Murky depths
The heights are hard to achieve when cutting edge theatre design is not accompanied by emotion.
TOILET
Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre,
May 20-24
THEATRE director Loh Kok Man has been on a winning streak of late. In this year’s seventh Boh Cameronian Arts Awards, he took home the Best Director award with his interpretation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and also bagged Best Lighting Design for the play Air Con.
Toilet is a marriage of text, movement, drama and dance to evoke
deep-seated desires and unleash fantasies.
A year before, Loh also won Best Lighting Design for his theatrical piece, The Lost and the Ecliptic. Then there was Break-ing Ji Poh Ka Si Pecah in 2006 when he was part of an impressive directorial trinity that included veterans Jo Kukathas and Namron. Not only did Loh direct a segment in Ka Si Pecah, he also designed the lights for the critically acclaimed production.
So when I heard that Loh was going to restage his award winning (Boh Cameronian 2003 for Best Director) Untitled, needless to say it was time to play catch-up, to witness a performance that launched the then-young director to critical fame. This time around, the piece has been re-titled Toilet, with a mix of new and original cast members.
The premise is that the toilet, and the activities in it, is the last private, solo space for humanity. Loh sets out to examine this space as somewhere for the physical and mental being to dream and imagine, and to literally and metaphorically purge. In its crudest explanation alluded to by Loh, as we purge and excrete, we make room for fresh imaginings and novel inspiration.
Toilet marries text, movement, drama, and dance to evoke deep-seated desires and unleash fantasies, to materialise the inner-most thoughts that individuals only allow to emerge when left totally alone. This is indeed an abstract and intellectual structuring of a theatrical performance that does not have a linear narrative or a cohesive plot to drive the performance.
So Toilet is also about vignettes of deep-seated desires and fantasies told by five performers with a variety of talents and skills.
In a playground scene, there is in a balloon moving in slow
motion.
Loh managed to assemble the likes of dance academic and seasoned performer Leng Poh Gee and the subtly powerful contemporary dancer Amy Len. Together with dancers Louise Yow and Tin Tan, the four could have easily formed a formidable ensemble of movers. Then throw in original Untitled cast member Gan Hui Yee, who is an earthy yet energetic actress from the Chinese language theatre fraternity, and Toilet boasts a most impressive cast, one that any director would be glad to work with.
Unfortunately, the vignettes of dances and dramatic moments seriously missed the mark time and again. The opening, comprising amusing and light-hearted movements of the five performers operating individually doing cutesy dance duets with their benches, did not seem to go anywhere.
I did not see individualistic characters “working” their benches but rather a loose collective united by the common “act of toilet”, perhaps? The question then is where is the private individual, lost in purging and dreaming, surfacing as a completely new entity?
While the moves were reminiscent of the bizarre and cute – kawaii – Japanese contemporary dance style that sprung up in the early 2000s, Loh’s ensemble could learn a thing or two about pushing the kawaii factor from the likes of groups such as Papa Taruhumara, Strange Kinoko, and Yubiwa Hotel. It’s not just about dance moves but a certain aura that performers have to bring onto the stage.
As the next vignette unfolded, things become more bizarre with a playground scene in which a girl (Tin Tan) marvels at her balloon in slow motion, watched by another woman (Gan) who polishes off one banana after another.
The mundane and ordinary is examined, as the simple joys and pleasures of a bobbing balloon is magnified and slowed down, almost in a frame-by-frame filmic way, for the audience to languish in. Then the ordinary becomes extraordinary as graceful movements slowly reveal themselves and the emotions are fully savoured.
Despite being set to intense electronic music and lighted gorgeously, the lyrical visuality of the scene that Loh obviously intended does not quite reach its full potential. When precise lighting design and pulsating ambient sounds become such a strong set-up, the live performers must exert that added spurt of energy to fill the picture, even if it is in slow motion. This, unfortunately, did not happen.
Toilet’s weakness lies in the fact that it seems to pay homage to clinically designed contemporary Japanese performances with quirky characters. Loh seems to have got the exacting peripherals such as lighting and music down pat but his performers fail to produce the needed edge to seal the deal.
With the exception of Len’s stunning solo mid-way into the night, there is a sense that the usually apt movement theatre director Loh seems to have floundered when directing or choreographing the dancers in Toilet.
The simplistic dance gestures did not elevate the performance above everyday ordinariness to sparkling heights. Emotional highs and lows that could have rocketed the performance to another plane were desperately lacking.
Cosmetically, Toilet presented cutting edge theatre design but it lacked the human qualities that the director speaks of in the programme: the clearing of the unwanted, the escape from discarded realities of the urbane.
‘Toilet’ has its two final performances today, at 3pm and 8.30pm, at Pentas 2, KLPac (Jalan Strachan, off Jalan Ipoh, Sentul Park). Tickets are RM37 (and RM24 for students, senior citizens, and the disabled). Call 03-4047 9000 for bookings. Go to klpac.com for more information.