Cheng Yin-Chen (left) and Koh Choon Eiow (right) in approaching theatre’s Ghostopia. Photo by Hsu Ping.
(Read the first part of the interview here.)
Chen: In your plays, or the ways you answer certain questions, I feel that you’re almost idiosyncratic about time. You’re always noting how distant events happen in the same year, or naming all the relevant or irrelevant historical coordinates. For example, when asked when you came to Taiwan, you responded “on August 31, 2004, on Malaysia’s National Day.” Yet compared to the seeming obsession with synchronicity, you rarely addressed the immediate history directly. I wonder what you think about how you tend to respond to current affairs, so to speak. What is the relationship between your work and the immediate moment?
Koh: Most artworks are surely correlated with the here and now, the immediate. We feel something at the moment; therefore, we have something to express. But one doesn’t have to address the event, the incident, directly—it’s more of a choice. Personally, I tend to maintain a distance and a sense of alienation. Because in the heat of the moment, emotion outruns everything else. Creative practice, however, provides room for sedimentation. Creating a distance in time and space allows us to see from different angles. When you have that space for approaching a subject, the audience would have the space for interpretation. On the other hand, there’s less space if you’re full of emotion. The audience would sense a clear stance when you only have one interpretation. I am not inclined in such a direction.
Chen: You have such a sustained career in theatre-making. With a few revivals of your major productions and the recent publication of these two substantive anthologies, you’ve managed to preserve work dating all the way back, even to the ‘90s. I wonder how you feel about your past productions? Have you discovered anything while looking back?
Koh: Yes, on occasion. I found appreciation for my past writings recently. There were ideas in Apostating Time or Ghostopia that I thought were worked out with the actors in rehearsals, but when I looked back and sorted through the files from my Kuala Lumpur days, I realized I had already done this or that in the past. I don’t recall the exact details, but take something like eating paper—I did that on stage almost thirty years ago. Of course the early experiments weren’t always satisfying, but I didn’t realize they planted the seeds. When time passes, the seeds mature without me even realizing it, nourished by my theatre comrades. So I am quite curious as to how they’re all connected to past sediments unbeknownst to me. There might always be budget issues, but yes, I would like to see how my past works will reappear to me.
Chen: You also acted a lot in the past, but I assume you haven’t done any acting gigs for quite a while?
Koh: I think people now see me as a director. I would still love to perform if I have the opportunity. I’d certainly consider it if the timing works out, and the character is interesting enough.
Chen: As a highly versatile actor yourself, how does your acting or training experience influence your directing? What are the things you often have to work on with actors?
Koh: My acting experience inherently influences my playwriting. When I write plays, I have the images in my head. I imagine how a character might sound, how they are built, or what their specific shape and movement are like. I’m not sure how normal playwrights approach this, but for me, I have access to these images quite naturally.
Chen: Then how do you work with actors when you have a rather specific shape in mind from the writing process? How do you approach rehearsals when there’s a gap between the actor’s cadence and the intrinsic rhythm of the play?
Koh: Just feel it. It’s hard to describe in detail, but to me it’s about the auditory experience. My language is more stylistic even if I’m writing a rather realistic scene; the choice partly comes from the fact that we’re easily trapped by the surface of language. We assume we understand the lines and the language because the language sounds understandable, but then we stop there. Thus, whether as a director or a playwright, I want to open up the possibilities. We should not be trapped by language but rather be opened by it. That’s why I fixate on its inherent musicality; language itself has physical qualities. You talked about working with actors; I usually approach them with attention to musicality. When the language is opened up, the actors can naturally feel the music; hence, when we are reading or acting, we won’t be trapped by the semantic implication. There might be something running underneath, and what the undercurrent is about is all in its flowing.
Chen: How exactly do you “open up”? What are your approaches?
Koh: Well, you have to listen. You have to listen. Take traditional theatre, such as Gezaixi, for example: they are speaking in a tune. The tune, not the meaning, dictates the interpretation. So the musicality I talked about is a kind of interpretation. And notice how it’s not one-to-one. You don’t want to equate a sad tone to a blatantly sad line. Human feelings are quite complicated, so you don’t want monotonic music. I always refer to traditional theatre because it provides a rather clear outer shape for the performance. In traditional theatre or classical poetry, they differentiate between vocal emotion (聲情) and rhetoric emotion (辭情). Modern theatre puts too much focus on the rhetoric; therefore, I attempt to slacken that.
Chen: You have been training for decades. I wonder what territories you have yet to explore.
Koh: There is too much yet to explore. Bodily aesthetics can never be fully exhausted. I don’t think we’ve “found it”; we’re still developing and learning. The work is always incomplete, but incompleteness is exactly what matters. Because only then can we continue working towards the incomplete. I made several changes to Ghostopia when we revived it in March. I keep changing my works because they’re incomplete; I can’t say a single one of them is truly complete.
Chen: You mentioned returning themes and now incompleteness. You also mentioned elsewhere that the Buddhist tale in Ghostopia was something that you knew from way back. I wonder if you have something that has been on your mind for a while, and might manifest someday as a theatre piece. Is there a piece of news or a material that has intrigued you?
Koh: I can share one. I keep wondering what solitude means for modern people. We live in the age of social media. A lot of relationships are formed through social media; everyone seems to be active and more willing to share out loud. But of course there are downsides to it. There is an eternal state of clustering, yet loneliness remains inescapable. The constant connection to people creates an illusion that merely covers our isolation. I am not completely against social media; I am simply curious about what it means for us and how it influences our state of being. It is something I’m still figuring out.
Chen: This eternal state of being reminded me of a recurring image across your plays. There seems to be a running man in various plays. Geographically, within a nation, across the border, on stage—there’s always someone running, always running from and to something. Do you think the image by any chance connects to your early Grotowski experience?
Koh: I wouldn’t jump to that connection. At one point, I trained under Chen Wei-cheng, who learned from Grotowski in the 1980s, so of course there are some traces. But tell me—what exactly does that running figure mean to you when you watch or read the plays?
Chen: Huang Yee-ling has a song that says “for three meals a day, for getting through daily life.” I feel like, again, the broader Han Chinese seem to always be running around, always running to feed themselves, always running from and to something. To me, that state of being is captured in this perpetual action of running, but I don’t know how you’d approach this.
Koh: I don’t like overanalyzing my own works. But if we could slightly expand the question, I would say that the Chinese care more about food. The culture is rooted in food, either in Taiwan or in Malaysia. I came from a small town, and the thing that matters the most for people who surrounded me was to live a better life. You don’t want to just live—you have to live a better life. Which means you have to have more money, or accumulate resources so that your life can have more options.
Malaysian Chinese are essentially immigrants. For example, my parents’ or grandparents’ generation were mostly from Guangdong or Fujian. They were mostly forced out by either poverty or war. And they had to find ways to feed themselves all the time during migration. They are intensely practical people who would most certainly prioritize stability over literature or art. These are the kind of people I grew up with.
Chen: You were still working a full-time job in your early 30s, so I wonder what advice you would give to young artists today who are in a similar situation. They might have a deep passion for theatre, but they also face the immediate reality of needing to feed themselves. So my last question is: What would you say to yourself at that stage, looking back?
Koh: Sometimes human beings have to be honest about their desires. A lot of the issues we have are from being dishonest to ourselves. If you could be honest, then turning 30 is indeed an actual threshold you have to cross. You have to picture the distance between where you are and where you want to be—five hundred miles requires a very different strategy from fifty. That assessment dictates how you approach the journey. Then, you have to continue asking yourself: are you willing to take risks? Nothing is absolutely good or bad; you gain some, you lose some. Are you willing to sacrifice something in exchange for something else? If you want everything, you will be tethered.
When I was in the TV production company, there was a moment when I realized I could already foresee my future, and I realized that is not the life I desired. I didn’t know what exactly I wanted, but I knew I had to abort the life I had in order to find that something I might truly desire. It’s risky, and no one can give you an answer. When I came to Taiwan for my graduate theatre degree, my peers in Malaysia all had stable jobs; no one would do the same thing. A friend of mine knew he was going to get married, have children, and build a family. He inevitably stepped away from theatre, but that was simply a choice, and I think that’s a good choice. At the time, I couldn’t possibly know where my choice would take me—I just knew I had to walk away, away to study, away to reset.
Of course, turning thirty is a threshold of choices. I’d say don’t be afraid of adventures. Don’t worry about losing things. If I were to look back from my 50s, I’d say that life is an oscillating process of gains and losses. There will always be ebbs and flows. Failures and frustrations are important because you will learn to be with yourself. Artists, in one way or another, have to learn how to live with themselves.
Chen: Are there gains in your life that, when looking back, you can confidently say, yes, that’s a gain, I’ve learned that?
Koh: I don’t usually think about gains. My brain is not wired that way. I do think it’s important to always have something that fuels you. I just keep thinking about creating the next thing and the next thing or what dialogue I want to have with the world or what connections I want to form with people, with history, with literature, with memory, creating ripples or echoes. I just keep treading down the path, and when the thing arrives, it arrives.
approaching theatre’s Apostating Time. Photo by Lin Yu-Quan.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
