Reading week 6

Reading – Week 6

Bonney, J. (2000). Extreme Exposure: An Anthology of Solo Performance Texts from the Twentieth Century. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

BRENDA WONG AOKI

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Aoki is a storyteller, actor, narrator, dancer, monologist, and uses tradition in her work. She draws on ancient Japanese folklore, but her performances are contemporary multiethnic and American as she is. She has trained across a broad sweep of theatre and performance, from Commedia dell’Arte, and Noh, to jazz and piano. Her work is minimalist, but the attention to detail is not. It contributes a sense of depth to each moment. ‘At times, she seems to be acting as much with her thighs as with her voice.’ Her work started by looking at dramatizing traditional Japanese folktales, but she has increasingly moved towards auto-biographical. She looks at aspects of her own family history too.

Random Acts – To Fa, Lia.

This piece is about the death, and funeral, of her nephew Lia, and the reactions to his death. The piece is charged with passion, hate, anger and mourning. Lia was shot by an unknown person the day before attending college. The piece discusses the mourning process, but also highlights the multitude in languages, cultures and religions present at the funeral, and how each culture deals with the death of someone that crossed and spanned so many cultures. There is humour and grief within this highly personal account. There are touching moments when members of his football team place their jerseys around his coffin, and when his brothers break down in front of the coffin. Sounds are used and expressed in the piece, like ‘clomp clomp’ and ‘haaaa.’ Reading the script is probably not as influential as seeing the performance itself, but just from the script it is clear that the piece is very physical and emotionally charged. There is a moment when Aoki herself breaks down and becomes violent towards her nephews unknown murderer.

Mermaid Meat

This is a Japanese folktale that has been dramatised. It is hard to know how this piece is performed visually as the script does not give much away. The story is about a fisherman who has a relationship with a mermaid, and she brings up his daughter as her own, but the daughter grows up to finally eat part of the mermaid which makes her immortal. The mermaid goes back to the sea and the story moves on by 100 generations, until the daughter reveals she has loved and lost many husbands and children because she is immortal, and asks for the mermaid to end her torment. Her life is taken from her and in place, there is a huge scarred tree that grows. This is obviously a moral tale, but there are no stage directions to say how it is performed, or what with, whether Aoki plays all the characters or just reads the story.