What happened to a farmer in a theater?
The Celestial City Folk Go Down to the Countryside to Perform
In April, while this hired hand was buried up to his neck in planting vegetables at Lixiang Paradise, a whole crowd of people, said to be involved in theater, suddenly appeared. Judging by the look of things, they had probably come for a country outing, and I thought to myself, please don't mess around. Unexpectedly, this troupe accepted without a word the job we assigned them of building up raised beds and planting dragon fruit (Hylocereus undatus). Along the way, some planted with great care, some laughed and cursed as they played, and some used a snakeskin to tease the timid.
I noticed they could really lose themselves in the fun, which in the fields is a good thing no matter what. Only later did I learn that they were in fact the "Three Short of One Theater Troupe," who had personally made repeated field visits to the farmlands of Changhua and Yunlin in response to the issues of the Sixth Naphtha Cracker Plant and the Kuokuang Petrochemical project, and who tried to transform what they saw, heard and felt into dramatic performance.
After talking for a whole evening, this hired hand, who had also dropped out of a theater graduate program, once again savored the theater people's rule-breaking zest for life, and so gladly accepted the invitation to watch their informal, non-public, experimental performance.
How Theater Language and Real Land Intertwine
It is not easy for Taipei Celestial City folk to willingly go down to the countryside for an experience, and it is even rarer for theater people from the Celestial City to be willing to set aside the anxiety and impulse of the "pledge of allegiance" style scramble for money, fame and resources, and to delve deeply into rural and environmental issues over the long term. But from the standpoint of a farmer in rural Changhua, this hired hand remains quite curious: how can Three Short of One Theater Troupe's land-based "land project" select "material" from the sprawling, chaotic reality in order to give voice to the people rooted in this land? Or, if they do not intend to speak for anyone at all, then what relationship or influence can this play actually have with the locals?
After all, in Taiwan, performing "art" seems to always be able to justify itself, but social "reality" remains chaotic and turbulent, and to stir these two things, which currently seem as unrelated as a cow and a horse, together seems to be asking for trouble. And at the discussion session after the play, Three Short of One Theater Troupe, using the human body, a large piece of cloth and a few wooden sticks as their performance objects, put on a playful, shape-shifting, wildly imaginative play about rural and environmental issues, and also drew questioning from quite a few "down-to-earth" audience members:
Some parts did produce certain effects, but I cannot see the purpose of stringing these fragments together? After watching, I still do not understand your exact stance on these events? Some plot lines were broken, which is a real pity. The audience on site seemed to feel that even within the play, Three Short of One Theater Troupe inevitably had to act as a "present" narrator and clearly "take a stance."
In acting class, this hired hand was also taught that an actor can freely dismantle and rebuild the threads of plot and the inner states of characters, and that only by being able to direct the interpretation and control of a character's every move can one give the lines a fresh, smooth and energetic emotion and action, while also letting the audience "clearly" see the actors' back-and-forth toss and catch of interaction. Thus a play can be rehearsed like a factory conveyor line, rapidly manufacturing a smooth, glossy product through processing and coordination at each stage; you can also casually pick up any piece of theater criticism and see that the critic can always, like Mazu descending in spirit, pronounce with absolute certainty how this play progresses and connects in dramatic structure, what aesthetics and theory the director displays in stage blocking, and what meaning and depth this gesture, that symbol, the whole space displays, and what kind of viewing emotion and effect it triggers in the audience.
In other words, everyone's purpose in entering the theater seems to be to examine or prove what we can clearly "know" or "interpret." But in this process, those "characters" in the play, who are taken and demanded from, manipulated and interpreted at will, undoubtedly become butterflies captured by experts and made into specimens -- seemingly clear and dazzling, yet never again possessed of the liveliness and wonder of real life.
In fact, to completely define or narrate a thing from a or omniscient angle is not so easy.Try to describe the Zhuoshui River, the mother river of farmers, and see: you have to decide which stretch of river surface, which background context to fit it into, from which perspective to set out, and with whom around it to establish a relationship. Not to mention that you have to decide on an ending point for the narration of the rolling, churning, drifting and turbid, never-stagnant silty river water.
Both Theater and Farmers Are Full of Drama
That is why even the epic tradition, the ancestor of Western narrative, was first passed down in oral form, where anyone could add embellishments and speak with great assurance, and over a long period of time ceaselessly added plot and perspective, only finally integrating it into a unified work in writing. Otherwise it would truly be hard to match the mass of the real world; and the most popular narrative genre of contemporary times -- the novel -- also needs several hundred pages of length to let people speak freely without obstruction. Otherwise, how could it fully reveal the twists and subtle recesses of the human heart?
So when audience members question what exactly your troupe can state in such a sealed, narrow space called a theater, within a performance length of usually only two or three hours, this hired hand often finds it quite incredible: do they not know that trying to compete with the narrative mass that epic or novel art excels at is a sure loss? Perhaps it is time for us to trace back and ask where the essential power of drama and theater lies.
This hired hand actually feels that the difficulty and interest of real life are more like Hamlet, who cries out ”To be, or not to be” ("achieving" or "doing nothing") and questions the "performance" of his own life; or Nora, who suddenly awakens to her identity as a "doll" and realizes that only by leaving the refuge of the family utterly alone can she possibly build a true marriage; or Oedipus, who is toyed with by the gods yet still chooses to punitively blind himself, and listens to the chorus chant, "Call no man happy until he is dead."
What you often see is a person living in a world with no standard answers and no reliable anchor, who must face the unknown future alone, hesitating, doubting, uneasy, hoping, praying, enduring -- in other words, a person treading on thin ice as he waits for fate and faith to descend. When such a person appears in the theater, what the audience sees and thinks about will not be the director behind the scenes, a group of actors, or the critic pulling the strings in the background, but actually themselves -- a living, breathing person possessing infinite possibilities and a sense of conflict, so the audience is bound to invest all the experience, knowledge and emotion they possess outside the theater to analyze the characters' interests, and even to breathe and rise and fall along with them, reflecting and struggling for the sake of being alive.
Thus every minute and second in the theater, every stillness and every movement, can be filled with a naturally formed, omnipresent suspense and tension, simple and direct with no room for compromise. Perhaps we can make a simple classification -- narrative art tries to depict and explain the world outward as much as possible, while this small space of the theater demands that the whole world focus, gaze upon, and ponder it with undivided affection. So in this hired hand's eyes, a farmer who bows and raises his head in the fields, humbly asking heaven and earth for charity, can also be full of drama!
The day after watching the play, this hired hand, unwilling to be left out, continued to take part in the "Three Short of One" members' debriefing session of wine pools and meat forests, personally witnessing everyone express their highest respect for the land's bounty through wolfing down food, and the pure affection (more accurately, nuzzling) of the "Master of Marital Harmony" Sister Mali, who now and then shook with laughter and collapsed onto her neighbor. I also heard the members discuss that they should focus on presenting the lives that various people truly believe in and devote themselves to, even if those lives conflict with one another; that they must return to the essence of drama, and simply let each character's own concise story display its force and provide room for imagination; that the rule in the theater is actually less is more; that next year we absolutely must go to Xizhou to perform for the farmers....
Watching from the sidelines, this hired hand thought to himself that they too were slowly focusing on a theater-specific way of "giving voice." It seemed that this troupe would take such an "unusual" path in the eyes of the theater industry, and it was no accident! I could not help but look forward, on behalf of the folks of Xizhou, to the moment next year when "Three Short of One Theater Troupe"'s screen is unveiled in Xizhou.
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