During one of the scene change of One Hundred Years of Solitude 10.0 – Cultural Revolution, an audience sitting in front of me shouted twice: ‘The Emperor is wearing nothing at all!’.
To say that this joint production by Dramabox and Zuni Icosahedron in this year’s Chinese Festival of Arts by Esplanade was controversial, is a little bit of an understatement.
After the 2-hour-ish performance (without intermission), a significant group of audience stayed back for post-show discussion that lasted another full hour.
Many audience who apparently did not enjoy how they just spent 2 hours of their lives and money on this performance, stayed back and were quick to raise doubts on justification of this production. While there were doubts on whether a group of young casts born and bred outside of mainland China could possibly have the appreciation of that era so as to deliver an accurate performance in a production with ‘Cultural Revolution’ in the title, most of the sentiment questioned the value of this production that many admitted that they found difficult to ‘understand’.
When the production was premiered in HK last year, a student audience was angry enough to create a Facebook page to request for stopping of HK government subsidy to the student shows of the production.
A friend expressed anger in an email to me after the show as to why a theatre performance has to be so ‘complicated’.
It was the first production in Dramabox’s history that a post-show discussion was offered and arranged to share with audience in greater details the creative process, a few weeks after the show.
I was told an audience brought his two young sons to the show and found himself wordless in justifying the value of this production to the seemingly bored sons. He feared that such production would actually ‘scare off’ people unfamiliar with theatre.
This is the 10th installment of director Danny Yung’s ‘One Hundred Years’ of Solitude’ series. As an audience who has attended a number of Yung’s past work, I am one to admit that I always doze off at one point or another during the performance. The typical slow moving gestures, the seemingly lack of storyline and dialogues, the many prolonged moment of silence on stage … all these make Yung’s work an audience challenge to focus without drifting thoughts, especially after a long day prior to attending the performance. But they did not prevent me from coming back for more. There were always moments or images on stage that hit me aesthetically, and many times, emotionally. They almost always draw on my memories – a place I had been to, a conversation I had before, or a story I once read. Yet they throw at me new emotions, new perspectives and new interpretations. They renew my way of looking at life.
I suspect the anger induced in some audience by this work is partly due to Yung’s status – considered a master in contemporary theatre circle of Chinese speaking world. Many probably expect themselves to be moved and touched in ways similar to watching Shakespeare or Cao Yu. The hesitation to dismiss the work as worthless considering the director’s name combined with the difficulty in pinning down what is good about the piece can easily frustrate many. Yes, in this way such work is intimidating, or in another word, scary.
But I don’t necessary think that it will scare off audience who are new to theatre. Many audience who felt dissatisfied were apparent regular theatre goers. What Yung’s work avoids to give are explicit ‘messages’ or ‘meanings’, or even sign posts to them that many theater goers are accustomed to. Instead, he constructs work that are like mirrors which if peeked into, each audience will discover something different but always personal.
To say that we are looking at the same thing but see different thing, can be hard to accept. But isn’t this how our world has always been?
