Maybe I am more influenced by my upbringing than I realize: a child of teachers, I've become infatuated with pedagogy as a performative experience. Adam Gopnik, writing about what makes public art successful, mentions as one common factor a "weakness for didacticism [that] becomes compellingly poetic". Well, I'm not sure if these recent performances in Singapore displayed a weakness for didacticism, but they used it in ways I found compelling and poetic both.

The first was first Spell7's National Language Class, which succeeded in making an audience into students, casting them into a field of school days power relations and language games. There was real pleasure to be in the classroom again (and to know the answers), but also to feel the legacy of Ionesco, to remember the absurdity and violence that lies in the pedagogical impulse. (To this day I hear the words "cou" "teau" echoing menacingly whenever someone tries to teach me something.) Class nodded in that direction, but moved mainly to confront us with more subtle stuff of cultural politics, historical allusion and play with intertwining the textures of performance, language teaching and art historical exegesis.

Then it was National Language Class' doublebill partner, Ho Tzu-Nyen's Utama lecture, with its cheesy ppt, and its twinning of didacticism and personal narrative. In this and its use of images it had something of the quality of a Sebald novel. In Utama we also had a more direct confrontation with two authorities, the founder and the teacher, both first persons, both disintegrating.

The fascination grew then, in the performance of communicative reason in Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun's Pichet Klunchun and Myself, at the Theatreworks space in Robertson Quay. This was a sort of dancing My Dinner with Andre, with intersubjective exchange providing the dramatic rationale, and dance just a form of anti-spectacle demonstration. "At least we've learned something" said the well-known academic critic sitting next to me. "It's like reading an article in Critical Review." He was pleased, I think, at getting a performance, a clearly presented idea of the contemporary performance impulse, and a lesson in Thai dance all in one. It possessed irony too -- while denying its possibility in cross-cultural dialog, it allowed irony in measured doses. Irony, for Pichet and Jérôme in this dialog, was enjoyed in the form of theatrical asides, shrugs and grins, for them alone, and for those of the audience who chose to follow. Irony registered mostly as resignation at the compromises and necessary distortions, the shortcomings of communicative rationality, the practical and personal limits of the urge to explain, to teach. Irony was theraupeutic to the communicators, and the audience, but did not derail the communication.

The idea is different from the act, Jérôme reminds Pichet, as he reaches to demonstrate the techniques of manipulation of the naked body which he used in his performance Jérôme Bel. Pichet demurs, hastily, "it's not my culture to see you naked". As unmoored and dessicated as a description of nakedness is compared to the real thing, we don't always need the full Monty.

So the pedagogical forms a key motif across some of the most pleasing performances I've seen in some time. There's a lesson for me in here somewhere.

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Labels: Singapore

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