It was many years ago, during one of Dujdao Vadhanapakorn’s dance rehearsals, when the image of an old staircase suddenly flashed into her head. It happened more than once, sometimes while driving home after rehearsals, that other shocking, painful memories she thought were long-buried and forgotten came surging up.
“That staircase was actually at my grandmother’s,” said the 35-year-old actress and dance artist, who is a member of B-Floor Theatre, a physical movement-based theatre troupe, which has been both socially and politically outspoken for more than a decade.
“I was around five then. It was when my mum was working hard and my dad had to be away that I had to stay at my grandmother’s. I hated that time. I was shocked because I lived there ages ago but a certain body movement suddenly brought that image back and I could recall all those memories again, how mornings in that house were like and how I once fell off those stairs.”
This was the beginning of a curiosity, a fascination, as to how the body and the mind work together. Soon after, she went to study for an MA in Dance Movement Psychotherapy at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Before that, Dujdao studied journalism and mass communication at Thammasat University and as more than a decade with B-Floor, she has acted in and directed a number of productions. Last year, she won the award for best performance by a female artist from International Association of Theatre Critics Thailand Centre for her role in Napak Tricharoendej’s adaptation of Jean Genet’s The Maids.
She also used to work as a dance movement psychotherapist in a clinic, but now her full-time job is an assistant to a senior director of communication for hospitals under Bangkok Dusit Medical Services, working on improving “emphatic communication” among doctors, nurses and staff, as well as towards patients through interview sessions, workshops and activities.
Her latest performance Secret Keeper, opening on Wednesday at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, is essentially a result, a culmination, of what she’s most fascinated by: means of communication, theatre and psychology.
This experimental performance is basically herself performing as a “secret keeper” who the audience can come in and tell secrets to. Dujdao did it twice last year, at Thonglor Art Space’s group project The Other Room: Exploring The Other’s Life and at Wonderfruit Festival. But this version, collaborating with two other actresses in each round of the performance, is the first time it has been performed in a theatre setting.
“At Thonglor Art Space it was site-specific work and at Wonderfruit it was very much connected to the landscape, but I have never treated it as a performance in theatre before,” she explained. “The idea for it originated from the question: ‘If I’m given a space and I can create whatever I want in it, what would that be?’”
Dujdao decided that what she wanted to recreate was certain feelings she had while with patients in a therapy room. And that’s essentially what she’s doing in Secret Keeper. At Thonglor Art Space, each visitor waded through water to get to her, as she was waiting in the middle of the room. Visitors could either tell her their secret or just sit there until the time ran out.
Dancing has always been her passion, ever since a young age. During university, she joined the drama club and immediately fell in love with theatre. Psychology, her minor subject in university, was also something she enjoyed. In fact, she said that reading such theories was like reading comic books for her.
Dujdao said that mass communication, psychology and theatre naturally blend together. While studying communication is about delivering a message and understanding the nature of the message and its receiver, theatre and psychology is about getting inside the character and being able to deliver the message.
During Dujdao’s studies, she remembers one class particularly well, “We went to a centre for patients who are mentally ill. I saw a very old lady sitting quietly in one corner. Only yesterday, I was told she climbed incredibly high up a fence and stayed there. Other people were scared but I was like ‘Wow, what was it that drove her to do that?’”
Though now a core member of B-Floor Theatre, Dujdao admitted she was once the troupe’s “groupie”, and would follow their performances for a long time before she eventually auditioned for the company herself. After graduation, she divided her time between being a TV show host and an actress with notable works including Crying Century, Flu-O-Less-Sense and San Dan Ka. Her directorial efforts, usually movement-based performances, are (In)sensitivity and F_ck Tong.
It was after a few years with the theatre troupe that Dujdao began to wonder about the connection between the body and mind and went to study for an MA in England. The course combined psychotherapy with movement analysis, studying how one’s physical body can reveal elements about someone’s personality, identity, memories and so on.
“The session started with an introduction and warm-up session, allowing us to connect and trust one another,” explained Dujdao. “There are many approaches, but for example you can let the patient talk about how they feel by asking them to move however they want. Then I will ask them to interpret their own movements, and why they moved the way they did. Then I try to connect each element together, asking them to share what prompts them to do what they do and then there may come a moment of internalisation, the same way that that staircase flashback happened to me.”
The actress said that movement in theatre works in a similar way in that it’s the dancers who are figuring out the moves that can deliver to the audience what’s inside of us.
“It’s a privilege,” said Dujdao of the experience in the clinic, as well creating Secret Keeper. “There’s trust and you share something you’ve never done with anybody before, not your friends or parents. Once you get that, there’s a special condition created in this world and it’s so special.”
Secret Keeper is being staged from Wednesday until Aug 23 (except Monday and Tuesday) at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, at 7.30pm. Tickets cost 600 baht (450 baht for students). For reservations, call 089-167-4039 or email bfloortheatre@gmail.com.
Dujdao Vadhanapakorn, lead actress in Secret Keeper, during rehearsals.
