Thanapol Virulhakul, critically-acclaimed stage director and choreographer, has a way of giving space a certain significance. His take is usually minimalistic, the stage bare and his actors assigned with limited set of movements, and it is the relentless repetition of those elements that would slowly make up the storyline and become part of the blow in the end.
Take his award-winning and most famous work, Hipster the King, his performers hardly do anything, yet the empty stage has eventually come to represent the climate of blind idolatry that is the case of our country.
He has done it again in his latest work, Happy Hunting Ground, only this time it is the politics of love and relationships -- a limbo of endless power struggles and frustrations. Last Thursday, Chulalongkorn University's Sodsai Pantoomkomol Centre for Dramatic Arts was packed for the premiere of this production, which is a collaboration between Thailand's Democrazy Theatre Studio, Goethe-Institut and Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe in Germany. Like Hipster the King, the show is a true test of endurance on the audience's part.
The project was initiated by German critic and playwright Jurgen Berger who was researching on sex workers in Thailand and Thai women who married German men and settled in Germany. Thanapol took it from there, using interview transcripts from Berger, while working with German dramatist Sarah Israel and his assistant director Peerapol Kijruenpiromsuk. The cast consists of Jens Koch and Luis Quintana from Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe and Jarunun Phantachat, Dujdao Vadhanapakorn and Waywiree Ittianunkul of B-Floor Theatre and independent dance artist and choreographer Vidura Amranand.
With six portable speakers lining up in front of the bare stage, the performance starts as actors come out one by one and, plucking their iPods or phones to these speakers, let the audience discover bits and pieces of what they would hear on their headphones for the rest of the show.
The recorded voices are of the actors themselves but they are likely from actual field research with the type of stories we hear too many times before. Stories from German performers Koch and Quintana are from a European man's point of view -- a guy comes to Thailand just for sex while another falls in love with a sex worker. In turn, the recorded voices from the four actresses are from a Thai woman's perspective -- one talks about what she expects from her customer during sex while another aspires to security in a new life abroad.
While Hipster The King was an simulation of the state of society, Happy Hunting Ground is a challenge for director Thanapol in the sense that movements are entrusted with the role of telling these people's life stories. Those recorded voices have laid down some background and the six performers have taken on from there entirely through movements.
From the sporty costume of the performers, the setting of the performance is presumably a gym, apparently a metaphorical location where the director has six people -- Koch and Quintana as European men and Jarunun, Dujdao, Waywiree and Vidura as Thai women -- come and meet one another, and then fall in love, court, seduce, reject, start a relationship, struggle to make that work, and fail and start all over again.
The movements go exactly along with that line; Thanapol has his performers run diagonally along the same line ceaselessly for the large part of the performance. Both the manner with which they jog -- at times in slow motion and at others of forceful military style -- and order of dominance in the run -- sometimes men in the lead or the other way around -- would continually shift back and forth.
And this is where repetition of movements -- Thanapol's characteristic style, which many could find frustrating -- finally does the trick. After some time, we begin to realise that this physical exertion is actually representational of romantic gestures and stages in relationship. At one point Quintana ran past Dujdao and glanced over suggestively, eventually separating themselves from the group and climbing over one another. Then Koch grabs Waywiree's hand but she rejects him right away. At one point, Quintana lies on his back and slides himself forward while looking upwards flirtatiously at the women passing by.
The repetition not only serves to make Thanapol's language of movements clear as words, but also holds the very essence of these stories: the people who are ceaselessly and desperately hunting for sex, for love, for the right partner and for security in life. We see a guy running meekly after a girl but, a moment later, she is already flirting with another guy, and we realise that the performance has nothing to do with the gym and the act of running at all. We watch a couple climbing over each other awkwardly and realise that's exactly how a couple trying to make their relationship work would look like in concrete form.
The word "happy" in the performance's title turns out to be just a disillusion after all. The happy hunting ground is anywhere else but on Thanapol's stage.
Happy Hunting Ground
is to be staged in Karlsruhe, Germany, from Sept 22-24 and Bern, Switzerland from Sept 29-Oct 1. Visit www.facebook.com/democrazystudio or www.Staatstheater.Karlsruhe.de.
