Ong Keng Sen Research Articles

(Un)learning theatre through stories of growing up: difference and multiplicity in Singapore

ABSTRACT This article considers the value of growing up stories among theatre practitioners in Singapore as a resource for learning theatre in multicultural contexts. It engages with the lived experiences of five Singapore theatre practitioners, Alfian Sa’at, Alvin Tan, Haresh Sharma, Kok Heng Leun and Ong Keng Sen, whose contributions to discourses on multiplicity and performance are significant in the city–state and internationally. Concepts of ‘Open Culture’ (Kuo. 1998. “Contemplating an Open Culture: Transcending Multiracialism.” In Singapore: Re-Engineering Success, edited by Arun Mahiznan, and Lee Tsao Yuan, 55–60. Singapore: Oxford University Press), ‘postcolonial conviviality’ (Gilroy. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press) and ‘critical multiculturalism’ (Goh. 2009. “Conclusion: Toward a Critical Multiculturalism.” In Race and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore, edited by Daniel P.S. Goh, 213–218. London: Routledge) are proposed as useful frames for understanding theatre in multicultural contexts, and from which the idea of a ‘bricoleur imagination’ is derived.

Shakespeare on the Edge of Intercultural Theatre: Lear Dreaming by Ong Keng Sen, a New Nō Performance

This article provides a general framework to the interview with Singaporean theatre creator and foremost advocate of Asian interculturalism, Ong Keng Sen, conducted on 30th of April, 2021. Aiming to focus on one of his latest works: Lear Dreaming, which premiered in Singapore, 2011 and was presented during the Singapore Theatre Festival in Paris, 2015, the interview covers a wide range of perspectives regarding Ong’s collaborative practice and the different strategies his work engages with, not only from a production point of view but also as part of a constant exploration regarding the continuities of contemporary practice of Asian theatre traditions. Harnessing the results from the unavoidable disruptions within the different traditions, his work enables an artistic practice that is acutely mindful of cultural mobility by exploring every possibility of innovation without losing sight of its relevant traditional background.

Dance as a Gift

This conversation was held on 19 February 2020 at the International Research Center ‘Interweaving Performance Cultures’ in Berlin shortly after Nanako Nakajima’s final presentation of her Valeska Gert Professorship. 1 Nanako Nakajima developed the Berlin version of the project Dance Archive Box with Dance Studies students from the Freie Universität Berlin. Initially proposed by theatre maker Ong Keng Sen, and conceived and facilitated by him, Daisuke Muto and Nanako Nakajima – and later Margie Medlin together with seven dance artists – the Dance Archive Box was initially launched with the Saison Foundation, Tokyo, in 2014, and exchanged and further developed in Japan and Singapore with artists of contemporary and traditional dance from the Asia-Pacific region. In the previous project, seven contemporary dance makers from Japan archived their works through their respective methods, each creating an archive box and then handing it over to another artist from a different background for re-performance. This time, Dance Studies students from the Freie Universität Berlin received these archive boxes from Japan and investigated how they could be used for recreation. There they found traces and documents of unknown dance movements: notes and drawings, pieces from costumes, sound recordings, or just one short letter. Dance Archive Box Berlin – a practical investigation into the archiving and reconstruction of movement – has been created through dramaturgical and performative explorations of the boxed material. In the field of Japanese contemporary dance, which has emancipated itself from the familial master-student relationship that long governed the Japanese system of passing on an art tradition, the project posed the following questions: how is it possible to separate a dance from the communal histories of the dance maker and to produce a Dance Archive Box as a creative common ground for all people? what does it mean to share a dance without sharing time with the dance makers themselves? how do we reconstruct whose histories for whom? what aspects of dance in the past should be passed on as an archive for the future?

Harmonic Reveries: The Intercultural Signifiance of Lear Dreaming

Lear Dreaming (2012) is an offspring of, and sequel to, the (in)famous multi-cultural pan-Asian collage Lear (1997), in which director and creator Ong Keng Sen employed a diversity of Asian performance traditions to reimagine and reconceive Shakespeare’s tragedy. The soundscape of Lear Dreaming reverberates with the (dis)harmonies and dissonance of electronic synth sounds, gamelan music, pipa songs and Korean jeongak; it places modernity, tradition, contemporaneity and custom in auditory confrontation. With only one actor surrounded by eight musicians, this acoustic interplay is further interjected with the oral patterns of Noh speech, the musicality of Mandarin Chinese and sonorities of Bahasa Indonesia. As a piece of postdramatic “music theatre”, I demonstrate how Lear Dreaming advances intercultural theatrical practice as a sonic performative. In its interplay of Asian performance cultures in/as sonic space, the production posits an alternative performative mode where the intercultural is the acoustic. This paper critically examines the acoustic strategy employed by Ong and analyses the soundscape of Lear Dreaming – the harmonies, harmonics, distortions and discordance – to consider issues of signification, representation, signifiance and the sublime in the performance of Asian inter-culturalisms.

How to Show Worlds?

In this piece, Gareis and Broszat discuss the need for a cross-cultural exchange regarding the practice of live art curation, a conversation that culminated in the 2015 project Show Me the World and the spielart Festival in Munich. At spielart, six invited curators, Rolf Abderhalden (Bogotá), Jelili Atiku (Lagos), Anja Dirks (Fribourg), Ahmed El Attar (Cairo), Judy Hussie-Taylor (New York), and Ong Keng Sen (Singapore), came together to discuss their regional curatorial practices. Here, the authors outline the main discussions that resulted from the festival, from issues of representation and ghettoization of artists to the challenges of the so-called white cube phenomenon.

Spectres of Shakespeare

Located within the myth of Shakespeare’s universality is a belief in the power and poeticism of his language. If we acknowledge Richard Eyre’s assertion that ‘the life of the plays is in the language’, what becomes of this myth when Shakespeare is ‘transferred’ across cultures? What happens to Shakespeare’s ‘universality’ in these cultural re-articulations? Using Ong Keng Sen’s Search Hamlet (2002), this article examines the transference of myth and/as language in intercultural Shakespeare. It posits that intercultural imaginings of Shakespeare can be said to expose the hollow myth of universality yet in a paradoxical double-bind reify and reinstate this selfsame myth.

Lear Dreaming (review)

Reviewed by: Lear Dreaming Sir Anril Pineda Tiatco Lear Dreaming. Conception and direction by Ong Keng Sen. Text by Kishida Rio. Singapore Arts Festival 2012. School of the Arts Drama Theatre, Singapore. 31 May–1 June 2012. My expectations were high for this revisiting of the King Lear theme that the auteur-director Ong Keng Sen first explored in 1997. Ong is a celebrated figure in intercultural theatre practice, mounting works in New York and European Festivals as well as in Asia.1 His works are studied as intercultural performances in theatre journals and books on performance, and this was an opportunity to see how he remounts a work that gained international popular applause and yet also roused critical hackles (a cultural pastiche, thought some; an appropriation of Western intercultural bad practices by an Asian subject, said others; politically incorrect or hyper-masculinist, said a few when it first played).2 Aesthetically, this 2012 performance was strong, with striking visual design, virtuoso performers, and unexpected juxtapositions. Nō master-performer Umewaka Naohiko re-enacted his role as Lear. The only trained actor onstage, he was accompanied by music artists rather than “actors” to fill the other roles. All of these performers had considerable intercultural musical experience. Contemporary female pipa virtuoso Wu Man played Lear’s ungrateful Daughter, and she has been a major collaborator with Yo-Yo Ma on his Silk Road project. Kang Kwon Soon, a leading female vocalist of traditional Korean court music (junga) and a member of the Tori ensemble who has collaborated in creating Korean fusion jazz, played Lear’s (dead) wife. Piterman, a specialist in the Minang music-dance-theatre (dikia rabano) of Sumatra who has collaborated with noted modern dance artist Boi Gumarang Sakti, played the loyal fool. Japanese expert Toru Yamanaka provided electronic music, and celebrated Javanese composer Rahayu Supanggah led a contemporary ensemble of gamelan musicians. Set design (Justin Hill), lights (Scott Zielinski), costume (Mitsushi Yanaihara), and graphics (Hanson Ho) were crucial to the work and made the piece a feast for the eyes. The lavish production also raised questions about intercultural work for me as a Filipino theatre scholar who has not previously experienced such intercultural projects. I will describe the production, note some of the alterations [End Page 532] from the 1997 version, and give my own response to the work as a Southeast Asian viewer, acknowledging that what formed my deepest critique may not have been consciously intended by the director. But unequal cultural capital, persistent historical memory, and current economic realities ground art creation and viewing. While some issues regarding gender representation that were raised in the original production were rebalanced in this one, the intercultural inequalities born of casting ethnic bodies in certain roles seemed even more striking in this reincarnation. Part of the 2012 Singapore Arts Festival, Lear Dreaming re-imagines the Shakespearean tragedy “on patriarchy and succession through the pristine philosophy of Japanese Noh theatre” (Lear Dreaming Program 2012). Ong, an Asian postmodern director who trained at New York University (MA, 1995) and has regularly toured the international festival scene, has, like Robert Wilson or Suzuki Tadashi, adopted an auteur approach to the classic he adapts. He emphasized during a post-show dialogue that this piece, which was written by Japanese author Kishida Rio, is no longer the Shakespearean tragedy, though it derived inspiration from it. For example, in the Shakespearean text, Lear has three daughters: the betraying Goneril and Regan and the loving Cordelia. In Ong and Kishida’s rendition, the Old Man (Lear character) has only two daughters, only one of whom has lines and (in 2012) only one of these two appears onstage; however, we get the impression that the Old Man favors her, referring to the absent one as his “daughter” and never using the term for the present child. Thus Goneril and Regan are combined into the solo Daughter, and the absent daughter (Cordelia character) is only discussed. The missing daughter, as mentioned by Ong during the post-show dialogue, was a strategy to embody the “presence of an absence.” Other changes include the onstage presence of Lear’s wife (albeit as a ghost), someone not encountered in Shakespeare and who...

Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance

1. Introduction: why Shakespeare? Dennis Kennedy and Li Lan Yong Part I. Voice and Body: 2. Shakespeare and the Natyasastra John Russell Brown 3. Speaking Shakespeare in Japanese: voicing the foreign Daniel Gallimore 4. Shakespeare and Beijing opera: two cases of appropriation Fei Chunfang and Sun Huizhu Part II. Shakespeare in Asian Popular Cultures: 5. All that remains of Shakespeare in Indian film Richard Burt 6. Shakespeare for Japanese popular culture Minami Ryuta 7. Shakespeare's villains in Japan Kumiko Hilberdink-Sakamoto Part III. Transacting Cultures: 8. Import/export: Japanizing Shakespeare Suematsu Michiko 9. Millennium Shashibiya: Shakespeare in the Chinese-speaking worlds Li Ruru 10. Ong Keng Sen's intercultural Shakespeare Yong Li Lan Part IV. Intercultural Politics: 11. What use Shakespeare? China and globalization Shen Lin 12. Shakespeare and the question of intercultural performance John Phillips 13. Foreign Asia/foreign Shakespeare: dissenting notes on New Asian interculturality, postcoloniality and re-colonization Rustom Bharucha.

Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance Kathy Foley Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance. Edited by Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xiv + 289 pp. 20 illus. Cloth, $95.00. This set of essays has useful information on the proliferation of Shakespeare productions in various Asian countries. The coverage is not uniform, and the work of a few directors seems overrepresented since productions that hit the festival circuit are more accessible to scholars. China, Japan, and Singapore are focal points for most of the essays, though Indian material receives some discussion. Ong Keng Sen is most controversial, praised by one author (Yong Li Lin), probed by another (John Phillips), and bashed by a third (Rustom Bharucha). Ong has perhaps stirred up as much comment, pro and con, regarding cross-cultural appropriations as Peter Brook did with his Mahabharata, an accomplishment in itself and a testament to Ong's ability (like Brook's) to tour, a requisite for global cross-talk. Lear Is Here (Li Er Zui Ci), in which Contemporary Legend Theatre actor-director Wu Hsing-Kuo plays [End Page 269] all the roles in jingju style, again merits multiple comments. Praise is uniform for this work, which combines Wu's strong jingju technique with his personal contemplations on closing his company, a parallel to the disempowerment of Lear. This personal focus, the relative mobility (and economic feasibility) of a one-person cast, and Shakespeare combined with jingju are selling points that clearly have made the production accessible. While one wishes productions that have not been curated in the festival circuit might have achieved similar cross-discussion, the more country-specific articles do give insight into work that is happening, and this makes the book a useful addition to the growing bibliography on Shakespeare in Asian theatre production. In the introduction Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan outline what they see as three major categories of Shakespearean production: national appropriation (as occurred in the Meiji period as Japanese explored Western authors to fuel their modernization), colonial instigation (as occurred in India where the British educational system inculcated appreciation of all things English, including Shakespeare), and intercultural revisions (in the manner of Mnouchkine and Brook and now Asian tiger maestros from Japan, China, Singapore, and, to an extent, Korea). Following this clearly written introduction, John Russell Brown ("Shakespeare and the Natyasastra") gives a very generalized discussion of his attempts to use rasa theory to inspire actors at the Bremer Shakespeare Company and the National School of Drama in New Delhi. One gets little sense of the productions, and the explanation of rasa is rudimentary and seems to be asking the actors to choose one of the eight emotions to use as their character's "objective." There is no discussion of director or playwright formulation of a uniform rasa experience through plot and performance features. Daniel Gallimore ("Speaking Shakespeare in Japanese") has a good overview on Shakespeare in Japan and gives ideas on how techniques from kyōgen, rakugo, and so on have been explored and the use of dialects and translations. He gives particular attention to Shakespeare recitations by scholar-actor Arai Yukio, who used katari (narration) and utai (chanting) to indigenize his performance. A discussion of Shakespeare in contemporary Chinese comes in Fei Chunfang and Sun Hizhu's "Shakespeare and Beijing Opera: Two Cases of Appropriation." The article shows awareness of the argument of Rustom Bharucha that Shakespeare is too fraught with colonial baggage, but the authors say this objection does not apply to China, where colonial impact was incomplete and where borrowing from the West was and is selective, directed by the Chinese as part of self-strengthening. The authors show how in 1983 Othello was a safe text for a country emerging from the Cultural Revolution. Ma Yongan, who played the title role, was a painted-face (jing) actor known for hot-headed warriors. He could no longer present the roles that had made him beloved by the Cultural Revolution leadership: "Shakespeare liberated Chinese artists who were searching for new content that could serve traditional theatre" (p. 65). The authors contrast this use with a workshop they did in 1994 in Boston, where...

Asian Shakespeare 2.0

Asia. An impossible interpellation. --Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2006: 121) How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over, In states unborn and accents yet unknown! --Julius Caesar 3.1.112-114 (Shakespeare 2005) The age of Asian Shakespeare 2.0 has arrived. It is an age in which performing Shakespeare in Asian theatrical styles generates incredible artistic and intellectual energy. It is an age in which certain Asian theatrical practices are foreign at home and abroad, while Shakespeare is proclaimed, once again, the bearer of universal currency. It is an age in which Asian performance and Shakespearean interpretations foster symbiotic and antithetical relationships with equal force and ever-increasing pace--fueled by the efficacy of virtual media (video sharing and social networking sites among them) and by rapid localization of globally circulating goods, ideas, and art works. Neither Asia nor Shakespeare has unified identities in any meaningful sense or even consolidated economic interests. Rather, they are defined by remarkable internal divisions and incongruities. The last two decades of the twentieth century marked the first phase of sustained study of Asian Shakespeare performance as a marginalized cultural phenomenon (Leiter 1986; Kennedy 1993; Brown 1999). The present time is defined by the rise of Asian Shakespeare 2.0 as both artistic and intellectual paradigms. As theatre artists challenge fixated notions of tradition, critics are no longer confined by the question of narrowly defined cultural authenticity. More notable productions are emerging across Asia, and these productions are being archived, read closely, and used as case studies in the classroom. Stage directors such as Ninagawa Yukio, Oh Tae-suk, Ong Keng Sen, and Wu Hsing-kuo reached diverse audiences through new strategies to bring together different cultural contexts and genres. A wave of new English-language scholarship since 2000 also put Asian Shakespeare performance in the spotlight (Trivedi and Minami 2010; Kennedy and Yong 2010; Huang and Ross 2009; Huang 2009a, 2009b; Lee et al. 2009; Dionne and Kapadia 2008; Chaudhuri and Lim 2006; Trivedi and Bartholomeusz 2005; Minami, Carruthers, and Gillies 2001). But there are critical gaps to be filled in research on the topic. First of all, the two-way traffic of intercultural exchange has not been addressed adequately. Important in their own right, questions such as is it that endures when [Shakespeare] is deprived of his tongue? dominated the research in the 1990s and continue to guide certain inquiries today (Kennedy 1993: 17; Kennedy and Yong 2010: 21), and the sea change occurring within Asian performing traditions has taken a back seat to what has been perceived as more urgent questions on Shakespeare's place in the modern world. Scholars are now seeking answers to how Asian Shakespeare formulates firsthand experience rooted in Asia (Trivedi and Minami 2010: 6). This special issue adds to the scholarship on global Shakespeare and Asian theatre's relationship to Anglophone cultural texts. As an Asianist and Shakespearean constantly moving among a number of fields that do not usually talk to one another, I am very grateful to Kathy Foley and Asian Theatre Journal for giving me this opportunity to edit this issue and put on several hats at once. The selection of essays has been consciously designed to include historical as well as contemporary work and to highlight diverse geographical areas even as some articles and interviews cover the usual suspects, such as Japan. Supplemented by reviews of performances, an exhibition, online resources, and books, as well as artists' reflections on their own works and an interview, these articles contextualize the arrival of Asian Shakespeare 2.0. Kathy Foley attempts to draw lines of convergence among what, at first glance, are disparate companies: an emerging troupe (Naked Masks) in Bangkok that tries to make Shakespeare a Thai contemporary, the work of a Balinese-influenced American company (Shadowlight) working in the shadow medium, and a Japanese theatre group (Setagaya) led by a traditionally trained kyogen actor. …

Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A-S-I-A): A Collaborative Digital Project

Asian Shakespeare has gained worldwide recognition for its role in the emergence of new artistic and cultural forms in the global age. Directors such as Ninagawa Yukio, Miyagi Satoshi, Ong Keng Sen, Oh Tae Sook, Wu Hsing-Kuo and many others experiment with new combinations of traditional and contemporary performance, new strategies for working across languages and genres, new ways of reaching diverse audiences. Shakespeare productions in Asia are now widely recognized as among the most innovative and distinguished in the world: they are changing how we understand the Shakespearean plays. They serve as a forum for theatre artists to deal with such contemporary questions as the emergence of new ideas of national and Asian identity, and reshape debates about the relation of East and West. In this paper we introduce Asian Shakespeare Interactive Archive: a Collaborative Digital Project (A S I A), which is a collaborative intersection between practitioners, individual scholars and three major Asian Shakespeare projects?the MIT Shakespeare Project (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Relocating Intercultural Theatre (National University of Singapore) and A Web Archive of Asian Shakespeare Productions (JSPS Kaken/ Gunma-Doho Universities). A S I A is an extensive on-line archive of Asian Shakespeare productions dedicated to synergizing the field of Asian Shakespeare intercultural performance studies. This interactive, user-driven archive will feature new tools for use by scholars, teachers, practitioners and audiences.

The Politics of Location in Othello, Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet, and Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona

This article begins with Ania Loomba's well-known position that analysing intercultural Shakespeare requires an understanding that ‘Shakespeare’ becomes ‘local’ in some new contexts and rendered ‘foreign’ in others. From Loomba's argument, we can suggest that just as ‘Shakespeare’ continues to be altered, so should the concept of ‘location’ (whether ‘foreign’ or ‘local’) be seen to transform and even to multiply. In attempting to pinpoint the significance of ‘location’ in this context, the author addresses the relationship between local and foreign in two plays that are loosely based on Shakespeare's Othello: Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona (2000) and Djanet Sears's Harlem Duet (1997). These two plays explore the meaning of ‘local’ and even of location itself; while Harlem Duet constructs a poetics of displacement in the context of a politics of location, Desdemona's focus on the poetics of displacement to the virtual exclusion of a politics of location reduces its potential to achieve its cultural and political goals.

Staging the Asian Modern: Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch, and the Asian Lear

771 An early version of this essay was presented at the International ConsumAsian Workshop on Intra-Asian Cultural Traffic, University of Western Sydney, Australia, 24–26 February 2000. Thanks to Beth Helsinger, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chris Connery, Lee Weng Choy, Chua Beng Huat, Tay Tong, Lee Chee Keng, Lucy Davis, the late Kuo Pao Kun, Ong Keng Sen, Ray Langenbach, Arjun Appadurai, Jean Comaroff, Tay Tong, Uchino Tadashi, and Charlene Rajendran for responses to the essay, and also to Ien Ang and the workshop’s participants. General discussions with Aihwa Ong, Don Nonini, and Pheng Cheah also helped. Krishen Jit and Marion d’Cruz maintain an enlightening and ongoing discussion on Malaysian and Singapore theater. Thanks too to Traslin Ong and Lucilla Teoh at TheatreWorks (Singapore) Ltd., and also to Wong Yen Yen of the Practice Performing Arts School. Finally, thanks to Brenda S. A. Yeoh and the staff at the former Centre for Advanced Studies, National University of Singapore, where the initial research was undertaken. A note on the usage of Japanese and Chinese names in the article: by and large, I put the family name first, following the custom of both cultures. The exception will be when a writer is better known by the inverted use of their names or when their publications use that order. Staging the Asian Modern: Cultural Fragments, the Singaporean Eunuch, and the Asian Lear

Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona, Ugliness, and the Intercultural Performative

The Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen's production of Desdemona (2000) brought several traditional and contemporary Asian performance forms, languages, and mediums together as a response to Shakespeare's Othello. This essay examines this production as an instance of how Asian intercultural Shakespeare performance exposes our investments in Shakespeare and/or Asia as its material, its attractions, and its meta-�ctions. It explores the performativity of failure in cultural exchange and connection in Desdemona, through its presentation of the inauthentic, of performance rituals, and of antitheses that construct Asia in opposition to notions of the beauty of Asian theatres.

Editorial Comment

What are the conditions that enable meaning production? This is a question that the five essays contained in this general issue engage from divergent directions. For each, this question raises issues of context, as the authors ask us to consider not only the contexts for the dramatic texts, the performances, and the theatre histories that they examine, but also the analytical contexts in which they situate these works. For John Bak in "'sneakin' and spyin" from Broadway to the Beltway: Cold War Masculinity, Brick, and Homosexual Existentialism," it is a matter of viewing sexuality in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof through an unconventional theoretical lens. Meanwhile, Jody Enders's examination of French medieval theatre history not only elucidates a significant historical incident, but also advocates for a reconsideration of the processes through which meaning is made and in which history is gathered. The last essay, Yong Li Lan's thought-provoking "Ong Keng Sen's Desdemona, Ugliness, and the Intercultural Performative," moves this debate over meaning-making to the contested space of intercultural performance. Thus, when read together, the purposefully divergent articles of this issue offer a dynamic, polyvocal dialogue on the conditions critical to our collective project of meaning production and interpretation as theatre scholars, artists, and historians.

Consuming the Asian Other in Singapore: Interculturalism in TheatreWorks' Desdemona

The Singaporean company TheatreWorks, under the artistic direction of Ong Keng Sen, has been responsible for the creation of a number of large-scale Asian intercultural works that have toured to international festivals from Adelaide to Hamburg. Among the best known of these are Lear and Desdemona, both of which use Shakespeare as a point of departure for new performance pieces that bring together practitioners representing a wide range of traditional and contemporary art forms. Unlike other intercultural experiments, in Lear and Desdemona practitioners stay largely within the frame of their own performance and linguistic traditions, creating a work which, especially in the case of Desdemona, is far from seamless. Using the 2000 production of Desdemona as an object of inquiry, this model of Asian intercultural production is examined against the backdrop of the politics of one's location, the troubled audience response to the work in Singapore and Adelaide, and the current state of intercultural theory.

The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields (review)

THE CONTINUUM: BEYOND THE KILLING FIELDS. By Theatre-Works. Conceived and directed by Ong Keng Sen. International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut. June 30, 2001. The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields, a project produced by the Singapore company TheatreWorks and directed by Ong Keng Sen, had its world premiere at the Festival of Arts and Ideas in New Haven, Connecticut, in June 2001. The piece is a moving exploration of the ability of traditional art forms to speak to new realities. Continuum is part documentary and part experimental performance about Cambodia's recent past and the process of four Cambodians using their art to come to terms with that past today. Between one and two million Cambodians died from execution, torture, illness, or starvation during Pol Pot's three-and-a-half-year rule (1975-1979). The regime targeted performing artists in particular because of their association with the court, and only 10 percent of them survived. These few survivors have spent the last two decades piecing together the remnants of their performance traditions and passing them on to the next generation. The Continuum weaves together stories of life and death under Pol Pot as told by three classical dancers and one shadow puppeteer with excerpts from the classical Cambodian dance repertoire, dance training exercises, shadow puppetry, evocative music by Japanese musician and composer Yen Chang, and documentary video by Noorlinah Mohd. The performance features the extraordinary artistry of master dancer Em Theay, her daughter Thong Kim Ann, principal dancer for the Royal Government of Cambodia Kim Bun Thorn, and shadow puppeteer Mann Kosal. The piece centers on the performer and teacher Em Theay, who at age sixty-nine dances with the grace of a twenty-year-old and the pure joy of a child as she reprises the classical dances she performed in the palace as a young woman, as well as songs she sang for children at a children's community during the Pol Pot regime. These dances and songs punctuate the emotional stories she tells about her past-the death of two of her children and the loss of three hundred friends from the world of performance to the Cambodian genocide. Her gentle movements and lively spirit evoke the lost courtly world in which she grew up. Continuum opens with a video of Em Theay and her students performing a sampeah kru, a ritual honoring deities, spirits, and teachers that is often enacted by dancers before they undertake a new project or learn a new role. Em Theay insisted on having this ceremony before beginning her work on the piece, and the video introduces us to her in her home environment where she is a gentle, wise matriarch surrounded by devoted students. She seems to be ubiquitous: correcting dance postures, keeping time by clapping her hands, and preparing religious offerings. Her students rely on her as their link to a lost past, and she is a role model for them in her dancing, her adherence to traditional practices, and her love of dance. At the end of Continuum she tells the audience that, although she is retired, she continues to teach because she loves her culture and her art, which, she says, is the spirit of her nation. The video sequences project images of Cambodia today and teach about the art forms demonstrated in the production and the political past. They also interrelate effectively with the stage action. At one point, video images of a young Cambodian slaughtering and skinning a cow follow some of the onstage accounts of the performers' harsh experiences under Pol Pot. The audience inevitably links the flesh being torn apart on screen to Pol Pot's genocide. …

Bastard Daughters and the Possession of History inCorregidoraandParadise

Previous articleNext article No AccessActs of TestimonyBastard Daughters and the Possession of History in Corregidora and ParadiseElizabeth YukinsElizabeth YukinsDepartment of EnglishJohn Jay College of Criminal JusticeCity University of New York Search for more articles by this author Department of EnglishJohn Jay College of Criminal JusticeCity University of New YorkPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 28, Number 1Autumn 2002Gender and Cultural Memory. Special Issue Editors Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/340910 Views: 114Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref © 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Ong Keng Sen Extravagantly Enigmatic, Performance Research 25, no.6-76-7 (May 2021): 66–78.https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2020.1909934Jessica Dawn Gagnon ‘Bastard’ daughters in the ivory tower: illegitimacy and the higher education experiences of the daughters of single mothers in the UK, Teaching in Higher Education 23, no.55 (Mar 2018): 563–575.https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1449743Karina Smith ‘The Attic of My Grandmother's Subconscious’: ‘Whiteness’, ‘Illegitimacy’ and Migration in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Honor Ford-Smith's ‘Grandma's Estate’, Women: A Cultural Review 25, no.33 (Dec 2014): 287–304.https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2014.977602Gabriela Fried Piecing Memories Together after State Terror and Policies of Oblivion in Uruguay: The Female Political Prisoner's Testimonial Project (1997–2004), Social Identities 12, no.55 (Jan 2007): 543–562.https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630600920241

The Silver River (review)

The Asian premiere of The Silver River opened in Singapore en route to New York's Lincoln Center in 2002. Three rising stars--composer Bright Sheng, playwright David Henry Hwang, and director Ong Keng Sen--collaborated to create this new piece of music theatre based on a Chinese legend.

Encounters

A leader of the intercultural movement considers his experiences bringing together Asian filmmakers, drag queens, visual artists, rock-and-roll computer musicians, disk jockeys, modern dancers, and actors—as well as ritualists and other traditional performers. Ong Keng Sen wants to forge a different relationship to intercultural performance than that which has developed in the West.