Interview with Tze Chien

So anyway, we managed to interview the playwright and director of POOP, Chong Tze Chien, and have asked him some questions regarding our piece as well as regarding POOP. Below is the interview with him.

1) What are some of your guiding principles whenever you direct a play?

TC: I think it goes back to the story itself. How do I best bring out this story? I could easily stage POOP in a very different way, with a big set in a big theatre. So if you analyse the play, it is about a little girl's perception of death, and so naturally, things have to be simple. You have to imagine that it is an eight year old girl looking at the world, how does she look at it? It is very different from an adult. So that became the guiding principle. From the start, I wanted to make it very simple and that was the guiding principle for every decision that I made. From the choice of music to the way I would stage the show. So I went through many drafts, many possibilities of staging. At first, it was something very puppet theatre style, with different levels. (He goes on to demonstrate the original set.) The actors would then dress up as puppets. So we began drafting, drawing up storyboards, but it became too complicated and techinical. It diverted away from the guiding principle of simplicity. There were too many things to construct and training was needed for the actors.

And then me and my producer went to see a Chinese Opera performance by Hong theatre group. But they stripped it down. There wasnt any set or make up. (He goes on to demonstrate their use of light to define space.) All they used to define the space was a narration. It showed that in theatre, you don't really need anything. In theatre, what make things theatrical is essentially an actor in a space. That is the most basic principle. An actor is the one who defines where he or she is. It gave me the idea of selecting one object that will best symbolise that particular scene. It would then be very simple.

Then the challenge was to control the lighting design. Because the it was very controlled lighting, and the light will hit the actor at an angle, and so the actors had to tilt in such a way that they will catch the light. Another challenge was the size and dimension of a little girl's world.

2) What were some of your influences in the production of POOP?

TC: Its simply going back to the magic of theatre. I mean even if it was a very big production, with big sets, you also have to be very selective of what you want to show the audience. If you show everything, it almosts unimaginative. How do you define something that is theatrical? It is something that evokes imagination. So sometimes you can get excited by seeing something and think to yourself, "Oh. I would never see it that way." And of course, the more things you have, the more choices you have, and so it can be very agonizing as well. And then a minimalist set design means that you have to be very clear of what you choose. That choice should represent the scene very clearly.

3) In all of your productions, what are some of the central issues that you address. For example, in POOP, it was death.

TC: For me, POOP was a culmination of everything that I've been doing for the past 10 years. Somehow or another, the issue of death was recurring. So even if death was not one of the main themes, it would still be a sub theme of sorts. So with POOP, you could say I got it out of my system. I think as an artist, you would be obsessed with a particular subject. Until you have fully articulated it, you would always be driven by it. For me, death is not a dark subject. To me, death is not the end, it is very optimistic. I find that death has something very calming about it. There's a sort of peace to it. That's why I'm always gravitating towards the theme of death inevitably. So for me, POOP was a very perfect fit in that way.

4) Can you name any practioners that you have studied or admire, and have applied to your work?

TC: As a theatre student, I think what I was most intrigued about was Brecht and Richard Schechner. What I loved about Brecht was the way he deconstructs things. While studying theatre as a theory, you learned specific styles to stage theatre. However, when studying Brecht, it showed me new and radical way to stage things. I still remember there was once where Brecht had all the stage managers and lighting crew calling the show, right in front of the audience. So the audience were constantly being reminded that they're watching a show. Then you see the actors break out of character, have a tea break, then go back into the performance. So it was literally breaking down walls and that was an eye opener for me.

As for Richard Schechner, he was very much about performance in space. His argument is that there is no such thing as a performance space. As long as you have a performer in any space, it immediately becomes a performance, and you have that relationship with the audience. For example, there was a show about mental patients. The audience would then be sitting on hospital bunk beds, and the actors are actually all around them. So the audience would actually be in the acting space itself. So that is the magic of theatre. Something so exciting need not be brought about by extravagent sets or lighting. Simplicity is the most complex. Because when you are doing something in its purest form, you will realise that a lot of things are not needed.

5) Are there certain elements that is present in all your productions (eg. puppetry) ? And why?

TC: Puppetry was mainly because I joined this company! (laughs) Before this, I was more of just a playwright, not so much of directing. When I joined this company, it was something very tangible. Before I joined, finger plays were mainly children's theatre. They wanted me to make it more of for adult's theatre. So basically, we would use puppetry as a device to best showcase the performance. Puppetry is something very visual and also something that is very theatrical. Puppetry is about design and objects and how you move them in space and time. If you watch POOP or Cats, puppetry is used to serve the story and is not the main focus.

6) So when conceptualizing the piece, do you actually plan where and when the puppets will come in?

TC: The usual process would be that once the script is written, we will pass it to the designers. The designers will then propose places in the script where puppets will be most effective. Sometimes they will even say, "Actually, this show doesn't need puppets." So for POOP, there wasn't any real puppetry, at least not in a very complex and big way. Its basically because I felt that this show really doesn't need that much of puppetry to bring out the story.

7) Did you have any specifications for the lighting designers when choosing the lighting?

TC: I actually marked the stage after the basic blocking was done. I drew a chart with very specific measurements on how big the spotlight would be, where the light ends, spillage and things like that. In terms of colour scheme of the lights, the lighting designer came up with different colours for the "reality" scenes and different colours for the "surreal" scenes.

8) On that note, what sort of theatre style/genre did POOP follow?

TC: I think that expressionism(omg look at this people) is one of them as well as selective naturalism.

9) So for expressionism, were you inspired by any director or production?

TC: Not particularly, but if you look at european productions, especially western european ones, you will see that they are all very dark and very stark. It's always something very austere. So I tend to gravitate towards that in terms of colours.

10) In terms of expressionistic set design?

TC: Not really as well. Because if you consider expressionistic sets, there's no real set. The objects are always from everyday life, its all very rooted to reality. So in a way, I think we adapted expressionism.

11) So what aspects of expressionism did you use in POOP?

TC: I think it is more of visual composition. Like the way the father was presented. Sometimes I would only focus on his facial expression, like in certain scenes where you only see his head. And sometimes when he is talking to his wife, and you see a pair of legs walking past. So these are the aspects that are very clean and very stark.

12) In terms of your creative process, after having an idea of the piece, how is the conceptualization of the ideas carried out? For example, through improvisation and such?

TC: Actually there's a lot of thinking involved where I rewrite the script until I'm happy with it. And yet also still be open to changes. I realise that as a director, I execute things very fast. While some directors will try and process it the script in rehearsal, for me, during rehearsals, I already have a clear picture of what I want. Basically I will tell the actors to do what I want and then we're done with the blocking. In my head, I would have gone through the production many times in many different styles, and so I would have a very clear idea of what I want.

13) When directing a play that has been staged before, what aspects do you keep or throw? Do you believe in keeping true to what the original playwright wanted to express or search for something new?

TC: I usually adopt the same attitude for all my productions; which is that I'm always open to making changes or improvements. For me, the script is the foundation for the entire project, and even before I can decontruct or play, I need to see in the script; what doesn't help? The primary goal is to best showcase the written words, but I'm not purist in that way in the sense that I can't delete stuff as well. I look at a script and ask myself,"Does the original text work? If not, what changes can I make?"

14)What do you think of the script for Hungry?

TC: The script is very very clear. And its one of those plays that is very eloquent and is one of those character pieces that is a very good short play. It is one of those plays that can provide the director a lot to play with. I guess the challenge for directors and actors would be to really dig deep at exactly what the piece is saying. Because it is not a superficial play. The original set design was simply four toilet bowls and the characters just moved around them. So it was a very simple production in that sense. And each of these characters are hungry for various reasons. How then do you show that and best bring out the intention of the script?

15) We don't know what kind of style we're following exactly...

TC: For me, I always tell people not to be obsessed on the definition of the style. Because at the end of the day, these definitions came about because they saw creations, and then they tried to coin a term that would best describe it. Its not the other way around. So it is about asking,"What do I see in the piece?" So if people try to place a style on my piece as ask whether its expressionistic or brechtian, I can say," I don't know. It's Chong Tze Chien style!"(gasp!) So for you guys, its about asking what do you see? In other words, what is your directorial vision?

16) So is there anything that you do not like about Hungry(Script)?

TC: For me, maybe it is that there was no real resolution. It was one of those pieces that went quite deep but there wasn't any real resolution among the characters. There's some revelations but those revelations wasn't translated to the audience. There wasn't a part of me that went,"Wow!" I didn't get excited by what they were trying to say.

17) Hungry is very episodic in nature. So how do you deal with such scripts?

TC: You have got to think about it in terms of performance text. A text is only a subset of a performance text. A good example of a performance text would be Cats: Lost and Found. If you would just read the script alone, it would seem normal. But the performance text was very rich. It added things onto the written text. Performance text consists of everything from non-verbal scenes, what's going on between the characters, character design and production design. For example the scene where the usher imagined that she was in the ocean, that wasn't part of the script. It was a non-verbal sequence that helped to contribute to her relationship with the cat. You realise that they are a very loving pair, which you may not get just by reading the script. So as a director, you have to look at a text and think," How do I jump off from it? How do I show things?"

-Melvyn (omg. this transcript was hell to type)