Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres

Chapter 6. Dancing with the Censors: Burmese Performing Arts Keep Time

184 CHAPTER 6 Dancing with the Censors Burmese Performing Arts keep Time Opening night had been postponed; spectators, who had to register their names at the gate, were kindly invited to return the following night for the Yangon premiere of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (2009). Directed and adapted by Paris-based Burmese Nyan Lin Htet, director of the Theatre of the Disturbed, and Thai-American Ruth Ponstaphone, the performance was the culmination of Ponstaphone’s two-week butoh workshop at the Alliance Française. Later that night one of the participants was visited by the police, but the following evening, the performance went on without a hitch. The actor playing Gregor remained constrained in a chair throughout and expressed his agonized transformation in butoh gestures and grimaces. Upon his death, his sister burned his clothes, a Burmese custom, but instead of using a metal bucket, a plastic container had been substituted and caught fire perilously close to the lighting cables. Once the fire was put out, his mother dashed clay pots to the ground, another Burmese custom by which the living separate themselves from the dead. The directors insisted that the production was nonpolitical and instead portrayed the traditional pressures on the individual—family and job. But the haughty cruel boss, the bullying father pelting Gregor with tomatoes, and the lodgers drinking and joking while Gregor writhed in grotesque death throes were all interpreted as political critique. Any depiction of a violent authoritarian figure and the wealthy indifferently enjoying themselves inevitably invokes the ruling generals in the minds of the audience. In Yangon it is difficult for any performance to escape political interpretation because martial law permeates every aspect of life. BUrmeSe Performing ArTS keeP Time | 185 The implications of this were experienced later in the year by a group of visiting performance artists attending the second Beyond Pressure: International Festival of Performance Art. Foreigners are not allowed to perform in Myanmar unless they appear on the international grounds of embassies and their cultural affiliates, such as the Alliance Française. Organizer Moe Satt planned for the festival to take place in the Sein Lan So Pyay Garden, a park beside Inya Lake in the center of Yangon, and had to preview all the performances in order to apply for a special permit. The local participants as well as those from Thailand, India, Korea, Japan, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the United States realized that showing and explaining their works to the censorship officials was an instructive performance in itself. Malaysian Sharon Chin remembers: All of us were poked and prodded as if by the most discerning art critics. Indeed, these men and women began to feel somewhat like our collaborators , giving us suggestions for improving our works, and scrutinizing The Burmese Metamorphosis presented at the Alliance française in yangon in 2009. gregor’s mother drops clay pots (far left). gregor is dead in the chair upstage. Directed by nyan lin htet and butoh performer ruth Ponstaphone. Photo: Courtesy of lorene Tamain/Theatre of the Disturbed. 186 | ChAPTer 6 every word in the artist statements we’d prepared. We were all keepers of the same door—pushing and pulling. Somehow, together—the balance shifting uneasily on the edge of a knife—we kept it open. The certificate of permission was issued half an hour before the public performance event.1 Several, especially the Burmese participants, had to alter their presentations slightly, but the visual, nonnarrative aspect of the works avoided overt political critique and left them open to a wide range of interpretation, depending on the imaginations of the censors and spectators. Many of the pieces required audience participation. In Moe Satt’s “Mr. Happy,” he handed everyone colored ping-pong balls on which to draw smiley faces. He then invited people to stick them on his face while Natalie Cole’s “Smile” played in the background . Myanmar artist Mrat Lunn Htwann’s “O! Picnic (Beyond Pleasure)” required members of the audience to hold a banner with the Burmese word “ha” repeatedly printed on it. They were then requested to laugh one by one into a megaphone, while the artist standing on the other side of the banner imitated each laugh also through a megaphone. This generated a lot of genuine laughter, some of it nervous, because laughter serves as a survival mechanism in a country so closely scrutinized by the military and plainclothes police. Japanese Kaori Haba’s...