Abstract
This chapter reflects on the inspiration and creative process of FACE – a bilingual autobiographical theatre performance in English and Cantonese by Hong Kong–born, London-based Eurasian actress/storyteller and Playback Theatre practitioner Veronica Needa. About bicultural identity, FACE was developed between two languages and influenced by two directors—one English and one Chinese. Its production history is chronicled from inception to the most recent incarnation, which included Playback Theatre facilitating a deeper engagement with the audience. Intercultural experience, linguistic contexts, and translation are discussed, as well as how each language is differently embodied. The mythological and cultural symbolism of the Chinese dragon is presented, and a report is given of the experience of different audiences in Asia and Europe.
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Notes
- 1.
Although the first usage of this term appears to come from the Anglo-Indian experience, it is commonly used in Hong Kong and Singapore to denote children of Chinese and European parentage. Sweeting (2007: 5–6) notes common English descriptors of Eurasians including “half-caste,” “hybrid,” “mixed [often, by implication, impure] blood,” and such contrasting metaphorical colloquialisms as “banana” (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) and “egg” (white on the outside, yellow on the inside). Historically, these alternatives have had pejorative undertones. In Chinese, metaphorical terms are tsap chung, meaning “half-caste” or “the bastards” or “mongrels.”
- 2.
For periods of time I have engaged in therapeutic practice within a variety of approaches—Jungian, biodynamic body psychotherapy, psychodrama, creative arts, and other modalities.
- 3.
I am past president of the International Playback Theatre Network (www.iptn.info) and until recently was an active board member of the Centre for Playback Theatre for many years (www.playbackcentre.org). In the United Kingdom, besides my activities with True Heart Theatre, I am a founder/member of London Playback Theatre (www.londonplayback.co.uk) and am a director of the School of Playback Theatre UK (www.playbackschooluk.org)
- 4.
Originally in French, Les Fourberies de Scapin is a comedy by Moliere first staged in 1671.
- 5.
Originally in Italian, Il servitor di due padroni was written in 1746 drawing on the tradition of commedia dell’arte.
- 6.
Active between 1984 and 1994, Ra-Ra Zoo devised physical theatre performances incorporating circus skills. This was one of their large-scale community shows.
- 7.
Madame White Snake is a popular classic Chinese folktale from the oral tradition presented in Chinese operas, films, and television.
- 8.
The co-founders of Yellow Earth Theatre were Kwong Loke, Kumiko Mendl, David Tse, Tom Wu and myself. See www.yellowearth.org
- 9.
This term is now commonly used to describe Asian peoples East of the Indian subcontinent. For YET I performed in Behind the Chinese Takeaway (1997), Face (2002 & 2005), & The Butcher’s Skin (2002) but left YET three years later to pursue my own interests.
- 10.
See www.trueheart.org.uk for more information.
- 11.
An actress and presenter born in Nottingham of Hong Kong Chinese descent, Pui Fan Lee was Po in Teletubbies, one of the first presenters on CBeebies, and host on Show Me Show Me.
- 12.
This won the 1992 CRE Race in the Media Radio Drama Award. Race in the Media Awards (RIMA) is an annual event organized by the Commission for Racial Equality since 1992 to recognize excellence in, and encourage more informed coverage of, race relations.
- 13.
Ivan Heng is actor and artistic director of W!LD RICE in Singapore. During the early 1990s he lived in the United Kingdom and created Tripitaka Theatre Company, which produced and toured his solo autobiographical play Journey West (1995) as well as other productions from an Asian perspective.
- 14.
Journey to the West is one of the four great classic novels of China, first translated in English as Monkey by Arthur Waley in 1942, and since represented on film, stage, and TV around the world.
- 15.
The first version of FACE was a work in progress in English. The second version is published in English and Chinese in Cheung (2000: 274–324).
- 16.
The third version of FACE can be accessed in the appendix of my MA thesis, Renegotiating Identity Through Performance, which can be downloaded from the True Heart Theatre website: http://trueheart.org.uk/?page_id=654
- 17.
From Festival Now ’98 Programme Booklet’s “Introduction,” the choice of theme “…is an artistic investigation…to bring into focus the invisible side of our community which has long been living a shadowy existence.”
- 18.
Although many Hong Kong Eurasians held prominent positions in government or in society as public benefactors, their mixed-race identity was generally either unknown (they “passed” as Chinese or European) or never acknowledged openly, as if being of Eurasian ancestry might be an embarrassment rather than an asset.
- 19.
I met Chris Harris when we worked for Chung Ying in Hong Kong. It was he who saw the “actor” in me and recommended that I train at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
- 20.
There are many examples of interpolating a theatrical aesthetic from one culture to another and much ongoing critical discussion and writing about cultural appropriation in intercultural theatre practice among leading academics and practitioners, such as Schechner (2002), Watson (2002), Pavis (1996) and Barba and Fowler (1988). At this time I drew on my childhood assimilation of Chinese theatrical stylization through watching Cantonese films and operas on Hong Kong television and integrated this with my elementary studies of Beijing opera as an adult. There is a long, almost lost, tradition of the itinerant storyteller in China, who would travel from village to village telling the old stories. I created my own version of a Chinese Storyteller for the telling of “Painted Skin.”
- 21.
The suggestions included showing slide projections of family photos in some way—an idea that Tang Shu-wing embraced readily
- 22.
I saw him in a play called Two Men on a No Man’s Land in Hong Kong, devised and performed by Tang Shu-wing and Jim Chim in the mid-1990s.
- 23.
This story is from his collection of ghost stories in Liaozhai Ziyi—Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
- 24.
Past life regression is a technique that uses hypnosis to recover what practitioners believe are memories of past lives or incarnations. I was much moved by information that came to me during this experience. For more see Woolger (1987).
- 25.
Both Diana Pao and her father, Pao Han Lin, have played important roles in the development of theatre in Hong Kong. She has worked in production management, theatre administration, and training, while he was a much-loved and popular actor in the early Chinese dramas in Hong Kong.
- 26.
Literate Cantonese actors, as they read a Chinese script, would automatically be making significant choices in semantic decoding according to context, as they read a text aloud; and one person’s reading might be different from another’s. I could not do this. So my Cantonese script needed to be written exactly as I should say it.
- 27.
For more on multilingualism in the United Kingdom, see this report generated by the British Academy and Cumberland Lodge: http://www.ucml.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Multilingual%20Britain%20Report.pdf. See also Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated (2015), which discusses multilingualism in literature as a core value in its content rather than just in translation.
- 28.
He also knew Shanghainese, Russian, and Japanese, but never spoke Cantonese when he came to live in Hong Kong after World War II.
- 29.
Louis Yu was festival director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s Festival Now ’98: Invisible Cities.
- 30.
From https://www.eurasians.org.sg/eurasians-in-singapore/, the Eurasian presence in Singapore is organized, and self-publicizing, which is somewhat different to the Eurasian experience in Hong Kong in my time, and still complex. There has been debate on whether to include “Eurasian” as a census category, and Eurasian children in the Singapore school system are encouraged to adopt Mandarin as their “mother tongue.”
- 31.
This may also have something to do with the official promotion of Peranakan heritage in Singapore. Peranakan Chinese or Straits-born Chinese are descendants from Chinese immigrants who came to the Malay Archipelago in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.
- 32.
My professional work over the years has been in community arts, capitalizing on my Cantonese-speaking skills in connection with many Chinese organizations in the United Kingdom. It has been a considerable challenge to galvanize members of the British Chinese community to attend events at mainstream arts venues. General advertising, even within the Chinese media, rarely makes any impact unless the event is also encouraged, and attendance supported, by youth and community workers. In this instance, Birmingham Chinese community organizations had not been directly contacted sufficiently in advance of the show.
- 33.
This was one of three productions as part of True Heart Theatre’s presentation In the Mirror—Three Women, Three Stories, from the Chinese Diaspora at the New Diorama Theatre.
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Needa, V. (2018). FACE: Autobiographical Theatre and Cross-Cultural Considerations. In: Thorpe, A., Yeh, D. (eds) Contesting British Chinese Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71159-1_12
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