The Obsession with Context
Dagmar Walser

From the first performance of Pratthana in Europe (aspart of the official program at the Festival dʼAutomne àParis / Japonismes 2018), at the Pompidou Center.
Photo by Takuya Matsumi

More than once I longed to be somewhere else during the theater performance Pratthana - A Portrait ofPossession on that mid-December evening in Paris. Not because I was bored and harboring thoughts of walking
out. Not because of the French subtitles, which I got lost in due to my inadequate language skills. And not
because the performance was getting too long for me, even though itʼs definitely a long piece. On the contrary,
the experience got richer and more inspiring as the evening went on and I became increasingly drawn in by thestory, or stories.
And yet, the one thing I kept missing that evening at Centre Pompidou is the audience in Bangkok, where thepiece had premiered four months earlier. Which scenes had the audience laughed at during those performances? Who in the room was holding their breath in suspense? Who identified with the protagonist Khao Sing andthe many actors who portrayed him, and at what points? What did people talk about after the play, and what
did they not talk about?
There are some plays that already have a story before you enter the theater. I had been in Bangkok for the firsttime just a few weeks earlier while researching Southeast Asian theater and had formed my own first impressions of the challenges facing the local scene. I got to know some of the performers in Pratthana personally. I
stood before the memorial of the massacre on October 6, 1976 on the campus of Thammasat University andtried to understand how the past and present meet in everyday life in contemporary Thailand.
Iʼve also long admired the works of the Japanese artists involved in the production: Yuya Tsukahara fromcontact Gonzo and Toshiki Okada, who is present in Europe for years due to his work with his company
Chelfitsch. In recent years, Okada had regularly worked with the Münchner Kammerspiele theater. I remember
how strange it felt at the premiere of the first collaborative production in 2016, when the “German” actors
adapted to the stylized Chelfitsch aesthetic and appeared to be performing “Japanese” bodies, which wassomething that no longer bothered me two years later during Okadaʼs third Munich production. Had myperspective or the approach of the actors changed?
Bodies and spaces are always political in theater. And the local context for contemporary international touring
productions is in essence a fragile one. It might sound obvious, but a theater production cannot exist without aspecific audience. The audienceʼs attention, specific frame of reference and emotionality turn a shared experience into a successful theater production. The performance is different every night, and different at every

1ESSAYvenue. But what would I have understood better in Bangkok than in Paris? What would the mood and presenceof the audience have conveyed to me differently in Bangkok?
Why did I continually think I simply lacked the context to truly understand the play?
And what does “understanding” even mean in art?
I watched myself as I almost obsessively responded to some of the props. The orange shoes, for example. It wasalmost spooky how they kept appearing. Sometimes they were projected onto the wall close-up and othertimes an actress strolled across the stage in them. Yellow is the royal color of Thailand. Red stands for theopposition. And orange? Even more obsessively, I watched the digital clock that showed the year we werecurrently in. No audience member in Bangkok would have needed to think about what had happened in
Thailand in 1992, 2010 or 2014, where they had been at the time, or how they felt. They would have stored it intheir bodies and remembered it collectively. Or at least thatʼs how I imagined it. How did the Thai audience
react at the end of the play, which I thought finished abruptly on the day of King Bhumibolʼs death in October
2016?
The preoccupation with oneʼs own perception is directly written into Pratthana, even more so than in otherplays. A single theme pervades the play from beginning to end: the gazer and the gazed upon. The actors are anaudience to each other. Observation and seduction merge seamlessly into surveillance and violence. The
question of who has the right and the power to watch whom is a question that is indirectly addressed throughout. The tipping point between gazing and being gazed upon becomes an artistic strategy. And when thepersonal story of the protagonist increasingly becomes a reflection of a fragile social body, that body ismultiplied by cameras and projections, and simultaneously broken down into many parts. From the trials of asingle artistʼs life, the picture of a traumatized society emerges ever more clearly.
Part of the power and attraction of international theater is that it confronts oneʼs own personal and cultural
history of perception. So where does this urge to understand the “real” context come from? Does this reflect a
Western attitude that assumes that we can or must be objective and distanced? Does this attitude perhaps evenmake it impossible for me to perceive another (non-Western) perspective without bias because I am looking fora unambiguous interpretation? Would it have been easier for me if Khao Sing had made a clearer statement
about the painful struggles for democracy in Thailand if he were to take an aesthetic position and a politicalone? When does the interest and desire to understand something become an obsession?
Questions, questions, questions. Fortunately, the play had completely captivated me by now. I enjoyed thesound of the language, the enthusiasm of the actors and their different approaches. I immersed myself in thetheatrical performance, which kept revealing new perspectives and spaces. Iʼm impressed by how Okada andTsukahara, together with Uthis Haemamoolʼs script and the Thai performers broke new ground for everyone
while entering new aesthetic territory. I became part of the action on stage and grew increasingly relaxed as I
watched my own questions come and go.
Towards the end of the performance, when the protagonist himself moves around Centre Pompidou and walks
among the icons of (western) art history on the fourth and fifth floor, he unexpectedly moves further awayfrom me again, despite his fictitious physical proximity. What significance did this museum have for his artistic
search for identity? Is it an escape to Europe or even a supposedly common reference point? In any case, thisscene is further proof that Pratthana is not intended to be a “universal” biography of an artist. Instead, thepotential of the play lies in its specific narrative, which can be viewed differently depending on oneʼs ownposition and perspective. What kinds of gazes would the Thai artist have received at Pompidou that a Swiss or
French artist would not have experienced?
And so, as I reflected on that night at the theater in Paris, I would have also liked to be in the audience at theperformances in Tokyo. I wanted to be there when the Japanese audience reconciles what they had experienced with their own understanding and knowledge, or lack thereof. What would I have learned from themand with them about their perception of the world and of art?
(Translated from German by Harry Bartelt)

The Obsession with Context

Dagmar Walser
Theater critic and program producer for a Swiss radiostation. Walser was a Saison Foundation Visiting
Fellow in the fall of 2012. She has curated andconsulted at events such as the Zürcher Theater
Spektakel (2007-2017) and the Spielart Festival inMunich (from 2018), as well as writing and editing
works relating to the performing arts in Switzerlandand overseas. Walser lives in Basel.

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