As part of Critical Path's Interchange Festival 2017, Julie Vulcan presented Stories from the Body #8 in my absence for her CURATED EVENING:

Continuity. Transgression. Interruption.

Our bodies are contested ground, from culture to culture, borders to membrane, public to private and macro to micro–climate. We are enmeshed, interdependent and involuntarily subject to interruptions, mutations and interventions. Over the course of the final evening six artists share provocations that nudge at the notion of a neatly packaged independent autonomous body.

Participants: Rakini Devi, Lux Eterna, Wei Zen Ho, Joshua Plether, Alison Plevey and Kathryn Puie

Photo Credit: Matthew Syres

Image: All images of Stories from the Body #8 at Critical Path Interchange Festival 2017

Stories from the Body #8

The background collaboration and conversation with Julie Vulcan, who presented the work in my absence (I was in my hometown Melaka, working with Linda Luke in MAPfest):

"...in encapsulating the process of collecting my hair (which started because I was fascinated by my revulsion towards finding my hair in every corner of the house. Part of BAM's process led me to the 'body sheddings' installation - the history held, the memory triggered and they are points of departure. There are also associations of hair in DNA testing processes and how it holds potency in some sorcery rituals for tracking the owner of the hair down...

I imagined Julie beginning with a soft introduction about my hair and what the imageries and memories I associate it with. On a round table (ideally), there are six bowls and soupspoons laid out, a container of my hair rolled up into tight balls, and a container containing Tie Kwan Yin oolong tea. (Julie had picked these items up from Katoomba Falls Kiosk the previous weekend and participated in Stories from the Body #7, wiping each other's body down with our hair). There is a kettle and stove and a large bowl to tip water into.

She opens a container and takes out my hairballs and places 2/3 into each bowl. The water is boiling and she washes a teapot with hot water, pours the water out and places a handful of Tie Kwan Yin tealeaves into a pot. She keeps talking and now she introduces this tea and talks about how proud the Chinese people from the South Province of Fujian are so proud of the quality of this high mountain tea. The leaves can handle at least 8-10 pours of water and each brew gradually shifts in aroma and taste. While she lets the tea brew for 60 seconds she passes the bowls with hairballs and distributes it to every other person.

She picks the pot and starts pouring the tea into the bowls and talks about how often, when Chinese mothers quarrel with their children, they don’t ever discuss the issue behind the quarrel or forgiveness. Instead, in some families the mother or child begins the peace-making process by offering the child/mother herbal soup that has been brewed for hours, from 6 bowls of water down to one (the size you have in our hand). The child/mother accepts by savouring and drinking this bowl of soup while being gently watched..."

#6 was devised as a participatory performance during the Festival of Death and Dying, Melbourne and Sydney.  It is inspired by mixed imageries and memories:

Hair that my mother’s mother had; long and dark brown-black, up to the day she died in her sixties.  My mother also related to me recently that many women in my grandmother’s generation never cut their hair. 

The washing of the bodies of my paternal grandparents and my maternal grandmother by my uncle, the only family member willing and able to take responsibility for this task. These grandparents died at home - my family home in Melaka, Malaysia.

I introduce the use of full-length batik fabric, which is the first thing that covers a dead body, an act of ritual carried out in the spiritual folk-culture of the Malays.

This is a participatory performance piece that explores the porosity between contemporary concepts of performance, ritual and conversation.  Much of the tension is the waiting time from my physical gesture of invitation to the audience and someone standing up from their seat and moving into the performative space to be wiped down by my hair.

Coming out from the team's penangpac theatre residency and showings of Unappeased in October, Alan Schacher and WeiZen Ho adapted scenes from the development process into a duet performance at the Bukit St. Paul site, for Melaka Arts and Performance Festival.

The audience consisted of people specifically came to watch the performance, but most of them were the local people and passing tourists.  Contemporary human insatiability, strange twists to deity divinations and other interpretations of Taoist tangki-shaman states influenced this daytime performance of Unappeased . The social environment of this famous tourist location gave it a more playful nature.

All photos by MRBAR Photo Works.

The Stories from the Body performance series is an ongoing life-work.

The series is a methodology to re-trace lineages that have been disrupted, myths that have been distorted and stories that have been fragmented, as a result of migration and time, from the South Fujian Province of China to Java, Singapore and Malaysia.  Coming from the premise that all of human living is performed, I chose to activate this process of uncovering, reclaiming and reimagining through my body and its voice – my ancestral template is embedded within my physiological being.

The entity I am exploring in Stories from the Body #2 is a hybrid between Opium Being and The Drunken Beauty, extrapolated from the deity possession states of the shaman by the King of Hungry Ghost, and a famous Chinese Opera character.

This self-devised performance was presented as part of Cerita Pendek night-works at Melaka Arts and Performance Festival Nov 2014.  I was privileged to have the special participation of Bantengan (Bull Trance) Leader, Agus Riyanto from Batu, Indonesia.

The Stories from the Body (SFTB) performance series is an ongoing life work. I am re-tracing lineages that have been disrupted, as a result of migration, from the South Fujian Province of China to Java, Singapore and Malaysia. Coming from the premise that all of human living is performed, I choose to activate this process of uncovering, reclaiming and reimagining through my body and its voice – my ancestral template is embedded within my physiological being.

The hybrid archetype I am working with in Stories from the Body #1 is a re-imagined combination of puyong and pontianak from the Malaysia folk-lore...

Stories from the Body #1 was first performed in Indonesia during 2014 at Arts Island Festival in Klungkung (Bali), Kediri (East Java), Undisclosed Territory#8 Performance Art Festival in Solo and Bedog Arts Festival in Yogyakarta. This puyong-pontianak entity was then incorporated into one of the scenes for Palimpsest Performance #1 at Woodford Academy, The Blue Mountain's oldest surviving building. In 2016, SFTB #1 was re-embodied and adapted for a site near the ferry wharf of Ogijima Island, as part of Setouchi Triennale Art Festival in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan’s Setouchi Region.

All photos taken by Watan Wuma at Undisclosed Territory#8 Performance Art Festival in Solo, Indonesia. Curated by Melati Suryodarmo.