Delving into the different manifestations of violence

One look at the flyer of Cuckoo Birds, with its psychedelic background and quirky costumes, and you get an inkling that this play won’t be run-of-the-mill fare. The piece, which stars performing arts veterans Anne James, Jo Kukathas and Elaine Pedley, as well as independent Singaporean artist Mohd Fared Jainal, is a collaborative work conceptualised by Five Arts Centre and Natalie Hennedige, artistic director of Singapore’s Cake Theatrical Productions, a company known for highly visual and theatrical productions.

Sitting down with Hennedige for this interview at Five Arts Centre’s office, the director assures me the play will very much reflect the poster. “The first experience for me (with the audience) is when you pick up the flyer, you get a sense of what you’re going to get into,” she says. “I’m going to follow through with that.” Audiences can expect to encounter a colourful and quirky world where nothing is really as it seems.

Hennedige’s collaboration with Five Arts is part of the arts collective’s 25th anniversary celebrations, where it has invited external artists to create works based on its principles of practice. Hennedige shares about what it was she found at Five Arts that resonated with her.

“I was looking at what was common between Cake and Five Arts, as opposed to what was different, and what I found was a spirit of adventure and of experimentation, and an engagement with theatricality. Another thing was an openness and flexibility. Those were very powerful bonds, common grounds from which we could start to work. It felt very natural even though I had never worked with Anne, Jo or Elaine before. It just felt like we were speaking the same language in terms of artistic vocabulary,” she says.

She tells of how this irreverently titled play came about. “In talking with Five Arts about what this piece was going to be about, we started sharing and many people from Five Arts told stories of incidences of violence that happened to them,” she says. “Everyone had a story of a bag stolen, a house broken into or a family being tied up at knife point. I thought it was interesting, this idea of crime as an everyday thing.”

From this starting point of crime, Hennedige decided to delve past the surface to explore what’s beneath, taking a deeper look at not just crime, but also the different manifestations of violence. She says, “We thought of violence in ordinary and extraordinary situations, from somebody smashing your car window and taking your purse to the violence of losing someone in sleep. How do you deal with that? Also, wielding power in an abusive way, in the sense that when you silence someone because you have more authority.”

The question that arises then is how does one find peace in the midst of such darkness and pain? “Pain, violence, it’s part and parcel of living. How do you find serenity in spite of it all? That’s what we’re searching for in the play,” says Hennedige.
Cuckoo Birds is episodic in nature, with the different stories linked together by a common theme of violence. The theme is indeed a dark and dreary one, but Hennedige says the play will be punctuated with splashes of humour and silliness. “When you deal with an issue that is so dark, it is important to find lightness and stupidity. There are some things in the play that are gloriously stupid, but in a wonderful way,” she laughs. “We try to balance it, and hopefully the play will be quite a ride for the audience.”

Taking audiences on a ride, or creating an experience, is what Hennedige strives to do with her productions, and it begins the moment the audience steps into the theatre and take in the set for the first time. Hennedige says she favours set designs that have “an art installation quality” to them, which is what audiences will see in Cuckoo Birds. “I enjoy the experience of the audience coming in, just seeing this almost as an installation, and then experiencing how the actors manoeuvre and journey in that space,” she says.

The set for Cuckoo Birds serves both a practical and symbolic purpose, as it looks at the whole idea of how safe we can ever be in our spaces, whether it’s our own personal space, the space within a society or community or the mental space of our beliefs. “That’s what it’s about: We’re all within these confined spaces, and we should have safety but sometimes don’t,” says Hennedige.

Indeed, we all should have a sense of security in our respective spaces, but the reality of it falls far from this utopian notion. The need to be at peace even when these spaces are rudely invaded is a relevant and pressing matter to address, especially with the recent crime wave we’ve been experiencing. It will certainly be interesting to see how this multifaceted issue is tackled in Cuckoo Birds.

Cuckoo Birds will be staged from June 18 to 21 at The Annexe Gallery, Central Market Annexe, Jalan Hang Kasturi, KL. Admission is by donation of RM20, or RM10 for students and senior citizens. For more information, call (03) 2070 1137.




This article appeared in Options, the lifestyle pullout of The Edge Malaysia, Issue 758, June 8 - 14, 2009.