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Bilqis Hijjas and Carmen Nge offer a heartfelt conversational review of Marion D’Cruz’s Solo Show ItSelf TerJadi, celebrating an artist they deeply admire.
This series is completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship. It was first edited and published by Eksentrika. The audio version of this interview is available for listening, through Eksentrika’s Spotify account [WIP] Arts & Culture Conversations.
[Petaling Jaya, December 2024.]
00:00:00 Bilqis
My name is Bilqis Hijjas. I am here with Carmen Nge, art educator and critic, and today we are going to discuss Marion D’Cruz’s solo performance ItSelf TerJadi. This was presented in December last year in the studio at Five Arts Centre, having been developed from material that Marion wrote during the pandemic, as a kind of staged reading. Carmen, what would you call it?
00:00:31 Carmen
In the format of a lecture performance, but with a little bit of movement thrown in, I guess – and multimedia design.
00:00:41 Bilqis
Yes, she’s sitting at a desk for most of it and she’s reading from a script.
Carmen
Yes.
Bilqis
And then at some point she leaves the desk, she walks around.
Carmen
Lies on the floor.
Bilqis
Lies on the floor. Does dance at one very particular point. Marion D’Cruz, of course, being known as primarily a dancer, also a founding member of Five Arts Centre, and… an art provocateur?
00:01:12 Carmen
Yeah, I guess she would be okay with that term.
Bilqis
So what were your first impressions seeing this show?
Carmen
Knowing Marion for many decades as I was her student, I think one of the first things that came to mind is the generation that she’s from. And to me, it’s sort of a best expression of the feminist idea of the personal is political. So because it’s about her journey through her treatment and recovery of breast cancer, and also her life as a woman primarily, aging woman, living mostly alone, and also talking quite a bit about her mother. So there’s a lot of gender themes, woman kind of issues. I wouldn’t say a feminist slant, but maybe more of a gender consciousness. And a lot of that was sort of brought through the personal stories and the personal experiences. So it wasn’t very aesthetically devised, in my opinion, because the content probably overshadowed any kind of dance or movement – because the performance was mostly talking. And a little bit of singing, I think, at some point.
00:02:31 Bilqis
There was quite a lot a lot of singing, actually; four or five different instances of singing. We know her as a dancer. But obviously the kind of dance that she has always presented to us, or at least in the last 25 years, has been the kind that a lot of people will be like, “That is dance, meh?” So much talking, so much, you know, stuff that you don’t think of as dance – so in that way if you take a very broad view of what dance is obviously anything can be dance – but I am continually surprised by how much song is involved.
00:03:05 Carmen
I like that you mentioned that because I think, in a weird way, the song is a kind of a soundscape for the experiences that she wanted to convey. She does like music, and sings a lot at home. So to me, it kind of was like a spillover from her own life, her real life into, like, her stage life. A kind of glimpse into what she normally does, that people don’t really realize or know so much about her. And most of the songs, I think, were songs from her childhood that her mother sang to her… and more personal songs. And of course, there were some, some I think was there like a Michael Jackson—
00:03:46 Bilqis
There was something like a Michael Jackson dance break but that was a video of other people dancing.
Carmen
Yes, yes.
Bilqis
So she presents it as a series of vignettes that she’s reading from a script.
Carmen
Yes.
Bilqis
To give a little bit of background on the development of this: initially she wrote it kind of in the way that it’s presented. So the vignettes are not connected to each other really in any very obvious way, although there is a thematic connection. Its first incarnation was as a reading over Zoom during the pandemic – when we were, I think, still in lockdown–
00:04:22 Carmen
Yes.
00:04:26 Bilqis
–before she was encouraged by other people to take it into a more kind of traditional performance format. So I feel like there’s a lot of holdover from its first incarnation as a reading of text, which I’m not averse to. And I think when you say that this is very much a glimpse of Marion’s normal life and herself as a person: she’s a person who likes to sing. She’s also a person who really likes to tell anecdotes.
Carmen
That’s true. That’s true. Very true.
Bilqis
So this feels like, and a lot of these stories feel like, the anecdotes that you hear from, you know, from her or from other people in that they are, they’ve been obviously told several times. They have been polished up for heightened dramatic impact – with this enormous sort of energy and joie de vivre, which makes you feel like an audience member, even when you’re kind of just listening to Marion on a normal day, not on stage. So there’s very much a blurring of lines between Marion the performer – or this as an artwork – and her life.
00:05:43 Carmen
Yes, definitely.
Bilqis
And she goes into a lot of very, very personal details. How did you feel about that?
00:05:50 Carmen
Well, I did read the script in the early iterations. So initially, it felt more like a written text because there was no discussion about performing it at that stage. It felt weird to me to read it because I felt it was so dramatic with a lot of performance potential. So when she was finally going to perform it, I thought, okay, I think this is the best vehicle for this text or for this kind of experience or stories. So I thought it was a good thing that she actually did the performance.
All the personal, some very graphic depictions of body parts, things cancer, like that – I think it was sort of timely, it fits the zeitgeist that we’re in now, where women, I think, are coming out more to say, we got to reclaim how we talk about our bodies publicly. It’s not a problem if we talk, you know, about, breasts or vagina, you know, or, things that we go through bodily as women – which usually we have to keep secret or only talk among friends.
It kind of made sense why it was so well received, her show, by the audiences. Because I think a lot of women who came felt like, wow, this is out in the open and we can laugh about it! We can also feel funny, but it’s okay kind of thing. So I think that part was the most probably like radical edge of the show. Maybe it wouldn’t been so radical to a younger person who may be used to that. But I think for people like my generation or Marion’s generation, it did feel really, yeah, like very, I don’t know, confessional in a rather uncomfortable but necessary way.
00:07:35 Bilqis
But it was also very funny. She intended it to be very funny. She is someone who I think has an enormous instinct for what is entertaining in an anecdote. So she picks up on the fact that we are somehow titillated by the idea of… At one point, she graphically talks about putting her fingers into her own anus to dig out her poo because she’s constipated because of the chemotherapy that she’s undergoing. Obviously, she kind of enjoys telling it in a way that she enjoys shocking people.
00:08:09 Carmen
Definitely think some people do not know how to respond, but because it’s public and you’re among others who laugh… So in a way, the collective consciousness gives a kind of okay to whatever discomfort you might be feeling.
00:08:28 Bilqis
Well, I talked to my mum about it. And my mother is a breast cancer survivor. And she’s also had a single mastectomy in the same way that Marion has. Her response was that she felt that her breast cancer journey had been very different from Marion. It’s not intended to be a universal story, obviously. It is a very personal one. And interleaved with this story of breast cancer, which overlapped with the pandemic, is stories about her mother, who had very serious dementia in the last few years of her life and who Marion cared for. And this was obviously a very challenging experience. And also her experience of the death of her husband, 18 years previous to this performance. And all of these experiences of loss – of her mother, of her husband, of her left breast – which informed this narrative and bring everything together and also overlaid with our experience of the pandemic, which also was a kind of loss.
00:09:34 Carmen
For me, the cancer took centre stage and other things were sort of circling the cancer. The kind of reflection of that bubble that we were in during COVID: so you are trapped in your house, you are recovering or in the middle of recovering from cancer, while dealing with chemo, post chemo, your partner has passed away, you are living alone, your mother also passed away and you are really like alone. Although she did say she’s not lonely, she’s just alone, right, but—
00:10:08 Bilqis
—and she often mentions how much support she gets from her family and her friends as well, and how much they’re with her on her cancer journey. And yet that does contrast with this feeling of being alone a lot of the time, yeah.
00:10:19 Carmen
Maybe that’s also why I felt like the staging made sense. Because it was her sitting alone at her desk in a pretty kind of cavernous space, because a lot of things were removed around her. So there wasn’t a lot of props. Okay, there were a few props, but not too many. And you felt like she was distant, but then the visuals and some of the multimedia brought her feeling very alive and kind of in our face a little bit.
00:10:47 Bilqis
So the projection visuals were by Shamsul Azhar and they were projected in two sides of the stage, and there was also at some point projection onto the floor. And a lot of the projection was the text that she was reading, but the text had been quite animated and arranged. And Marion told me that there were lots of cues because she and the projection had to cue off each other, so while it seems like quite a stripped-down show, there was actually quite a lot of choreography in that way between the different elements. And there’s a lot of quite outré animation in which, like, boobs bounce across the screen, and, like, boobs go into space, and boobs grow sort of Fibonacci sequences. It’s very playful and it’s very, it does serve to lighten the tone, sometimes, of the stories, which – despite the fact that they’re often very funny – might become… it is in some ways a very dark show.
00:11:59 Carmen
For me, it surprisingly moved towards a pretty dark ending. But generally the overall tone, because of the multimedia, it had a lot of levity and also the multimedia gave it a different way of entering the cancer discussion. Because it wasn’t just light-hearted, but it was very visual. So most of what Marion was doing was talking, right, and sometimes when you talk I think, because Marion doesn’t necessarily have, like, actor training, so I think some of the things she said maybe didn’t feel very acted – meaning like voice acted – and to me that was how the sound design and also the multimedia design kind of helped to supplement some of that. Like, some of the visuals gave us a kind of reprieve from some of the heaviness. Because when I think… because I’ve read the script and also listened to it without any multimedia, and you can totally read it a totally different way! Like, it’s not funny.
So when she was talking, if you remember that, there was one scene where she was talking about all the drugs she’s on. Like all the names of the different drugs–
Bilqis
She sings it!
Carmen
Oh, that’s right, she sings it. Yeah, so if she didn’t sing it and you read all those drug names, it gets really terrible, I mean you feel really terrible. Like, there’s so many drugs you have to take, right? And there’s a kind of a repetitiveness to it that doesn’t feel very pleasant. But when you sing it, when there’s a lot of multimedia or all these drugs, like, you know, moving around, being animated, then it suddenly feels like, you know, a little nice, a little short animated film – which is funny, you know.
00:13:36 Bilqis
I feel like it’s very TikTok friendly, in that because it is broken up into these little short segments, you could take any little short segment by itself and kind of put it online, and people would watch it for the 32 seconds that are necessary or whatever. Did you feel that there were parts that, because of the vignette nature of it, that didn’t connect for you?
00:14:02 Carmen
There are times where I felt I was going along a certain path, a certain emotional path and then when it gets really sort of strong, it brought me to a certain kind of emotional state, and then it suddenly swung to something totally different – and then I felt a little bit like jarred out of it. I don’t know if that was done intentionally so that I wouldn’t dwell so much on one thing, but certainly it didn’t make me feel the emotional sort of sustenance because I was constantly being jarred from one thing to another. So that was the only downside I felt.
00:14:36 Bilqis
Yes, there were moments when it felt like it might have shied away from its own theatrical potential. But then because the material is so very emotional, it is easy, I think, to let it tip over into melodrama. And I think they were just very conscious as an entire creative team about not allowing that to happen and by keeping it present and by forcing you not to relax into familiarity. So it wanted to keep surprising you.
00:15:15 Carmen
I also think it’s very Marion to not let you relax! So I’m not against it. It’s just that there are times when I was like, just give me a little bit of a few seconds to dwell on it, can’t you? And then boom, you know, something else. I think it’s structurally necessary because one, as you said, the melodrama, we don’t want to fall into it. But also the other thing is, I do sometimes wonder what it’s like for her. I’m sure it’s also emotional. So to constantly have that level of emotional intensity for her may be also maybe a bit much. So then the jarring also is for her to have some kind of break. The jarring also is coming visually through the multimedia. So then she doesn’t have to talk immediately, kind of thing.
00:16:02 Bilqis
It’s her first solo show since Gostan Forward which was 15 years ago, maybe. It does require a lot of stamina as a performer. The show itself is about one hour long, [and] the very personal emotional content of the stories… Yeah, I’m not sure how much as a performer she is able to just think, “Now I’m performing and I don’t feel these things that I’m talking about as I’m talking about them, I am just in the moment of performing this anecdote rather than actually thinking about the content…” But it is an emotional experience for the audience. She is a very powerful performer. She certainly compels your attention throughout the one hour. There’s never a moment when you feel that your attention is drifting off. You are always there with her wherever she wants to take you with the anecdote that she’s telling you. And in the end, it is incredibly powerful. It’s very moving.
00:17:04 Carmen
Yeah. I did hear feedback from people who said, you know, like, why didn’t she dance more, because the one moment when she did dance, which is really short, people liked it so much! The reason why I really like that scene is also because she didn’t dance at all, and then she finally did which is close to the end, then you felt like, like okay, I’m getting my money’s worth or something.
But I think the other thing for me personally is, I mean, she’s 70 and we rarely see women of that age dancing in whatever form. So I felt like if she had maybe danced a little bit more, it would be a little bit of a testament to, you know, “I’m 70 and I still dance.” But then that will be not like Marion to conform to what people would want her to do. Their expectations. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s like complex, right? So, she probably also resists doing what people expect. So, not dancing, I think, is a really strong act of resistance for someone like her. Everybody expects her to dance. She doesn’t dance. She reads.
She also is trying to resist her own obsolescence. She’s getting older. She doesn’t perform much. So it could be a weird way of reclaiming her body through her voice. And I think this was something I learned from watching other Five Arts shows by like Ren Xin’s dance performances where I learned that your voice is also part of your body, so why can’t it be part of body performance or dance performance or movement work? So that made me think, later, like okay, okay, well, that makes sense. Marion was performing through her voice because maybe her body is something she didn’t want to be the core vehicle to convey whatever she was going through.
00:18:52 Bilqis
Although a lot of the stories are about her body, the cancer, and about how in some ways, you know, your body has betrayed you by having created this thing. The title of the work ItSelf TerJadi refers to the way that the cancer just menjelma (manifested), you know, it incarnates itself within you, and it is your body incarnating itself in a way that is designed to kill you!
The decision not to dance until the very end, it is a very powerful choice. It is a powerful scene anyway: it’s… it’s the emotional climax of the show. She talks about how she is lying on her sofa in her living room in the morning, and she smells her husband’s cologne which always used to introduce him coming down the stairs. And of course, he’s not there, because he’s been dead 18 years. She closes her eyes and she speaks to him. And she eventually asks him, “Are you here to take me away? I wish you would.” And then there is no more text. And then there is a very romantic Malay song which plays, a nostalgic Malay song, and she gets up and appears to be dancing with him, and then sort of reaches out into the air and brings her hand towards her face, as if both to capture the smell of his cologne but also to capture the person who is no longer there… And, you know, it’s incredibly touching…
Yeah, and I think it’s really interesting your point about what Ren Xin was saying because Ren Xin’s point was that a lot of dancers are afraid to use their voices because they feel like they somehow have no claim to being able to speak and to sing. Whereas to Marion the singing seems to come so naturally and she seems so much more comfortable with that. She talks about… there’s another anecdote where she’s catching a frog in her kitchen, and she talks about how much her body hurts, and how difficult it is as a woman over 70. The entire piece is also about losing your capacity as a dancing body, and that as an extra layer of loss, and that has really defined her for so long. She is Marion D’Cruz, the Dancer.
And one of the most interesting anecdotes – and I think one of the anecdotes that she enjoys telling the most, because I’d heard it from her before she wrote this text – was about how she goes to her surgeon to discuss the mastectomy, and she discovers that her surgeon saw her performing Urn Piece in Experimental Theater at Universiti Malaya in the 1980s, and how blown away she is by this. You know, not to be too, like, pop psychological about it, but I think it’s also because, you know, when she lies on that table to have her breast taken away by this woman, she also does it in the knowledge that she is – to the woman who is doing it and to herself and to the world! – she is still Marion the Dancer, she is first and foremost Marion the Dancer, and I think that’s important to her.
00:22:22 Carmen
I never thought about that. That’s a good connection. I did think when she was doing the dance with Krishen – don’t forget she sprayed some perfume into the air just before she did the dance.
00:22:37 Bilqis
Which you assume is his cologne.
00:22:39 Carmen
Yes, it is. So she was saying, I cannot spray too much because there’s not much left. But for me, that scene, what was most amazing about it is, I don’t think it’s ever happened in theatre or performance where you have all your senses, right? Okay, other than touch, we can’t touch her. But you have the smell, which is… you don’t have smell ever in shows, rarely, where the smell is central to the story. So then you have the smell, you have sound, you have visuals. And of course, she’s simulating touch and things like that.
That to me was the moment when I felt it was beautiful. It was romantic. It was sad. I cried. But at some point, I also realized she was saying like, take me away to death. So that was that dark part that we didn’t have to think about so much because we were very enveloped in that very nice bubble of romance and sweetness and all.
To me, the edge, the darkness that you’re talking about, and that was closer to the end too. So the general feeling for me was, where is this going to go now? And I think the final, one of the final, slides was something like… like there’s no point to resistance or something, right?
Bilqis
Resistance is futile and resilience is futile.
00:23:54 Carmen
So that was why I felt like, whoa, okay…
00:24:02 Bilqis
Yeah, it’s interesting that she leaves us with us with that. Previous to that, she talks a little bit about transformation. She talks a lot about losing her confidence and becoming fearful.
00:24:14 Carmen
If we were to think of her life and her work as being very much about provoking, resisting, fighting, questioning, upending established hierarchies, perceptions, expectations, whatever… I guess it makes sense that if you were to transform and evolve, you would evolve away from that? Because that’s what you were right? The flip side of that would be acceptance and going with the flow or no need to fight already, you know.
00:24:47 Bilqis
But then I feel, Marion, no need to fight, might as well be dead! There are things that are integral to you as a person and that if you lose these things, what are you? Who are you? There’s so much loss. What remains after all of this loss?
00:25:05 Carmen
She does say at some point, I think, “I can’t go back to the old Marion anymore.”
00:25:10 Bilqis
So is this an exciting new moment for Marion? She says this will be her last performance, I think. I’m not sure that we will ever see it again. I think a lot of people wanted to see it. As far as I recall, it was sold out.
Carmen
Yes, that’s right.
Bilqis
It was in Five Arts Centre black box which is very small, so the audiences were very limited. Which made me feel very grateful to be among the few people who saw it. But also I think it just doesn’t work in a bigger format. You can’t imagine her doing it even in a 300-person theater.
Carmen
No. Oh, no, no.
Bilqis
Like it has to be a very very small, personal, intimate, very immediate experience of her. I’m not sure that it can be a more accessible, more widely distributed format unless it’s digital and not live.
Carmen
To me, some of the sensory aspects or tactile aspects would be lost if it was digital as well. I mean, certainly, you wouldn’t be able to smell the perfume. You wouldn’t feel her pain, I guess.
The other funny thing, she’s also wearing like pajamas…
00:26:23 Bilqis
Which have vertical stripes on them and they’re black and gray. And in a way, it makes her look like a convict.
00:26:30 Carmen
That’s right. I was going to say more like prisoner. She’s imprisoned in her own world, story, body, pain, grief. I don’t know if I like that prisoner, convict kind of visual metaphor.
00:26:45 Bilqis
She also wears her trademark hat.
00:26:47 Carmen
Yeah. The hat was good because it kind of made me think about when she was going through chemo and she lost her hair. So the hat made me think about that. The pyjamas, I think, because she spent a lot of time at home during COVID, so she was in pyjamas all day. So I understand that part. The striped pyjamas…
00:27:04 Bilqis
The convict metaphor, I’m not sure, is necessary. They may just have been her been her favorite pajamas. Who knows?
Carmen
Mmm.
00:27:15 Bilqis
Marian is a very form-focused artist. She’s always been interested in upending the forms of performance, also creating structures for herself and for other people to make more unexpected decisions in the form of the art that they’re presenting. How did you feel about the choices that she made around form and structure in this performance?
00:27:48 Carmen
Okay, well, on the one hand, you have the lecture performance format, which she ostensibly seems to be abiding by, by having her sit at the table. She’s reading from a script. She’s practically being more, like, word heavy or text heavy rather than movement or visual. I mean, meaning she’s not the one generating the visuals. But then I think the other interesting thing is she’s not really following the form that much as well. Because for me, the lecture performance format is very intellectual. It’s designed to be that way because of the term lecture, so you’re going to deliver a lecture, you’re going to give us some groundbreaking insight we didn’t know before, and it’s going to be rather heady, a lot of visuals, a lot of text, basically a lot of info coming at us. And the performance is in the performance of data or how the data or the information is presented.
She does have a lot of data or information in her show, but I don’t think it’s designed to be very intellectual. So she’s not looking at herself or her experiences, cancer, etc., from a very kind of analytical lens per se. So it is very personal, as I said earlier, designed to be very accessible, I think, because it’s the first time I’ve seen a Marion show where when it ended I felt like I understood everything and I got it. There wasn’t a moment when I was thinking, okay, I need to, you know, go back and mull on this some more, I need to figure out what was this really all about…
So to me, it felt very straightforward, almost literal and very accessible; meaning, accessible to anyone who maybe have never even seen a dance show, or gone to an arts performance. Part of the accessibility is because there’s a lot of text, so the text explicates and elaborates. The movement, also, is very, I guess literal. She’s dancing with her husband, you know, in absentia and it didn’t really feel very abstract in the way I think of dance. So in that sense I feel it is her most accessible work compared to other works, and might also explain why there were a lot of people who came to a show who may not necessarily be the typical arts audiences. And that could be a good thing, because maybe at her age, I don’t know, I feel like, you know, is there a need to constantly be like obtuse and abstract and difficult to understand? Maybe not. But maybe it’s also the nature of the content. So maybe there’s no desire to make cancer into a very abstract thing with a very convoluted form to convey that abstract thing. And it’s not abstract at all for her. It’s real, right?
That is my only feeling about the show. I would have liked there to be a little bit more moments where I would have some grey area to dwell on or some gaps where I would then have to fill in myself. I think those are the things that I kind of miss when I think about her previous shows. This show didn’t really have that. Probably the only area I would have those kind of moments was in the multimedia design, because I felt that multimedia had a lot more looseness to it. Obviously, it’s mostly just sound and visual, didn’t really have a lot of words, so you can read it how you want to read it. It’s funny, but also at times you can kind of have like a meta-analysis of why these visuals in this way… But that to me was just like an overlay, not necessarily the core of the show.
00:31:25 Bilqis
Yes, when you think back to her previous major work, so Gostan Forward, a lot of it is exposition, as in this show. And that is reasonably clear, but because it’s interleaved with excerpts from the shows that she’s talking about, some of which are quite opaque in some ways, then you get that interesting combination of content and exposition and this much more mysterious material that has multiple potentials and goes in multiple directions and that requires you to, as you mentioned, fill in the gaps a little bit for yourself.
Everyone seemed to enjoy it! Yes. And if you think of Marion being a kind of very crowd-pleasing performer – that’s not what you always think of with her. So that’s possibly a surprise with this format. Or maybe there is something to do with our collective experience of having all gone through the pandemic, which gives us a certain degree of empathy with the material that she has.
What [impact] do you think the other people mentioned in the creative team had to affect this work? I mean, there are various slightly cutesy titles that they’ve been provided with. So Janet Pillai is the Provocateur. Charlene Rajendran is titled as the Constant. We might think of both of these roles as sort of dramaturgical roles. What impact do you think they might have had on this material and format?
00:33:10 Carmen
Maybe as an outside eye or outside eyes, and a little bit of a reality check for some of the sequences. I do know that there was some discussion about how to thread all the vignettes; like, whether you want to do it a little bit more chronological or how to make it a little bit more linear or easy to follow, rather than just flip back and forth. But at the end of the day, I think for me, you know, Marion is a very strong choreographer, dancer, personality herself. It’s impossible to force Marion to do something that Marion herself wouldn’t want to do. After all, she’s performing her own piece about her own life written by herself. So it’s so self-authored that if at all someone comes in to give an opinion, it’s still up to her whether she wants to take it or not, I think.
00:34:01 Bilqis
So it’s a bit different from Gostan Forward, I would say, which was directed by Mark Teh and has very much the mark of his direction, although the content is, again, from her life, and she is the solo performer. Whereas in this case it felt that she very much took the reins, although presumably took advice and possibly a degree of reassurance as well from having other people review the material with her.
In a way, also, I feel like she’s putting herself in a position of enormous vulnerability, and it’s not just that you know some of these stories are very kind of outré and shocking, but it’s also that she is giving us all this material, which seemed to be about her very innermost self. And that is incredibly brave to me, to give other people this insight into your most dearly held convictions and memories and thoughts… And, again, you feel privileged to be in a position [to witness this], but also it makes me a little bit afraid for her—
Carmen
Mmm, how so?
00:35:19 Bilqis
I wouldn’t give other people that kind of ammunition on my life! [laughs]
00:35:24 Carmen
Well, I mean, one thing I thought was kind of very intriguing to me is, could this show have been done if the person performing is not Marion D’Cruz? If it was another woman, but same story, just not her. In some ways, I feel like we feel these things that you just said because we know it is her. I mean, I’m sure there are members of the audiences who didn’t know her very well, but there is that sort of larger-than-life Marion D’Cruz personality where you wouldn’t get that same feeling if it was another woman who we don’t know at all. Because then it would just feel like, well, that’s just from her life, but because we know Marion personally and she’s also a public figure, then I think whatever she reveals, the vulnerability, becomes, like, way more intense or way more radical, in that sense, because she’s a public figure revealing these things.
It seems – I know it’s not, but it almost feels – like a raw, unfiltered, it-is-what-it-is inside a window into her. I mean, minus the multimedia and all the other lighting cues and stuff. And to me, the only kind of comparison would be, if we had Martha Graham, is doing a performance of her own life, suffering from cancer or something, right? It would be somewhat like that. That, to me, is an important part of why that show can have that kind of resonance.
00:36:51 Bilqis
Yes, I mean, there is this question of, like, would anyone be interested in hearing this if it were not Marion D’Cruz? But I think that elides the fact that it’s a show. It’s very entertaining. Even if we didn’t know who she was, I think even if she was playing it on the other side of the world to an audience who didn’t know who she was, they would find it emotionally affecting. Anyone who has an experience of cancer, of loss, of grief, of medical intervention, of the absurdity of what you go through in order to treat your body during cancer – I think these things would still resonate. And because she is a consummate performer, they would still land. They would still be both entertaining and convincing.
00:37:41 Carmen
Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree that people would still gravitate towards that show and the themes. I guess what I’m saying is, like, we feel very deeply for her when she says… There was one scene which I thought was really so surprising. She’s talking about her turkey neck, you remember? Marion cares a lot about how she looks, how she appears. So to me, some of the things—
00:38:04 Bilqis
We all do, right?
00:38:05 Carmen
We wouldn’t say it so openly, especially if we are like a famous, well-known performer. She’s just saying the things that we probably already think in ourselves. We just don’t articulate it. I think it’s more powerful when we see someone who we know, who is out there, who is already well known, saying these things. And saying it in a way that reminds us of ourselves, but also reminds us that we know this person. And this person probably doesn’t say these things to us ever.
00:38:37 Bilqis
Actually, one of the interesting things that’s just occurred to me is one of the scenes, she starts reading it and then she stops… and she says, “I’m not going to read this, you can read it yourself.” And we have all of the text and it’s on the screen, and then you do, you read it yourself. Obviously you read it in her voice, because she started reading it and obviously it is her own anecdote. But I think of that now as actually being the most private thing that she is sharing. And it is so private that she cannot read it. She feels like she needs us to know it but she cannot actually tell us this thing.
And it is a story about how, you know, she feels like she’s lost her confidence, but then she’s having a good day and she attends an online feedback session for a bunch of artists. And she starts giving comments. And then someone messages her on a back channel and says, basically, “Marion, shut up, you’re taking over this whole discussion.” And she feels mortified. But then, later, one of the artists responds to her and says, “Look, I was so pleased that someone was so engaged with the material that we had to offer. And thank you for offering all of the feedback that you did.” So in some ways, she’s sort of redeemed.
But to me this feeling of exposing the thing that deeply deeply makes you ashamed of yourself… She’s not ashamed of having to dig her poo out of her butt, she’s not ashamed of – you know, she would probably show us her mastectomy scar if you asked to see it. These are not things she’s ashamed of but she… This is a moment in which she is ashamed. And she’s so ashamed she cannot actually read it out loud. And that to me is a degree of vulnerability which I think is very brave to offer.
00:40:37 Carmen
I kind of forgot about that until you mentioned it actually. As I was reading the text, there’s a lot of text to read, by the way. I also was thinking, like, “Why you didn’t want to read it, ah?”
00:40:48 Bilqis
Yes, we feel the real intimacy with her in that climactic scene in which she’s dancing with Krishen, but we also know that that’s how we expect her to feel. We expect her to be missing her husband. We expect her to feel a deep abiding grief. We don’t expect her to feel, you know, ashamed about occasionally overreaching. Yeah. So that is really what gives us more insights, more access. In this very kind of confessional world, where it feels like everything is on the table, you know, everything can be talked about… it’s interesting to see the degrees of that within this show.
00:41:36 Carmen
Yeah, the only thing I want to say about that particular scene is because the text was so much on the screen… Okay, I can read, like, pretty fast but I do know some friends who are like, “Can you like tell me what was all that about? Because I didn’t really read it. It’s like too fast.” And so then I wasn’t sure, like, how many people actually read the whole thing, and got it.
But I also cannot help thinking… She was sitting there but she was not saying a word while everybody was reading it. I don’t know. How would that feel like?
00:42:04 Bilqis
How would you feel?
00:42:04 Carmen
Mmm.
00:42:05 Bilqis
Rather than how does the audience feel, how does the performer feel?
Carmen
Mmm.
Bilqis
Mmm.
And that’s the end of our review. Thank you to Carmen Nge for discussing Marion D’Cruz’s ItSelf TerJadi with me. This was my first conversational review with another critic and I hope there will be more soon. Thank you to Eksentrika and to ArtsEquator for making this series happen.
This is the fifth part of a series highlighting the continuing contributions and exciting new pathways of the pioneers in Malaysian contemporary dance. The series considers issues of succession, creativity and novelty, as well as practices of archiving, documentation and restaging. This series is completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship. Views expressed are solely those of the writer. Read the previous installment here or read the next installment here.
Bilqis Hijjas is the founding editor of Critics Republic. Formerly a producer and organizer in contemporary dance, she believes the main purpose of criticism is to enhance the audience’s appreciation of art.
Carmen Nge is an arts enthusiast and currently an assistant professor at the Faculty of Creative Industries, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR).