Brett: I read your whole blog, and I didn't see a photo of me. (To Rachael) Were there any of you?
Rachael: No.
Brett: You got something against white people?
Me: Fine then. Here's your affirmative action. (Click)
Went there for dinner last night with a group of the artists. As Venuri said, after the deadness of the 5-star, big-boulevarded city, we finally found an oasis of genuine life.
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Rushed back to IFB for this performance at 6pm. It's created by Lin Htet from Theatre of the Disturbed. Oh boy. Really problematic performance. We'll probably be talking about it a lot tomorrow (i.e. 6 Jan), so I won't critique it here. I'll try to give you an objective description instead, shall I? Prelude: 64 male volunteers were gathered at IFB from lunchtime onwards - one for each of the 64 years Myanmar's had a military dictatorship. By the time we were seated, they were all standing on stage, faces wrapped in masks, arms wrapped in bandages: the guise of protesters. Act 1 (15-30 minutes): Monks in red robes chanted a (lengthy) blessing. Young people seated in front of the stage poured a libation in memory of those who had died during those 64 years. (No good photos, sorry.) Act 2 (60-90 minutes): Four public intellectuals are invited on stage to talk with Soe, a member of Theatre of the Disturbed. The intellectuals - including feminists and survivors of the 1988 student protests - sit comfortably around a coffee table and answer questions about nonviolence. Lin Htet translates. Lin Htet: How do we as individuals take part in this conflict resolution? Or are we just waiting for the leaders to lead, for the leaders to come so we can follow? The answer was, we are. We are. We are still encountering conflicts. It is still part of human society. We will always encounter conflcits. But as a civilized society, we should be able to overcome conflict without resorting to violence. And I think this form of conflict resolution is the most important concept. This goes on for a very long time. Bear in mind that the volunteers are still at the back of the stage doing nothing. Eventually they decide to sit, collapsing like a Vanessa Beecroft live installation. I meet one of them during my pee break. I begin to worry about their welfare. I consider an intervention. I am about to buy them all canned drinks which they can pass amongst themselves at the back of the stage, when the direction of the conversation finally turns to Titus Andronicus itself. Lin Htet: Even this performance is a conflict between the participants over whether we should play Titus Andronicus with more violence or with less violence. His opinion is we should do Titus Andronicus as it is, because then we can educate this society in a very civilised and very sophisticated manner. Act 3 (5 min): The lights go out. Actors begin to do Titus Andronicus, but not as it is. A half-naked man in a longyi eats ice cream on stage. A half-naked drummer in shorts marches around the audience. A woman pushes a stroller around the audience. The drummer and the woman meet. The drummer drums. The woman does nothing. =CURTAIN= Riding back to the hotel, my bus-mates discussed what we'd seen.
It’s a Burmese pagoda guardian lion! Made out of plasticine! On a stick! While the FCP artists were checking in with Valerie Oliveiro about tech, I went gadding about with my old college friend Cho, and she took me to an awesome little fairground whose name remains a mystery. Got this done for 1000 kyat by a retired boatman. (Asking price was 500, but just look at it. It’s worth several times that much.) Cho tells me she used to spend all her pocket-money on these things after school. They look good enough to eat – everyone kept asking if it was candy when it brought it to the French Institute.
Only downside is, these things don’t last that long. They’re still soft and unglazed; mine’s already beginning to droop to one side. Makes it all the more precious, I say. Oh, and to all you conceptual boys and girls : THIS man is an artist. Odd discussion at lunch: KS brought up communication flow amongst ourselves; we expressed concern that we don’t know the Alter U participants properly yet; that both Ko Tar and Ju had chosen to address us in English without translation, never mind the fact that at least half the people in the room spoke Burmese as their first language. Deal sealed: from now on, there’ll be interpreting all the way. Then we started looking at the photo documentation of our Myanmar citizen journalist, Sithu Zeya. He’s been shooting and videoing everything we’ve been doing. Yep: I’m not the only one at work here – in fact, KS hopes Zeya might even set up a blog once he’s done. KS: We all document very differently. And many of us are involved in documentation, citizen journalism. The whole project that we’re inside is this whole question of memory. How we remember, how the Burmese remember. It’s the first time FCP’s commissioned a local documenter-blogger for the country we’re visiting. This is meant to complement my blog, your blog, everyone’s blogs and Facebook walls that record the course of these two weeks – no monolithic archive but a fretwork of contradictory accounts. However, Zeya’s shots of yesterday – body postures of us gazing at the feet of the Buddha, precious arrangements of flowers on a temple altar – provoked some friction from the participants. Wu Wenguang: These are just tourist photos. It’s not about trying to understand the people here. I want to transfer some information to people who want to know what’s about Myanmar. Because for me, it’s not just coming here for myself. It’s for my people. To China, Myanmar is a small country, but we have always had a story of each other. People are talking too much about Aung San Suu Kyi, but what about ordinary people and social movements? Adriaan leapt in here to point out the irony of this situation: we were telling a Myanmar person that what was important to him wasn’t important enough for our reports on Myanmar. Everyone must have his/her own story to tell. Julie: I’m not an uploader. To me it makes me feel nervous to think that things are being uploaded. It makes me feel strange. Maybe I’ll be interested in the future, what everyone said. I’m sure I’ll be interested. But this just reminded me how we have to negotiate ego around ethics. Ju’s a best-selling novelist: author of over 19 novels and over 60 short stories (she says this is a minimum guesstimate). She’s also the founder of Ju Foundation, an environmental group that was involved in the Myistone Dam protests, funded with the proceeds of her books. Plus she’s unmarried and supports a family of 11 kids – her brother’s and sister’s, I think. Superwoman, no? But the truth is that after Ko Tar she’s a breath of fresh air, because she’s so refreshingly human. Ju: Actually believe it or not, I don’t like Powerpoint. I hate Powerpoint presentations, but I do it in case you don’t hear my English words. Sure, she gave us some touchy-feely stuff about her love of art, the pollution of the Ayeyarwady, orphans of Hurricane Nargis healing their trauma through drawings, and her mother’s songs about black-blue-and-white pigeons. Ju: The little sound of fluttering wings of a dragonfly teaches me to touch it very carefully so as not to hurt it. This too is art. But then she started talking about gender. Ju: I don’t hate men. I like them as friends and as my boyfriends. But I don’t like get married. I don’t want them to be my husbands. She’s seen as a feminist writer, ‘cos she writes about women’s education, women’s independence, especially in rural areas where there’s little access to learning for girls. She’s a speaker for the silent, telling the tales that her patients and friends are too scared to reveal themselves. Yet she denies that she’s a feminist. Julie Tolentino: You write about women, you love women, why don’t you call yourself a feminist? Oh, but she struggles with her womanhood sometimes. For example: ladies aren’t allowed to touch the gold leaf of the most important pagodas in Myanmar, never mind that it was a princess who caused the construction of Shwemawdaw and a queen gave her weight in gold to gild Shwedagon. Ju: Sometimes I think I am too feminist. But sometimes I want to touch Buddha’s toes and his robe by myself. Sometimes I want to touch it. So sometimes I go to see the Trustees’ Committee, and when they are not looking at me I touch it. Just to see. What it feels like when I touch my lord Buddha. Just for a minute. That thin gold leaf. Then there’s the government: the military dictatorship’s been so testosterone-heavy that Myanmar got its first female minister just last year, in 2012. Ju: I have to tell you about my situation of hardness. I gave a talk at a military event. I was there with another four writers, men. And I didn’t have the right to sit next to my colleagues, because I was a woman. Speaking of politics, she’s been extremely alarmed by efforts to expunge General Aung San from the historical record. Kids over the past ten or twenty years haven’t learned about him in school. Ju: I asked one girl, “Do you know why July 19 is Azani Nei (Martyrs’ Day)? She said it was the day the rock singer Azani was born! What indeed? Don’t worry, Ju – you’re not the only one asking herself that question these days.
One important bit of FCP is getting an introduction to Myanmar culture – in KS’s words, making sure we know we’re not coming into a culture that’s starting from zero. We’ve four speakers for this purpose, and the first is Ko Tar: a former medical doctor who’s become an educational pioneer. He’s spent the last five years transforming Buddhist monasteries into schools where kids can learn vital life skills and empowerment. (If you speak Japanese, you can listen in on his TED talk at Yokohama.) Ko Tar: I was born in a village. Whenever I visit the villages I see the children. The children are everywhere. They are bunched in the trees and on the streets. It’s a kind of calamity, to see the children on the streets. In 2008, cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar and added more unfortunate children. Education is a big problem in Myanmar. 20% of kids don’t enroll in school: 59% (I think) of those who do enroll don’t complete secondary school. Traditionally, monastery education hasn’t been very good quality – it’s top-down, memorization stuff. But it’s the best way to reach kids in underprivileged communities, who can even get free meals in the temples. Now, a lot of what Ko Tar says about his strategy feels like fuzzy New Age babble: “innovative social technology”, “transformation from within, organic and driven from the heart, not only from the head.” But there’s real substance to what he’s doing. His program consists of three ways of learning: head (reading and writing for critical thinking), heart (self-awareness training) and hands (practical life skills). What he does is he recruits monks and sends them off to foreign countries: Laos and Thailand, so they can get out of their comfort zones. He shows them what’s going on in monastic schools over there, and they come back with ideas and life lessons: working across ethnicities and religions, helping HIV+ people, microcredit unions, high energy stoves, planting organic crops, harvesting cowdung as biogas, building libraries out of mud. Ko Tar: Every transformation has three openings: open mind, open heart, open will. But there’s real substance to what he’s doing. His program consists of three ways of learning: head (reading and writing for critical thinking), heart (self-awareness training) and hands (practical life skills). What he does is he recruits monks and sends them off to foreign countries: Laos and Thailand, so they can get out of their comfort zones. He shows them what’s going on in monastic schools over there, and they come back with ideas and life lessons: working across ethnicities and religions, helping HIV+ people, microcredit unions, high energy stoves, planting organic crops, harvesting cowdung as biogas, building libraries out of mud. Ko Tar: We change their context, and they are transformed. No more rote learning either: the birth of critical thinking, leading to what he calls “little democracies”. But frankly, I was suspicious of this project. I’m a gay activist from a multi-religious country. I’ve a natural distrust of religious entities taking over state social services. But I have to get over my first-world thinking: we’re in a situation where a secular government won’t step in to fill the gaps; where the spiritual leadership of monks often makes them the only channels through which we can reach out to rural communities. And it’s dumb of me not to want to reach out to the 90% Buddhists in the nation, for fear of depriving the Muslim/Christian/animist 10% (who are in fact often admitted into the schools). And Ko Tar’s approach does bloody well reach out. He’s transformed 57 monasteries, benefitting 17,000 kids. His target for 2015 is 51,000 kids in 180 schools, with some schools serving as teaching-learning hubs that’ll disseminate this form of education. Ko Tar: I know there is a long way to go. Our country is in transition. We can challenge the calamity fo street children running in the streets, thanks to all engaged Buddhist monks and nuns. So Alter U begins today! KS is addressing the 24 new voices. KS: One of the things we try to do as an international arts group is to invite independent artists. So there are no “national” artists here. And they come from many different fields like you all do, some from visual arts, some from film, some from the field of writing. And we all make so many different kinds of art, and we are involved in so many different fields in our home cities. |
AuthorMy name's Ng Yi-Sheng, I'm a writer from Singapore, and I've been a Creative-in-Residence with TheatreWorks since 2006. I've served as blogger-documenter for two previous Flying Circus Projects: Singapore/Vietnam in 2007 and Singapore/Cambodia in 2009/2010. ArchivesCategories
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