A Mad World(wind)
When I first came across the play, La Libre Latifah by Aidli Mosbit, I thought I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do to respond to it. I wanted to explore the life of Latifah that wasn’t in the play. I wanted to create a life for her after the play. However, the more I read the play, more ideas started to generate. I thought about creating a social media presence for her. I thought about playing her in real life. I thought about duplicating her; I thought maybe the original Latifah (played by actress Molizah Mohter) can meet her “clones” or fans played by other actresses who look like her or dressed up like her. Too many ideas: a recipe for madness!
A sculpture in Bishan Park.
This was coupled with my proposal about experimenting with nostalgia and augmenting bodies between social media and real life. I really wanted to expand Latifah like how Arsene Lupin was recently remade in a Netflix series, Lupin (2020). I thought that it was an interesting way of keeping our local plays alive and current. Very ambitious, I know. But hey, dream big, eh?
(Before I proceed, I would like to clarify a couple of terms. I used Latifah and Latifah. For convenience, ‘Latifah’ refers to the character and ‘Latifah’ to refer to the play, sometimes both.)
The beginning stage started quite well. I took pictures of some aged neighbourhood and places like the HDBs in Hougang and exercise areas in Bishan. I also took pictures of some sculptures that reminded me of nostalgia.
Picture of a HDB in Hougang.
I had fun during this stage. I had fun trying to create a fictional world from materials in the real world and to create a relationship between Latifah and the audience, especially for those who didn’t read the play or watch the performances in 2003 either in Singapore or in Kuala Lumpur. I took the pictures also because I wanted to document Latifah’s life like how Kemal from Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence did. Those places were nostalgic to me and to some Singaporeans. They hold sentimental value for some of us. Perhaps it could be the same for Latifah herself.
However, a couple of weeks in, I began to doubt my materials. I started to wonder if I am presenting a museum theatre piece. (Thinking back, it could have been a sexy idea had I pursued it.) Also, some dramaturgical questions began to creep up. Questions such as:
Sand writing at Coney Island beach.
- How do I want to set my response piece?
- What are the limitations and potential of the digital medium?
- What aspects of Latifah’s life do I want to present?
- What aspects of her life had been shown?
- Who will be playing Latifah?
- What performance style do I want to present in?
- What am I asking from Latifah?
To answer these questions, I went back to the play and new questions arose. Questions about the theme, characters and performance style kept resurfacing.
- What is Latifah about?
- Who is Latifah? How much do I know about her? Do I know a “Latifah” in my life?
- What about the performance style? How can I use the extra performative elements (video, songs, costumes) in my way?
I ruminated on my proposal.
- Where are the parts about ‘nostalgia’ and the ‘augmentation of bodies’? Have I forgotten all about them?
- How did Aidli Mosbit treat the text and the performative elements?
Ironically, in the midst of my frustration, I saw how limiting my thinking was and therein lay the solutions. It was obvious and I felt ridiculous.
I returned to the play and studied it carefully. The play, Latifah, was dramaturgically quite tight. Aidli Mosbit was very neat with her play text and its staging. The play was dramaturgically quite good. There was a lot to learn from her narrative- and performance-making techniques. I revered her skills so much that I did not want to do the play a disservice by trying to rearrange the scenes or reimagine the performative video elements. It would be a dramaturgical suicide. Therefore, the most plausible “solution” I could think of (in those moment of languor) was to go in the opposite way of how the play was structured; to completely break it apart and to radically reimagine Latifah (the play and character). I thought, “Why not deconstruct completely and then build another story from the fragments? Why disassemble something only to reassemble it again?” And so, I went on my merry way.
Since it was a dramatic style of theatre, I could go post-dramatic. Since there was a linear plot, I could make it post-structural. Since it was centred around a human body, I could use inanimate objects or disembodied body parts to represent the character. Since the play was presentational, I could make it representational. Since there was human language, I ought to break away from that too. It was truly liberating (I even had Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball playing in my mind as I completely deconstruct the play’s structure and narrative.)
What it did was it opened up possibilities for my performance-making aesthetics. I played more with Time and Space. I asked myself questions like:
- How can I play with real and imaginary time?
- With diegetic and non-diegetic sounds?
- With colours?
- With puppetries?
- With language?
I was essentially applying my knowledge of Viewpoints in creating a “language” for my performative response. And to avoid the same mistake I did in the beginning, I kept thinking about Latifah and ensured that I was responding accordingly to its theme, character and performative elements. This was what I did.
Ruzaini in a scene in his Les austres Latifahs performance video presented at The Vault Lite: A Whole New World? Artist-in-Residence Sharing.
I started to translate some of the scenes from the original play. For example, the ‘Test Drive’ scene (the romance / love-making scene between Latifah and her lover, Raj) became a poetry reading about lovemaking juxtaposed against pulsating lights in the dark. The ‘La Libre Latifah’ (the diary scene) became a dance with one arm and its shadow. The drag queen video in ‘Abang Is Alone’ became a scene of a man transforming into semi-drag with a popular Malay song about finding a partner who is faithful. The gossip queens, Cik Ana and the neighbours, were presented as puppets using a broom and a mop speaking in “Latifahs.” I kept experimenting until I had too much material. Then came the second problem: finding a narrative to string the materials together.
I was aware that my audience may not be familiar with Latifah (the play and the character) hence they may not get the references of what I was doing. Or they do and still be lost to the references I am making. I asked myself again: “Does that matter? And if so, how much do I care about that?” It was back to the drawing board.
After much deliberation, I decided to find a middle ground; to present Latifah (the play and the character) where the audience may be familiar with and also to introduce a new one. I wanted an esoteric presentation of the character and my response piece. I wanted the audience to be lost yet had enough attention to check in once in a while. I wanted the audience to experience something new and hopefully appreciate it, even though it was far removed from the original. I guess I was also trying to also be Romeo Castellucci about it. I was, of course, curious to know the audience’s response so I thought I asked during the Q&A.
(The response I received was… lukewarm. They didn’t really respond to it as how I wanted to but it’s alright. It was weird. They might have needed some time to think about it. Or they might have hated it and forgot all about it. I don’t know. I may come back to this.)
I would like to say that by this mad whirlwind point, when everything (presentation style, finding a narrative, dramaturgical conundrums) was confusing for me, I felt closer to text than when I started. It was bizarre. I felt I was really exploring the limits of what stories I could tell, and how to tell them. I was excavating, discovering and putting together a puzzle of the essence of the play and its character, and then regrowing them. The mad amount of material generated all came from within Latifah. At first, I thought that I was going further from Latifah (the play and character) when in fact, I was going deeper into Latifah’s (the play and the character) “world”.
Ruzaini in a scene in his Les autres Latifahs performance video presented at The Vault Lite: A Whole New World? Artist-in-Residence Sharing.
Bonus: I realised that in my exploration of materials for the response piece I was also actually experimenting with the idea of “augmenting the bodies”. True that it was very far from what I started. It wasn’t two bodies – one in the physical space and the other in the virtual. But it was breaking the body apart and taking parts of it on/off screen. It was “augmenting the souls” into different bodies. I somehow managed to tackle the “augmentation of bodies” part of my proposal albeit it being more philosophical on this aspect. And the same for nostalgia. ‘Nostalgia’, as a concept, is about Time and Space. Nostalgia happens in the past and in the mental space whereas the person recollecting it is in the present and living in the physical space. Nostalgia is a narrative constructed by the mind, pieced together by shards of memories that contain images and sound. Nostalgia is created by disembodied memories. Nostalgia is all about going into a different Time and Space. I am actually, unknowingly and deeply exploring nostalgia, augmenting bodies and Latifah (the play and character). In short, I was keeping in line with fulfilling my proposal’s objective after all. Voila! My worries slowly eased up and I continued to play. The last bit was finding a narrative which I found was the easiest of the Herculean tasks.
In the end, I would say that the final product was an homage to the writer, Aidli Mosbit, and her play. To me, Latifah was a story about someone finding her identity and herself. The writer took us on a journey of Latifah’s life and ended her play by asking us to do the same. To discover who we are. To make mistakes and learn from them. To keep going even when the going gets tough. To brave through the unknown. To look at the pieces of our lives and make memories from them. To create a film out of what we choose to remember and present. And I felt I had done exactly that. Je suis content!
It was impossible to imagine this leg of the journey when I started. It was very far from where I thought I would be. The paths that led me to this leg were unnerving, stressful, terrifying and unknown. (I said paths because it was a rabbit hole.) And through them I learnt more about the play, and also discover my voice as an artist. An artist who is becoming surer of his performance aesthetics and ways of working. An artist who is deepening his craft. Thinking back, it didn’t matter if the response piece (finally called Les Autres Latifah (the other Latifahs)) wasn’t well-received by the audience. It was after all an experimental response. What mattered more was the learning process, like how Latifah (the play and the character) had taught me. Indeed, it was a mad world(wind) of a journey. But I would do it all over again.
Ruzaini Mazani, Reflections on Les autres Latifahs
Les autres Latifahs by Ruzaini Mazani was developed under The Vault Lite: A Whole New World in respond to Aidil ‘Alin’ Mosbit’s play, La Libre Latifah. This edition of The Vault: Lite ran from January to February 2021. Find out more about The Vault: Lite and Ruzaini’s work here.
