The performance of Rimini Protokoll’s CARGO: Kuala Lumpur-Singapore, used a rather powerful metaphor: that of an audience as cargo, passive goods being transported (by artist) from one place to another. Yet, the passivity of the audience was challenged by tasking them with finding actors and scenarios in the streets, and experience art in living culture. The performance seated the 40 odd strong audience in a modified container that was transported by a truck driven by the performers, two Malaysian truck drivers.
“Once two cows fell down from the truck and died, so put on your seat belts.” warned one of them as they prepared to start the ride. And in many such ways, the two hour long performance cleverly nudged the audience to participate and give more of themselves to the experience than their ticket price (in addition to the ticket price of course). A few ideas stood out as important to CARGO; national identity was one, boundaries and mobility was another. But it also inadvertently spoke of the city, and indeed urbanity, as something crucially common to art and industry.
The idea was simple enough. Imagine turning sideways in your car to face the view instead of letting it slip by your side. Add to it commentary and context, and poignant scenes are churned out. When the truck wound up a multi-storey off loading bay giving us repeated yet diminishing snapshots of the vast arrays of containers and cars on the ground, the music, a selection of recorded orchestra and live solo vocals added a chilling vibe to the view of scale, production and consumption. We descended the building to enter the locality of labourers’ dormitories. An opening guitar segment of a Tamil cinema song was looped with almost extended bits of silence inbetween, as some alarming statistics of labourers’ compensations were provided, creating a mixed mood of sympathy and uncomfortable apathy. Just then, at the curb, the strumming guitar flourished into exuberant song as a sea of men, horizontally along the canteens and vertically upon their dorms came into sight. What the statistics seemed unable to compute was the joy derived more from mutual interaction than anything else. Largely oblivious to the presence of a truck in their midst, what amused the men was the unusual shinny facade of the vehicle, behind which we were seated invisibly. Perhaps this was a two-way invisibility. Seated inside a refrigerated container, perhaps we were impervious to the condition of these men.
The artificiality of the reality that such theatre aspires to was paradoxical. Our experience of the reality of the lives of ‘unskilled labourers’ was heavily mediated by the skills of the creators in appending text, numbers, music and additional visuals to our view of their lives. The ‘real’ text, numbers, sounds, even, smells and heat that enveloped the dense populace was sealed away by reflective glass. Rimini Protokoll’s (re)construction of CARGO for the Singapore audience, seemed to lack an emotional continuity, even coherence in its scripting. Given that pulling theatre out of the comfort zone of the concert hall means conceiving the use (or abstinence) of theatrical devices: text, music, lights body among others, CARGO did well in conceiving the parts. Unfortunately the whole fell short. The performance boasts a successful running for about 2 years, travelling from Frankfurt, Vienna, Madrid, Paris, Hamburgh, through Tokyo, now to Singapore and then Shanghai. I suspect that CARGO: Kuala Lumpur-Singapore has well recreated the morphological aspects of its European and Japanese versions. But its political voice seemed muffled and contrived here. Potent issues of fines, bribes, working hours, red tape, time, money and location were all littered around the sometimes rehearsed, sometimes spontaneous conversations between the two drivers. But the men often held back heavily on their own engagement with the topic(s). I think the problem began somewhere with the choice of English as the spoken language in the performance. A choice that meant, quite surprisingly, the complete loss of Tamil and Malay from the script written for two Malaysian Indian drivers. Agreed that moments where they turned to speak directly to us, when done in their often broken English was both amazingly lucid in its communication and endearing in the effort. Yet, could we have not simply peeked into their world via surtitles? Is art in Singapore or the Singapore Arts Festival under any compulsion to flush the vernacular out of the cosmopolitan? I felt remorse, as in letting a juicy fruit go rotten.
Kiran
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