanding why it was really important. So then again, we got married. Then about a year and a half, when I was trying to figure out my position as a convert in the family, and trying to navigate between my Chinese family and all that, I actually went to watch Nadirah on my own. It was one of those interesting things that I couldn’t get my usual theatre kakis to go with me, because they weren’t really interested for whatever reason. I couldn’t get my husband to go because he wasn’t really interested. I think we were still at a point where he didn’t want to get into a conversation about it. And then I think actually Nadirah affirmed—I felt it represented what could be me. For me, a divorce was never an issue of—it’s just, if I have to, I’ll do it, because I never believed that two people have to stay together, you know. And it was a very interesting conversation that happened on stage, I mean, that made me think about, “Oh my god, what if I have children? Then what’s going to happen to my kid?” and you know, all those questions. But at the same time, what really touched me, and I remember up to this day, was that at one of the scenes at the end, I loved the way that it represented all the different voices in the show. And at this scene, it was a dining table scene between the mother and the daughter, and the daughter was really trying to convince the mum. Like, “Why do you want to go through this civil marriage? Don’t you love me? Don’t you want to see me in heaven we die?” And she left the table. And the mother said to herself, “Why isn’t the heaven the same? Why isn’t it the same heaven that we will go to?” And that really kind of affirmed, in myself, the idea that, you know, with religion and all the questions about it. And I decided I can go on a journey to learn about Islam, and kind of reconcile the family. So I realise now, as everybody’s talking, and I was telling How Ngean this whole dramaturgy thing is all over my head, I don’t get it. But then I realise, I think I’m dramaturging my life, because I am constantly trying to navigate this relationship between the families. I’m trying to, you know, be a good daughter-in-law. I’m trying to constantly still be a good daughter to my mum so that she doesn’t think “I’ve lost her to the Melayus” and all. And in fact, next month, my husband and I are going to move in with my mum and my dad, because they are getting on, and we’ve decided that’s what we have to do, because we don’t have children yet. And we asked my in-laws for their blessings. They were very happy. We’re very close as a family, two families. And they believe it’s important. So we’ve gone—it’s this whole big family project. My brother’s paying for the house, my second brother’s managing the renovation, and we’re moving in. And then we had to, you know, navigate the whole, OK, how do you renovate the kitchen? You need to have two different fridges because you have to have the Chinese fridge where pork will be, and the alcohol, and we have to have an Islam fridge, so that all the non—it’s true! And then you know, my mum was like, “Do you need two stoves?” I’m like, no lah, stove is the same. But I need two pots! You know? So it was a very interesting—Then we had to really went out. And I was thinking, oh my god, even the renovation! You know, my brother was saying, “Do you need an extra oven?” I’m like, yeah, because you know… So you know, and I realised that it’s the multiplicity of this whole culture and whatever we are talking about, even if I don’t actively do that in my creative practice, oh my god, I’m doing this in my life anyway. So, sorry, it was just me indulging a little bit, and then suddenly it’s all coming together because—I was telling How Ngean, “I’m not going to get this. I’m not going to—“ But then hey, I’m living it. I’m living it, man, guys. So representation’s all well and good. So just a personal response. Yeah, I’m Luanne by the way and I do theatre for young audiences. So yeah. But yes, thanks! And I love Nadirah. It was really one of those shows that was really good. Good story, well told. Thank you.
ASW: See, it’s real.
KHL: And I think that’s where dramaturgy has this aspect whereby we also have to look at the receptivity in part of the dramaturgy. And a lot of time, dramaturgs are so involved in the making of it that—For example, we use the word “social realism”, but we are looking at how the world of the play is being constructed. But the social realism whereby the audience lives may not be the same social realism as social realism that you create on stage. That mediation actually, a lot of times, has to be looked at and dealt with. And then, you know, how do we actually mediate? I keep using this word “mediate” because I think that’s the work of the dramaturg. How do they actually make sense of this language? And when it’s being performed in Malaysia, they live in a different world as what we perceive it would be. And of course, I think when we talk about colour-blinding, which is very interesting because Macbeth is no longer seen as that Scottish play. It becomes a metaphor actually. It is a different realism. And so when we access it with social realism, with a colour-blind kind of casting, we’re looking at Macbeth with a different kind of lens. So I think that’s where the dramaturgs play a lot of these kinds of conversations here. But I see someone holding the mic. Yes, please.
Q: This is a reflection and also a comment on one of Edwin’s works. As I keep working in the participatory field of theatre, etc., I keep on being reminded that that type of work is a rehearsal for life, especially for the participants. And I think the more and more I think about that, a lot of the theatre that I’m starting to see, like more traditional theatre, can be seen through that lens as well. And then, this talking about representation and also the roughness Shawn was talking about yesterday. Zero Feet Away, the work that Edwin put on, started off jubilant, started off [with] all of us expressing through our little text messages, you know. Who we were interested in, the age we were, the sexual proclivities that we may have that we may want to share publicly. And I just wanted to say that it was situated in an Adelaide nightclub and an underground—well, not underground, but on a lower level. And so we were sort of in a nightclub but it wasn’t a nightclub. It wasn’t a nightclub setting. It was starkly lit. And then at one point, the work turned, and we were remembering the Orlando shooting. And that’s where it became almost like a rehearsal for life. And it’s really interesting what you all—again, going back to representation. We were there, we were sort of sharing, and then we were in it. And there’s these layers of representation that we’re dealing with in art and non-art. And I love the fact that you can get the rough bits as well, that sort of, you know, sandpaper, these experiences. It’s just a comment. Thank you Eddie as well.
KHL: Just some words that very quickly, I will just respond from there. The word “transgression” actually keeps coming in. In the way you say it also, there’s how a work becomes transgressive. Is it overly transgressive? Is it just confrontational? To, well, there is rehearsal for life, there is also rehearsal for change. Rehearsal for revolution. So in that particular space, as you are experiencing that thing, is it really a rehearsal or is it a sort of reminder of life? And when does it then become a rehearsal—when does it then become for change and for revolution? Again, I think that’s another part of dramaturgy that we probably would also have to look at. And then within that space, there is the private and the public, the ethics behind it. At which moment should certain things be coming in, and when and where and how? I think those are equally important issues, especially when we are transgressing between the real, the authentic, and of course, we are looking into the future, and it sometimes involves the private and your own personal—I mean, he was talking about how to talk about a sex life, you know. So how do you actually enter into the private world, and yet be able then to sort of put it into a platform, such that we can share it publicly, but without actually feeling that your privacy is being infringed or being scrutinised. Yeah. Those are just questions.
Any more responses? Check the time. Yes, I think we have had quite a very, very fruitful session, I think even with more thoughts for us to carry into the afternoon, where we will have Charlene and David having a conversation. Am I right? Yes. We’ll come back at 2.30. 2.30. We have a long time for lunch, where we can, again you know, share and discuss. But thank you very much. Thanks for the sharing. Thank you, ADN, for this. Thank you. And I hope Luanne, you will have a good time flying back tonight, thinking about your dramaturgy of life. Let’s have lunch, which is part of our dramaturgy.