{"id":4168,"date":"2019-12-23T14:34:44","date_gmt":"2019-12-23T07:34:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/?p=4168"},"modified":"2019-12-23T14:34:44","modified_gmt":"2019-12-23T07:34:44","slug":"hard-to-be-a-god-or-the-thing-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/?p=4168","title":{"rendered":"\u201cHARD TO BE A GOD\u201d OR \u201cTHE THING ITSELF\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Chetana\nNagavajara<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

          \u201cThe Unfloding Kafka Festival 2019\u201d\nhas brought a number of world-class performances to Thailand. The very loose\nassociation with Kafka can serve as a vague guideline, inevitably with a\nphilosophical penchant, and performers go their own way to present their\npersonal modes of looking at the world and communicating the message to the\npublic. The question arises as in what way dance as an art form can\ncommunicate, and perhaps more specifically, to what extent it can tell a story.\n\u201cHard to Be a God\u201d, which I saw at the Nelison Hays Library on 6 December 2019,\nset me thinking hard on this very basic question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          My immediate response was that dance\ndoes not aim to rival literature and the language of the body does not operate\nin the same way as the word. The most troubling moment occurred when the lone\ndancer, Romeu Runa, put his face onto the ground and delivered a soliloquy, via\na microphone: I thought it represented a capitulation of sorts that the\nlanguage of the body was insufficient to carry the message. It need not be so.\nThe one-hour performance was suggestive enough to convey human\nexperiences that should induce the audience to think further and to make its\nown interpretation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The physical ambience was perfect. The\ngarden of the Neilson Hays Library was spacious, with the outer perimeter\nbordering on Surawongse Road, lined up with trees. With a most imaginative\nlighting, the \u201cstage\u201d had great potential to help communicate the message of\nthe performance. At the very beginning, we could see only vaguely how\nthe dancer emerged, or rather disentangled himself, from the natural\nwilderness. When he moved to the open space, accompanied by a variety of sound\neffects and highly nuanced lighting, we could witness how choreographic\nimaginativeness could express a breadth of human experiences, of course, marked\nmore by suffering than joy. What, I am sure, stunned the audience was the\nvirtuosity of the dancer in creating movements, some of which made us hold our\nbreath because of their acrobatic riskiness. But we never felt that all this\nwas a mere floor exercise: the various movements created impressions, evoked emotions,\nbut they did not quite tell a story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The attempt at story-telling occurred\nwhen two drones appeared one after the other and interacted with the dancer,\nreally a remarkable feat of navigation on the part of the two drone operators\n(who shared the \u201ccurtain\u201d call at the end of the performance.) It was obvious\nthat the protagonist\u2019s predominantly distressful plight experienced only those\ntwo moments of respite, signifying perhaps the precarious role of technological\ninterventions in human life. Or were these supposed to represent spaceships\ncoming from another planet? Be that as it may, the two visits could not do much\nto alleviate the burden of existence. After their departure, man was left again\nwith his loneliness and struggled to survive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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          I must confess I enjoyed the\nperformance not strictly on account of what I saw out there (the\naudience being caged in glass box normally functioning as a Caf\u00e9 and having to\nview the performance through a transparent glass wall.) But the associations,\nparticularly of literary and dramatic kinds, made my experience of this dance\nperformance all the richer. When the dancer performed his monologue, speaking\nface-down onto the ground, I could almost identify its literary source. My\nresearch assistant, a former German major, who was sitting beside me,\nexclaimed: \u201cB\u00fcchner!\u201d I was so glad that what I was trying long time ago to\nimpress upon those innocent young minds struggling with difficult German\nliterary texts was not lost. Yes, the spoken message was very much akin to the\nfamous \u201cGrandmother\u2019s Tale\u201d from Georg B\u00fcchner\u2019s \u201cWoyzeck\u201d. According to that\nstory, there is no way out \u2013 a complete \u201chuis clos\u201d \u2013 from the world as it is,\nand even excursions into the planetary realms provide no relief, because the\nsun and the moon are just as arid and lifeless. Many years ago I wrote an essay\noutlining this lineage of \u201cphilosophical cruelty\u201d from Shalespeare\u2019s \u201cKing\nLear\u201d through B\u00fcchner\u2019s \u201cWoyzeck\u201d to Beckett\u2019s \u201cFin de Partie\u201d (Endgame), but\ndid not touch on Kafka because the essay addressed only the dramatic genre.\nNihilism is the word! It can also characterize \u201cHard to Be a God\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          But the sight of this half-naked man\n(who towards the end of the performance became fully naked) reminded me starkly\nof Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cKing Lear\u201d, especially the storm scene, and two characters\ncame to mind, the Fool and Edgar, disguised as a mad beggar. Lear, hitherto,\nrevels in his regal authority in spite of his voluntary abdication, finally\nlearns to be humane and sympathetic towards others in need and distress. The\nold man grows up through hardship amidst climatic calamity. Lear\u2019s words, provoked\nby the sight of the half-naked Edgar, tell it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026\nThou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor\nbare, forked animal as thou art \u2026 (\u201cKing Lear\u201d: Act 3, Scene\n4)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The hermeneutic challenge cannot but\nentice the critic, and I cannot resist the temptation to view the dance\nperformance as a philosophical statement. \u201cThe thing itself\u201d was to be vested\nwith various meanings in the course of Western thinking after Shakespeare, including\nthe famous Kantian concept. But to make a choreography express such a\nphilosophical way of thinking was no mean feat of artistic creation. Man\u2019s corporeal\nnakedness signifies the barrenness of the human condition, culminating in\nphilosophic nihilism. The performance, somehow, did not leave us in a total\ndespair. This was where choreography could produce some form of cathartic\neffect. The way the dancer created those movements that suggested a struggle of\nPromethean dimensions was not to be missed. So it was not total nihilism after\nall. A Buddhist runs the risk of over-interpreting Western thinking so as to\nalign it with his own philosophy of life. It is \u201chard to be a god\u201d, because\neven a god cannot relieve man of his suffering. No external source, not even a\ntranscendental one, can be of help. So why not\nconcentrate on the inner strength that can pave the way to \u201cNirvana\u201d?\nWill any choreographer be prepared to devise a dance that points in that\ndirection? Can dance be capable of such a challenging task? We shall wait and\nsee. In the meantime, let us applaud a noble attempt like \u201cHard to Be a God\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chetana Nagavajara           \u201cThe Unfloding Kafka Festival 2019\u201d has brought a number of world-class performances to Thailand. The very loose association with Kafka can serve as a vague guideline, inevitab […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7026,"featured_media":4169,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[153],"tags":[61],"class_list":["post-4168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-153","tag-chetana-nagavajara"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7026"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4168"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4172,"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4168\/revisions\/4172"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thaicritic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}