As cold as ice

THE BANGKOK Theatre Festival2014 came to a close on Sunday night at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, with a ceremony in the fourth-floor studio that continued to almost midnight. In its first 10 days, the 13th edition of the annual showcase of contemporary Thai theatre faced strong competition from the Harmony World Puppet Carnival, which received considerable financial and administrative support from state agencies. One has to wonder at the reasoning behind investing our tax money in a one-off event and ignoring an annual festival that showcases the current state of Thai theatre.
Many people were also left wondering whether puppetry is a form of theatre and if so, why there was no cooperation between the two events. A suitable metaphor would be if the organiser of Miss Motor Show Universe, if there were such a thing, organised the pageant during the upcoming Motor Expo but at a different venue. I’m betting I wouldn’t be the only one to skip the cars – most of them out of Mr Ordinary’s price range – and opt for the girls.
Lack of financial support notwithstanding, the organisers of the BTF, namely the Bangkok Theatre Network (BTN), seemed content with attendance. After the opening weekend at Santi Chaiprakan Park and BACC, the venues spread out to include theatre studios like Democrazy Studio, B-Floor Room, Crescent Moon Space, Creative Industries, Thong Lor Art Space, Sun Dance Theatre and Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts and theatre-goers were happy to travel from one to another to watch performances.
As in the previous festivals, members of the Thailand Centre of the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) were the busiest, setting out to watch as many performances as they could before handing out the BTF 2014 Awards in 10 categories.
The biggest winner was B-Floor Theatre’s “Satapana: Iceberg”, a solo performance on the theme of censorship in Asia with strong relevance to the local situation, seen at Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts on the opening weekend. The second episode of this political work, following on from “Satapana: Red Tanks” at Pridi Banomyong Institute’s Diverse Arts Festival early in October, won four BTF 2014 awards for best movement-based performance, best performance by male artist (Teerawat Mulvilai), best direction (also Teerawat) and best art direction.
Teerawat, who is the co-founder and artistic director of B-Floor, shared the best performance by male artist award with Gandhi Wasuvitchayagit whose multiple-role acting drew loud applause in Cucumber the Killer’s “Virginian” at BACC. Its female counterpart went to Japanese actress Marino Yamamura for her performance of the blind girl in Inzou Theatre Company’s heartfelt drama “Smell”, at Creative Industries; while the best performance by an ensemble award went to the cast of New Theatre Society’s comedic romp “Sao Khruea Fa in Search of an Author”.
Parnrut Kritchanchai took home the award for best adaptation script for this hybridisation of Luigi Pirandello’s “Six Characters in Search of an Author” and Thai lakhon rong, an adaptation of “Madama Butterfly”, proof yet again that we prefer to creatively adapt than blindly adopt.
The other Japanese production was also a big winner. Staged at Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts with support from the Japan Foundation (JF), Hanchu-Yuei’s “Girl X”, a 2.5 dimension theatre, which explores the sense of fear and despair in the post-Fukushima society, went home with the best play and best original script awards. The process of bringing this play to BTF is worth mentioning. Earlier this year, theatre management professor Piyawat Thamkulangkool, funded by a JF grant, went to Tokyo Performing Arts Market (TPAM) and proposed this work for its artistic and cultural merits, the relevance to contemporary Thailand as well as the fact that it can travel with only two actors plus a director and a producer and can be set up and ready to perform in a day.
This is quite different from many other foreign cultural institutions and embassies who are ignoring the significance of BTF and instead either present grand-scale productions for a bigger bang, or pre-select works without taking into consideration our performing arts scene.
The Japan Foundation is continuing its support for BTF and plans for next year’s productions are already in progress, including the world premiere of a new physical theatre production by an internationally renowned director, with Japanese, Indian and Thai actors.
More importantly, the BTF, like contemporary Thai theatre itself, continues to grow. Additional support from both local and foreign agencies as well as the public is of course always vital.
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