Book Review : Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe

Review of Ministry of Moral Panic by Amanda Lee Koe

“It’s important to live for yourself. To know life.”, Jenny instructed Alice in the tale Alice, You Must Be the Fulcrum of Your Own Universe, the story with the longest title in Ministry of Moral Panic. “You don’t have to be afraid to give, because we are always in a process of becoming.” These two statements, I feel, sum up the premise of the collection of fourteen stories by Amanda Lee Koe. The characters seek love to live. They give love, they dare to become, even if their becoming would be frowned upon. In the process they toughen up, and they (mostly) continue with hope.

So Jenny, a woman in her sixties, and in her nude pantyhose and cream pumps and apricot dress, salmon lipstick, always trying something new, something she’s never done before, admitted to Jenny, a young art student, “I think I’m a little in love with you. It isn’t your fault.” But neither was it Jenny’s fault to pursue joy and vitality through love. “We let ourselves get into the habit of the grind, we let the grind wear us down”, drawing a sharp contrast between Jenny and the narrator in Love Is No Big Truth.  The latter suffered in silence and dutifully fulfilled the gender and role expectation on her until the mistress brought home by her husband ate the food she cooked and drank from the cup of her daughter.  After her husband died and her daughter moved out, she felt an incredible elation course through her body. Loneliness is freedom. She declared that there is no such thing as “I cannot live without you; you cannot live without me.”  

In all stories, the protagonists find and lose or discard love, none with a happy ending. It is a woeful reminder that love relationships are challenging, and perhaps doomed between two persons from different geographical, social or cultural background, or of sexual orientation not considered the acceptable norms. For example, in Flamingo Valley, a rich Chinese girl and a Malay guitarist separated after he was beaten up by a similarly wealthy Chinese love rival. In The Ballad of Arlene & Nelly, Arlene has been obsessively in love with Nelly for years, and both could finally live together after Nelly’s divorce, but the happy times did not last.

Lest the readers think that there is only a narrow focus on love and emotion, Amanda Lee Koe does portrays other social phenomenon, and I question the value of art through the curator’s interview with the artist in Carousel & Fort, ponder on self-cutting disorder in Chick. In The King of Caldecott Hill, the protagonist idolized the King, but was more able to thrive by carrying her delusions through her life.  Even if some characters need some made belief and illusion in their realities, they have lived for themselves.

Amanda Lee Koe succeeds in depicting the emotional struggle of characters coping with situations that challenge the ministry or institution of social norms, cultural formations and moral standards instilled through education, religion and social interaction.  

Soledad: An Honorable Pact with Solitude?

Published in Hong Kong Dance Journal on 5th February 2016

http://www.dancejournalhk.com/#!Eng-Soledad-An-Honorable-Pact-with-Solitude/cjds/56af12470cf2dc1600db2345

.    Peter Suart in Soledad by Helen Lai
Photo provider: City Contemporary Dance Company

Soledad, the Spanish word for solitude, is the title of Helen Lai’s latest dance theatre work. It was inspired by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’ novelOne Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel depicts the rise and fall of the imaginary town of Macondo told through seven generations of the Buendía family. Lai choreographed and directed Soledad while collaborator Peter Suart composed and recorded the music and designed the sets. In his role as Melquíades, the gypsy turned into a ubiquitous Buendía household phantom, Suart also recites poems throughout the dance that he wrote in response to Márquez’s novel.Soledad portrays selective scenes and characters from the novel rather than attempting to cover the whole story, an impossible feat to accomplish in the normal time span of a theatrical performance.

1.    Peter Suart in Soledad by Helen Lai
Photo provider: City Contemporary Dance Company

Soledad, the Spanish word for solitude, is the title of Helen Lai’s latest dance theatre work. It was inspired by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez’ novelOne Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel depicts the rise and fall of the imaginary town of Macondo told through seven generations of the Buendía family. Lai choreographed and directed Soledad while collaborator Peter Suart composed and recorded the music and designed the sets. In his role as Melquíades, the gypsy turned into a ubiquitous Buendía household phantom, Suart also recites poems throughout the dance that he wrote in response to Márquez’s novel.Soledad portrays selective scenes and characters from the novel rather than attempting to cover the whole story, an impossible feat to accomplish in the normal time span of a theatrical performance.

The stage design for Soledad is one of simplicity and elegance. Throughout, a ship is represented at upstage left. Perhaps it depicts the galleon the first Buendía and his kin stumbled upon when searching for dry land in the vast swampy jungle. Stuart’s “Melquíades’ Key” and the soulful music of the accordion conjure up the ghostly passengers and crew of the ship who witnessed other towns and families during their dangerous voyage. At the beginning of the dance, there are two piles of sand, one upstage right, the other downstage left. A dancer appears with a shovel and digs at the sand, possibly signifying the building of the town of Macondo and presaging its eventual demise – sand an unsuitable foundation. Later, more than a dozen wooden chairs form a row where the whole cast sits as Úrsula, wife of the first Buendía portrayed by Qiao Yang, places her hands on each, touching each of them in turn. In a later scene, the chairs are stacked at upstage right, maybe representing barricades used in a riot or revolution. With few props, each carrying multiple meanings, the stage is mostly bare with plenty of space for the dancers.

The various duets are packed with sensuality and passion, the movements beautifully designed to convey the different states of romance and sexual relationship of the generations of Buendía lovers. A duet of male dancers is captivating too in the portrayal of affection, comradeship, and betrayal.  The solo dances also depict significant moments from the novel, notably Amaranta with a black bandage on her lower arm, with Rebeca watching her, and Remedios the Beauty engulfed by white sheets supplemented with a video projection of her ascent to heaven, Rebeca eating earth during crisis, and the physical battle and emotional struggle of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. One memorable ensemble section is of the generations of Buendía that starts with a couple followed by one or two dancers rapidly joining in succession to show the proliferation of the family and going through the motions of gathering together for a family portrait. Another ensemble piece represents a battlefield with the dancers scampering, crawling, running, and falling. The most enticing scene, which I will call the umbrella scene, portrays the implausible event of a never-ending rain that incessantly floods Macondo. With the dancers shouting in Cantonese “four years, eleven months, and two days”, opening and closing golden umbrellas in unison, huddling and drawing apart under the rain, the revolution depicted in the novel, as show in the dance, resonates in the hearts and collective memory of Hong Kong audiences.   

The house program introduces each scene by using passages from the novel. My title also borrows from the novel - “Colonel Aureliano Buendía could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” Lai’s Soledad may not have seemed rich in solitary sentiments, unless we concede that emotion is felt within oneself, in solitude, then most theatrical performances convey solitude. Alone or in good company, those in the audience were able to witness, in their solitude, this energetic and soulful dance to the lively and mournful beat of Latin American music that ends with the lonesome figure of Melquíades discarding page after page of his manuscript.

Joining a theatre production

I went for an audition, and I got a role. The whole cast ( I am not sure because I was late, so I miss any announcement on whether anyone is reading a role not assigned to him or her )  gathered for a reading of the play text. There are actually actress around my age group.  Most of them read very well. I am quite excited with the coming rehearsals.

Schiller

Introduction to Don Carlos by Nicholas Dromgoole

Friedrich Schiller was born in 1759 and died in 1805. Although a late arrival and younger than most, Schiller was a leading spirit in the movement known as Sturm und Drang that was a forerunner, a precursor of what was to grow at the turn of the century into a fully fledged Romantic Movement - Rebellion - Revolution, whatever its various historians have called it. Most of the main themes of Romanticism can be found alive and kicking in Sturm und Drang: the emphasis on the individual and individual freedom, a political idealism, the crucial importance of creative imagination, a subjective Rousseau-esque response to nature, the new attention paid to feeling and sensibility, the use of symbolic imagery, the championing of Shakespearean freedom in dramatic writing, as opposed to the dramatic unities, and scurrying back down the corridors of time to find themes for plays in distant epochs and other cultures.
This involved the first serious attempt at some kind of historical realism in stage settings and costumes. Sturm und Drang took its name from the title of a play by Klinger. Its leading spirit was Goethe from 1771-78 who greatly influenced the younger disciples around him - J H R Lenz, H L Wagner, F Muller and F M Klinger. Schiller's work from 1780 - 1785 was a later flowering from the same stem.

To talk of Germany, even in 1805, is misleading. The Holy Roman Empire consisted of a patchwork quilt of little independent states, kingdoms, dukedoms, fiefdoms, each supporting a Court and local aristocracy, depending as it had since feudal times on a labouring peasant class. Yet the increasing efficiency of the educational system was producing a talented middle class for which there were very few jobs, very little chance of status and position. This created a growing social tension which was only gradually resolved as industrialisation and increasingprosperity in the later nineteenth century absorbed and greatly increased the new middle class. In the 1760's it looked as though there was nowhere for this upstart middle class to go. They depended pathetically on the patronage of the aristocrats, particularly on the local ruler.

Seneca

Peter Brook's comment on Seneca

Seneca's play has no external action whatsoever ... It takes place nowhere, the people are not people, and the vivid action, as it moves through the verbal images, leaps forward and back with the technique of cinema and with a freedom beyond film. So this is theatre liberated from scenery, liberated from costume, liberated from stage moves, gestures and business.

On the Sublime

Sublimity is a kind of eminence or excellence of discourse. It is not an essential property of language but rather makes itself known by the effect it produces, and that effect is one of ravishment.
Whatever knocks the reader out is sublime.
Sublime language disrupts everyday consciousness.
It is great writing that takes the readers out of himself. It tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator's whole power at a single blow.
The sublime produces ecstasy rather than persuasion in the hearer. This combination of wonder and astonishment always proves superior to the merely persuasive and pleasant. Persuasion is on the whole something we can control, whereas amazement and wonder exert invincible power and force and get the better of every hearer.
"Hypsous" is the state of transport and exaltation. The moment of hypsous becomes a struggle for dominance between opposing forces. The sublime not only produces an identification between speaker and audience but entails a modification in relations of power between the parties involved, and the diversity of ways in which such modifications may be conceptualized is at the heart of critical debates regarding the sublime.

Discourse in the Peri Hypsous (on Great Writing) is a power struggle.
The Longinian sublime appears in a climate of antagonism, as rivalry between authors.

For Longinus, who believes that "sublimity will be achieved if we consistently select the most important of those inherent features and learn to organize them as a unity by combining one with another, the ability "to select and organize material" is one of the factors that "can make our writing sublime".

Cloud Nine

"The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama" by W.B. Worthen

Onstage, the most exciting and interesting device in Cloud Nine is its use of cross-dressing and role-doubling. In the first act, for instance, Betty must be played by a man, Joshua by a white man, and Edward by a woman. By "alienating" actors from the characters they play, Churchill clearly intends to raise the questions of gender, sexual orientation, and race as ideological issues, for in each of these cases the difference between the performer and the role marks what Clive wants to see as real. Betty is played by a man because Clive - and his patriarchal society - cannot envision women's identity; women are constructed on the model of male attitudes. Joshua is played by a white man because imperial and racist culture reduces African identity to the construction of white, European attitudes. Edward is played by a woman to express the impossibility of Edward's conforming to Clive's heterosexual standards.

In all three cases, the "identity" of the character is compromised or even erased, to be filled in and embodied by the attitudes that Clive and his society want them to hold. This performative dimension of the play's politics is echoed by the play's doubling of parts - each of the actors in act 1 takes a part in act 2, inviting the audience to draw comparisons between the two characters. Although other doubling patterns are possible, Churchill has suggested doubling Harry Bagley, the explorer, with Martin, the superficially liberated man; Clive, the father, with Cathy, the child ; Betty with Edward; and so on. Doubling and cross-dressing are familiar conventions in the theatre, but in Cloud Nine they have a specific dramatic purpose in developing the themes of the play. By denaturalizing the categories of gender, race and sexuality, Cloud Nine undertakes a typically postmodern inquiry into the construction of social reality, asking what meanings are created by these categories, and how they work to structure the relationship between self and society.