On Desdemona: In Response

I am afraid Desdemona was never meant to be an easy read. However, I must say the company left Australia without the impression that it had been a failure there. I am also surprised that Helena Grehan's assessment of the performance was so affected by RealTime's response. RealTime does not represent Australia even though it is an important voice reflecting cutting-edge work. It's almost like saying a performance failed in downtown NYC because the Village Voice refused to comment with a review.

I think the audience and possibly even the theorists/critics were not ready for the work. Isn't that because, as Grehan says, the parameters for criticism of intercultural performance have yet to be developed?

Ironically, if I had made Desdemona more accessible--that is, kept the narrative, encouraged the performers to perform the emotional thread of the story--it would have been well reviewed, even though there may have been voices objecting to the spectacle of an aesthetically gorgeous work.

Ultimately, I think we were too issue-based for the audience in an international festival that is built up on consumption, and too "confusing" for critics who do not dare venture into the unknown, even to make a comment, for fear of being politically incorrect!

We built the production upon Brechtian principles of teaching the audience some of the struggles of being an intercultural company. For me, interculturalism in performance is increasingly less about finding a better way of telling the story and more about asking, Why engage in interculturalism at all? Hence the work naturally shifts from character to actor and I must say that these are issues that we cannot answer directly at this point in time.

Questions with no answers.

The last scene/epilogue is instructive in that we have re-created it differently in different cities. In Adelaide, it was kind of a meditative moment where the characters walked through the space while light bars were lowered into the playing area, as the video artist Park Hwa Young suggested time by wearing different-sized socks (a play on the foot fetish that surrounds the mystique of the East Asian woman, Desdemona). In Singapore, this meditative moment was intersected by an email (visible on a monitor) written by Low Kee Hong about the ironies of intercultural work presented in a consumer market, bringing the action back to the actors rather than the characters.

Ultimately, the bigger issue posed by Desdemona is: "Who is the audience that we are playing to?" The audiences have been so radically different. There is no one universal audience, and this complication is compounded in intercultural work. Adelaide audiences were uncertain/ambivalent; Singapore audiences were unforgiving; and Hamburg audiences gave it seven ovations.

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