Catherine Diamond Research Articles

Empathetic Exchange of Censored Scenes: Southeast Asian Theatre’s Bold Experiment

At the 2021 Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM), Southeast Asian dramatists presented new works that combined personal histories with the overarching political struggles in the region. One presentation, Deleted Scenes in SEA: Ownership Under Censorship, not only took up the issues of censorship and self-censorship but also entangled the distinct cultural identities of three countries – Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand – by reprising scenes formerly banned in them. The new versions were directed and performed in a language of one of the other countries. Adapting each other’s censored scenes, and re-enacting their similar experiences in countering political repression, required empathetic imagination, and could be a new theatrical platform for creating a sense of regional solidarity. Catherine Diamond is a Professor of Theatre and Environmental Literature at Soochow University, Taiwan. She is the author of Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres (University of Hawai’i Press, 2012) and the playwright/director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project (KETEP) in Southeast Asia.

Silent Cicadas and Noisy Burrowers: Kafka Inside Out in Thailand

In 2015, the Unfolding Kafka Festival was initiated by Thai dancer/choreographer Jitti Chompee, exploring the writings of Franz Kafka as a source of creativity for performers in Thailand and the Southeast Asian region. Three of the presented artworks focus on the concept of metamorphosis, and the body’s interaction with the environments it both creates and inhabits. Inspired by Isabelle Schad’s dance Der Bau (The Burrow), Chompee and visual artist/scenographer Yoko Seyama created Silence of the Insects, which adopted the cicada as a model of bodily transformation. Together, the two dances and the installation form an assemblage that can be considered under the rubric of Una Chaudhuri’s concept of a ‘theatre of species’. Catherine Diamond is Professor of Theatre and Environmental Literature at Soochow University in Taiwan, and is the director/playwright of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project, creating new plays addressing environmental issues in Southeast Asia.

Being Carmen: Cutting Pathways towards Female Androgyny in Japan and India

In this article Catherine Diamond examines the flows of transcultural hybridity occurring in dance between Spanish flamencos, Japanese exponents of flamenco, and Indian dancers interacting with flamenco within their classical dance forms. Japan and India represent two distinct Asian reactions to the phenomenon of global flamenco: the Japanese have adopted it wholesale and compete with the Spanish on their own ground; the Indians claim that as the Roma (gypsy) people originated in India, the country is also the home of flamenco. Despite their differing attitudes, flamenco dance offers women in both cultures a pathway toward participating in an internal androgyny, a wider spectrum of gender representation than either the Asian traditional dance or contemporary Asian society normally allows. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre and environmental literature. She is Director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia, and the director/choreographer of Red Shoes Dance Theatre in Taiwan.

From the Editor

From the Editor Kathy Foley I invite readers to look at the names and affiliations of the authors of this issue and note that our contributors (many of whom are Association for Asian Performance members) are all over the globe. We are Japanese (Yoshiko Fukushima) or Chinese (Dongshin Chang) who teach in the United States, Indians who teach in the United Kingdom (Arya Madhavan), Italians who have studied in China (Antonio Leggieri), Chinese teaching in Australia (Xiaohuan Zhao), Taiwanese (Yi-Hsin Hsu and Iris Tuan), Filipino (Sir Anril Tiatco), Indonesian (Een Her diani), Greek (Avra Sidiropoulu), or Chinese (Qinghuan Huang) scholars teaching in home countries. We are Americans with teaching experience in Japan (Ruth Forsythe and Jonah Salz) and Taiwan (Catherine Diamond), Portuguese who have studied in India (Filipe Pereira), and Americans studying Indonesian arts (Kristina Tannenbaum). Though ATJ is published in the United States and a good number of the authors may have been educated in the United States or Europe, we are a wide, transnational group. We are a reality of the world today. At a recent conference on Southeast Asian Shadow Puppetry at SOAS, which was organized by our ATJ Southeast Asia area editor, Matthew Cohen, I found there was much consternation about the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. In the recent US presidential campaign much of the discourse has been about "walls" and othering of those within and beyond our US borders. There is fear abroad in our contemporary world. When this journal was founded in the 1980s the world seemed to be opening, as today it may seem to be closing down. I find the borders that are being touted are often about limiting imagination, understanding, and empathy—making sure we don't know each other, lest we recognize and implement our commonality. We see governments (I speak of my own at present) that increasingly limit funding to public education, making it expensive, narrow, and "dumbed down." Many will argue that theatre is passé in a world of technology [End Page iii] and give live performance the swipe. Some will question the simplicity of our medium, which needs, in its essence, only the moving figure that is seen and the body that sees. I argue, however, that we theatre makers are increasingly needed to bring people together via that simplicity and directness, to look at aspects of ourselves and understand our differences and similarities. Theatre is live and shared, and changes minds and visions. As the move toward isolationism grows, I hope that each of you who is writing, singing, dancing, or writing your research continues to reach across boundaries; your work dissolves misinformation. Coexistence begins by opening doors. [End Page iv] Kathy Foley University of California, Santa Cruz Copyright © 2017 University of Hawai'i Press

Four Women in the Woods: An Ecofeminist Look at the Forest as Home

Four Women in the Woods:An Ecofeminist Look at the Forest as Home Catherine Diamond (bio) In 2002, Futerra, a British media company advocating sustainability, launched "The Seasons Alter," a four-minute video of Titania's "bad weather" speech. Played by two actresses, Titania chides the surly Oberon, chasing him around the sparse modernist set dominated by an enormous clock. He responds to her recital of environmental disasters stemming from their quarrel by placing the onus on her: "Do you amend it then: it lies in you." She then repeats her own last line more forcefully: "We are their parents and original."1 Formerly, directors were wont to shorten this speech—the longest in the play—because its serious topicality broke the spell of comic fantasy. Futerra, by extracting its prescient relevance to the contemporary global warming crisis, thrust A Midsummer Night's Dream into the Anthropocene.2 By posing their fault equally, however, Futerra obscures the ethicality of their respective positions. It places Titania's commitments to rectifying the weather patterns upon which farmers depend and nurturing her votaress's child on the same level as Oberon's whim, an expression of power invested in him by a patriarchal hierarchy. Their debate also puts the Fairy Queen's concern for the world's inhabitants in conflict with her maternal affection for one particular child. She is not allowed by Oberon to love both. By trickery, he obtains the changeling, quells her rebellion, and reabsorbs her into his hierarchal order. However, Titania's challenge to his rule lingers from the image of her loving command over the forest dwellers, a delicate dream of an alternative relationship, of a possible something else. Titania's importance in the play and the expansive expression of her values and desires demonstrates one woman's conflict between her loyalty to nature and to her husband/king. Three other female characters in classical dramas also face similar dilemmas of having to choose between [End Page 71] their identities associated with forest life and their roles in patriarchal societies: Sakuntala in Kalidasa's eponymous fifth century Sanskrit play, Neang Seda (Sita) in the Reamker, the eighteenth century Cambodian version of the Sanskrit Ramayana,3 and Shakespeare's Rosalind in As You Like It. All four are unusual in that they are aristocratic women who spend the duration of their respective dramas in forests. Ecofeminism Their conflicts reprise one of the major concerns of ecofeminism that examines the "important connections between the oppression of women and the destruction and misuse of nonhuman nature within male-dominated cultures."4 This general formulation does not specify the important connections, but Karla Armbruster adds, "central to the ecofeminist agenda is the goal of individual, social, and ideological change—specifically, change that will improve the cultural standing of women and nature."5 She implies that the hierarchy of dualisms that divide the world and valorize the male side, such as nature/female and culture/male, has to be dissolved to allow more nuanced interconnections. These artificial divisions, with their concomitant ramifying dyads, were imposed not only to simplify, dominate, and unify the multiplicity of life forms, but also to justify that domination as the natural order. The mutual exclusivity of dualisms has been harmful to both halves, and ecofeminism challenges the gendered essentializing of qualities. It critiques those expected of women that perpetuate the notion that they are somehow physically and emotionally closer to nature, in contradistinction to mind, reason, and the scientific method, and that this association invalidates their environmental knowledge and concern. "Inherent in ecofeminism," writes Barbara Gates, "is a belief in the interconnectedness of all living things. Since all life is nature, no part of it can be closer than another to 'nature.'"6 At the same time, it must account for women's historical roles as nurturing caregivers and the current focus of agencies dedicated to poverty eradication by empowering poor women to protect their own environment. Moreover, ecofeminism challenges the cultural construction of "nature" within the humanist project of mapping the world as well as the aesthetic melding of women and landscape within a sexualizing gaze of Western art. Pleasures of the land and body have to...

Editor’s Note: Spring 2016

Editor’s NoteSpring 2016 Rebecca Rovit What if the aesthetics of a performance or a playwright’s message prevails over the dramatic content of the theatrical event? Our six featured articles explore contemporary forms of theatre—devised and scripted—whose dramaturgies provoke an emotional or critical response in a spectator that exceeds our expectations for representational drama. Two authors frame this spring edition XXX.2 with vantage points from the Pacific Rim: Sharon Mazer examines performance trends in New Zealand’s fringe theatre which foster a community response to identity politics. Catherine Diamond introduces the concept of the hyperobject, suggesting the large scale experience of global warming in her analysis of plays about climate change. How can theatre performance engage difficult subjects like Alzheimer’s disease, immersing audiences in a sensory experience that simulates dementia? Jane Turner considers the science of sound perception and digital technology at two theatre events which disoriented spectators through altered aural and spatial environments. Cara Berger too focuses on devised theatre—her own practice—to propose a feminist approach to postdramatic form that creates a performance space for what she calls “feminine knowledge.” Sara Freeman, meanwhile, suggests that feminism and post 9/11 geopolitics merge in the dramaturgies of Tony Kushner and Timberlake Wertenbaker, wherein ideas of otherness and the maternal generate a process of “becoming m/other.” In his exploration of plays by the Argentine playwright, Ricardo Monti, Milton Loayza also emphasizes spatial and philosophical planes of being and becoming. He adopts a Deleuzian approach to show how Monti’s aesthetic strategy prompts a critical engagement with the subject matter of political tyranny and crisis, rather than representation. Our editorial staff is once more in flux. We welcome Christine Woodworth as the new Book Review Editor. Chris is an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. To our outgoing Managing Editor, Jeanne Tiehen, I owe my gratitude. Jeanne has served our journal with dedication and meticulous management over two years, while also working as the Subscriptions Assistant. We wish you much success, Jeanne, as you complete your doctoral dissertation and pursue a professional career. Happy 30th birthday to the JDTC: This year also marks the retirement of John Gronbeck-Tedesco, cofounder of the journal and a dear colleague. Thank you, John, for your dedicated and expert service to the profession over the decades. Finally, I am pleased to note a steady flow of new submissions and an ever-growing group of first rate reviewers for the journal. To our readers and subscribers: we invite your scholarly inquiries, creative explorations of performance paradigms, and innovative essays related to theatre praxis. After all, it is your work that continues to expand our field of study. Please direct all inquiries to jtdc@ku.edu. Rebecca Rovit University of Kansas Copyright © 2016 The Author

Human See, Human Do: Simianification, Cross-species, Cross-cultural, Body Transformation

Simianification is the practice of humans inhabiting the simian body on stage. Because Asians have lived with monkeys and apes, several Asian theatre traditions have long legacies of representing monkeys on stage. In Europe and North America, where non-human primates did not exist, they are not a familiar feature in performance until nineteenth-century music hall and circus and twentieth-century film and television. In some recent performances in Asia dancers and actors have expanded their understanding of monkey roles by incorporating scientific discoveries, modern movement techniques, and global pop culture. On the British and American stage, actors experiment to ‘impersonate’ the humanized ape bodily and mentally, without the aid of the disguises and prosthetics usual in film. These performers ‘embody’ the philosophical inquiry of what it means to ‘be monkey’ by inhabiting a monkey’s body while still performing ‘art’ for a human audience. Catherine Diamond, a Contributing Editor to NTQ, is a professor of theatre and environmental literature at Soochow University, Taiwan. She is also the director of the Kinnari Ecological Theatre Project in Southeast Asia.

Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres by Catherine Diamond (review)

Reviewed by: Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres by Catherine Diamond Jennifer Goodlander Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres. By Catherine Diamond. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2012. 426 pp. Hardcover, $55.00. Author Catherine Diamond began this project with the plan to spend three to four weeks in each Southeast Asian country with the goal of seeing as many performances as possible. She declares, "I adopted this inductive approach because I wanted to remain as free from expectation as possible, and impose neither theories nor subjective judgments too precipitously before I had had a chance to see the range of theatre on offer" (p. vii). Diamond went back to each country several times in order to see more theatre and to conduct follow-up interviews, but her initial plan gives insight into the structure and purpose of the book: to provide a comprehensive overview of the many different kinds of performance that make up theatre in Southeast Asia today. The strength of this book lies in the vivid descriptions of a variety of performances that favor neither traditional nor contemporary performance genres—but rather examine theatre in Southeast Asia as a multilayered tapestry. In order to link the different countries and chapters, Diamond invokes Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagined communities"; throughout the book she argues that theatre makers create a community across the region through their use of the imagination to bridge tradition and modernity within contemporary culture. Many books on Asian theatre struggle to compare and contrast theatre that could be considered traditional against newer genres of performance that have appeared in the last century. Diamond defines traditional performance as "the theatre considered authentic to the peoples of Southeast Asia before [End Page 233] European intervention" (p. 2). She contrasts "traditional theatre" to what she describes as the four prevailing types of twenty-first-century theatre; these are postmodern theatre, postcolonial theatre, intercultural theatre, and social action theatre. In the introduction, Diamond perhaps simplifies the complex array of performance genres and cultures that make up the region of Southeast Asia, but I also very much appreciate her attempt to define terms and to establish boundaries. Southeast Asia provides a complicated object of study because of the many diverse histories, cultures, political formations, geographies, and of course theatre and performance genres found there. There are many differences and similarities, and deciding how to organize a book that deals with the entire region is a dilemma. James Brandon organized his book Theatre in Southeast Asia (1967) by themes such as "puppetry" and "social contract," which allows the reader to compare and contrast similar performance phenomena across national borders. In Diamond's book each country gets its own chapter, and she groups her chapters and countries together under three different yet overlapping themes in an attempt to foreground some of the regional trends. The different topics allow for interesting connections and comparisons that would certainly not be limited to the countries within that section but assist the reader in finding a way into the vast subject. Addressing one country in each chapter also allows for excellent comparisons and contrasts and reveals the rich amount of theatre happening in each of these areas. The first theme, the increased participation of women in the performing arts, applies to the countries of Thailand, Vietnam, and Bali. In the chapter on Thailand she contrasts two characters, Mae Naak and Phra Ram, as two key opposing archetypes of female and male that appear in myriad theatrical forms and stories. Through and in opposition to these two archetypes, Diamond describes how much of Thai theatre represents anxiety about traditional versus modern values that come into conflict both inside and outside their society. In the chapter on Vietnamese theatre, Diamond starts with gender by examining the work of female theatre artist Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc, but that is not the only focus. Rather, this chapter provides an excellent overview of many of the different genres of Vietnamese theatrical forms, such as cai luong, kich noi, and hat boi. Diamond argues through rich examples that actors "create a distinctly Vietnamese style" by combining Stanislavski based methods of characterization with Vietnamese character types (p. 73). The...

Hiking in Yangming Mountain: "Listening"

Journal Article Hiking in Yangming Mountain: “Listening” Get access Catherine Diamond Catherine Diamond diamond_catherine@yahoo.com Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 20, Issue 3, Summer 2013, Pages 683–684, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/ist005 Published: 09 August 2013

Dreaming our own Dreams: Singapore Monodrama and the Individual Talent

For its size, Singapore hosts an exceptional amount of theatrical activity, emanating both from within the city state and from its role as sponsor of regional international workshops and productions. Its English-speaking dramatists are in the forefront of staging original plays about the foibles of Singaporean society and serving as mediators among South-east Asian theatre practitioners. While troupes depend on government funding and must obtain government permits to perform, most have opted to take an alternative position to the government's narrative of the Singapore success story. This has created an uneasy relationship that undermines the strength of the theatre's social-political critique and encourages self-censorship. In the following essay, Catherine Diamond examines the psychologically cramped conditions within which current Singaporean dramatists operate through a comparison of monodramas. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre at Soochow University in Taiwan, and a frequent contributor to NTQ. She is currently directing a flamenco dance-drama adaptation of The House of Bernarda Alba.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Kathy Foley As the title of Pirandello's play claimed, "So it is (if you think so)." But the authors of this issue of ATJ point out that it is useful to test received wisdom. The articles give insight into Japanese kabuki, contemporary Thai performance, and Tibetan lhamo folk opera. While thematically diverse, the articles share common features. They remind us that even the most conservative of genres is malleable to the changing politics of the producers. They show that the West sometimes serves as an ideological whipping boy in conflicts about societal directions. The articles all show that received versions of history can profitably be questioned. Though this issue does not include a play, it does not lack drama. James Brandon's article on kabuki censorship by the American Occupation in the wake of World War II covers old ground, but shows that by going into the archives a researcher can resurrect a completely different history about an event. While acknowledging the importance of Fabion Bowers in the Occupation censors' office, Brandon presents the startling conclusion that other theatre censors were as significant in "saving" kabuki, and preceded Bowers in releasing plays. The Japanese producers, and not just philistine Americans, may have been calling the shots in this period where what had been a living theatre became an aestheticized artifact. Who would have thought that in rummaging through old office files one could come up with evidence that subverts accepted "facts"? For those who know something about kabuki, this is a page-turner. Brandon gives us the who, what, when, and where. Rather than fully addressing the why, he presents his case, vindicating some previously vilified American censors and leaving the reader to play the jury. Catherine Diamond's article on Thailand's Mae Naak and other unruly heroines gives insight into contemporary Thai theatre and at the same time interrogates wider patterns of female representation in Asian theatre. Her material is specific to Thailand as she probes the duality implicit in traditional female representation. However, her finding [End Page iii] should also have resonance for scholars working in other areas. The Javanese Lara Kidul (goddess of the South Sea), Chinese White Snake, Japanese Dojoji, and all the snake ladies that inhabit traditional and modern theatre have comparable features. She invites readers to consider popular tales and classical myth in a feminist perspective as she traces the conflicted heritage and the current interpretations in Thailand. Syed Jamil Ahmed discusses both contemporary lhamo of the Tibetan diaspora and the form in the People's Republic of China. He argues that the diaporic community uses an old Buddhist jataka tale of a prince who gives up everything and lives in exile in a demon kingdom to signify the fate of the Dalai Lama. At the same time he shows that groups in the PRC are manipulating the lhamo repertoire to validate their rule. Ahmed historicizes our understanding of the art and sets current presentations in the context of the political strategies of the cultural producers. In lhamo we are seeing artists going to the past to influence the future as they perform in a contested political context. The final work, Kevin Wetmore's bibliography of Japanese scripts in English, serves as a resource for Asian Theatre researchers and educators. His insightful introduction gives an overview of the field. I thank each of these talented authors for sharing the work. Kathy Foley University of California-Santa Cruz Copyright © 2006 The University of Hawai'i Press

Red Lotus in the Twenty-First Century: Dilemmas in the Lao Performing Arts

The small and sparsely populated country of Laos is squeezed between Thailand and Vietnam, and receives information, financial investment, and cultural influence from both – arguably overwhelming the development of its own modern identity. While theatre has often been a popular and important means of disseminating cultural information and values in societies with low literacy levels, in today's Laos the mass media have become the most influential source of information and influence, with Thai television dominating the Lao airwaves – and Vietnamese-style socialist realism still the model for the live performing arts. Although the troupes disseminate didactic messages deemed important by the central government, they are supported primarily by foreign aid agencies that also dictate their content. In the following article, Catherine Diamond traces the history of the three major performing arts in Laos, describes their present state, and assesses the difficulties they face in developing along their own creative and artistic paths. Catherine Diamond teaches theatre and ecology in literature at Soochow University in Taipei, Taiwan. She is a theatre reporter in Southeast Asia, and has previously written about theatre in Burma, Vietnam, Turkey, and the Czech Republic for NTQ.

Prague Summer: Encounters with a Third Kind of Theatre

All major cities are now competing with each other to attract cultural tourists: yet Prague, since the Velvet Revolution, has been distinctive in using the city itself as a cultural icon, also capitalizing on the artists associated with it – notably Mozart, Gluck, Kafka, and Arcimboldo – to create performances that present an idealized and imagined Prague, the city as its own persona. Since tourists might hesitate to go to Czech-language drama, theatrical entrepreneurs instead offer puppet opera, Black Theatre, and Laterna Magika – forms closely associated with Prague, and which circumvent the language problem. Thus, during the summer, when the regular theatres close, Prague theatricalizes itself for tourist consumption. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre in Taiwan, where she also dances and directs. A regular contributor to NTQ, she has written several books, including Sringara Tales, short stories about Asian performers, and Madmen and Fools: Taiwan Theatre 1988–1998.

Burmese Nights: the Pagoda Festival Pwe in the Age of Hollywood's ‘Titanic’

The Burmese zat pwe, an exuberant variety show involving almost every kind of performing art, has fascinated foreign visitors to Myanmar for the past hundred years. It continues today as a vibrant amalgam of singing, dancing, acting, and comic improvisation, still performed annually at pagoda festivals. As Burmese scholars have noted, the Burmese performer is primarily a singer and dancer rather than a dramatic actor, and therefore tends to use plays as frameworks for demonstrating virtuosity in these areas. This is reinforced by the training given at the two State Schools of Music and Dance, and while the Drama Department at the University of Culture does acquaint students with dramatic acting, the emphasis remains on music and dance. Moreover, the scripted drama, especially the classical drama, which reached a peak in the mid-nineteenth century, is increasingly omitted from the pwe programme, having gradually been displaced by the pop music that is considered necessary to attract young audiences. Despite such changes, which alarm traditionalists, the pwe performance has shown a resilient flexibility to adapt to audience preferences and remains a lively highlight at the festivals. Catherine Diamond – who has previously written for NTQ on Vietnamese and Turkish theatre, and on oriental approaches to classical tragedy – is a dancer and drama professor who is currently directing for the Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

The Supermuses of Stage and Screen: Vietnam's Female Dramatists

According to Catherine Diamond's survey, Vietnam's contemporary theatre has an unusually large number of women participating in playwriting and directing. Several, as well as performing, are involved in both. Moreover, the plays being presented in the two largest cities, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, have female characters dominating the stage. The women dramatists exert an unusual amount of creative control in the theatre. Some work in close collaboration with male colleagues or have spouses in the theatre; others have been at odds with male management and prefer to work with other women artists. The predominance of successful women playwrights and directors may be the result of severalfactors: the centuries old tradition offemale-oriented theatre; the recent activities of women in military theatre troupes; the Communist Party's attempts to legislate equality in a society with lingeringfeudalistic attitudes; and women's transmission offamily traditions in theatre. Catherine Diamond is a professor of theatre in Taiwan, where she is a director with Thalie Theatre, Taiwan's only English-language troupe. Also a dancer, she has published several times in ATJ and has written fictional accounts of dancers in Asia in Sringara Tales.

The Floating World of Nouveau Chinoiserie: Asian Orientalist Productions of Greek Tragedy

Criticism is increasingly being levelled at western directors who, in the name of a vague intercultural aesthetic, embark on experiments combining western texts with various kinds of oriental movement, costume, and music. In this article, Catherine Diamond raises the same issues in regard to productions of western drama in Asia, and offers a detailed analysis of three productions of ancient Greek tragedies to reveal how a new kind of non-specific orientalism has come to pervade the international stage, originating no less in Asia than in the West. Lavish productions, mounted to impress the international festival circuit rather than to engage local audiences, appropriate western tragedies primarily on account of their status in the western literary and theatrical canon; and rather than offering new interpretations of the texts from a different cultural perspective, they contribute to the creeping ascendancy of superficially exotic spectacle. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor, is currently a director with Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.

Anatomy of Corruption, and: Ilustrado (review)

Reviewed by: Anatomy of Corruption, and: Ilustrado Catherine Diamond Anatomy of Corruption. By Malou Jacob. Tanghalang Pilipino, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila. 24 January 1998. Ilustrado. By Paul Dumol. Tanghalang Pilipino, Cultural Center of the Philippines, Manila. 6 February 1998. Click for larger view View full resolution Cely (Irma Adlawan, center) and other members of the cast in Tanghalang Pilipino of Manila’s production of Malou Jacob’s Anatomy of Corruption, directed by Dennis Marasigan. Photo uncredited. Click for larger view View full resolution George de Jesus III, Ony de Leon, Irma Adlawam, (as Cely, center), Len Ag Santos, and Lambert de Jesus in Tanghalang Pilipino of Manila’s production of Malou Jacob’s Anatomy of Corruption, directed by Dennis Marasigan. Photo uncredited. In 1998, the Republic of the Philippines celebrated the centennial of its Declaration of Independence. Tanghalang Pilipino, the resident company in the Cultural Center of the Philippines, contributes two perspectives on Philippine independence and its contemporary democracy. Concomitant to the centennial, Artistic Director Nonon Padilla has also framed his company’s eleventh season around the theme of “the individual and today’s Philippine society.” Anatomy of Corruption, a satirical comedy, reveals not only the pervasiveness of corruption in modern Philippine institutions, but explores the ways in which it steals into the fabric of social life of even the most morally rigorous individuals. Ilustrado, a biographical musical about José Rizal, the designated father of Philippine revolution, is the final play in a trilogy featuring Rizal’s two influential novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. Tanghalang’s two offerings not only present the dilemmas of the individual resisting pressures of society, but also the ambiguous position of the Filipino hero at both ends of the twentieth century. Not only do the texts focus on the isolation of individual activists, but the staging of both productions heightens their sense of alienation. Both productions convey serious messages, yet they employ a variety of popular techniques—slapstick, comic stereotypes, and popular music—to reach their audiences. Both perhaps also suffer from their protagonists’ lack of humor and aloofness from the other characters, which inadvertently distances them from audience sympathies, as well. In Anatomy, we see Cely, engagingly played by one of Manila’s foremost actresses, Irma Adlawan, on her first day as an attorney in the Family Court, which handles cases of adoption, divorce, and child support. In a bright red suit, contrasting with the dim gray of the bureaucratic office, she navigates her way around the small stage crowded with the occupants of seven desks. She is given all the cases that come to the office, while her superiors play cards and her subordinates eat, flirt, and purchase unnecessary goods from the vendors who magically appear every payday. The three pairs of petitioners with their accompanying lawyers, all played by the same four [End Page 531] actors, arrive each time through the audience via a front ramp. Their hysterical over-the-top performances supply most of the play’s humor. Ony de Leon and Len Ag Santos as the various combatant couples carry on their ludicrous arguments, as Cely tries to be the voice of reason, such as when presiding over their separation and dividing their fruit stand—fruit by fruit. Gary Lim, a popular comic actor, brings down the house every time he enters as either the Moslem or the gay vendor, exploiting stereotypes with comic disingenuousness. Ethnic humor is still viable on the Philippine stage, as evinced by Julius Comia playing a pompous pipe-smoking Chinese who comes to the court to adopt a Filipino surname. The crisis occurs when Cely refuses a kickback, saying she did nothing but what she was supposed to do at her job. This throws the office members into consternation, since it means they will not get their cut. With the tacit consent of the senior attorney, they hide files, rendering Cely impotent. The climax comes when a satisfied petitioner leaves an envelope on her desk. Cely tries, though fails, to return the money, and absentmindedly sticks it in her purse. Noticing the gesture, the boss accuses her of being as corrupt as the rest. Despite her protests that she intends to...

Darkening Clouds over Istanbul: Turkish Theatre in a Changing Climate

Modern Turkish theatre, benefiting from the support of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, has had a secular bent throughout its history. However, after the elections of 1994 and 1995, when Refah (Welfare) Party candidates espousing a distinctly religious agenda swept into power, dramatists have found themselves in an uneasy position, caught between corrupt secular politicians and a censorship-inclined military on the one hand, and Islamists hostile to theatre both in principle and as an unnecessary luxury on the other. Besides swiftly changing demographics and competition from alternative entertainments, shifts in political policy in Istanbul are eroding the city's strong theatre tradition. Yet the theatre of this nation which straddles Europe and Asia maintains an impressive vitality and variety, with state and municipal companies mounting regular seasons of foreign and Turkish works, and experimental troupes challenging established theatre forms as well as daring to broach some of the sensitive ideological conflicts in Istanbul. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan, is author of Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about dancers in South-East Asia and the Middle East.

The Pandora's Box of ‘Doi Moi’: the Open-Door Policy and Contemporary Theatre in Vietnam

In the 1990s, Vietnamese traditional theatre has seen its popular base eroded by foreign videos, television imports, and the films that have poured into the country since the advent of the ‘open door’ policy, or doi moi. As that policy is primarily economic in purpose, the advantages offered to the national culture have been questionable. The traditional forms here discussed by Catherine Diamond – tuong, hat boi, and cheo – have lost much of their status in the urban areas, though still popular in the countryside. However, the forms which address contemporary issues – ‘renovated theatre’ (cai luong), spoken theatre (kich noi), and, most recently, ‘mini-theatre’ (san khau nho) – play to significant numbers in Saigon and Hanoi, often employing a distinctive vein of satirical humour. Though trained in the academies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Vietnamese dramatists have now broken away from the socialist realist ideal and are looking towards the West and China for new artistic developments. The author of this survey, Catherine Diamond, is a dancer and drama professor in Taiwan. She has recently published Sringara Tales, a collection of short stories about the traditional dancers in Southeast Asia.