Preface | Making Inquiries among the People: A Kind of On-site Performative Archive

LIN Hsin-I*
Translated by Kris CHI
Proofread by LO Chun Yat, Timothy

An Immediate and Intimate Event after Halla Bol!

In 2016, I planned two issues—“Voice-Over of History, Negative Theatre” and “La Mise Hors Scène: The Flesh of Words”—for ACT Art Critique of Taiwan, trying to examine the scenes of people’s theater and documentary theater and reconstruct the writing from translating the repetitive languages, visualization and theaterization of oral literature. For these two issues, I had interviewed Chung Chiao, the practicer of people’s theater in Taiwan; Wang Mo-lin, the theater director; Augustine Mok Chiu Yu, the activist promoting people’s theater in Hong Kong; Lee Chun Fung, one of the founders of Woofer Ten. I had also invited Wu Sih Fong and Guo Liang Ting, the critics who had been concerned with theatric development for a long time, to write articles from their perspectives. Also, in these issues, Eugène Van Erven and Arindam Dutta’s articles on Safdar Hashmi, the director of street theater, were also translated. At that time, Taiwan Haibizi and Sakurai Daizō’s play of tent theater, At the End of Seven Days Chaos Died (2016), and Assignment Theatre’s play of documentary theater, The Étude of the Covered Wagon Song (2016), were played on the lot of Miculture Tiger Mountain. I also documented Chung Chiao’s The South Wind—A Narrative Theater (2016) at Taixi Village, Changhua. My being on-site for these events was because I was making a documentary, through which I attempted to document sites by reenacting events, and to delve deep into the relations and contrasts among the reenactment, documentary theater, and street theater. After many years, participants in these issues coincidentally gathered for an intimate event. Theater directors, performers, researchers, and artists from inter-Asia societies, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, and Germany, joined hands to offer a more panoramic and multifaceted visual path, and triggered an on-site practice with an attitude, which no normative discourses and regulations could bound. Many records of the practice and articles on documents make Where Are the People? a disturbing book because it is a collection with the premise that can motivate our critical thinking with bodily energy. It reflects how we realize the statement—“Viewing as participating; audience as actors.” It is also a book where some keywords constantly appear, like resistance, politics, the oppressed, and conversation. With its humming buzz and murmur against the present situation, it is a collection of words refusing to remain silent.

The On-site Performative Archive Speaking up

When reading this book, I thought of a line in an article Augustine MOK Chiu Yu wrote on Safdar Hashmi’s Halla Bol! (1989)—“Slogans are absolutely essential for our play,”¹ which served as the shared place of all the discursive actions; the documentaries of Safdar discussing plays with the people then are the index for us to think about the on-site archive record in Where Are the People? “Halla Bol” is a Hindi phrase, meaning stirring up agitation, raising one’s voice, or producing an attacking sound. Rewritten by Safdar for the seven-day strike of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions for workers (CITU), Halla Bol! is a play of street theater based on Chakka Jam, his early work. It was also in the performance of Halla Bol! that Safdar Hashmi and a Nepali migrant worker were beaten to death by mobs. To Safdar, Halla Bol! is more than a rehearsal of the revolution but the real life and death happening on the fictional battlefield. Safdar sewed the stage language used by actors and the everyday speech together and reshaped the relationship between the two. At the same time, he disintegrated and reconstructed the living space of the speakers to form conflicts. It was those conflicts that summoned the agency of connecting the living and political space. In the video Safdar Hashmi on Ending of Street Play, he noted: “Every play has its own demand depending on the subject and what you want to say through the play… . Most street theatre activists believe that street theatre is giving a call to action. What one is showing in a play must graduate into action. But there are many subjects which do not lend to that simplistic call for action. One can’t give a concrete programme of action in every play. A lot of times you can give certain thinking points that these are the points that we want you to think about, and these are the questions that we want to raise. So you end your play with a question or a problem.” When discussing Aurat [Woman](1979), a play of street theater about the violence against female workers, women’s rights, and education, Safdar emphasized the strength of solidarity through “singing.” In another video,² he stated: “[folk tunes] which are part of the heritage of the people. People own them, and people use them to say different things at different times… . In some of our plays the songs mostly [are] sung by the chorus. It sums up what has happened in the play for the audience and takes the story forward.” Safdar interspersed many of his works with songs. Like the line “Slogans are absolutely essential for our play,” “lyrics” are also part of the slogans. When actors waved the flags chanting the lines like “To fight against oppression,” “Solidarity is the truth of life,” and “Why we keep quiet?” they were at the same time attacking external reality, raising their inquiry into the public and causing agitation. Those tunes, similar to folk songs, would become the words of mouths among people who came back home after having heard of these voices, if not noises. They would accidentally be blurted out at a particular moment in daily life, asking further about “why we keep quite?” to those who were being oppressed.

Thus, when reading chapters about riddles, oral lore, and anti-colonial poetic narratives in “PETA’s GOLD: Gaming the Nation, Changing Asia,” the mixture of folk dance and popular songs by Makhampom Theatre Group, Au Sow Yee’s discussion of things beyond the verbals through “The Taiwan Song” and “Night in the City of Tainan,” and “An Orphan Girl’s Wish” in Yan Kun-chuan: A worker, a play of documentary theater, I could see these words, voices, and languages become a kind of on-site performative archive. They kept bringing themselves into a “collection,” sounding vague and different voices, secretively raising issues and agitations. Zhao Chuan, in his “Grass Stage at the North Gate of Foxconn,” mentioned, “[a]t that moment, the theater becomes a site-of-the-matter that has everything to do with ‘us.’” Such a statement triggered my delayed thinking about the collection of common sounds. First, what sort of site-of-the-matter have the people’s theater in inter-Asia societies constructed? What kind of actions have been summoned through it? Second, how could the “common songs” in Safdar’s theatrical method become the language of the people and the everyday echoes that penetrate people’s lives after they have invoked the action? These questions were based on my past understanding of the people’s theater. These understandings included driving the audience from the passive position to the position of subjects in which they could have access to their agencies and further discuss the reform and take action in the process; theater workshops became the methodology of altering bodies and drew our attention to the pressing reality. In “Angura Afterlives: On Sakurai Daizō’s Theory of ‘Tent Theater,’” the discussion about “struggle,” “(art) expression,” “the daily leaflets used for agitating the workers,” theatrical space, and “us” (warera/watashitachi), the foundation of these questions started to be loose and deformed. What is the language of the people? What kind of unity does “we/ us” refer to? As the refugees who are kidnapped with the bodies being controlled by modern spaces and epistemology, what are our unspoken and non-expressive art expressions? Sakurai Daizō directly blurred the category of the crowd, be it the audience, actors, workers, or “the people.” He did not limit them to national images, or it could be said that he treated everyone inside or outside the theater as “we/us.” This “we/us,” sometimes showing up as the dead, specters, or nonhumans, was also a specific collection of deviant voices. When “we/us” are no longer solid plural divisions but the bodies wandering in various spaces, then “the theater” is not a venue dividing the outer reality and inner situation but a place for diverse bodies and collective systems to confront, stumble and collide with one another. In other words, the theater is “a site-of-the-matter.”

Regarding this site, I would like to use Wild Grass Heaven—Screen Memory performed by Sakurai Daizō and Taiwan Haibizi at Losheng Sanatorium in 2006³ as the scene to think with. This play of tent theater borrowed the narrative form of the early modern Japanese wanderers’ Sekkyobushi, to question how the artists and people on the road and in the temples could pass information mutually. In the preface, Sakurai Daizō said: “What kind of resonant container did the ‘site’ at the time become? The performance of so-called contemporary theater has become nothing but the consumed and fixed ‘information’ in the theater. Theater, as a part of the information industry, makes actors and audiences nothing but a piece of information. Their value only lies in whether they can be consumed in a better way. Communication, reflection, and resonance are trapped in price tags without mutual linkage and transformation. The present is mistakenly kept on the stage like a corpse, unable to communicate with the past. The door of time is there reflected as an image. The door of history is called the archive, afar in heaven. This time, we are like the ghosts standing upside down or the wild grass nurtured by the soil from the dead to create the ‘site’ for theater.” This statement does not only express Sakurai Daizō’s criticism of certain forms of theater. His invocation of Sekkyobushi also thins and complicates the identity nature of the speakers in the theater, mixing contemporary social issues into the historical context to make them the practice to summon the voluntary riot “we/us” provoke against the ruling order. Furthermore, the participants (narrators) of theater raise questions through “languages,” but “languages” themselves, the crowds the participants are facing, and the ways of expression are also questionable. Thus, what the people’s languages are, what kind of collection “we/us” refers to, and how languages can be attached to the struggling and expressive bodies are not so much the point. When the theatrical participants cross the boundary of languages and identities to “express,” it is “we/us” speaking up together on-site. In this kind of “site,” I rethink the performative archive from the views of inter-Asia societies in Where Are the People? more like as the container including various resonance, as a site-ofthe- matter. On the one hand, this site focuses on the appeal of people’s theater in specific historical contexts; on the other, it suggests the experimental methods of diverse theatrical forms to expand our agency of artistic expression and to invite everyday intervention. In this book we can constantly encounter the restart of the identity of the participants, the linkage and transformation of language expression, the invasive flow of bodily methods, and the conscious conflict from the dialectics among the people. As a publication collecting discourses and records of practices, the book is more like the sharp question about the governmentality of biopower for the people, refusing to be silenced among other books.

* Associate professor at the Institute of Applied Art, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University.

Translator’s note: Here Lin Hsin-I quoted from Mok’s translation of Safdar’s script, which underwent some abridgment. The direct translation of this quote from Chinese here will miss the context. In the original play, the artists argued with the police over their shouting of slogans when performing a play on the street. Thus, they said: “But we have to raise slogans in our play… . Slogans are absolutely essential for our play.”
See three videos, Safdar Hashmi on Ending of Street Play, Aurat, and Safdar Hashmi on Use of Songs in Street, on the website of Jana Natya Manch: https://www.youtube.com/c/ JanaNatyaManch
See the Japanese preface of the article of Yasennotsuki [Rural War of Moon Troupe] “「穢れ」に徹してひるむことなく！” [Don’t Fear of Sticking to Defilement]: https://yasennotsuki.org/portfolio/野草天堂screen-memory2006-2/. See also “Haibizi TENT16-18” for the Chinese translation of Wild Grass Heaven—Screen Memory: https://taiwanhaibizi.pixnet.net/blog/post/34614350.