Washing dirty linen with the public
Friday, July 6, 2018
Highly acclaimed at home and internationally for her site-specific installations, Jaffa Lam has tried melding theater with visual art in a new immersive art project. She shares with China Daily Hong Kong the story behind creating a show that questions assumptions about “purity”. Kong many of us often feel exhausted or work too hard. I hope the experience can be akin to meditating for those who feel stressed out.
Q: How active do you expect the audiences to get during the show?
A : The venue, Shouson Theatre, will be transformed into something like a giant laundromat for the show. The theater has a capacity of 450, but only 60 people will be admitted to each show. They are welcome to sit anywhere, move around, stand right next to me and my fellow performers. There will be live music, or rather certain sounds will be generated. I’m going to be one among what I’d like to call “workers”, rather than actors or performers. I won’t speak but use gestures which hopefully will lead the audiences somewhere. The show doesn’t have a definite structure. For example, the audiences won’t receive any instructions on where to stand and when to leave, mostly that is. So for each person in the audience the experience could be different. They have to actively participate in order to get the most out of the show.
Q: So at the end of the day what would you expect the audience to take away from the show — art or theater? A: I would like the audience to experience and enjoy a sense of theater through a visual art experience, feel the tension and energy, that’s somewhere in between visual art and theater. This show is the result of a very reciprocal collaboration between visual arts and theater people. In the process we have both tried to gauge where the boundaries between our two fields lie. The way they and I had visualized the show turned out to be very different. I discovered that the theater people had to be more specific and graphic with their imagination than someone like me, who could get away with visualizing the show as a more abstract piece. To try to explain and convince them about my point of view took quite a bit of work. In retrospect, I realize we had those long-drawn conversations because the show’s director and light and sound designers were trying to work out a way of expressing my aesthetic through the idiom of theater. It’s me they wanted to prevail.
I hope the audiences find something different from my previous work in this show, for in a way it is a retrospective of my work so far.
Q: Do you want the show to have a cathartic effect on the audience — would you expect them to start looking at things differently after they walk out of the show? A: I would expect Piu³ to challenge previous notions about me as an artist. Visual artists have worked closely with theater people before, but they would usually be invited to design the backdrop. It’s very rare to have a visual artist conduct and direct theater. I wanted the show to be somewhere between theater and reality. I have created dreamlike experiences for the audience before in my installation works, but this time I am working with sophisticated lighting equipment meant for the stage.
I told my collaborators that this show won’t be about acting, rather about movement. I told the musicians I didn’t want beautiful sounds, I wanted to create a mood, and a thought and have the sounds emerge as a response to the performance.