The Scala comes alive

Arriving at the Scala last Thursday evening, participants in Thailand’s first “micro-festival” of arts were astonished to discover that they didn’t have to go further than the ticket sales table downstairs before stumbling on a performance.
Brian Lobel’s “Hold My Hand and You’re Halfway There” ran continuously from 7pm to the close of the event at around 10pm. Signs in English and Thai invited us, with or without a ticket, to join him in a corner with a bed and four TV sets connected to four videotape players and several headphones and watch popular movies with dance scenes, dance along and enjoy ourselves.
 

A student of mine bypassed this participatory performance at the beginning – as did I – because she wanted to watch Action Hero’s “A Western”, starting 20 minutes later in the upstairs lobby. She quickly realised that she’d arrived too late to be in the limited seating area and had to stand at the back. And being a standard-sized young Thai, she didn’t get to see much of it, even though the three performers occasionally moved around the lobby area and down the stairs as they attempted to recreate scenes from western movies. My student gave up and went downstairs for “Hold My Hand”. A day later in our theatre criticism class she told me, “When I put in the videotape, the movie was not at a dance number, but had gone back to the beginning. So I lay down on the bed, watched the whole movie and then went home. That was worth the Bt100 I paid for the ticket.”
That was her entire experience of “Live at the Scala”, curated by Forest Fringe and presented by the British Council (Thailand). Mine, like that of other members of the audience, was different. That’s important: in this country we don’t get to enjoy an individual experience of arts that often and in this case, it was a combination of visual and performing arts at a movie venue, highlighting the fact that borders between arts disciplines are becoming like the EU and the AEC.
After the 50-minute “A Western”, the audience was invited to spread out to various corners. The programme leaflet provided sufficient information on each work to make it fun to navigate through the area. I actively participated in B-Floor Theatre’s “Kissing Booth” and it was the first time, after years of watching movies at Scala, that I had sat inside a ticket booth.
Along the west corridor, B-Floor also staged the contemporary performance “(In)sensitivity” with a large photograph of the Scala’s lobby as a backdrop. The experience reminded me that the Scala, losing out in the popularity stakes to multiplexes, may soon be history as the land owner, trying to maximise the profit on this piece of land in downtown Bangkok, may not renew its lease.
In a nearby dressing room, we got to watch Richard DeDomenici’s cheeky and fun recreation of the box-office smash “Bangkok Traffic Love Story”. In the adjacent room, Messy Project Space showed us photographs of unseen or overlooked areas around Siam Square in “Cinema and Space, Extracting the Unrecognised”. Another work by this new collective of Bangkok-based artists, the real-time printing of Messy Sky Magazine from contributors around the world, was overlooked as the printer was hiding above the auditorium’s main entrance and the printed pages looked more like garbage, especially to the cleaning staff.
I missed Gob Squad’s film “Live Long and Prosper” and the finale performance by Dickie Beau called “Echo: The Nymph”, both in the auditorium. The latter was because I wanted to experience the one-on-one performance – meaning there were not many lucky audience members – titled “Jarideh” (“Newspaper”) by Tania El Khoury, despite the warning from a young staff member of the festival that “It will be entirely in English”. The highly personal experience in the semi-public space turned out to be my personal highlight of the evening as I little by little became El Khoury’s political ally and conspirator by reading the instructions, “in English”, hidden in an Arabic newspaper (she told me to “read from right to left”) – and listening to interviews on an MP3 player she put in her backpack.
It’s clear that among these works, those that had more relevance to the Thai audience were the more memorable. For example, I found myself wishing that Action Hero had watched the Thai film “Tears of the Black Tiger”, which would have given them an understanding of how Thai people perceived western movies and allowed them to adjust their work. I also wished that Tim Etchells had spent time watching a movie at the Scala – holding a movie ticket whose seat number is hand-written and being welcomed by veteran ushers in bright yellow jackets – and come up with a more striking set of movie posters and pamphlets, even though he did trick me into believing that there would be a film called “Gorgeous” opening there soon.
But in the end – and many audience members would probably agree – this micro festival, albeit with some improvements, should not be a one-off but instead develop into an annual event.