There are
a million reasons why this piece shouldn't work. The premise sounds
like a recipe for a snooze-a-palooza:
1) Place one Chinese-Australian man in his fifties wearing a mandarin
collar solo in the centre of a stage.
2) Allow him to show off a tableau of ten knick-knacks from his home,
his "objects for meditation", each evoking a different moment in his
life, resounding deeply with quotations from the Tao Te Ching.
3) Screen his travel photographs and a few video-recordings, none of
which are very dramatic, since we are of course engaged in the meditative
process.
4) Continue in this vein, without entrances, exits, costume changes,
or plot structure, for about 90 minutes, without intermission.
5) Curtain.
Are we excited yet?
So you can guess I was surprised to discover that Objects for
Meditation kicks some serious ass. In spite of its static layout,
in spite of its structurelessness, in spite of its soliloquy format,
the show works. The writer/photographer/director/ performer William
Yang holds it all together with his rare stage presence, wearing
a faintly amused Zen smile and addressing the audience in his gentle,
dry, Aussie accent.
What might have been a dreary monologue becomes an intimate exploration
of the world of an idiosyncratic individual, often moving, often strange,
often hilarious. Dressed in that dinky mandarin collar, Yang consistently
exudes the persona of a sweet old Chinese uncle while nonetheless demolishing
and deconstructing that very image. His admission of his homosexuality
comes casually - as does his admittance of his non-monogamy: "The man
in the picture is Scott, one of my boyfriends." And yes, he is very
Taoist, with an altar in his home and a cheesy Chinese rock ornament
on his table of souvenirs. But since he identifies as Australian more
than Chinese, he admits he's gone against the Dalai Lama's advice that
truth is best found within your own culture. "I am a decorative Taoist",
he explains, to the audience's hearty merriment.
Yang further deconstructs his Chineseness by exploring how, on his
travels as an artist to Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, rural
Germany and aboriginal Australia, he is able to discover resonances
with the people and within himself, making friends, making love, making
connections. Among his objects for meditation, he presents a Native
American dreamcatcher and a Maori volcano figurine, and treats us to
slides of the Roman Baths and Haw Par Villa. He interweaves personal
anecdote and history, and in balancing them manages to avoid the narcissism
that might come of the first and the sweeping pomp that might come of
the second. It is rather the voice of an earnest, compassionate thinker
we hear as he notes the chilling similarities between colonial policies
toward the native Welsh and the Australian Aborigines, so although we've
grown pretty blasé about post-colonial angst, Yang arrests us
with his sincerity, and we listen. Rather than claiming to represent
world culture, Yang represents himself, so that he becomes a lens through
which we can perceive the planet he has traveled.
I'm still taken aback when I consider the simplicity of the entire
show. Certainly, he was accompanied by a versatile instrumentalist who
played everything from the gourd flute to the saxophone to the didgeridoo,
and two giant video screens displayed his photographs and videos to
provoking effect. But even here there was no postmodern overloading
of the senses or technological wizardry, the photographs were loaded
more with the casual intimacy of a family photo album than with the
glamour of an art studio. Like the ten objects on his table, these were
mere tools to aid us on a journey inside a personality, rather than
objects of remark in themselves.
As always, this critic has a few quibbles. First, the performance
I saw was strangely full of stammers, as again and again Yang almost
flubbed his lines. Friends tell me this did not occur the night before,
nor on Yang's previous visit here to perform his show "Bloodlinks",
so I'll put it down to circumstantial problems.
Second, Yang's closure, whereupon he re-exhibited his objects, two
by two, and explained in the barest terms what they represented for
him, was a violent and inconsistent break with the beautiful sense of
unstructuredness that permeated the rest of the show. The atmosphere
of enchantment is broken when he spells out that his yin-yang porcelain
teapot and his Shakespeare tea towel are icons of his "bi-cultural roots".
Honey, we've heard that song a million times. When you talked about
them earlier, you made us realise they were only fragments of you, and
the richest part resists categorisation.
Nonetheless, one could see that the audience was truly moved by the
end, as his voice faded and the video played the deafening roar of a
waterfall, the first moment of sensory overload the audience had received
throughout the night. Just before the lights came on for applause, there
was a magical moment of silence and darkness, as we sat before the bowed
man before us on the stage, barely breathing.
My first review for this site was W!ld Rice's Second Link,
not long ago. This morning I read that in this country, a night of poetry
and literary performance doesn't qualify as a "play" for the Life!
Theatre Awards. Well, screw categories. Objects for Meditation
wavers between drama, lecture, documentary, multimedia installation
and show-and-tell. It follows a formula that does not appear to be workable,
and it succeeds. So here's to the experimenters. Thanks for surprising
me.
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"I was pretty surprised to discover that Objects for Meditation
kicks some serious ass. In spite of its static layout, in spite of its
structurelessness, in spite of its soliloquy format, the show works"
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