Alice Canton, creator of Orangutan, has woven a story with many threads. It's a story that brings together Alice's fascination with Eastern storytelling, her mother's journey from Malaysia, and her own journey to Bali where she lived with a master mask carver.
Why did you decide to create Orangutan?
I’ve always been interested in Eastern and cross-cultural storytelling. My mum is Chinese and from Malaysia, so I’ve always had a strong pull to Eastern storytelling. Probably just from growing up and my mum telling me stories.
I am also a percussionist, and played in a Gamelan orchestra (an indigenous Balinese orchestra) when I was at university. I always had an interest in and pull to Balinese storytelling. It’s interesting though, I always learnt Gamelan from a musical and theoretical perspective, not a performative perspective. That is really unusual, and Balinese people find that really funny. The idea that I would learn Gamelan without learning shadow puppetry. So that was where the seed was planted. And through study and my career I did a lot of mask work and commedia. Naturally there is a tie between the archetypes of Commedia and the archetypes of existing Balinese masks. And so when I was at drama school I actively looked for connections between the two (commedia and Balinese masks). I’m interested in breaking through eastern and western forms of storytelling, and looking for similarities and exploring where they are quite different. I chased an opportunity and went to Bali. I was trying to investigate indigenous storytelling from that region. I lived there for 3 months. When I was there, I was learning carving off a master mask carver – Nyoman. He taught me a lot. |
Alice studied mask carving in Bali in 2011
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Did you learn just the process of mask making, or the performance too?
I Iearnt a particular style of dancing while I was there. Went to lots of temple ceremonies. Went to lots of friends of friends and family karaoke nights. Did A little bit of Wayang Kulik – Balinese shadow puppetry. I learnt about the performance, the carving, and also more about the history and spirituality. Because mask is associated with spirituality you have a relationship with the mask, the person who carved the mask, with the teacher who taught the carver, and with your family.
When I was in Bali it was the first time I made the realisation that a mask maker makes their masks in the likeness of their own face. Everyone does this in life – we make what we see. But with the craft of mask making, just look at a mask and you know who has carved it. Carvers all have a particular style – the eyebrows, the nose, how light or dark the skin is. Even neutral mask. It’s supposed to be neutral, but ultimately the face has to come from somewhere. It is still modelled off someone’s face. So all this stuff started to unlock for me. I realised I had been a masked performer for so long, and I had never had a relationship to the masks I worked with.
When I was with Nyoman I carved lots of masks, and one was this Orangutan. I had hoped to take all these masks home to NZ and craft a show out of them. That was in 2011.
When I was in Bali it was the first time I made the realisation that a mask maker makes their masks in the likeness of their own face. Everyone does this in life – we make what we see. But with the craft of mask making, just look at a mask and you know who has carved it. Carvers all have a particular style – the eyebrows, the nose, how light or dark the skin is. Even neutral mask. It’s supposed to be neutral, but ultimately the face has to come from somewhere. It is still modelled off someone’s face. So all this stuff started to unlock for me. I realised I had been a masked performer for so long, and I had never had a relationship to the masks I worked with.
When I was with Nyoman I carved lots of masks, and one was this Orangutan. I had hoped to take all these masks home to NZ and craft a show out of them. That was in 2011.
So how did you turn all of this into a piece of theatre?
I wanted to create something that was experiential, and really immersive. In the first season of the work, in the theatre we controlled the temperature of the room, the sounds, the smells…the smell of the bark when audiences are walking into the theatre - all the unseen parts of the production.
With mask work you never know how it will impact people, because so much of it is them projecting their own experiences onto the face of the mask. You get the most interesting readings of a work. I think that is why the work is so still. Some might argue that it’s a show where not much happens. But that’s kind of the whole point of it. It is a show where not much happens. |
Alice with her mask teacher, Nyoman Setiawan
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How will you change the show now you are staging it outside of the theatre?
Initially I thought touring it might compromise a few of those things. But ultimately I think it is an amazing opportunity to try and see if the show holds up in different spaces like school halls and libraries. To take it out of the theatre and see how it does. We can’t be precious about the spaces in which we create work, otherwise we’re only ever going to put work on in a black box theatre.
Brad Gledhill and I are working together to orchestrate a similar kind of immersive experience for students. At the moment we think there will be black curtains put up around the performance space. We want it to feel intimate so audiences can sit up really close, but use the black behind to make the space feel as big as it needs to feel too.
It’s a tricky thing to do. The lights play a really important part of that. Brad is a big fan of side lights, and in the theatre there is also a single spot light for the cage as well. When the lights hit the bark, the bark warms up, and the smell of it starts to come out.
The space needs to transform into three places –the jungle, the cage, the sanctuary, and back out in the wild. Each of those environments has a different lighting state and feeling in the theatre, so it is our challenge to recreate those quickly in schools – we don’t have 13 hours to pack-in all the gear. So we need to have a plan. We think when we head into shows we’ll bring in scaffolding, heavy curtains, and a big pile of bark. Oh, and some mandarins.
Brad Gledhill and I are working together to orchestrate a similar kind of immersive experience for students. At the moment we think there will be black curtains put up around the performance space. We want it to feel intimate so audiences can sit up really close, but use the black behind to make the space feel as big as it needs to feel too.
It’s a tricky thing to do. The lights play a really important part of that. Brad is a big fan of side lights, and in the theatre there is also a single spot light for the cage as well. When the lights hit the bark, the bark warms up, and the smell of it starts to come out.
The space needs to transform into three places –the jungle, the cage, the sanctuary, and back out in the wild. Each of those environments has a different lighting state and feeling in the theatre, so it is our challenge to recreate those quickly in schools – we don’t have 13 hours to pack-in all the gear. So we need to have a plan. We think when we head into shows we’ll bring in scaffolding, heavy curtains, and a big pile of bark. Oh, and some mandarins.
Once the orangutan learns that food drops from the sky when she acts in a particular way, she adopts that learned behaviour for the rest of the story. Even when released back out into the wild.
For this schools tour, I’m totally fine with exposing the mechanics of storytelling. On the one hand with an immersive experience there can be that delight from the audience, that feeling of ‘how did they do that?’ and it’s magical. But on the other hand there’s power in seeing that the work is just me working with a mask, and that’s about it. |
"In the theatre we controlled the temperature of the room, the sounds, the smells...
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That’s the technical side of things, but what about the story? Will that change?
Approaching this tour I’ve asked myself how much I should keep and what I should change. In the original story I always wondered if it was missing a beat. If there was this next step where she became so human like that she busts out the walls of the sanctuary and goes running through the streets. Eating rubbish and running wild. I never took the show there in the original performance – to that place where we really see a transformation into a human, a grotesque human. And of course she would be shot, and wake up back in the wild. And in my head that is something that has been missing from her story. I can picture her on top of a car bonnet eating cigarette butts.
So I think we’ll push it a bit further. But the narrative is essentially the same.
So I think we’ll push it a bit further. But the narrative is essentially the same.