Ten years ago, Reboot the Roots creative director Serge left the squats of Hackney and returned to Malaysia to facilitate and organise in solidarity with a community of recovering drug users, refugees, and people living with HIV. They blogged about their experience, and we wish to share highlights from their writings to highlight the origins of RtR as an arts-for-social-change organisation.

“Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.”

– The Invisible Committee

The following analysis is backdated to the Tenaganita workshop that took place at PODs, Brickfields, on Thursday 20th October 2011.

Today’s Tenaganita workshop repeated the memory exercises of the Malaysian Care workshop earlier this week. I feel this is a vital activation technique for producing theatre based in real, not projected, versions of experience.

The groups made images based upon their memory of the previous session, or what they were doing last week. This group really struggled to identify each other’s attempts, especially when they were over complicated, over detailed. Essentially, the majesty of the technique is the simplicity of the static image. For example, one group portrayed a trip somewhere, where they encountered a large number of ants in the forest. The woman portraying the ants pulled all kinds of faces, and movements, and gesture, but the group was overloaded with information. They worked their way down from madman, to monkey, to dog, to rat. Finally, one member of the group brushed her shins as if to wipe away tiny creatures, and they got what was being portrayed.

The second half of the session revisited the memory technique, but this time to talk about problems they had faced or heard about. We received a number of suggestions, at first reluctantly, but then flowing faster and faster once disclosure was shown to be safe

1)      A man’s wife arrives from Myanmar, and wants to divorce her husband and leave him, saying he is dirty and she doesn’t love him. He desperately wants to stay married.

2)      A man’s wife is accused by a family friend of being unfaithful, saying that their son does not look like him, but their uncle.

3)      A man wishes to divorce his wife because he feels she is unfaithful and untrustworthy. She wants to stay married.

4)      Co-habiting couples who fall pregnant. Pre-marital sex and then the burden of what to do when a girl becomes pregnant, three or four times, and sometimes driven to the point of suicide.

The first two stories were suggested by a man. The second two by women.

We tried to find a commonality amongst the issues – and unfaithfulness leading to the breakup of the family was decided upon as an apt moniker.

From here, I allowed small groups of three to collectively form images of the oppression they wished to explore. Then, retaining their individual images, they rearranged themselves into one cohesive image. Gradually, we removed any duplicated images (arms crossed, scowling, was popular, as was a woman being restrained by a man). Finally, we were left with the following image, which we designated will and role to, developing a communal oppression story.

The Pressure of Community

A wife is trying to walk away from her husband, desperately wanting to leave, whilst he holds on to her arm and pleads with her to stay. A neighbour points accusingly from behind and laughs behind her hand, wanting peace and quiet in the neighbourhood, but secretly enjoying the spectacle. Meanwhile, a stern looking community leader looks on, distant and concerned.

First Dynamisation

The wife character enters into a fierce argument with her husband, accusing him of being ugly. ‘You ugly! You ugly! You send me photos of Korean pop star and you no Korean popstar!’ He pleads back that they have children, please stay, he loves her. It becomes apparent he lied at the beginning of their relationship. Meanwhile, a neighbour very loudly and rudely talks over them, shouting and pointing, constantly trying to intervene, stirring trouble between them saying that she had cheated on him, that she should not leave. The community leader, almost simultaneously, is intervening, talking to then, trying to placate them, but at a sudden point suddenly retreats and moves back to the original position to watch. The wife character and husband continue to argue, but nothing really changes.

In post-discussion, we queried why the community leader had entered the fray, and then left. The woman playing her answered that she had interpreted the threat of physical violence in the posture of the husband, and had intervened to ensure that this would not happen. When it became apparent that he was not violent, but extremely persistent, she retreated and left them too it. There was an extended discussion to clarify the relationships and history, which I have included in the above description.

In the discussion that follows, we wondered if the community leader could not have done more to solve the problem ,and someone had a suggestion of how this might be done.

Second Dynamisation

In the second activation, the community leader stormed into the middle of the husband and wife’s argument and was physically restraining the wife, holding her arms and talking constantly over her protestations, repeating phrases such as ‘you must think of your husband, all he has done for you, you must think of your children’. Meanwhile, the husband continues to jabber and plead and the neighbour too. The actress playing the wife was driven to absolute frustration, shrieking at the top of her voice to stop, but the community leader just continued.

The effect of this scene was quite disturbing to watch – the community leader who we had sent in to resolve the problem seemed to have become an oppressor! The wife’s limbs continually flailed for freedom, each time being captured and controlled by the community leader (an older woman of the community). If anything, the protagonist seemed even more distressed and less empowered than before.

The effect was to generate an extended discussion on why this was a problem, what could women do in these situations, what could be an effective solution. The translation from Myanmar to English took a tremendous amount of time, but spirits remained high and the group for the large part engaged and activated by what they had seen and experienced. There was a significant amount of ‘hotseating’ of the husband and wife – this emerged organically from my own querying of the characters, which those watching from the side began to mimick. Again, it took time to clarify the backstory of these characters – the wife had arrived from overseas, lured by fake photos, and married the husband due to family pressure. Ten years and three kids later, she explodes and wants to leave, saying that her husband is ‘ugly’. We later wondered if these expressions (ugly/dirty) were culturally contextual, actual real phrases that might be exchanged in the way that we might call an unfaithful spouse ‘a  tramp’ for example.

Ideal Dynamisation

For the close of the session, I offered to the group to propose an ideal image, not a magical solution where suddenly the wife wants to stay with her husband or the husband stops caring about the wife leaving, but one based in reality – a progression we could all agree was positive.

Immeadiately a man in the group who had been very unresponsive so far leapt to his feet and rearranged the image. He turned the busy body neighbour to face the other way, and sat the husband and wife down on the floor with the community leader. The group conceded this was a much better version.

The neighbour declares they are going to mind their own business and walk away (on reflection, this is possibly oversimple, but at the time we wanted to focus on the couple). The community leader very calmly and softly asks whether they would be willing to give this discussion space and time, to each other some opportunity to think things through. She asked if the wife was able to look at the husband’s face yet, and the humour lightened the mood. At the close, husband and wife both conceded to this idea.

However, in the debrief, the community leader from the second dynamisation was insistent that the woman should change her behaviour, be more compromising, remember what the husband has done for you. She wanted the couple to end in a hug, arms around each other. I conceded that was an option, but requested that the group examine what we had collectively selected as being an ideal solution. They picked out this method of allowing space, or de-creasing pressure on the couple rather than increasing it.

In our debrief, we expressed the need to keep the older community leader as a part of the group as she represented old school Myanmar cultural practices – practices that are coming under question as the younger generation battle with the changes in their world. Surely when they form a forum theatre piece and take it to their community, they will be playing to an intergenerational crowd, and it will be this dialogue of old and young that will create the drama.

Repeatedly in today’s session we heard the phrases – ‘nothing can be done about this issue … you cannot do anything about a husband and wife.’ This is why I chose to create an amalgamated oppression rather than a specific story, so as to circumnavigate this blockage. The oppression we created contained the essential elements of all the previous stories – a couple divided, the pressure of community values, and the sneering mockery and spite of neighbours.

In essence, they are representing the struggles of relationship values within their community. The first dynamisation (and second) created a cacophony of noise, insistence, pressure, all directed at the wife, not so much the husband, who was pretty cool despite not wanting his wife to leave.

I really, really felt for the young girl playing the wife. We could see that she recognised this pressure, from older relatives, from boys, from strangers even, within her community, to surrender her will. I was not, personally, totally satisfied with the ideal solution – I wanted to see her tell the collective group where to shove their ideas and listen to her! However, it is only our second session and, in all reality, that would most likely be deemed a ‘magical’ solution too.

The more I work with this group, the more interested I become in seeing them take these forums out into their communities. Already we begin to see how this sessions and last week’s devised pieces can be linked together thematically into a dialogue all about power and gender in relationships.

The session ran at 4+ hours. I slept less than that last night, though I managed to catch a couple of extra z’s on the floor of PODs before the workshop. Tomorrow, Malaysian Care – 6 hours! – and right now I am sat in the foyer of KLPAC awaiting the group to finish their second night of performance of Short + Sweet.

All the reports I have heard back have been fantastic – the standard this year is high, and our group is acquitting themselves admirably. Tomorrow I get to see for myself. I have observed that inimitable community spirit emerging within the performers that comes from living the payoff of two months of rehearsals, occasional rows, lots of laughs and a growing sense of unity.

Let’s hope we can all ride that through this weekend, where we shall be performing at KLPAC, at MAP, and in Batu Arang, all in the space of 3 days. Surely, the Commonwealth Foundation monies could support some of this expenditure too. I’ll look into it, as it definitely comes under our arts for social cohesion buzz.