RL: Welcome back to ADN this afternoon. We’re very happy to have you with us. My name is Robin Loon, I am the provocateur for this session, which means that I’ll be moderating. It gives me great pleasure to introduce and invite the four speakers for today’s roundtable to take their seats: Jae Lee Kim, Li Yinan, Ugoran, and Tzu Nyen.
The topic today is “The Political in the Arts.” There will be on-the-spot interpretation of the speeches in English and Japanese for those of you who require it. So, I propose that what we do today is, we will invite the speakers to talk about their experiences vis-à-vis this topic, and then we’ll leave the last 30 to 45 minutes for question and answer from the floor. So, we’ll start with Jae Lee Kim.
JLK: Thank you. I am Jae Lee Kim from South Korea. I have worked as a dramaturg in the Korean National Contemporary Dance Company, and now I am working as an independent dramaturg in South Korea, so this is a great opportunity for me to share my ideas and thoughts from my dramaturgical experience. I’m pretty nervous to be the first speaker here {chuckles}.
I’m going to present one of my projects of dramaturgy. In the last five years, I had many opportunities to [be] involved [in the] artistic process as a dramaturg. Dramaturg, dramaturgy, [are still] new concept[s] in South Korea, but some institutions and independent choreographers want to invite dramaturgs into their artistic process. I mostly collaborate with some artists, they’re from contemporary dance and performing arts. They have very strong political questions, [from] contemporary dance—from questioning politics and rethinking about the process of art-working, and choreography, and the new form of art. In the field of art today, politics and art are very closely connected, I think. I believe that we are all witness[es] to this kind of phenomenon.
I would like to introduce one of my works, it’s considered as critical art in [the] relationship between institution[s] and [the] body in dance. This piece is meaningful for me because it is an example of the young generation within [the] Korean context. They are presenting their political stance as a choreographer, and they are upholding criticism about institution[s] and traditional thought, and education, [and] it’s all from the context of Korean history.
The title is Glory. I’m going to present a piece of Glory. I’m going to read all this interpretation and background. Glory is about how institutions manage and control the body, by intersecting Korean military service and dance competition. In the last 60 years, after the Korean War, every male over 18 years old and more must serve in the military in Korea. In the dance field, if a male dancer gets the first prize in a certain dance competition, they are going to be released from obligatory military service. The choreographer in Glory observed this situation for quite a long time, and explored how social institutions control bodies, and then again how this affect created a trend of dance.
Glory is not about the personal work, arising from the Korean context, but [is] also connected to the criticism of modernity in contemporary art. The criticism of modernity, such as human alienation, and materialization, and control of the body have been discussed in both postmodern dance and contemporary dance. However, the reality of dancing inside the institutional system nowadays is contrary to this kind of critique.
Glory asked the question, whether the body and dance can be subjective in our society. Through the territorial issues stemming from Korean peninsular division and the nation-established military systems, all males are controlled within the territorial command, and the dance that issues their freedom for about two years. Glory focuses on the paradox between the soldier who lives for the glory of protecting their country, and the dancer seeking glory to escape from it. Can an individual or even an art form be politically independent in this situation? That was a main question in this piece. In this piece, the dramaturg’s main task was [to] consider not only the piece itself, but also [to] research to enlarge the institutional or the social dimension.
I propose the formal concept of “choreographic documentary.” If anyone is familiar with this concept, I just used this word, I don’t know if I made it up or if somebody used this concept already. Choreographic documentary means to create the mechanism of a performance based on real documents. We collected the data by interviewing the dancers who had been victorious or unsuccessful in competition. We [traced] their physical experience in order to establish the structure of the choreography. My main focus is not directly dramaturgy work, it’s just expanded choreography, because we are working in [the] process of choreography.
What is critical here [is to] specify the main medium of choreography, focusing on the body, activity, and the physical aspect of thought. This is because the purpose of the work[‘s] critical attitude will not limit it to criticize institutions, but [will] also include developments into the art form, [into] the hold on the aesthetic attitude of dance. I think that this a political artist- you mentioned before, just thinking about political artists and then activists, it’s a little bit different from the perspective of aesthetics, so the choreographer is quite interested in the process of choreography, rather than just asking some questions about the political. Before I go further, I’ll just show a little video clip of how this look like.
(Onscreen: Glory promotional poster appears first. Voiceover audio in French, with subtitles, describes the background context of Korean military service and exemptions. Two dancers are onstage, one remaining stationary, the other walking slowly, downstage then upstage, back-and-forth, several times.)
This piece has premiered in Danse Élargie in France, so we speak a little French, and English and a little bit of Korean, we mixed all the languages for the piece.
(Onscreen: dancer dressed in white moves to center stage, while the grey-clad dancer moves offstage.)
I’ll just show you two minutes. He is the main dancer, kind of the victim of the institution in Korea. The choreographer and I found a lot in common between the dance movements and the military-service kind of training, so we just play with this and then make some composition. We are using this kind of term of the ballet. They are emphasizing that this is kind of a dance situation, not military service.
(Onscreen: two dancers move in tandem in a ballet-inspired duet form. A dancer dressed in black begins to manipulate the body of the main dancer, dressed in white.)
The dancer in black, he failed the competition and had the experience about military service in Korea. We just put some sacred music because the piece, the title is Glory, so we made [fun of it a little].
(Onscreen: the two dancers dressed in black and white separate from each other and move apart, one remaining downstage, the other moving upstage. Camera focuses on solo movements by main dancer dressed in white.)
I’ll just explain about the process [of] the research and the studio work. We just gather[ed] the documents from the male dancer, and then we analyzed and categorized according to the elements of dance from a corporeal, and history[ical], institution[al], or political perspective. At the same time, [we ourselves lived] through our dance education, [so] we found there’s a lot in common between dance competition and movement, and from all this education in Korea, it’s kind of- the choreographer and I have both experienced [this], we went through the elite dance education. The training is very hard, and we are always mimicking our teachers, and the piece [takes on] the traditional way [of teaching], attacking directly to our teachers, so it makes [a] critical issue from that.
I think that is enough [of the video documentation].
This is my dramaturgical reflection. Through the process of Glory, I [found] quite interesting how we developed methods according to our political questions. The choreographer and I [were] harsh to criticize some principles and rules—from the power and the power relationships—but [the] more important thing is [to consider]: how can we actualize the political question on the stage? How can we use the symbols of politics as a material source for the choreography? And, then, how can we produce the aesthetic perspective of dance itself in order to ask the question: what is dance today?
Our political questions made us rethink about the body, not only as a subject in society, but also as [the] main medium of dance. We [were] just thinking about the body, it’s sometimes subjective, sometimes objective, of the same level as the other material. We just played with the body, and finally it becomes the subject on the stage. I don’t know if this dynamic- if everyone’s familiar with this? I don’t know, I can give a [clearer] explanation, but still now I’m just confusing you all with the object and subject situation.
The body of Glory is regarded as a place where society and art exist, as one field in the struggles among institutions and power, social mechanisms, and even history. Once can say, according to this, that revealing the power structure of social institutions through choreography is a political act by the choreographer. Thank you.
RL: Thank you very much, Jae Lee. Now, we’re holding the questions to the end of the session, until we’ve heard from all four speakers. So, thank you very much Jae Lee. And now, it gives me great pleasure to invite Ugoran to take over the presentation.
UP: Thank you for the time. My name is Ugo, I come from Teater Garasi, which I will discuss after this a little bit. Before I begin, I structured my conversation around sustainability and networks of ideas as options for the politics of performance, (Onscreen: title reads “sustainability and networks of ideas as options for the politics of performance”) but just to clarify the position at this stage, I think artists’ engagements with the political- since, I think, that’s what we are going to touch upon on during our conversation—that is, how they address actual crisis, actual political crisis—that kind of approach, it’s always going to stay. I think it’s going to be a part of [a] theatre mode [and] performance mode of production, because crisis always calls. Having said that, I think it’s always going to also be part of our disengagement to make visible a certain political crisis, or even further, to create a certain political crisis so that it becomes a tool for citizen engagement, and so on and so forth.
My conversation today is precisely the current trajectory that I have been working with in my theater collective. The kind of questions that we are currently asking around- precisely because I think the background of this inquiry is [that] Indonesians have been living in a different political realm since 1998, to which the democratic sphere seems barren, it seems like it’s a different world compared to the previous Suharto regime era, the 30 years of [the] Suharto regime era, but things have been going around in a different kind of political complexity, so that this kind of question—sustainability and network of ideas, sustainability of ideas, and network of ideas—seems like a more pressing concern in our trajectory.
In many ways, [this] kind of conversation around political art and art as politics, [which] I locate in a trajectory of [the] 25 years or so of our collective, we don’t believe—I don’t believe—that a singular theatre production is usually the most significant, or the most effective, tool for political engagement. I’m not saying that I am against individual characteristics of a performance, or a certain uniqueness of a performance, but what I mean by singularity is to put a particular aesthetic idea, or discursive idea, as something that is leaning to the extreme, so that it becomes the state of exception, the exceptional performance, it’s a “genius performance,” something like that. I don’t think that kind of performance is politically effective. It’s a bold statement, and I kind of see it from an Indonesian point of view, but I’m not sure that [the] Indonesian point of view is also singular, in the sense that I think it happens everywhere.
However, we found that a collecti[on] of performances, a group of performances, sharing similar ideas, that is something, in the sense that we might have a better option with that. We have a better chance with that. So that’s what we kind of [thought] through these past several years.
Before going further with this statement, certainly I am affiliating myself in a larger network of artists and cultural producers who think that artistic production is always political, even in their absence of politics. To think politically and to propose political choices in performance lies at the core of practices that I am involved with, either as theater-maker, or merely as spectator, I feel that I create affiliations with that.
Having been involved in a collective called Teater Garasi in Yogyakarta for almost 20 years, at this stage I am currently experimenting with the dramaturgy of politics and performance through meditating on how to make our politics sustainable and persistent, long after our performance has ended. By thinking through the sustainability of political ideas we find that performance should be located as part of a larger network of political ideas, a conscious subject of an ongoing discursive formation.
[These are] just the two points of inquiry, it is an inquiry- I think it should be an inquiry, always be an inquiry, because we are never warned again. So, we kind of split it into two areas, or “games,” so to speak, if it’s a game. The first approach takes place on the front stage, and the second is on the back. This is just to clarify what I am trying to say.
The first approach was informed by Garasi’s aesthetic trajectories. It’s a collective group, [and] we have a lot of artists in it, so every time we have a core work—like Waktu Batu in 2001 or Je.ja.l.an in 2009—artists who are involved in it unintentionally dig deeper to a particular part of that particular project, and they create their own work, so that is always an environment in every core production that we have. Lately we kind of want to put that further by making this connection visceral too, for the audience, because if you go deeper to a particular theme, sometimes you kind of [lose track of] the originating point, so to speak, so we want to make it more visceral, and I don’t know how does it work in a way that—I mean, this is a new inquiry.
(Onscreen: production photo from Yang fana adalah waktu, kita abadi (Time is Transient, We are Eternal), 2015, five actors arrayed in a row onstage, one holding a bullhorn.)
This is a part of the picture, we have full versions of the Yang fana adalah waktu, kita abadi (Time is Transient, We are Eternal) on YouTube. If you are not lazy, it is one hour and thirty minutes, with bad subtitles, but it’s good enough. This is a production commenting on the cacophony of post-98 Indonesia. We have a polarity, just like everywhere else, and a crisis in [the] public sphere.
If we want to simplify the conversation, before ’98 it was the citizen versus the state; after ’98, it is the citizen versus the citizens, like a horizontal kind of friction. It created a lot of noises, and it’s a very cacophonic sphere whenever we talk about the public sphere.
(Onscreen: five actors brandish weapons at a sixth actor lying on the ground.)
So, we are dealing with history, we are dealing with the logic of the family, and then there is this very simplistic idea of creating a ghost out of the performance, because this—on the back, here—there is [a] covered general statue that we never uncovered throughout the production, like a haunting of a military regime in Indonesia.
(Onscreen: production still from Menara Ingatan (The Minaret of Memory), 2017, four actors wearing oversized animal-head masks.)
The same statue appeared in other production[s]. This is a musical theater production [by] Yennu Anendra of 2017 called Menara Ingatan (The Minaret of Memory), which actually dealt with a different theme. He’s working with a space, a region in Indonesia called Banuwangi, and the colonial history in Banuwangi, which has trespassed into modern Indonesian history. The same statue is there.
(Onscreen: production photo from NKKBS (The Norm of the Nucleus, Prosperous, Happy Family, Melancholic Bitch), 2017, eight actors onstage with instruments.)
The last project that individually outside of Teater Garasi’s Melancholic Bitch album, called The Norm of the Nucleus, Prosperous, Happy Family, which is coming out of the Indonesian New Order family concept, “Norma Keluarga Kecil Bahagia dan Sejahtera.” The same statue is also there.
This is a very simple project of creating an environment of constellations of images, but it also travels to different kinds of audiences. We don’t know what it does, actually, because it’s very recent. How does it work? We [had] a lot of conversation[s], and people already had some feedback about that, [asking] why it is covered? I think the strong image of [an] uncovered statue and the ghost of the military regime in Indonesia—[which] is much more apparent in the last 2–3 years—kind of created the conversation in different ways. This is the kind of question that we ask. Again, it is an inquiry state. Can we go further than that? Because aside from the similar motif, aside of the sheer thematic alliance, I think we feel it is very important to create a certain kind of environment—[but] once again, what I mean by “environment’ is probably fleeting and unclear as of now.
That’s what happened on the frontstage. On the backstage, our question is: how does performance-making in a network of ideas work, on the backstage? What does the collective do, [both] to each other and to the spectator? How to create a network of performance production?
We have a participant of Majelis Dramaturgi (Dramaturgy Assembly Initiative), one of them is here. We have an accidental working group that [came] out of a dramaturgy workshop in 2016, consisting of 20-something artists, and we kind of continued this network of dramaturgs and artists from Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta, and Madura—similar to what we have here in [the] Asian Dramaturgs Network, but most of them are producers. Not producers in a “produce” sense, but in the sense of “cultural producer,” “artistic producer”; they are dramaturgs, directors. We don’t care much about dramaturgs; we care about dramaturgy. That’s why it’s Dramaturgy Assembly Initiative, rather than Dramaturgs Assembly Initiative.
In 2017, focusing on Historiography of Performance and Performing Historiography, the working group [had] a different reason to gather beside drinking and getting drunk. The Majelis explored complex structures of—at least in 2017—complex structures of historiography and representations of history of and in performance.
Why history? I think history is one of the core problems in the political realm in Indonesia, in political discourse in Indonesia. I think it’s everywhere: we have a problem with race in the United States because we don’t understand the politics of race, right? The same goes in Indonesia. We have a problem with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism because we don’t understand the history of Islamic teaching in Indonesia. Because there is also [the question of] who writes history. The Walter Benjamin question about history, and so on, it’s still there. The Majelis then explored the complex structure of historiography and representations of history of and in performance, the crisis of histories in performance between disembodiment as precondition of history, and the process of re-embodiment of performing history.
We got macro and micropolitics—because they are all independently deal[ing] with and dwelling on their own particular theme—so we got macro and micropolitics of embedded ideologies in the performing history. We have a work-in-progress already taking place. They are all produced independently, so we are just a group of people talking, we couldn’t help each other that much, [aside from] talking.
(Onscreen: production still from Watching Turang / Menonton Turang (2017).)
This is Watching Turang, Menonton Turang, by Akbar Yumni, who is dealing with the attempt to recreate a spectatorship out of a lost film. The film was made by a communist-related director back in the 50s and 60s, and the film was erased from the archive. There is no firsthand data, we don’t have a copy of the film at all. There’s a rumor that we have a scenario of it, but Akbar couldn’t find it, so he reconstructed the film from photo-publications and film reviews and stuff like that.
The second project [is by] another artist, Dendy Madiya, who is working with reenactment of several Teater SAE productions, which is a very important physical theater group in Indonesia. At this point, he just reenacts them, choosing a certain scene from different performance pieces and reenact[ing] them.
The third one is a monologue project by Ari Dwianto, who is actually talking about his childhood and the idea of “dance history,” so to speak, throughout his childhood: around [the] schooling system in Indonesia, Michael Jackson, and so on. He claims it as The Brief History of Dance, that is, the ultimate history of dance.
Taufik Darwis is probably going to talk about his own project tomorrow, right? Membeli Ingatan, right? Which is part of the conversation too.
We don’t know about politics at this point, but we can talk more about sustainability of ideas, and [the] sustainability [of the] political sphere for artists—[which] seems like a very interesting challenge in Indonesia—after this, but that’s it from me.
RL: Thank you very much! Very exciting work. Ok, I know we’ve got lots of questions for Ugoran, but we’re going to move on to Yinan, and then after that we’ll end with Tzu Nyen.
LY: Hi everyone, my name’s Li Yinan, I come from China. I would like to start my talk with a small response to what Charlene and Robin and How Ngean said this morning about the concept of dramaturgy. I know many of you have wondered what dramaturgs do. Should they exist, or should the profession exist? I’m the one who translated the German notion of dramaturgie, Draturgie, into Chinese, “ 戏剧构作Xìjù gòu zuò.” That was 2009, nine years ago, and since then it raised a debate—a heavy debate—in China, about how to translate the concept. I myself am not so keen about terminology or dictionary-making either, but in the particular political context in China, it is very important to choose a word to present the meaning of dramaturgy.
As I said, there was a heavy debate, and one of my so-called enemies, a professor from the Shanghai Theatre Academy, denounced my translation of dramaturgy into 戏剧构作 Xìjù gòu zuò, and he insists that the word should be translated as “戏剧顾问 Xìjù Gùwèn,” that’s ‘consultant.’
In the particular context of China, [there is an important difference] between the two translations, and Professor Soon’s translation as 戏剧顾问 Xìjù Gùwèn denounced this profession. He wrote quite a long article, which was published one or two years ago, to justify his translation. In his article, he said: there’s no profession of 戏剧构作 Xìjù gòu zuò—or dramaturg—in China, or [else] everyone can be [a] dramaturg in China. He quoted some examples in the Cultural Revolution, when the Model Operas were still going on, and he said that Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing also gave some comments to the Great Opera, so they can also be dramaturgs.
So, for me, someone [who] just come[s] from the outside to give suggestions—or to limit the creative process, to censor—is not [a] dramaturg; dramaturg[y] is a profession, I think. Dramaturgs play important roles in [the] theatre-making process, and I think it’s very important to train dramaturgs, and educate dramaturgs in China, to politicalize theatre-making. [Over the past] 20 years in China, there [has been much] progress going on to de-politicalize theatre-making, and that’s the reason some people insist not to include the profession of dramaturgs in China. So that’s a short introduction to my talk this afternoon, and just a little background.
I established the first B.A. study program in dramaturgy in Asia (to my knowledge) three years ago, in the Central Academy of Drama. I’m now teaching in the department. In China, we did alter a little bit what dramaturgy means in the theatre-making process, and stress upon the active role—the creative role—of dramaturgs in the whole theatre-making process.
In our B.A. program, we combined the so-called “applied theatre studies”—[which is] not similar with the U.S. or English meaning of “applied theatre,” but more in the German Gießen sense of applied theatre studies: a new method of theatre-making, devising theatre together with dramaturgy. The theatre program is called [the] B.A. Study Program in Dramaturgy and Applied Theatre Studies, and it’s [been in existence for] three years. At first, [I was solely] teaching the dramaturgy part, and since half a year [ago], Kai Tuchmann—a German dramaturg—also joined us, so we two are basically teaching some 50 dramaturgy students.
I’m now introducing a project we did in July last year, it’s called “Water Margin 水浒 Shuǐhǔ.” It’s based from a famous Chinese classical novel I guess most of you know. 水浒传 Shuǐhǔ zhuàn is supposed to be written by Shi Nai'an at the end of the Yuan Dynasty. He lived at the end of 13th century and beginning of 14th century. The novel is about a peasant uprising in the Song Dynasty, in the 12th century. It’s a typical story—in Chinese we call it 官逼民反 Guān bī mín fǎn—‘people [are] oppressed by the officials, and the [masses revolt] against them’, so [it is] a highly political novel, which [was] banned many times, but it was one of the favorite novels of Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Revolution. Mao Zedong [supposedly] carried the novel all the time in his bag, and also in the process of the Long March, so you can see how dear the novel is to him.
He seem[ed] to see many connections with the novel about the peasant uprising in the Song Dynasty and the Communist Revolution which he was leading, and he also compares himself, sometimes, and the other Communist leaders with the leaders of the peasant uprising, such as Song Jiang and Chao Gai.
In the year 1975, one year before his death, Mao Zedong raised a country-wide, huge campaign against the novel of 水浒传 Shuǐhǔ zhuàn, because at the end of the novel, the leader of the peasant uprising capitulate[s] to the court, which leads to the failure of the whole uprising. [This was at] the end of the Chinese long revolution—because in China, in the 20th century, the revolution starts with 1911 Xinhai Geming until the end of the Cultural Revolution, which is 1976, so it’s a long revolution within a short century, so-called.
At the end of his life, and at the end of the whole Revolution, Mao Zedong did see the danger of capitulation, he saw [that what] he called the reactionary cadres would, after his death, capitulate to the old system, to the old order system, to feudalism and capitalism. After his death Deng Xiaoping took over, and especially after 1989, the present situation is that there is new elite class in China—the upper class—which is made of the officials and the rich, so there’s a huge gap between the poor and the rich, and between the upper class and the lower class.
We return, after a long revolution, to the starting point, which is present China. What is the link between present China and the time before Revolution, and what will the Chinese future be in the big slogan of the “Chinese dream,” etc.? So [those are] the questions we raised through this project. It’s a one-year-long project that I [led] 25 students of the B.A. dramaturgy program to do, together with two other mentors: Peng Tao, who’s the chair of our department, and Kai Tuchmann, who took over the role of dramaturg.
Basically, we three were just mentors, and we led a group of 25 students. At first, I just led the workshops—the devising theatre workshops—to help the students to develop the text and the performance at the same time. It’s a long process of rehearsing and of research, of reading books together.
We read different versions of 水浒传 Shuǐhǔ zhuàn the novel, and different versions: in Chinese musical theatre, there’s a lot of operas, local operas, or narrative literature about the same story, and also there’s a TV series in recent years in China too—twice in China, and I heard also, here in Japan, in the 70s there’s a TV series of 水浒传 Shuǐhǔ zhuàn going on. We studied the novel as a document in the whole process of Chinese history, it’s 700 years of history of China, and especially in the long history of Chinese Revolution.
Finally, we decided to concentrate on Chapter 39 of the novel. It recounts a story of Li Kui. Li Kui is one of the underdogs, so-called underdogs, who tries to save his big brother—哥哥Gēgē—Song Jiang. Song Jiang, through an injustice, was sentenced to death. Before the execution, Li Kui and other heroes from Liangshan rescued him. But, by achieving justice, they put a lot of injustice to innocent people by butchering around blindly, a lot of innocent lives [were] lost. We concentrated on this chapter, and the 25 students were divided in five groups. At the end of the first semester, which is December 2016, each group presented their own scene fragments. In the second semester, Kai Tuchmann led a workshop of text collages, he taught students how to make collages from different texts—also from news nowadays—to combine the present situation with the old materials. We finally made the production on July 1st last year, on our campus.
(Onscreen: two actors recline on the floor wearing masks.)
As you can see, this scene starts with a prelude. The audience were located on the second floor, and they [the actors] are [on] the first floor, which seems like a ritual perspective to history, or to the world—because, in our opinion, the world has [a] similar order as the pre-Revolution eras. So, we saw two girls are playing cards and wearing different masks, perhaps you can see the mask of Sen Lin, and the other is Churchill, and now there’s one [which] is Putin, and the other is Trump. {chuckles} [It’s] right in the present day.
We also invited workers in our academy—who work for the canteen, and for the student dormitory—to read the speech text of Xi Jinping and Obama, and in Xi Jinping’s speech, and Obama’s speech, they’re talking about their countries blooming, flourish[ing], but the blooming and flourish[ing] has nothing to do with common people’s everyday life, so that’s basically the prelude.
(Onscreen: Actors stand scattered around the performance space, which has white cloth draped across the ground.)
And then we have the Revolution. The Revolution is depicted as a carnival, and the actors [invite] the audience to join them. Among them was the Clemens Treter, he’s the leader of the Goethe Institut in Beijing; he was also invited to join the Revolution carnival. Everyone here is dancing to loud music and celebrating the Revolution.
(Onscreen: Close-up shot of audience members standing in the performance space. / Slide changes to a view of the multi-level performance venue from the ground floor, looking up.)
That’s the second scene. In the same place, the people are located now in the first floor, and they see four actors on the second floor. The four actors are recounting the story of the 39th Chapter, they are exchanging roles frequently, and the one who has the role puts [on] a huge dunce cap—a large paper cap which is used in the Cultural Revolution to denounce the so-called reaction[aries].
(Onscreen: Dark, mostly indistinguishable outdoor image.)
That’s the third part. [A] guide—she’s wearing a mask of [a] Peking Opera rebel—is leading the whole audience group through the campus. It’s like a long march. It’s quite a long march actually, it took half an hour, but after the exhausting march they just return to the original location. So, because Peng Tao, who is the chair of our department, he’s also the chair of the party secretary of our department party committee, some audience members just interpreted this section of the performance as we followed the party and we returned to our original location.
(Onscreen: A group of people stand densely clustered in a dimly lit glass corridor.)
This is the fourth part, which is located on the fourth floor, it’s a long corridor made of glass. It’s July, it’s very hot, so it’s overheated, it was a very humid and hot night. The actors present a dumpling-making scene, but the dumplings are made of human flesh, of human meat. It’s one of the stories of the 水浒 Shuǐhǔ, of Water Margin, but it’s also a famous metaphor of Lu Xun: people eating people, it’s a depiction of the Chinese [feudal society].
Then we go to a long corridor, an underground corridor, behind our canteen. We did not know [before], but through our investigation on campus we know that, in this basement, the workers—the canteen workers—all live in small rooms in this underground basement. The rooms are without windows, so it’s a scene about [the] underclass of the society.
(Onscreen: Four actors stand in a concrete-walled corridor, brightly lit by floodlights.)
Then there’s a scene which is in the free-air theatre on our campus, but the whole action took place in the auditorium, where the audience members sit. Each member [wore] a safety helmet; it might be interpreted as a symbol of everyone [being] in danger in this story of this rebellion.
(Onscreen: Two performers dressed in white stand illuminated behind a third performer, seated on the floor, dressed in black, with no lighting.)
This is the final scene, of reflection, which took place at the same location as the prelude. It ends with a quote from Walter Benjamin, and I would like to read it to you, it’s from his Theses on the Philosophy of History. Walter Benjamin says:
“The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things, without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils, which fall to the victor, that the latter made their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in the struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force, and will constantly call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn towards the sun by dint of a secret heliotropism, the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”
So you see the sun—all the audience members can see it’s a basin, it’s a foot-wash basin, dragged by two girls on the second floor. It’s the raw material. Thank you all.
RL: Thank you, Li Yinan, thank you very much for that. Our final speaker today is Ho Tzu Nyen, if you would just give us a few minutes to set the presentation up.
HTN: Hello, good afternoon, my name is Ho Tzu Nyen. I’m just going to give a quick sort of introduction to what I do, and then I will speak a little bit about this project, which is up here, which is a website, actually.
I am primarily a visual artist, so I’m not quite sure how I wandered into the performing arts, but many of the terms and terminologies and concepts that one encounters in such meetings are a little bit foreign for me, because I’ve never had any kind of training in this discipline. Over the years, I’ve also tried to engage and learn a little bit, but at the same time I always feel a little bit of a foreigner or a stranger. Even the concept of dramaturgy, it’s still something that I’m kind of grappling with a little bit.
So, today I was actually planning to speak about the most recent work that I have done, which is actually present here at the TPAM, and I was resisting showing images of that work, because some of you might not have seen it yet and it feels strange to show pictures of the work that you are about to see, so I thought maybe a good challenge is to speak about the work without showing images, which is a highly unusual for me. Usually, I rely on a lot of images to get out of talking so much, but today I will try to describe the work—and maybe we have to kind of imagine it a little bit—and I will end off with talking about another project, which is this website over here. {points to screen behind}
The work that I will first speak about is called One or Several Tigers, so it’s actually, in fact, an installation, which premiered—I mean, even the term “premiered” isn’t a term we use in the visual arts—but it premiered in Berlin at the Haus of Work Cultures in May.
Just to describe, physically, what the work entails, it’s a room with two screens. On one side of the screen, we see a man, and on the other side of the screen, it’s dominated predominantly by a tiger, and the man and the tiger are singing a duet. This duet, I would say—at least my intentions for the duet—was that it condenses a million or more years of human-tiger relationships in the Malayan world.
A lot of the questions and conversations I’ve had over the last few days were about these two screens. I had questions as to why the work didn’t put the two screens next to each other, which would—maybe dramaturgically—make it easier for us to access, to see both screens, so maybe I will start by just kind of talking about these two screens, and maybe, hopefully, we find a way to kind of return back to the topic, which is dramaturgy and, I guess, politics.
So maybe I should also start a little bit by just giving you a sense of the contents of the work. So, tigers have always been prevalent in Singapore, up until the period of colonization by the British. Maybe I also should return further back to the name “Singapore” itself. Some of you might also know that Singapore in Sanskrit—Singapura—actually means “Lion City,” but, of course, there are no lions in Singapore, or in the region of Southeast Asia, but what we did have a lot of were tigers. So, in a way, choosing the tiger as a motif to think history is perhaps a dream of another version of how history can be written.
Tigers first actually dispersed across Southeast Asian when Southeast Asia was linked across one landmass, which is called the Sunda Shelf. So, after sea levels rose, that’s when Southeast Asia kind of like split apart, but tigers have already been dispersed in that region prior to that. Tigers like to live in the zone between the waters and the forest, so contrary to our popular kind of like idea—we always think that a tiger lives in a forest but actually it prefers to live at the edge of the forest, because in the dense tropical forest, you don’t have mammals of enough biomass that can sustain the appetites of the tiger.
This was more than a million years ago, so that was before Homo Sapiens even emerged. When the first humans spread across Southeast Asia, actually the preferred zone of habitat was that same area between the waters and the forest, so I think humans and tigers lived in close proximity, and this gave rise in turn to a cosmology in which tigers kind of played a crucial role in many of these traditional societies.
In the Malayan world, tigers are kind of known as mediums or vehicles for ancestral spirits. There is also a habit of never referring to the tiger by its proper name, because that’s kind of bad luck. You refer to the tiger through a series of other terms, which [mean] grandfather, or uncle, and they are all kinship terms—which is kind of interesting, because it means that tigers are not the other, but there is a kind of ambiguous relationship to humans.
But all of these myths, I would say today in Singapore, [are] gradually being erased, and these myths are also erased with the destruction of the forests and the extinction of tigers. Annihilation of tigers in Singapore was a result of colonization, and I would say that tigers in fact were one of the severe victims of that period of history. So, I’ve been researching on these different stories, mythologies, and histories of humans and tigers in the last seven or eight years. I produced a number of different projects: I did a work in 2014 which was called Ten Thousand Tigers, which is as close as I got to doing a real theatre piece; the piece we are seeing here at TPAM came after that, and it’s kind of an installation, so that’s kind of the background.
So, now I will [return] to the question of the two screens. The main problem—the main topic of conversation I’ve had with some friends—was why I created the piece in such a way that it’s kind of difficult to look at, because there are things happening simultaneously on both screens at any one time. A lot of these comments came from people who are working in the performative field. This has actually, for me, never been a question up to now. This figure—just to give a little bit of context as well, the human in one of these screens was based on an actual figure called George Drumgoole Coleman, who was an Irish surveyor working for the British. In 1835 he led a road survey in a forested area of Singapore, and a tiger leapt out at the survey team, and the tiger didn’t kill anyone; what it did do was to destroy an instrument called a theodolite, which is used for triangulation.
So, this was made into a lithographic print by a German artist in 1865, and my work draws very heavily from this image. In this image, we have the tiger emerging sort of from the right side of the frame, and we have the white surveyor sort of falling back to the left, and this instrument or machine is sort of suspended in the middle. So, when I was thinking about this installation, it was, for me, almost a logical necessity that the tiger and the man [have] to be positioned in this confrontational configuration.
So, what do I think of the audience presence in it? How does the audience watch both screens at the same time? For me, it was that the audience has to choose which side to look at, and [what] we are missing is constantly part of the experience. It might not be part of the narrative, but it’s kind of part of the experience of encountering the work.
But I would also kind of perhaps push this a little bit further, which is to say that, for me, the work was not meant for humans. The tiger and the man are in fact singing this duet to each other, and the human presence is secondary. So, I think of the work as an object, it’s a self-enclosed loop, which is complete in itself. Of course, I’m aware that this is a work of art, and spectators have to see this. For me, what humans are actually observing is the act of the tiger or the man observing each other, so if I’m to borrow a term from cybernetics, it’s like a second-order observation: we observe an act of observation.
So, this has been on my mind in the last few days, and I was thinking: maybe this has something, in a way, to do with a difference in approach. In theatre, we are used—mainly—to watching something in full; we have the comfort, or the idea, that we can master the visual field, that we have to follow the narrative, [and] a narrative is paced in such a way that the audience is kind of constantly led through with a thread, whereas for me, this confrontational configuration is a kind of exclusion of the human in that immediate level. At the same time, as I said, the work deals with more than a million years of history, and it’s condensed into the work—which is exactly 33 minutes and 33 seconds long—which is also to say that information is extremely dense, and I never imagined that there would be a human spectator who is able to follow every bit of the exchange. Even the narrative and the spoken text, in a sense it’s a certain kind of ritual that a tiger and a man perfor[m] between themselves.
Now I will just try to inch a little bit toward the politics, which was part of this seminar. So, I wrote to them a few days- to Robin a few days ago. I would say that I feel uncomfortable framing my work as “politics,” even though I respect and have high regard for people who do this, but it’s not really in the vocabulary of my system, in thinking about the work. But, of course, through the histories of humans and tigers, it opens up to all kinds of political-ecological questions: the annihilation of tigers, and today we are very conscious of the planetary crisis that we are in, so, for me—very often we have works, we deal with history only through the perspective of the human—I thought, with this particular work, it could be interesting to kind of think about history through the figure of the tiger. In the Malayan world, in the precolonial times, maybe the division between man and tigers, between culture and nature, is not actually that distinct, since the tiger is a kin, it’s like a relative, and there are many myths of human and tiger metamorphosis, or were-tigers, so shamans could kind of transform into tigers. We see this, for example, in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s excellent film Tropical malady, so that’s kind of my approach, I guess, as close as I can bring to thinking politics.
But I would like to now return to the lithograph, the original lithograph, of the man and the tiger confronting each other during the surveying mission. I think when we first look at the lithograph, what we are immediately drawn to is this dichotomy between Malayan tiger and a white surveyor, who was also kind of very conveniently dressed in white, so you can see this distinction, and we very often don’t look at the rest of the figures; they are kind of disposable. So, in the earlier theatrical piece that I did, called Ten Thousand Tigers, this lithograph emerged as well, but I was mainly focusing on this binary clash between the Western surveyor. The surveyor is the master: the work of the survey is to master space, to grid space, to control, to transform space into a set of mathematical coordinates, whereas the tiger, on the other hand, would represent this wild animality, the force of chaos.
With this particular work, one of several tigers here at TPAM, my main focus was in looking at the rest of the figures who have been scattered around the surveyor and the tiger. So, I started researching on who these figures actually were. So, this image was done by a German artist in the 19th century who has never been to Malaya, so the representation is not the most accurate, but according to historical accounts these figures that are scattered around were actually Indian prisoners. This was at the time when the British abolished slavery, but to replace the labor force that slavery was generating, they started a system of using indentured labor, meaning that they were people who were actually mostly South Indians who were sentenced to prisons, they have a special sentence called transportation, in which they are transported to different British colonies, and then they basically became this source of cheap labor.
Actually, this, in the end, worked out much better for the British, because sailing to the African continent and raiding for slaves was extremely costly. So, this group that was accompanying the road survey mission were actually these Indian prisoners, so I started actually investigating into the history of this penal system. So, the road surveyor, whose name is Coleman, actually his official title was Superintendent of Public Works. So other than doing the road surveys, he was the chief architect and probably first urban planner in Singapore; but at the same time, he was also the Superintendent of Prisoners, and these two roles have been conflated always in the early British Colonial system. So, Coleman’s successor was an engineer, who was also the chief in charge of the prisons, so whoever was actually in charge of building public works and designing the urban fabric of early Singapore was always in charge of the prison for obvious reasons, because these [prisoners] were the people who built all of these public works.
The penal system in Singapore at that time was known as the most progressive in the British system. They had the ideal of creating a prison that no longer had to even employ wardens, so prisoners were encouraged to surveil each other, and to report on each other, so [to] the British—being great, pragmatic businesspeople—this was a great cost-saving device. So, that kind of got me very interested in this model.
So, in order for me to create figural representations of these Indian convict laborers—by the way, I forgot to mention that the work was mostly a digital animation, which is kind of an important fact to mention—so for me to create 3D images of these Indian workers, I decided then to cast contemporary migrant workers in Singapore. These days, the majority of our migrant workers involved in construction are from Bangladesh, rather than from India. So, I cast eight of these migrant workers from an area in Singapore called Little India, and then I invited them into the project. So, the original prints from which I’m drawing all of these references, is now in the National Gallery of Singapore, which is actually at the heart of the old colonial part of Singapore, and one of the main entrances into the museum is known as Coleman Street, so it was actually named after the road surveyor.
The National Gallery itself was an old colonial building, and it was rebuilt recently to transform it into the National Gallery of Singapore. In the process of the construction, which took years, there were quite a few casualties—fatal casualties—for these migrant construction workers. And these migrant construction workers—most of us know of the conditions in which they work and live, which is, they are paid very minimal wages. A lot of them don’t have access to their passports, it’s kept by the company, by the middleman; a lot of them come to Singapore through a loan, and they have to work a long time to pay off their loan; and often when they get injured, that’s when problems appear, because they might not be able to pay back their loans.
So, as I was working on this, it started dawning on me that perhaps, from the early period of the British colonization—when these workers were kind of indentured labor, prison laborers—up to now, perhaps there is a certain kind of continuity in the system of how Singapore is continuing to build itself. Then I thought it was also interesting for me to bring these eight workers—actors that I was working with—to the National Gallery, and to film in the National Gallery, and to film them looking at these prints, and to speak about why I am doing this work, and some of the ideas behind it.
So, I don’t know if this kind of fits in the politics side of the panel. Just in ending very quickly, I wanted to talk about this, but I guess I kind of ran out of time, which is also fine. But just to take 10 seconds, 15 seconds, this project is called the Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia. It’s basically a set of algorithms that is editing a film endlessly, based on 26 ideas that I have about Southeast Asia, and one of the terms from A–Z, under T we have “T for tigers,” so all of my research on tigers, and all the work on tigers as part of this larger project—I just suddenly thought I wanted to show this website, because earlier we were talking about spreading this network of ideas, you know, on the stage and behind the stage, so when I was doing this website, I also thought it was interesting that this is not in a white cube or black box, you know, but that this is something that was readily available, and a reference point for all of the questions and research topics that I was interested in. So, I will stop here. Thank you.
RL: Thank you Tzu Nyen. We have about 30 minutes to take questions. Very happy. Again, we are documenting this. If you have a question, please raise your hand so that my colleagues can pass you a mic for clear audio capture. Any questions? If you want to ask a question in Japanese, our panelists have access to the interpreter, so that’s not a problem.
Well, as the provocateur I guess I’ll start. I’ll start with Jae Lee. Jae Lee, I’ve got a few questions for you. I think, one, I’m going to question you about your position as a Korean, doing a project—I think the question can be extended to Ugoran, and Yinan, and to a certain extent Tzu Nyen, [but] you, being Korean, talking about this particular episode, the whole idea of institutions, about the political questions: can you do it without being personal and subjective, or as a dramaturg, is that part of the strength? That means, it is an advantage that you are a Korean talking about Korean history, rather than, say, if we had a German dramaturg going in, giving an outsider perspective. Since we talked about the inside and the outside, can you tell us a little bit about how your process was?
JLK: I think I’m not in charge of the representation of Korean dramaturgy. This work relates to Korean history, or [the] Korean context, but my main focus [is] on: how do we make art?
So, my strategy and my focus always depend on the choreographers, or the process of choreography, so this one relates to the political question—the political situation—in the context of Korea. I just decided to present this kind of project, but I’m a pretty young dramaturg in Korea: I’m from the contemporary dance scene, and so I pretty much think about the way it’s influenced [by] the West. I just made the kind of choreography-documentary work. Glory is lecture-performance-like, which is from the West, so I’m not sure if it relates to the Korean context, or just personally, and my [interest] about the old choreographic process.
RL: Thank you. Yes? Can you wait for the mic, thank you so much for waiting.
A1: Ok, so I want to start with something which Jae Lee, you said, which was that one of the objectives of the work was to make the power structure visible, [and] that this, in itself, was a political act. I want to then look at what Yinan, you were saying, about the Water Margin. I grew up with the 70s version, so I have quite a warmth to the whole story. That—in a way— making the power structure visible is a political act, and often the power structure does not want to be made visible, and so, was it possible to make clear both this attempt to stage the power structure—because I saw the party secretary was visible as the party secretary, the canteen workers were visible as canteen workers, etc.—so the real power structure and status within society is fictionalized within the show? Because there will be limits to how much you can show that structure, I suppose. Was it possible to make both the visibility and the invisibility readable to the audience?
JLK: I’m not sure—I’m interested in all your questions, but, as an artist—also as a dramaturg—we’re just talking about the choreographic process, and then we’re just thinking about, how can we make our art? The process was, we just unfold every element, [every] implicit elements in the structure of society, and then we just look around at all the material. I used the materials—not only the jargon of the performance, or dance, just a lot of elements, the factors of society—we just picked that up, and then we gave some other, older, or composition or sometimes constellation, and sometimes this was very obvious on the stage. At the same time, sometimes it’s [a] bizarre composition, we didn’t get any idea from this metaphorical kind of elements, and it’s very obvious material is altogether very messy on the stage. So, it depends on the choreographer’s intention, or the dancers’ characters, or sometimes we just kind of experiment with [the] making of the art, of the choreography.
LY: For me, dramaturgy is just to make the invisible, visible. It’s—for me—the major function of dramaturgy, [but] authoritarians like to have secrets. If you keep everything secretive, you can make decisions without consulting, without making any explanation; dramaturgs just make all the secrets visible so that we can discuss. So, I think that in the Chinese context it’s a very useful tool for democracy, it’s [a] tool against the authoritarians.
RL: Yes, please.
A2: Hello, my name is Linda. I just want to share the context of the political art in Yogyakarta, as I understand it, [which] we have been discussing in our study group in Yogyakarta as well. I’m happy that we are talking about these kind of things again, in this space, but somehow I feel that, when we’re talking about political art, or art and society, it’s like, opposite sides: this is art, and that’s society, and then we’re against each other, the problems, these kind of things. But in reality, I and several friends are questioning: is it contextual to perceive the political art like that? Because we’ve found that there [are] several practices already happening, and still going on now. For example, in art itself, we are structuring structures; there are also power relations and contestations, and whatever comes on it, and we also face these kind of things both in my practice in visual art, and [in] dance. And, some of the artists and agencies—we call it agency—[are] also addressing the institutional critiques, not only to the political state or whatever, but also the art system itself. We’re also perceiving that that is also political art.
On the other hand, somehow, I feel that art is not only owned by us, the people who are working in the art scene, but it’s a democratic space where people can also engage with their own context. For example, in Yogyakarta, we are facing the problem of land rights issues, and people who are not coming from the art field, working together with artists and then initiating some movements—performative activity—as a resistance. So, how then can we recontextualize the [divisions] of political art, when we have this kind of reality? I’m just trying to provoke all of us to see the broader context of these things, so we are not tracking only: in a frame, that’s art, and [over there,] that’s political things, we have to face that. We also have a political problem in our art systems, for example. So that’s my comment and idea.
RL: Thank you very much for that. Any other questions? Yes, there’s one over there.
A3: Hi, my name is Virkein, I’m from India. I’m just sort of going ahead from what Linda also said. One of the questions I wanted to ask everybody is: there’s certain processes that you utilize with research, when you’re creating what you do, but how much of that is also translated to how it gets read by somebody who watches it? And is the intention of making—I don’t quite like the term “political art,” because I think it’s a bit problematic—but in the politics of what you’re trying to say, is there an intention [for] discussion in the larger realm of things? [That is] also to say, it’s sort of a starting point?
I sometimes imagine that when you’re using art as a tool, as a medium to be able to say something, it’s something that you can’t otherwise do. It’s not something that you watch on television that somebody is resisting every day, but I understand that, if one is making, or [if one is] using the body, for example, as a tool for resistance, it’s doing so in a manner which you may not be able to see otherwise, and that’s why you’re using this particular medium. Otherwise I can talk about it, I can write about it, I can draw, I can do many other things. But one chooses—as a medium—movement, or dance, or theatre, or the body essentially, as that act, and what does that mean? How much of it gets translated in me being able to read it, for example, between the tiger and the man? There’s so much that you talked [about] right now, about the context, and it was very well understood, and it sort of made sense. Now if I was to go watch it, I would really go much deeper into what it would mean to me, but is that something you intended, in the way either [that] you presented it, or how it was presented, and how much of that [can] the general person without that context get, and if it’s necessary at all?
RL: Thank you. Ugoran, do you want to start? How much of your research is put out there in the art that you create, and how much of that will be picked up, or do you ever take that into consideration in terms of the reception part, how much of it they will get?
UP: We can make effort for creating discussion and everything, but at the end of the day, politically it’s also problematic, like [spoon-feeding] to the audience, thinking they are not smart enough [to get] our conversation, but also, at the same time, I think the whole conversation—especially about political relevancy, at least subjectively right now—is what moves us. Also addressing Linda’s mapping about the land reform problem in Yogyakarta—which we share the same city, and we share similar networks, [many] work in the same network—ok, you got the conversation, you know what we are talking about, what about doing something about that? Right? And that’s not happening. For instance, the rise of fundamentalism everywhere, so theatre cannot do anything, or performance cannot do anything, because avant-garde is always everywhere, as much as you like, but who’s watching performance, and who’s watching theatre, is precisely the problem. I think in Indonesia we have this strong phrase, “kelas menengah ngehe”—which is something like ‘bullshit middle class,’ or ‘fucked up middle class’—but [they are] that middle class who lives in a bubble, who actually attends our performances, and we are also part of the middle class, and our conversation doesn’t go anywhere.
This is precisely because the enemy, so to speak, in terms of thinking about the citizen classes in Indonesia right now, they are doing the labor, they are really, really doing the labor: organization, creating a ritual, creating a conversation. If there is a fire happening in Jakarta, they are the first. They, meaning us and them—it’s very political, forgive me—but there is this hardline group who are going to be there. [They are the] first one who’s attending any environmental crisis or any hurricane, any flooding, they are the ones who are going to be there. The critical ones, the ones leaning to the left, middle to the left, they are the lazy ones. They don’t go anywhere. They are going to theatre, they’re going to dance, but they’re not going to this.
So, who’s calling, and who’s answering the call of political crisis? Are we creating an environment safe enough to talk about politics, and thinking that we are critical enough, but actually at the same time, that’s the extent of our political commitment, right? I think that’s the trouble in doing this: knowing that there’s this circle of producing and consuming that we in many ways perpetuate. It’s troubling.
The land reform is another case, a new case in Indonesia. We have 37 famil[ies] who are almost being eradicated by the new plan of creating a new airport in Yogyakarta, because the old airport is very problematic: it [raises] environmental problems, traffic and everything, so the whole middle class in Yogyakara is clapping at the idea of having a new airport in Yogyakarta. But we have 37 who are almost being forced from their homes right now. In general, we have a lot of artistic projects around it, political projects around it, movements around. There is a strong- 37 musical group—pop-ish independent projects, which my band was involved as one of them—we created a biweekly music release, single release, from wide population of independent projects, not only from Yogyakarta, but also from Jakarta and even Bali, because forced eviction is a problem all throughout Indonesia right now because of infrastructural development. But it is never take[s] place at the center of mass conversation. It[‘s] never takes place as a citizen conversation.
In comparison to, say, for instance, the rise against [the] Chinese governor in Jakarta back in 2016, which is 600-, 700,000 people marching in Jakarta. They are doing performance, they’re totally doing performance, they’re in the same costume—like the white-white, the Arabic is everywhere—and they’re totally performative, they’re very performative, they even have the same motorcycle, and the noise is the same. They’re much more advanced than the artists claiming [a] performative strategy. And they’re winning the game: 600-, 700,000 people marching on the street, and then a couple months later, they jail our Chinese governor, which is Ahok, [who is] right now in jail two and a half years for blasphemy.
So, how to think of performance, and how to think of theatre, how to think of the significance of art within the art scene? So Linda is precisely correct, what is the political border of our political situation—the political situation of the discipline, the political situations of performance, of theatre, of visual art—and what is the limit of that political scene—[that] very political scene, the hierarchy within that particular discipline—and then what is the significance of that discipline within the larger sphere of [the] political realm, the crisis of the political everyday?
This is the hardest part. At the same time, if you go to other groups, such as FAE, they’re all very performative. Being non-artists, being non-dramaturgs, they [dramatize] themselves really well, because it’s fascist performance. Fascist performance is very prescriptive, very formulaic. The dramaturgy of fascist performance is easily copied, easily duplicated, easily perpetuated and circulated. It’s all about same color, same uniform, same noise, same voice, sameness, right? It’s about sameness. And on the middle to left, so to speak, everything is about individuation. It’s about particularity, it’s about uniqueness. So yeah, the question is, what is our 21st century assembly, so to speak, if every institution we kind of question, if every institution must fall, if god is dead, what is our new way of conversing, right? That’s the issue, I think.
RL: I mean, I know you have not conceived of your work as inherently political, but I think the question is: the research that you’ve done, and the things that you’ve uncovered, the kind of exposé that what you thought was a white man, you actually mentioned slavery and all that. Obviously it goes into the work that you’ve done, but how much of that actually communicates? I agree with Ugoran, that if we wanted to be political, we want diversity, we certainly can’t tell them this is how you should think, because that’s exactly what we’re telling people to relist. The political has a double bind, that I want you to understand the oppression out there, but I cannot tell you what to think. So again, it has that paradox, and that double-bind. So in the work that you do, specifically to this one, how much of the research translates into the reception?
HTN: So, for me, I think of the core of what I do as actually the research. The works that are generated out from it just interface[e] with different groups of audience. This began with the very first project that I did in 2003, which was a film and an installation, which I then kind of packaged as a lecture that I could deliver to schools as a history lesson, and which eventually found its way into the theatre, which is how I started engaging with the performing arts. For me actually, at the core, it’s what I’m truly interested in. And these manifestations—as an installation, performance—I mean, of course I try to take each presentation and discipline seriously, and I try to think a little bit about the history and specificity of what I do, but these are just ways for me to circulate some of these idea, which is why I wanted to show the website, because that’s another dissemination of these ideas.
In the website—other than these terms—are a lot of my writings that were previously published in journals or magazines, about the tiger, but also about a series of other parts of the dictionary, they were all kind of included. So, I also started thinking about tigers more concretely because I published an essay in a journal about a history of large cats in Singapore. So, for me it’s just this kind of like, dissemination or attempt to deal with-
Because Singapore, at the time when I started my practice, Singapore was still very small. I was going to say Singapore used to be very small, but it’s still very small. But actually, the audience size for a contemporary art exhibition is very limited, so for me it’s constantly thinking of ways of engaging and circulating the ideas.
But when it comes to this particular piece of work, for me, a visual arts work exists in a different kind of economy than a performing arts work. It also exists, to me, in a different kind of timeframe, it doesn’t exist in the same kind of time. Like, we always hope that the work is collected, let’s say, by a museum, not just for the money, but also so the work persists in time, and you have this hope—or the delusion, or the illusion—that it could be reactivated again. There is not this pressure of delivering it in the live unfolding of an event. So, when it comes to audience, how much they can unpack, you have to leave it to the audience, how much he or she really wants. If he or she really wants to track down some of these supplementary forms, you know, it’s easy to do that now, with the internet and the essays that were published. So, I think about what I do as this network of different, small little activities.
RL: Jae Lee?
JLK: It’s always challenging, to present political questions through the medium of the dance. Dance is not the main concern in society. Nobody cares about dance, or what it’s talking about. After the Glory performance, during the performance, during the process, we really want[ed] to encourage the audience [to think] about the body: how precarious the subject is, and the relationship between the institution and the body. But after the show, people just came to me, “You are not allowed to talk about the military service because you are a woman.” So, they come up with the gender issues, which is a political question too, but they don’t care about the dance, or all the performance themes. The theme of military service is very sensitive and problematic in Korean society, so it’s really challenging for me, and the dance society in Korea. But [for] contemporary dance, political question[s are] part of contemporary dance. I still explored the possibility [of addressing] political questions through the medium of dance. It’s challenging, but there are many possibilities still there, because nobody cares about it, so I can still play with these things. And then the art is more diverse and comprehensive, rather than just demonstrating the scared, the gomin-eul voice, so I just expect the possibility to share the important issues in society through the dance medium.
RL: Before I let Yinan share with us her thoughts on the question, I also wanted to share with you that, just after her presentation, she told me that that particular performance itself—with invited guests—was actually quite dangerous, a dangerous thing to do, and that of course has really high stakes, other than just, “Oh, I’m just adapting a chapter from a Chinese literary classic.” I just wanted to contextualize the element of risks involved, so I’m going to let Yinan talk about and engage that question.
LY: Okay. Yeah, it was a very special case. Our first goal of this project is education. It’s [a] one-year process, so we might say the process is more important than the result. So, the performance itself was just shown one time, on one evening, and for that evening it was a really hard endeavor to realize that, and all the audience members are invited, and they were limited [to] 50 people invited, and they were our guests. It was shown on campus—that’s the regulation of our academy, we can’t do student projects outside the campus—but inside the campus, we have to go through a 10-member committee of censorship, which is really hard, so that’s part of the reason we decided not to show [the work] in theatres. We have about 10 theatres on campus. We [didn’t] use them [to] avoid the whole censorship procedure. So, I think, for me, the project is quite successful in one way, in that the students really had fun with it, and they think that, through the one year, they learned a lot. And also, it’s a hard process, because 25 students, each of them are grown-ups, each of them are in their rebellious age, and they try to fight with Peng Tao, with me, with Kai, with their original ideas, and it was not quite easy to realize the whole project. But, I see all the hardships, it’s quite creative and quite productive, and through the debates among the students, and also among the three mentors, we achieved our goal of a dramaturgy course, as this seminar was called. Also, the 50 audience [members], they stayed after the show, and had a very active discussion with the students, so I think we just achieved our goal.
RL: Right, we have just run out of time. Alright, so thank you very, very much. Can you please thank my lovely panelists for me?
And I think—just a closing note—one of the things that has always been fascinating about art for me, in any medium, is the opportunity for us to talk, and I think that’s always very important.