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All images are from Lear, directed by Ong Keng Sen, TheatreWorks, Singapore. Courtesy Japan Foundation Asia Center.

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Rustom Bharucha

Consumed in Singap ore

The Intercultural Spectacle of Lear

There are at least two provocations in selecting the Japan Foundation Asia Centers production of Lear, performed in Singapore, for my intercultural investigations in this essay. The first relates to the tension between the global, which is associated with the economic hegemony of global capitalism and its cultural ancillaries in the world market, and the intercultural, a fuzzier term for semi-autonomous, voluntarist cultural exchanges between individuals, and groups, from different parts of the world. As I have written earlier (Bharucha 1999, 2000), intercultural practice is unavoidably subsumed within the inequities of the global economy, but this does not mean it has to submit to the cultural demands of the market. Indeed, there is an oppositional component within interculturalism that cannot be separated from a larger critique of capital. This pristine formulation, however, is challenged by the minuscule city-state of Singapore, whose very survival, if not phenomenal economic success, was facilitated by its embrace of global capital at the outset of its formation as a nation. The task of discriminating the intercultural from the global is obviously harder within the First World context of Singapore than it would be in the Third World context of other nonWestern nations like India, on the margins of the global economy. However, the tension between the intercultural and the global should not be dissolved in the Singaporean context through a conflation of categories. Such conflations are ubiquitous in Singapores political scene, where it is almost impossible to distinguish, for example, the control of the state and the government from the dominance of the Peoples Action Party (PAP). Without elaborating on the political expediency of such slippages, I would emphasize that it is necessary to uphold a contrapuntal relationship between these terms, if only to retain a critical view of those enterprises in which the intercultural is part of a global agenda.
This essay is an abridged and revised version of a longer monograph of the same title, published in the CAS Research Paper Series of the National University of Singapore and Pagesetters in 2000.

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The second provocation concerns the assumptions of liberal democracy underlying almost any articulation of interculturalism. In the context of the unapologetically anti-liberal (Chua 1995: 185) policies of the PAP government, it must be stressed that interculturalism is mediatedand, indeed, made possibleby individuals and groups not necessarily controlled by the strictures of communities or states. The state has no claim to the narrative on interculturalism, even though state agencies can facilitate (or impede) its production. Yet in Singapore the state has indeed authored (and implemented) the undeniably vexed narratives of multiracialism and multiculturalism against which interculturalism can be offered as a tentative alternative.1 I say tentative because the practice of interculturalism in Singapore is as yet emergent, and fraught with its own traps and selfdeceptions. Through my analysis of an ambitious intercultural production of Lear, directed by Ong Keng Sen of TheatreWorks (Singapore), I hope to tease out some troubling questions that cut across the domains of intercultural practice and multiracial/ multicultural politics. To what extent, for instance, is it productive to speak of Asian models of interculturalism? Do such experiments counter Eurocentrist models, or do they succumb to a reverse orientalism, or, more invisibly, to a form of self-orientalism (Tan 1997: 270)? Does the inscription of Asia in cultural practice unconsciously echo the advocacy of Asian values by ASEAN politicians? To what extent does interculturalism circumvent the investigation of the local through a refusal to engage with cultural and class differences at home? Can there be a politically engaged intercultural practice? Or do these recent Asian experiments merely enhance the global prospects of cultural tourism, exhibiting a specious concern for other cultures that, in actuality, masks the boredom of an excessively mechanized metropolitan existence? These are questions that I would like to engage not just polemically but with some critical empathy. I may not be an insider to Singapores cultural scene, but I am not entirely a foreigner. I choose to speak in this interstitial space, drawing some encouragement from sociologist Chua Beng-Huats candid acknowledgment that outsiders dont seem to have a problem reading Singapore, it is the ones who live here who have problems reading this place (quoted in Lee 1998: 78). Moreover, the outsider has the privilege not to speak elliptically (Devan 1993a), which would seem to be almost de rigueur in voicing ones critique of the state as a Singaporean citizen. Inevitably, I am reminded of the OB or out-of-bounds markers that have been internalized at almost every level of public life and culture by Singaporeans. Even I cannot claim to be entirely free of these phantasmatic markers, whose self-censoring devices lurk in the unexpected corners and shifts of almost any discourse on the cultural politics of Singapore.2

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Spectac le in Singap ore

The spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

I will now jump-cut directly to the lobby of the Kallang Theatre, where Lear received its Singapore premiere in January 1999. Featuring a lavish banquet that exemplifies the diversity of cuisines available in the food capital of the world, it accommodates a glittering cast of characters who represent the crme de la crme of Singaporean society. This is a space where it is important to be seen: image and appearance matter. Social chatter prevails over dialogue. In a consummate display of elegant consumptionthe food is the very source of the spectaclethe signs of the dominant organization of production (as Debord would put it) have been reinforced by the advertising and public relations agencies of the corporations hosting the banquet. This lobby prefigures and extends the spectacle of the production. In the auditorium, the world of the commodity endorsed in the lobby is reiterated in a voice-over acknowledging the productions sponsors. On cue, the opening image of the production follows, as laserlike beams of light shoot out through cracks in the sets monumental wooden platforms. A gong reverberates. Almost magically, an aesthetic experience presents itself, following the culinary theater. But strangely, the specter of the spectacle still dominates, as the silent mechanisms of the mise-en-scne are then absorbed in the high-decibel levels of the intermission chatter, which in turn is matched by the live-wire intensity and technical wizardry of the second half of the production. Clearly, this spectacle is not just a collection of images; it relates more precisely to a social relationship between people that is mediated by images (Debord 1995: 12). And these images are not just artistic, imagined to be free of the contamination of the world. To quote what remains Debords most succinct aphorism: the spectacle that ultimately prevails long after the show is over is nothing less than capital accumulated to the point when it becomes image (ibid.: 24). Immediately after Lears first night in Singapore, a confirmation of this seemingly abstruse reflection on capital was voiced by none other than the most prestigious representative of the Singaporean state, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, in the lobby of the Kallang Theatre itself. This chief guest of honor was candid in his appreciation of Singapores association with Lears celebrity and particularly appreciative of the considerable financial support that the production had received from Japan. In short, Singapore could claim an intercultural spectacle for which its investment was almost negligible. Whether he was aware of it or not, the esteemed prime minister, surrounded by an impressive entourage of his colleagues, was making a case for corporate interculturalism facilitated through transnational capital.

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The transnational nature of this financial investment was, however, more rhetorical than real. Lear could not have materialized without the sustained support of the Japan Foundation Asia Center, which nurtured it from its inception in July 1996 through a tour of Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia in JanuaryFebruary 1999, to more recent performances in Berlin and Copenhagen. The funding in the productions first phase was emphatically conditioned by national rather than transnational criteria the money was given exclusively for performances in Japan (Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka). This intercultural Lear was clearly Made in Japan. It was assumed, however, that other Asian countries represented by Lears various actors would take on the financial responsibility for sponsoring individual tours. This did not happen, because no national governments cultural agencies were prepared to sponsor what did not belong to them. The Singapore Arts Festival felt that apart from being too expensive, the production was not Singaporean per se; the Indonesian cultural authorities, considerably more financially constrained, did not feel that it was sufficiently Indonesian. The production remained in cold storage for almost two years before it was revived in JanuaryFebruary 1999 for an extensive tour whose costs were covered by local sponsors and government agencies. Tellingly, the most extravagant investment involved the purchase of a vast supply of wood for the construction of Justin Hills massive, yet spartan set (a multidimensional abstraction of a kelong, or fishing hut, rendered through an intricate vista of wooden ramps and raked platforms). It was cheaper to constructand junkthis set in each city than to transport it by air from one location to another. While

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local theater practitioners (and ecologists) may be justifiably piqued by the sheer waste of this seeming economy, the point is that the spectacle of Lear cannot be separated from some of the fundamental premises of the global economy that sustain the society of the spectacle in Singapore and elsewhere. Modalitie s of Prod uction Lear exemplifies an inter-Asian model of global cultural enterprise. For a start, its $1.5 million budget (a modest estimate of its primary costs) represents a totally different scale of investment from most theater productions, not just at local and national levels but at intercultural levels as well. This budget can compete with the big stakes of masterpieces directed by Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine. Lears production process and division of labor also conform to the new norms of the market economy. While the basic idea of the entire enterprise was initiated by Ong it would be disingenuous to deny his sheer artistic drive and ambitionthe actual production was made possible by lighting and costume designers Shin Inokuchi and Koji Hamai, based in Tokyo; an Australian expatriate set designer, Justin Hill, located in Singapore; and composers Mark Chan and Rahayu Supanggah, who live in Singapore and Indonesia, respectively. These individuals do not constitute a company in the sense that the Theatre du Soleil, the Centre for International Theatre Research, and Odin Teatret are intercultural companies. Rather, they could best be described as experts in their respective fields who assembled their particular skills for a particular assignment, as did the actors, drawn from different parts of Asia representing different performance traditions (Noh, Chinese opera, silat, contemporary theater). Not unlike commodities in the global market, whose production is no longer centralized in any one location, Lears production process has been implemented through a highly sophisticated division of labor coordinated by jet-set overnight conferences, e-mail consultations, and electronic banking. The multilingual text was originally written in Japanese by Rio Kishida and then translated into Mandarin, Bahasa Indonesia, and of course, English, which is almost entirely absented in the actual production but served as the link-language for the entire process. While Kishidas authorship of the text cannot be questioned, it has undeniably been mediated by the multiple languages of the translators and the actors. These diverse contributions raise the issue of acknowledgment; they also compel one to ask how far such an assemblage actually displaces the centralized notion of the playwright. Indeed, can there be a playwright in the conventional sense of the word for intercultural practice? The question of translation also was crucial in investigating, shaping, and interpreting this text. At one level, Ong made a conscious attempt to break the monolingual

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mode of Peter Brooks practice, exemplified in The Mahabharata, where a multinational cast was made to speak either English or French in two versions of the productionlanguages that were clearly thrust on some of the non-Western actors. Ongs alternative was to have the actors speak only in the languages corresponding to their performance traditions and locale (Mandarin, contemporary and Noh-derived Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai). In this sense, he was playing with the premise that no one spectator could understand all the languages used. He did not sufficiently question, however, the homogenizing and reductive use of computerized subtitles, which were projected in the national language of each performances location. Inevitably, in Singapore, this had to be Englishthe very language Ong has self-consciously attempted to distance himself from in his mise-en-scne. The overall effect, for me at least, was somewhat counterproductive: the signification of English overpowered the echo chamber of the other languages vocalized on stage. It goes without saying that to coordinate the production at multiple levels of language, location, modes of expertise, and different states of technology called for a masterminding of the entire operation, undertaken with formidable efficiency by Yuki Hata of the Japan Foundation Asia Center. Even when Lear was revived in Hong Kong after an absence of two years, during which almost no one in the cast and crew had communicated with each other, it was possible to reinvent the production with two new cast members and an altered script in exactly ten days. The production worked like a supercomputer. This display of efficiency is open to different readings. At one level, it testifies that we (in Asia) no longer need to turn to the West for our models of professionalism; the Broadway musical can be reproduced with even greater virtuosity in Tokyo and aspiring Renaissance city-states like Singapore. Moreover, we no longer need to offer our traditional cultures as raw material for intercultural spectacles produced in the West. We are capable of producing these spectacles for ourselves and for the global market. At a less euphoric level, one must acknowledge that the ethos of superefficiency is not so much an artistic quality as it is the sine qua non of the agencies of state-controlled spectacle. I am reminded in this context of a devastating comment made by the cultural critic Janadas Devan while articulating the inevitabilityindeed, the non-negotiabilityof success in the Singaporean context. The problem, Devan (1993b: 146) said, is not whether we will have a successful Singapore Arts Centre. The problem is that youre going to have a successful Arts Centre. This statement could apply to the unquestionable success of Lear itself. The point is that it had no choice but to be successful.

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E s s e n t i a l i z i n g I n t e r c u lt u ra l D ra m at u r g y We must ask a fundamental question: Why Lear ? The Japan Foundation Asia Center gave priority to Shakespeares universality, which convinced its cultural officers of his appropriateness for intercultural adaptation. For Ong, however, the issue was not Shakespeares universality but his neutrality, in the sense that no theater culture from Asia could claim Shakespeare on their own grounds. Doing Shakespeare in Asia, Ong argues, is quite a different matter from doing the Ramayana, not only because any interAsian Ramayana is bound to be compared to Brooks Mahabharata, but also because the Ramayana as a text is deeply contested. I would never do the Ramayana with an intercultural cast from Southeast Asia, Ong emphasizes, because everyone would be fighting over which and whose Ramayana it is. For me, it is important that the play to be selected for intercultural work should be outside all of the participating cultures, so that the Indonesians cannot say, Why a Japanese play? and the Chinese cannot complain, Why an Indonesian play? Shakespeare, in a sense, is neutral territory and therefore OK. Perhaps not OK is that Shakespeare is almost entirely absented from Rio Kishidas text, which holds on to the barest story line of his play. The entire cast is almost reduced to the personae of a morality play, notably the psychomachia of good and evil forces. Lear becomes the Old Man; Goneril and Regan are collapsed into the

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malevolent figure of the Older Daughter, who assumes the Oedipal role by killing her father; Cordelia remains the problematically silent (and intrinsically good) Younger Daughter; Gloucester and Kent are divested of all their disguises and reduced to the Loyal Attendant; Edmund becomes a lascivious Retainer. Kishidas one inspired invention is Lears wife, the Absent Mother, who is unfortunately marginalized by the spectacle of the production. The other additional characters include the Mothers Shadow, who is surrounded by a chorus of Earth-Mother figures (probably the most unconvincing characters), along with the more dominant (male)

Shadows that follow, stalk, and cluster like serpents around the Older Daughter, as they play Ambition, Unpredictability, and Vanity. As performed by Ongs most trusted and experienced actors from his company TheatreWorks, the Shadows exemplify his predilection for dissolving characters into kinetic principles. At once erotic and slippery, these three figures mediate the monolithic traditional characters of the Old Man and the Older Daughter, on the one hand, and the contemporary presence of the Fool, transformed into a funky, cross-gendered Japanese tourist, who takes Polaroid shots of the Old Man (and the audience) with a flash camera. The reduction of the characters into abstractions and archetypes is enhanced by their identification with specific forms and traditions of acting. Ong cannot escape the charge of cultural essentialism in his forthright identification of Noh theater with the age and dignity embodied in the figure of Lear, or the way he uses the extroverted pas-

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sion of Chinese opera to capture the Older Daughters flamboyance and bitchy camp. The rough idiom of the Indonesian martial art of silat is linked to the musculature of the Retainer and his henchmen; Thai dances lyrical and sinuous movements evoke the androgynous figure of Cordelia. At every level, assumptions are made not only about the innate qualities of specific forms but also about their correspondence to the essential qualities of the characters themselves. Why should a set of signs extracted from a specific performance tradition be selected over other traditions to project specific emotional states? If the Old Man had been played by a silat martial artist from Indonesia, the performance would surely have registered very differently, but silat in Ongs interpretation is specifically equated with the lower characters of Lear. There is no way such a choice can avoid being viewed in a larger hierarchy of forms, with the East Asian forms (Noh and Chinese opera) given precedence over Southeast Asian performance traditions. In this context, it is worth quoting Lee Weng Choy (1999: 3), who has expressed his discomfort with the equation of forms and class or social positions in Lear :
Are we supposed to read or to ignore that the King is Japanese and that the usurper of the throne [i.e., the Older Daughter] is Chinese? Or that the Indonesian soldiers, the Southeast Asians, are subservient to the Northern Asians (who happen in reality to be more dominant politically and economically)? If we are to move beyond seeing cultural form as representative of national historywhich may be the intentthen I think it is fair to be given a reason to do soif not expressed in the directors message in the brochure for the play, then somehow in the play itself.

This pertinent critique is complicated further through Ongs frequent riposte to his critics that he is not interested in giving reasons for how he shapes a particular text or cultural history. At one level, this is a liberal argument (Let the audience decide the meaning for themselves), but it is also a somewhat shifty way of not owning up to the responsibility of rendering choices in theaters multivalent language. Intercultural Ae sthe tics In Lear, the director is very much in control of the mise-en-scne, though he is more of an intercultural negotiator and cultural diplomat than an authoritarian genius figure. To give due credit to Ongs aesthetic as a director, it is necessary to push Lees criticism into a more theatrically inflected, performative context, where it doesnt matter at a certain level whether the actor playing Lear is Japanese or using the Noh idiom in an iconoclastic individual way. What matters instead is the resonance of a performance, in which the

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transmission of signs between the actor and the spectator is negotiated and transformed at deeply personal, imaginative, and perhaps unconscious levels. I want to call attention to a scene where the Old Man is alone, listening to the waves of the sea, sitting absolutely still, rather like a cormorant on a rock. This is one of the very few moments in the production where there is time to explore the fathomless depths of inner space. The actor Naohiki Umewaka displays the quintessential no emotion of Noh, which has been immortalized in Zeamis insight What [the actor] does not do is of interest (Senu tokoro ga omoshiroki) (Komparu 1983: 73). Slowly, he draws what seems to be a dagger from within the stiff folds of his gold robe, and then, suddenly, in a split second of transformed energy, he opens a fannot a traditional Japanese fan, but a steel one that provides a certain edge to the aura of deep, brooding elegance held by the Old Mans still figure. Transforming the energy yet again, he waves the fan with a slight undulating motion of the hands, and almost magically, we can see the water trickling from his fingers. It is a profoundly graceful and transcendent moment suggesting the Old Mans inner resilience and refusal to be dethroned. It could be argued, of course, that I am responding to the productions least intercultural moment in the production insofar as the actor is represented in a state of resplendent solitude, free to extrapolate from his discipline and years of experience as a Noh performer. This is different in effect from other scenes where he has to hold his stillness and yet cut through the sentimental spiel of a contemporary Troubador, the narrator who sobs his platitudinous lyrics about walking in the moonlight alone in an excruciating pastiche of Singaporean blues and pop. At such junctures, the Noh energy is surely tested, but Umewaka survives the triteness of contemporary juxtaposition by rotating his body in a still center of continuous energy. His resistance to porosity (Ongs catchword for intercultural encounter) produces the distanced immediacy of his performance. In an even more climactic scene, the Old Man, holding a cluster of white gauze representing Cordelias dead body, runs downstage as if he intends to throw the body into the sea. Striking a freeze, Umewaka has to amplify his histrionic energy to match the thunderous soundtrack of drums and electronic keyboard synthesizer. Reminiscent of new-wave pop opera, this sequence is perhaps Ongs most audacious attempt to popularize intercultural performance. The theatricality is so assertive in its technological expertise that the audience has no choice but to be stunned by its bravura. And yet this bravura is also a shortcut, reducing the Noh actor to an exotic oddity from an intercultural, high-tech version of the Phantom of the Opera. Virtuosity in a more immediate sense is to be found in the Old Mans devastating death-fall after he has been savagely stabbed by his daughter. Like a felled pine tree, Umewaka drops his body forward with a blind trust one rarely sees in the mannered technicism of intercultural theater. The

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power of this performance lies precisely in the actors tenacious hold on the innermost secrets of his tradition, whose juxtaposition with a heterogeneity of foreign elements oddly serves to heighten its inner focus and energy. The Disappearance of the Text Kishidas text could be one of the unacknowledged casualties of Lear unacknowledged, because its spare economy has not merely been overwhelmed by the scenic grandeur of the production; its raison dtre has also been undermined. This is unfortunate because the collaboration between Ong and Kishida has been marvelously sustained, involving close mutual consultation at every step. Yet in the valorization of the visual, the texts disappearance in the mise-en-scne has resulted in another kind of evasion. Not just Shakespeare is absented, but also Kishida herself. Taking off from Ongs perceptive point that the production should begin after the storm, Kishida was drawn almost instinctively to the phantasmal qualities of Noh drama, in which the ghosts of the past in disguised forms reveal their identities to a passing traveler and then disappear, only to reappear in the forms they had in real life. Kishida simplifies the intricacies of this phantasmal dramaturgy by creating a prologue in which a Troubadour sings about the voices of the dead, while the specters of the Old Man, the Older Daughter, and the Younger Daughter emerge from the shadows. The boisterous entrance of the Fool disrupts the dreamlike prologue by fast-forwarding into a fictional present. This is perhaps the least convincing part of the production: Ong neutralizes or fails to sufficiently inflect the texts specific references to the ruptures of the real worldthe Old Mans ignorance of poverty, the Fools awareness of a world that has gone mad, and the working-class Retainers resolve to become a king who knows starvation. These details are simply overwhelmed in a spate of visual effects, particularly in the second half of the production. Here, in a breakneck roller-coaster series of at least four killings, the audience has no choice but to be gripped by the Grand Guignol of the action. The Loyal Attendants blinding, for instance, is visually accentuated by the Retainers blowing water from his mouth into the air, an act that is repeated three times and then cut abruptly by a sudden flash of red ribbons dangling in the hands of the Retainers henchmen. The Younger Daughters murder is even more elaborate, as it evokes the humiliation of Draupadi in the court of the Pandavas. In this scene, the topknot of the daughters headgear is unraveled in a long plait that trails along the floor, becoming a rope with which she is dragged on the floor by the Retainer and eventually raped; the Retainer holds the end of the plait against his crotch to suggest the final deathblow. In creating such sensational visuals, eerily interspersed with the Three Shadows holding mirrors whose reflections

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cut into the audience like laser beams, Ong displays an undeniable flair for effect rather than any telling comment on the reflexivity of the mise-en-scne, as he might like to imagine. In what could have been an impossibly messy scene where the Older Daughter plunges a dagger into the Old Man, a red silk backdrop snaps Kabuki-like, the light picking up the ripples of its downward cascade of movement. One is struck by the directors chutzpah in negotiating the clash of two traditionsNoh and Chinese opera. As Ong revealed his master diplomacy to me: Noh actors are most austere in their most charged moments. The Chinese opera actors, on the other hand, believe that they can only kill with the full power of their art form. So, to negotiate these different conventions of dying, I opted for the following: Kill passionately [Chinese opera], die minimally [Noh drama]. Thereby, both performers have their moments and share the same space. Getting beyond issues of diplomacy, however, one is compelled to question how Ongs directorial legerdemain circumvents the role of the Absent Mother. Where is she in the larger histrionics? At one level, it is an inspiration to have Naohiki Umewaka play both the Old Man and the Absent Mother, the latter emerging with almost hermaphroditic serenity from beneath the mask of the Old Man. However, despite Ongs penchant for visuals, in this particular case he does not linger on the ambivalence of male and female personae within the same body onstage. Indeed, why wasnt this amalgam of the Old Man/Absent Mother introduced in the very opening beats of the production? Also,

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given the almost sacrosanct role of the mask in Noh performance (of which Ong is keenly aware), why is the unmasking of the Old Man allowed to pass as if it were nothing beyond another theatrical effect? This unmasking is nothing short of a reversal of the ritualistic process by which the Noh actor enters the being of another self within the confines of the mirror room backstage. To remove the mask onstage is to challenge the ritual foundations of the Noh actors presence. Unfortunately, this unprecedented action is not given due respect in either iconographic or ritualistic termsif the moment of reconciliation between the Old Man and the Mother fails to resonate, it is because the audience has never been made to feel that they are part of a single existence. I have dwelt at length on the visuals not merely to provide some description of the mise-en-scne but to remind the reader that Ongs surrender to spectacle in Lear is unequivocal. He relentlessly illustrates the two primary principles of his intercultural aestheticsjuxtaposition and rupturebuilding one image after another. This spectacle is a victim of time in its metronomic precision and carefully calculated speed. The production almost seems to be running a race with itself, refusing to rest till it gets to the end. Consistently mercurial, and therefore predictable, its impact also results in an impasse, which bears some resemblance to what Guy Debord (1995: 14) has described as the spectacles essential charactera negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself. The Politics of Patr icide In his numerous press releases, Ong has reiterated that in Lear he has found a paradigmatic text through which to question both the authoritarian, patriarchal figures of Asia and a younger generation of Asians who kill their fathers only to become like them. In the final moments of the play, the Older Daughter remains alone, seemingly oblivious to the specters of the Earth Mother and the Absent Mother, who hover around her and then disappear. The Older Daughter is left intoning a question that has the aura of an incomplete litany: Who is behind me? While this can be read as an open questionindeed, a direct confrontation of the audienceother readings need to be considered: Is the daughter ready to receive the beneficence of the Mother(s), which has been offered as a gift? Or is she doomed to be isolated in her continued rejection of their care? Has the cycle of karma been disrupted by the killing of the father, or has it been perpetuated? Can a new Asia rise phoenixlike from the ashes of older regimes, or will the specter of Lee Kuan Yew, among other political father figures, continue to reign in different manifestations? In other wordsand this would seem to be the directors statementcan we ever free ourselves from the cul-

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tural, historical, and political baggage of the past? Or in killing our fathers, do we simply become like them, perpetuating our own selfdestruction? These interpretations should be juxtaposed with a more complex alternative to the killing of the father that was put forward by Kishida herself in her first draft of the play. Utilizing her ingenious decision to create the Absent Mother, Kishida had suggested that this spectral maternal figure could kill the Older Daughter as an act of redemption for her patricide. Cast within a Buddhist framework of thought, this choice was simply too extreme for Ong, who felt that yet another death could only be read as an overkill of authorial intervention, if not a problematic equation of patriarchy with matriarchy (first the daughter kills the father, and then the mother kills the daughter). Unable to cope with the actual intricacies of Kishidas position, Ong rejected it outright as a very male thing, and she shouldnt do it. The ironies of a male director telling his female playwright that a woman should not kill another woman onstage cannot be lost on any attentive reader. The real question is: Who is this woman? Can either the Absent Mother played by a Noh actor, or the Older Daughter played by a female impersonator from Chinese opera, be regarded as women? This dimension in the politics of representation is sadly absent in both Ongs direction and Kishidas text, both of which use the stylized conven-

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tions of traditional Asian female impersonation without any adequate thought about its re-signification in a contemporary allegory on the state of power in contemporary Asia. Once again the possibilities of critique have been subsumed within the seduction of performancein this particular case, the spectacle of men becoming women. The most questionable representation is that of the Older Daughter, played by the virtuosic Jiang Qihu, who had never played a womans role before. It may be unfair to seize on this, but at no point did Jiang register femininity except in obvious details the falsetto singing voice, the coquettish malice, and above all, the swinging golden tassles attached to his ornate headgear, which seemed to vibrate of their own accord. At a physical level, I was not convinced even by the conventionality of his performance that we were in the presence of a woman, in distinct contrast to Peeramon Chomdhavats intensely personalized vulnerability as the Younger Daughter, which was unmistakably androgynous in effect. With Jiang Qihu, we were in the presence of a man who happened to be dressed as a woman but who refused to surrender his maleness to the inner fissures of the role. However, what is downright objectionable in the production is not so much the lack of attention given to the politics (and erotics) of female impersonation but the directorial indifference to the representation of the real women onstage, notably the Earth Mothers and the Mothers Shadow. Costumed awkwardly in coarse and crushed makeshift gowns, with no particular line or fall or shape, and even more amateurishly disfigured through the use of black wigs, the Earth Mothers resort to discordant, splenetic movements with flailing, unconvincing hand gestures; worse, it seems as if no one had cared to engage with what they were doing onstage. Inevitably, they are overshadowed by the feminized men. This is one of the oldest traps in the history of female impersonation, where the men playing women invariably come out looking better than the women themselves. Since there are no other actresses in Lear (apart from Hairi Katagiri playing the self-consciously cross-gendered Fool), one must ask: What is the role of women in this production? Do women matter at all in this reading of Lear ? Or are they merely surrogates for the directors persona, who would like to kill his father through the guise of a woman but who is not fully prepared to allow that woman to be adequately represented in her own right? The charge of misogyny, it seems to me, cannot be raised against Shakespeare here, because Shakespeare as such does not exist beyond his story line. Ong as director has to assume responsibility for the ways in which women are marginalized in his production, even as they are metaphorized as icons of a future Asia. Finally, we have to return to the bleakness of Ongs statement We kill our fathers only to become like them. Why does this worldview have to be mediated through the fictional body of a woman? And to what extent can the Older Daughter bear the

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Asian burden of this statement? These questions take us beyond gender to the larger crisis of political interventiona crisis to which Ongs practice of interculturalism can be read as a surrender, rather than as a critical response to the spectacle of the state. Consuming the Other Does the inexorability of children becoming like their fathers altogether close the possibilities of change? Defending his seeming pessimism, Ong says,
The resolution is not achieved by killing the father. The resolution has to go deeper. I dont have a solution for it. Its more a statement of our current situation. You have the Tiananmen Square happening, the student uprising in Indonesia, and the Anwar situation in Malaysia. We always begin a new era with hope, but it invariably degenerates into something else. And so I think we need to find a new type of uprising.

While appreciating the honesty of this statement, one is nonetheless compelled to question why this new type of uprising is so singularly absent in most of Ongs productions. Ongs resistance to solutions in his very tentative articulation of politics is curiously at odds with the confidence of his immaculate stagecraft, where the overall effect is that of a perfectly resolved set of mechanisms. Any clearly defined sense of opposition or engagement with ongoing struggles is absent in Ongs imaginary. Even when dealing with the trials of cultural and racial identity in Singapore, as in his earlier Workshorse Afloat, he consciously circumvents any direct relationship with the Other, even as he claims the right to represent their erased histories. Ultimately, Ong seems to accept that no choice is available but to consume the Other. The disturbing finality of this position seems to constrain not just Ongs aesthetics but his real commitment to broadening and deepening the framework of interculturalism. If, ultimately, we cannot avoid becoming like our fatherswhom we have the luxury to killeven with the best of intentions, where does that leave us as intercultural seekers and, hopefully, as responsible citizens of the world? At one level, the intercultural consumption of the Other can be regarded as a self-critique, but it is also implicitly self-congratulatory, legitimizing the absence of any real respect for the Other, who can never be regarded on equal terms but who isultimatelyfit only to be consumed. This is a cynical position to my mind that can do nothing to transform the existing inequities of cultural exchange, both within the borders of the state and beyond. It is no secret that the Singapore economic miracle has been sustained by cheap labor from other countries, whose assimilation is tightly controlled, even as they are crucial to the daily functioning of the nation-state (Cheah 1998: 318). Within the larger

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social demarcations of Singapore society, there are hierarchies imposed on the laborers as well, who are divided according to their country of origin, race, and skills. Ghettoized in barracklike quarters, they live in abject conditions that do not seem to represent an appreciably better life than the poverty they have left back home. What is dehumanizing is not just the blatant ways in which the laborers are undercut by their contractors (for which they can turn to no legal aid center or union for help) but also the sophisticated racism to which they are subjected on a daily basis, marked by polite indifference, an infantilization of grown men and women who are expected to behave like good guest workers. They are rendered almost invisible. The workers are there, and not there. Strategically, they are allowed one free day in the week, which amounts to a couple of hours on Sunday in the late afternoon and evening, when it would seem as if the entire Indian labor force has congregated on Serangoon Road to socialize and be together. Never in my lifeand I make this comment as a resident of Calcutta who is used to crowds and the close proximity of peoplehave I seen such a homogenized mass of people, marked for all their seeming differences by the same class, job, and condition. I feel obliged to inscribe Sunday evening on Serangoon Road on the borders of my essay as one of the most saddening experiences of my life. As you jostle through the crowds, picking up snatches of conversation in Tamil, Bangla, Sylheticommon talk about family and prospects of going home, bargains in shopping centers, quarrels and bitter regretsyou see men talking their lives out in a state of chaos and cacophony. For once, the sterile image of Singapore is completely shattered. One is left confronting the

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most profound isolation of the foreign workers that has yet to be addressed adequately in the multicultural discourse of Singapore. It is necessary to acknowledge that the cultures of the world are not just located elsewhere; they are also to be found on the streets of Singapore and in its unacknowledged ghettos. To recognize these cultures in their states of fragmentation, displacement, and vulnerability could be the first real step in developing a critical openness to the cultures of the world. Intraculturalitythe relationships across ethnic communities within the boundaries of a specific cultural geographyis necessary not only to counter the sterile divisions of official multiculturalism; it is also needed to counterpoint the global cosmopolitanism of intercultural practice that can so easily degenerate into a form of atomized alienation. In a moving revelation, Ong once asked me: How much of myself do I have to lose in order to belong to this intercultural circuit? How much do I compromise? Perhaps the answer lies not in holding on to any illusory truth buried in ones own subjectivity but in questioning relentlessly the shaping of this truth in relation to the representations of the Other. Here it seems to me that Ong has no other option but to subject his surrender to the spectacle, at both aesthetic and political levels, to a new critical scrutiny. It is not enough in this regard to focus periodically on the process of investigating different Asian performance traditions, as Ong has been doing in his organization of inter-Asian workshops coordinated under the rubric of the Flying Circus Project. If the insights gained from these workshops are ultimately going to feed more spectacles, their purpose is lost.3 New dialogic structures of cultural practice are needed by which the mechanisms of the spectacle can be ruptured. New modes of investigating cultural difference must acknowledge the disparities, disjunctions, and injustices of the global economy and confront them. Without a critique of this economy to which the society of the spectacle in our times is inextricably linked, Ong runs the risk not merely of consuming the Other but of being consumed himself within the mechanisms of his own intercultural spectacle.

Notes
1. See my monograph Consumed in Singapore (from which this article is excerpted), pp. 814, for an extended discussion on the politics of multiculturalism/multiracialism in Singapore with particular reference to Kuo Pao Kuns formulations of the cultural orphan (Kuo 1993) and the quest for an Open Culture (Kuo 1998). 2. The ubiquity of censorship in the city-state of Singapore operates with the most sophisticated mechanisms of thought control that extend to the practice of the performing arts, particularly in the avant-garde and communitarian sectors (for a detailed description of specific cases of censorship, read Sasitharan 1994; Devan 1997; Krishnan 1996; Kuttan

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1996; Lee 1996; Langenbach 1996, 1998). Symptomatic of the larger unresolved relationship between art and politics in Singapore, the problem of censorship is inextricably linked to what Sharaad Kuttan (1996) has formulated as the limits of liberalization. On the one hand, the state has made certain tokenistic gestures in considering the removal of OB (out-of-bounds) markers, spelling out the dos and donts of public performance and interaction. Initially this generated a sense of good faith among performers that the government was finally opening up to the vitality of a more liberal art practice; some of the more naive artists even imagined that the state could be regarded as an ally. However, with the arbitrary and extremely swift reimposition of these markers through the censorship of certain performances and genres, and the banning of certain artists from performance altogether, it has become more obvious that the governments commitment to liberalization is, at best, a chimerical strategy to keep artists in a state of permanent uncertainty regarding the limits of their freedom. While the state would like to determine the political on its own grounds (i.e., through established parties and electoral politics), it is not prepared to allow artists to determine what is artistic on their grounds. Instead, there is a paternalistic and essentially materialist concern for the arts (not least its potential to enhance tourism through the propagation of a certain kind of commercial entertainment); but there is no acceptance that artists could have their own agendas that may not necessarily conform to the protocol of the state. Within the hegemony of liberalization, where the state can be imagined to be working in accordance with the will of the people, artists are reconstituted as comanagers of cultural development and as co-administrators of censorship; indeed, they facilitate the self-policed space of liberalization itself (Kuttan 1996: 110). 3. Process as spectacle seems to be the directorial stance of Ongs latest intercultural ventureDesdemona, which premiered at the Adelaide Arts Festival in March 2000. Sketched rather than written by Rio Kishida, this text is nothing more than an encapsulation of cryptic images, subsumed in a high-tech multimedia presentation dominated by video screens and live e-mail projections. The greatest casualty of this experiment, which resembles a pastiche of fake theatrical deconstruction, is the performance of several talented Asian artists, whose skills in Kutiyattam, Kathakali, Burmese puppetry, and Indonesian dance are truncated and glibly decontextualized within a fragmented postmodern narrative. Self-referential rather than interactive, this virtuosic display of nonlinearity disdains any sustained engagement with the emotional content and inner logic of the theatrical forms themselves. Ongs mise-en-scne is at once mystifying and confused. Why there should be two Othellos (one played by a man, the other by a woman, who never seem to recognize each others presence onstage) is never made clear. Is the male Othello, ostensibly transformed into a woman in his final moments, murdered by the specter of a vengeful Desdemona? This transgendered Othello is killed through the poisoned saliva of a slave-like character called Sword, who is also inexplicably feminized. The obvious homoeroticism sealed in their kiss of death is highlighted (once again, as in Lear) through the marginalization of

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the real women on stagethe Indian female Othello played with primitivist energy in a raucous display of Kathakali, and the very disembodied, Singaporean, English-speaking Desdemona, whose earnest desire for independence beyond death merely catalyzes the union of the men on stage. None of these interventions makes much dramaturgical or performative sensetheir juxtaposition with some undeniably brilliant video insertions (for instance, on the enslavement of Korean women, or the multiple images of zero that run like a leitmotif through the mise-en-scne) only contributes to the general opacity. More objectionable than the reductive use of Asian performance traditions is the pseudo-self-critique adopted by Ong in mock interviews with the Asian artists, whose real anxieties as traditional performers dealing with the global mechanisms of interculturalism are incorporated into the mise-en-scne as valedictory statements of a reflexive dramaturgy. There is also a liberal use of e-mail typed out feverishly by a Singaporean actor, who questions the priorities of the director even as he assumes the role of the manipulator and puppeteer in his own fictional state as a character. In actuality, these pseudo-critiques masquerade as political correctness, enabling Ong to circumvent any real exposure of his own facile strategies in democratizing inter-Asian theater practice. The seemingly risky process of Desdemona, much hyped in the publicity of the production, is a mere pretense for reassembling the spectacle in a postmodern mode. This deception is worth further analysis.

References
Bharucha, Rustom. 1999. Interculturalism and Its Discriminations: Shifting the Agendas of the National, the Multicultural, and the Global. Third Text 46 (spring): 323. . 2000. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. London: Althone Press; Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press. Cheah, Pheng. 1998. Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism. In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chua, Beng-Huat. 1995. Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London: Routledge. Debord, Guy. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Devan, Janadas. 1993a. Forum: Art vs. ArtAre There Choices? In Art vs. Art: Conflict and Convergence. The Substation Conference, Singapore. . 1993b. Is Art Necessary? In Art vs. Art: Conflict and Convergence. The Substation Conference, Singapore. . 1997. Notes on Proscriptions and Manners. In Nine Lives: Ten Years of Singapore Theatre, edited by Sanjay Krishnan. Singapore: First Printers. Komparu, Kunio. 1983. The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives. New York: Weatherhill. Krishnan, Sanjay. 1996. Waiting for Theatre. In Looking at Culture. Singapore: Chung Printing.

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Kuo, Pao Kun. 1993. Commentary. In Art vs. Art: Conflict and Convergence. The Substation Conference, Singapore. . 1998. Contemplating an Open Culture: Transcending Multiracialism. In Reengineering Success, edited by Arun Mazhiznan. Singapore. Kuttan, Sharaad. 1996. The Limits of Liberalization. In Looking at Culture. Singapore: Chung Printing. Langenbach, Ray. 1996. Leigong Da Doufu: Looking Back at Brother Cane. In Looking at Culture. Singapore: Chung Printing. . 1998. Atropia. Presentation at the Contemporary Art Forum, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Lee, Weng Choy. 1996. Chronology of a Controversy. In Looking at Culture. Singapore: Chung Printing. . 1998. Time, Landscape, and Desire in Singapore. In Singapore: Views on the Urban Landscape, edited by Lucas Lodojne. Belgium: Pandora. . 1999. Correspondence with author. February. Sasitharan, T. 1994. Do Not Proscribe Political Art. Straits Times, February 8. Tan, Alvin. 1997. A Necessary Practice. In Nine Lives: Ten Years of Singapore Theatre, edited by Sanjay Krishnan. Singapore: First Printers.

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