I’ve just written two drafts of a play that is set over the course of one day on the road in outback Australia. The characters are real in my mind. They have back stories about their parents, grandparents, experiences, beliefs, ethnicities, heritage, and they have transgenerational memories – all of which, in my mind at least, contribute to say what they say.
Concerned by recent controversies surrounding cultural appropriation, colour-blind casting, colour-conscious casting, and regular calls for diversity in theatre, I experimented in my second draft by deleting or altering all references which confirmed the characters’ ethnicities. A simple example is when one of the characters asks another, “Where are you from?” By the second draft the line had become the more ambiguous, “Where’s home?”
I have not yet attempted to extend my experiment to delete gender references, mostly due to the subject matter of the play which involves a contemporary love story between a man and woman and a historical rape case. Perhaps experimenting with gender non-specificity could be my next step in an imagined theatre.
The natural extension of this experiment would be for me to work with, say, five different directors from five varying backgrounds in ethnicity and gender self-identification, and ask them each to cast their version of the play as they see fit. I would be curious to know how the play changes meaning–however subtly, perhaps drastically–depending on the directors’ presumptions and or imaginings about the script, and its subsequent embodiment through their chosen actors. I imagine that it would be even better if my name was not on the script and I never met the directors or actors, so that their understanding of the script would not be biased by my background. Finally, I would like the same story to be told five times with the five different teams of directors and actors presented one after the other in a single performance. Perhaps at one point, some of the actors could change teams to further the experimentation, to add another layer of casting fluidity.
If it makes any difference to the reader, I am a female performance maker, yellow in colour, and writing in English in a country where the majority of the population is white in colour and most playwrights are male.
Mayu Kanamori’s imagined theatre piece challenges us to reimagine the racial politics of Australian theatre cultures. On the one hand, her play’s ideas intend to disrupt the white dominated theatre stage in Australia and give space to the bodies and stories of people of colour. On the other hand, Kanamori unsettles hard forms of ethnic identity that arise in response to persistent forms of exclusion and marginalisation. She strikes a carefully considered balance between two quite opposing positions, and in the process asks important questions about what racial representations are possible in Australian theatre.
Choosing to remove racial or ethnic markers from the script allows directors of Kanamori’s play considerable freedom in casting ethnically diverse actors. Diverse representation over several performances of the play (by ethnically and gender diverse directors) would create a polyethnic theatre experience with overlapping subjectivities and multiple reference points of identification. While the script offers a particular structure of feeling, the ethnically diverse interpretations would allow for unexpected and no doubt challenging lines of affiliation between physically and culturally different individuals and groups. While the first iteration of the play may create, in the audience, attachments to particular bodies playing particular characters, subsequent iterations would encourage audiences to delink themselves from those attachments and reorient their investments in characters and bodies. This unique performance structure has the ability to cultivate, in the audience, a truly diverse attitude towards casting and theatre performance.
Kanamori avoids creating a scenario where the voices of a particular ethnic group monopolise the representational and thematic aims of the play. By taking the focus away from the concerns of her own ethnic and diasporic heritage, she enables a multiethnic representational politics that is quite unusual for theatrical pieces that attempt to comment on race. The traditional structure is one that develops coherency around one particular ethnic identity and experience. The multiple forms of attachment and identification alluded to earlier mean that audiences do not have the safety or security of investing in one particular construction of ethnic experience.
Having said all this, by giving directors license to make their own decisions, and by keeping her own identity anonymous, Kanamori creates a situation where the interconnections between interpretations will be unplanned, spontaneous, and potentially confrontational. The lack of curatorial decision-making to connect performances is an experimental move that leaves open all sort of possibilities. Interconnections will develop on their own during the course of the performances, and audiences will be doing the work of creating lines of affiliation between interpretations.
The openness of this structure does run the risk of producing a conceptually incoherent performance with few interconnections between interpretations. This raises the question of whether theatre pieces that engage with race as a concept should direct audiences towards particular kinds of arguments. And if there are inexplicit arguments about diverse casting and performance in this imagined piece, will they be evident to audiences? I imagine that Kanamori would want to direct attention away from self-fulfilling arguments, preferring, rather, unpredictable possibilities and unforeseen ways of understanding race and ethnicity. It is the risk involved in leaving open the conceptual meanings of this play that is its creative strength. Without this risk, we cannot imagine new ways of performing racialised bodies in Australian theatre.