A story for our times
Under oppressive regimes, artists are often forced to turn true stories into metaphors or disguise them in the stories of others to escape censorship, or much worse fates. The atmosphere of fear and the sense of stagnation perpetuated by such rule can have such insidious effects that the practice of wrapping true stories in the safe veil of the cryptic sometimes crosses into self-censorship and becomes habit-forming.
Clarity suddenly requires courage. And the resulting artwork reeks with the stench of fear, undermining the artist’s act of resistance. Over time, some artists let themselves be swaddled snugly in the abstract. And their defiance becomes redundant.
Even though it’s not political with a capital P, The Voyage, a documentary and devised performance, is refreshingly defiant. The production by Thammasat University’s Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, which was shown this past weekend as part of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre’s Performative Art Festival #6, brings true stories of war, migration and resilience to the stage with touching simplicity and clarity.
In undemocratic times, giving space and voice to overlooked stories of oppression and discrimination is an act of defiance. So is exploring national identity through family history.
Directed by Parichat Jungwiwattanaporn, dean of Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts, The Voyage presents stories of four Thais of different ethnic origins through narration, re-enactments and movement (choreographed by B-Floor Theatre’s Jarunun Panthachat and Wasu Wanrayangkoon). Two of the actors tell their own family history, while the other two tell the stories of interviewees whose ethnic backgrounds they share.
The immigrant experience, except that of the Chinese immigrants, finds little to no space in both mainstream and alternative media in Thailand. As a society, Thailand lacks interest in the outsider’s experience in general. On the other side of the world in the US, stories of immigrants abound, especially since Donald Trump became president. So The Voyage feels not only long-overdue for the Thai audience, it also resonates with the current humanitarian and migrant crises in other parts of the world.
From these accounts of the children of immigrants — of Chinese, Vietnamese, Javanese, Malay, Akha and Mon descent — emerge not political ideologies, but evidence of the depth of human cruelty and capacity to endure, adapt, assimilate, love and blaze the trail.
The Voyage only stumbles at the end, when it becomes heavy-handed and borderline didactic. The four stories are so powerful on their own that they need to be as unadorned as possible.
There has been no shortage of political theatre in Thailand in the past decade. Some have been bold in both content and aesthetic. Many of them focus on institutions and structural problems. But the absence of plain true stories of individuals on the stage has begun to bother me. The Voyage is a good start. Hopefully, it will inspire more theatre artists to get on the ground to put stories on the stage.