Triple Crossings

---A performance documentary and analysis.

Yomei Shaw (Lecturer, English Department, CUHK)

Part I: Beyond the Horizon

The performers were Hong Kong secondary school students ranged ages 12-21, who had worked for a month everyday with their director(s) to create their performance. Although a few had previous experience participating in school drama activities, none had ever had the chance to perform their own creative content before. The performance presented the multiplicity of the students’ voices as is, without trying to impose the structure of a larger narrative or argument; the audience could experience these adolescents simply, openly presenting their points of view without the interference of any adult judgment or frame of reference.  Although the performance was done almost completely in Cantonese, a significant portion of the stories overcame the language barrier by using nonverbal storytelling. Like the second performance, this one was accompanied by the use of percussion instruments which set the mood and marked transitions between stories. The percussion was performed by Andy Ng, their director, kneeling quietly in the downstage left corner of the stage amongst the instruments.

Their performance had four main sections: an introductory segment, “We see something. . .”, “I have a secret. . . ” and “I want you to know. . . ”

In the introduction, the entire group of performers crept on stage, masked. 20 beings filled and prowled the space like beasts, or perhaps pre-human or infantile life forms. They looked and listened wonderingly about them, reacting with curiosity and fear to a series of statements directed at them by an unseen voice overhead—random fragments of clichés and common sense from the adult world, things they might hear parents, teachers, or other authority figures say to them: “no matter what happens, your family will always be there for you”, “only good-looking people are well-liked”, “it’s human nature to fear inferiority”  . . . I was reminded that this was the experience of adolescence, to absorb from the constant onslaught of adult messages around you and be psychologically, emotionally, physically affected by them even before you could fully understand what they meant.

The next section, “We see something. . . ” presented various daily scenes of Hong Kong life as seen from the point of view of the teenagers. The performers walked quickly across the stage, filling the space with hurried movement (like the movement of human bodies you can recognize on any Hong Kong street) until, at a signal from the percussion, the bodies froze into configurations. The repeated effect of this was like the freezing of time and motion when a camera takes a picture.  One performer would act as the narrator commenting on the scene he /she saw, while the others used their bodies to create a physical depiction of the scene. Photos of street scenes in Hong Kong were projected onto a screen at the back of the stage. These scenes created an atmosphere of the rushed pace, crowds, but also loneliness of Hong Kong life, the isolation of the individual lost in the crowd: a girl watching the scenery flash by through the train window, a teenager who sees an old man on the street but is too shy to offer help, people crushed on an escalator in a shopping mall, people rushing into the MTR entrance.

The third section, “I have a secret. . . ” consisted of a series of stories delving deeper into the psychological frustrations and desires of the group, exploring problems of relationships at school and at home. Episodes ranged from realistic miming to fully abstract expression: in a piece called “I need a listener”, a girl who is repeatedly blocked in her attempts to get attention at school and at home gets pulled into a vicious cycle of violent aggression against her peers. In “Failing to succeed”, a boy tries to cheat but is caught by his teacher and humiliated in front of his peers. The most abstract piece was “Mask”, in which a collection of mask-wearers cautiously attempt to approach one another, finally makes contact and becomes a group, then removes their masks, exposing their frightening faces. But one mask-wearer does not remove her mask; the others try to pressure her to unmask, until she flees, chased by the others.

The last part of the performance, “I want you to know. . .” explores the normally unspoken feelings of the teenagers towards their parents.  The piece was performed in pairs. On the left side of the stage, one masked performer mimed the behavior of a parent at home. Another performer, unmasked, watched from the right side of the stage, addressing a brief but heartfelt message to the distant figure across the space.  This continued until the whole group had gathered on stage. The messages expressed a combination of dissatisfactions, apologies, and grateful appreciation to their parents; but the manner in which they were expressed gave a sense of the distance they felt from parents and the difficulty of expressing oneself to someone who was so close and yet so far.

The piece ended with the group turning to face the audience, then addressing us directly with a series of questions about how to live life. I sensed that the strength of their desire to know the answers to these questions had caused to them to grow bold enough to express themselves and shout their questions at us. Then the group joined their voices in singing a popular local song, Eason Chan’s ‘Shall we talk’.

Part II: Young IDEA International Exchange Showcase

“Babel: the apocalypse of miscommunication”

The 26 participants of this slightly older group of young adults coming from so many different countries and speaking so many different languages, perhaps it was natural for them to base their performance on the theme of modern global society and the limitations of human language. The piece presents a humorous but surprisingly dark vision of our world’s future (or is it the present?).

The piece is framed by the screen of the television, turning the audience into the viewers of a series of illogically connected yet interrelated episodes which overflow into one another.  It opens with the sound of bad channel reception and 3 actors sitting downstage right corner, backs faced to us, trying to change channels with a remote control. Subsequently the stage becomes the world within the screen of the television. The space being performed on stage is always racially and culturally mixed, reflecting the composition of the audience; we never know exactly what place(s) we are looking at, but it is always a place inhabited by a variety of people who don’t belong there, who seem to be passing through. An urban space? Paris, or London, or Hong Kong? Or perhaps a virtual space? In some ways television is an extremely apt metaphor for the chaotic disjuncture of global space—a multiplicity of channels, of stories occupying the same space simultaneously or juxtaposed meaninglessly, combining to create not harmonious logic but cacophony.

The various episodes presented everyday situations where people are rendered helpless because they can no longer use their own language to communicate with others. For example, a tense argument breaks out on the street when two people collide and are unable to resolve the situation with their words; a long line of hopeful job applicants are rejected one after another because they cannot speak English; a frightened woman having an abortion in a foreign country screams for mercy at the hands of an incompetent doctor.  Perhaps the episode which best captured the idea of the divisive nature of language was the scene which begins as a foreign language class. An authoritative teacher tyrannizes the frightened students by making them drill a difficult tongue twister. She leaves the classroom for a moment, instructing them to keep practicing the tongue twister during her absence. The frustrated students beat their hands on the desks in time to the drill, but the rhythm soon morphs into the beat of a song which they all know: ‘We don’t need no education’. However, the song of rebellion is quickly crushed when the teacher returns to the room. The repetition of the drill becomes a taunting chant; the students who have mastered the words use it to jeer at those who cannot. 

The ending of the piece is a grotesquely humorous fast-forward version of human history from the coming of Christ to the apocalypse. A man feeds and cares for the outcasts of society, is worshipped and elevated to the status of god. Just as he begins to get used to the singing of his praises, his followers begin to quarrel and soon kill each other off. When he finally delivers his message to the world: “God is peace!” no one is left to hear his words. The man shoots himself in the head.  Then, awakened by the rhythm of music, the dead rise up again in a macabre zombie dance. Watching the audience, one of them points a remote control at us and turns off the television. This grim ending is perhaps not so much a prediction of the future as it is a striking commentary on the Babel-esque state of the present world. 

Part III: Crossing Nomad’s Land

“Language as song”

This piece was the collaborative work of two different theatres, with five performers from Théâtre du Fil (France) and three performers from Theatre Natya Chetana (India). It dealt with the themes of language, communication and the perspective of the refugee. Because of the different cultural backgrounds of the two groups it is probably safe to say that their actual language of communication was likely to be English, and yet in the performance they chose to use English sparingly, with each group’s performers speaking mostly in their native tongues (which much of the audience could not understand). Why did they make this choice, rather than eliminating language as an expressive tool altogether, as the second group did? My guess is that this is because their performance was deliberately calling into question the nature of human language and our normal assumption that language can only be meaningful with rational understanding.  Like the individuals in the performance, we may not be able to fully understand each others’ languages, but as this theatre piece suggests, if we open our hearts, the event of communication can still take place.

Throughout the piece, spoken language is contrasted with song. This contrast appears from the opening—the performers enter the stage together singing a song in unison, their bodies linked together in the form of a boat which slowly moves through the water. The solidarity and intimacy of this moment is contrasted with the isolation and discord characterizing many of the other episodes, where we witness the performers raise their voices in futile appeal towards each other and towards the audience. The boat reappears again at the end, framing the piece with a suggestive image of cross-cultural understanding and unity. If both music and language are methods of human communication, why aren’t they interchangeable? Why is it that we can still join in song with people whose language we cannot understand?   I am suspicious of the romantic notion that music is a universal language which is somehow more basic than words, existing on some level below or before reason. It can be just as difficult and require just as much logical thinking to learn a song as it does to learn a grammatical pattern. The real difference might be in the patterns of behavior we apply to music-making or talking. Singing a song is essentially a communal activity, we listen and mimic what we hear, striving to match the pitch and rhythm of our own voices with other voices.  Talking, on the other hand, is an extremely individualistic activity which stresses the difference between ‘you’ and ‘I’ and usually presumes a high level of shared common ground between participants (language, culture, identity). Without common ground, verbal communication usually fails.  One of the cruelest moments of the piece was when we saw the depiction of a haughty employer who didn’t even bother to speak to his immigrant workers, communicating his wishes simply by snapping his fingers or banging a spoon against the bottom of a dish. What this performance proposes is not intercultural communication through such potentially inhumane bypassing of language, but through the use of language in new ways, possibly language as song.

Another key feature of this piece was the use of a mesh barrier (recalling a chain link fence) set up horizontally across the center of the stage. This structure played a critical role in defining the perspectives of the performers and the audience throughout the different episodes. The space in front of the fence seemed to represent the ‘nomad’s land’, or the space of limbo in which refugees are trapped, while the space behind the fence was the outside world inhabited by ‘normal’ society. Thus, the audience is also situated to view the space from the same perspective as the refugees, looking out at the carefree, colorful life of the average population through the holes of the chain link fence. We begin to understand what it feels like to be stared at, laughed at, pointed at, but ultimately ignored as an invisible part of the community when we see the finely dressed actors enjoying life and looking at us as if at animals in the zoo.

The piece ends in a prolonged moment of recognition—the individual refugees recognizing each other for what they share, the performers recognizing themselves in the audience, appealing to us in unison: “Yes we have to live, live with hope. We all are refugees of this world in nomad’s land.” In the culturally closed society of Hong Kong, I found this to be a powerfully relevant appeal for greater sympathy and recognition of the others who live amongst us.

Crossing
July 20-22, 2007
Hong Kong City Hall.

Uploaded：Aug,2007