by Bilqis Hijjas

Toilet
Co-presented by Pentas Project and KLPac
20-24 May 2009
Pentas 2, KLPac

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On the way to see director Loh Kok Man’s new version of his work, now entitled Toilet, I was expecting, or perhaps hoping for, lots of grit and grime, blood and guts all over the walls, grotesquerie and grimness. What I found was altogether different: light polished vignettes, all scrubbed and disinfected. And while I enjoyed the production in the end, I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing.

Toilet began with an ensemble dance section, or at least, the dancers were dancing, and Gan Hui Yee, the only non-dancer in the cast, was providing a heavy posed counterpoint to the dancers’ romantic repeated phrase of little movements – feet padding rapidly on wooden benches, lips administering quick kisses to their own forearms, bodies hopping lightly on and off the benches.

Tin Tan Chai Chen and Gan Hui Yee

Although a late addition to the cast to replace actor Berg Lee, Hui Yee quickly established herself as the grounded earthiness of the production, the only one to whom my original concept of the work could still apply. Soulful-eyed Louise Yow, veteran of Kwang Tung Dance Troupe who has worked with Charlie Tan Dance Theatre, Low Shee Hoe, and Musical on Stage, was by contrast the most ethereal of the group – her extremely slender form and easy extensions always controlled by her technique, but threatening at any moment to go drifting into the stratosphere.

But Louise and Hui Yee never got to face off in Toilet. Hui Yee was paired most often with Tin Tan Chai Chen, a doll-faced dancer with a committed and confident theatrical presence in scenes which require considerable physical stamina, such as the slow-motion sequence in which a banana-gobbling Hui Yee pops Tin Tan’s yellow balloon, or Tin Tan gets her own back by bullying Hui Yee with domineering singing.

Louise Yow

Louise meanwhile shared several scenes with Leng Poh Gee, who started his dance career with Dua Space Dance Theatre and is currently a tutor and choreographer in the University of Malaya’s dance programme. In their first scene together, Louise and Poh Gee dance by themselves on their own wooden benches, a yearning phrase of balances and suspensions. I found it particularly difficult not to be mesmerised by Louise’s long lines and the elegant grace of her transitions. Poh Gee and Louise’s second scene together is a duet, full of clinging drags, close body work and lots of variations on the basic baby carry. Physically the sequence is interesting and it was well performed but it lacked convincing passion, as did the scene that preceded it, in which all the dancers kiss, then trade partners. Only Hui Yee’s character, rejected by the kissers, watching but uninvolved, strikes a chord.

Amy Len battling her solo

And then there’s Amy Len. One of Kuala Lumpur’s most powerful dancers, Amy made her mark quietly in other scenes, but came to her own in an increasingly frantic solo against a backdrop of repetitive self-conscious narrative voiced by the other performers. The text, drawn from Peter Handke’s play Self-Accusation, documents the growing self-awareness of the narrator, and his subsequent descent into social anomie and existential crisis. Against this relentless wall of noise, Amy slices and twists, twitches, contracts, in battle with herself, dancing to and against a rising crescendo of music and sound and flashing lights, falling to the floor and dragging herself up again, to eventual collapse. It was a performance that had Best Featured Dancer stamped all over it.

But for me the best performer in this often baffling production was the Ng Chor Guan’s two-faced music. A melodious tinkle of pianos and birdsong dominated many of the scenes. (I was impressed that the birdsong was locally recorded rather than pulled from the usual catalog of sound fx – the call of the black-naped oriole was unmistakeable.) The transitions between scenes interrupted the lightness with raucuous brass, the sound of the backwash of water, whistle-blowing, the crash of construction noises and the feeling of being under a train, all more commonplace and toilet-like.

The most memorable and magical moment of the production was entirely due to the combination of music with stage and lighting design, rather than with the intrusion of any human performers. Scores of different-sized disco balls descended from the ceiling, and to a brilliant tinkling score, they revolved at their own speed and heights, now all lit, now only some, showering the audience with shifting polka dots of light. The scene strained the barriers of belief, at certain moments it came dangerously close to the twee soulless spectacle of the sound, light and fountain show down the road at Taman Tasik Titiwangsa. But those gorgeous musical disco balls, they could not help but enchant.

The conclusion of Toilet

The risks of that scene were repeated across all of Toilet. At times the production bordered on kitsch and predictability, then it seemed to rescue itself. The performers were all individually skilled but they occasionally failed to convince. The production was enjoyable, and yet it somehow missed its mark. In its polished performances and sterile set I could not sense the ugliest gestures of the excretion of body waste. Perhaps the work should have been named something closer to “Hidden Desires”. Perhaps it was better left untitled.

But with such a strong cast and direction, I would go and see Toilet over and over again. And not just for the musical disco balls.

(BH)