A Delicate Balance
Negotiating Isolation and Globalization in the Burmese Performing Arts
Catherine Diamond
If you walk on and on, you get to your destination. If you question much, you get your information. If you do not sleep and idle, you preserve your life! (Maung Htin Aung 1959:87)
So go the three lines of wisdom offered to the lazy student Maung Pauk Khaing in the wellknown eponymous folk tale. A group of impoverished village youngsters, led by their teacher Daw Khin Thida, adapted the tale in 2007 in their first attempt to perform a play. From a well-to-do family that does not understand her philanthropic impulses, Khin Thida, an English teacher by profession, works at her free school in Insein, a suburb of Yangon (Rangoon) infamous for its prison. The shy students practiced first in Burmese for their village audience, and then in English for some foreign donors who were coming to visit the school. Khin Thida has also bought land in Bagan (Pagan) and is building a culture center there, hoping to attract the street children who currently pander to tourists at the site’s immense network of temples.
TDR: The Drama Review 53:1 (T201) Spring 2009. ©2009
New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of T e chnology
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I first met Khin Thida in 2005 at NICA (Networking and Initiatives for Culture and the
Arts), an independent nonprofit arts center founded in 2003 and run by Singaporean/Malaysian artists Jay Koh and Chu Yuan. With the financial support of Dutch, Japanese, and Singaporean foundations, Koh and Chu, through NICA, offered exhibition space and work studios to local artists. NICA also hosted workshops and residencies for foreign artists, facilitating interaction between Burmese, Southeast Asian, and European artists.
In 2005, NICA sponsored an international festival of conceptual and installation art called
Borders: withIn withOut that featured 24 artists, many of whom presented works concerned with globalization. For example, in his piece Japanese artist Arai Shin-ichi bathed spectators’ feet in the different foodstuffs sent by the United States to postwar Japan, such as inferior grade flour and Coca-Cola. After describing the eventual “7-Elevenization” of his village, he stood on his head crying, “Viva Globalization!” Vasan Sitthiket of Thailand squatted and drew figures of cars, planes, mobile phones, and televisions in a mound of rice grains, saying that we can live without them. He then put on a black balaclava and stood up to reveal he was wearing a bullet belt filled with squashes and cucumbers—a vegetarian terrorist. Similarly, Burmese Nyo Win Maung expressed his antiglobalization sentiments by tearing a map of the world in a continuous strip, like an orange peel, then wrapping it around to encircle himself. He donned a balaclava and held a gun toward the spectators, reminding everyone that they were still in Myanmar and under the government’s constant vigilance.
Despite Nyo Win Maung’s performance, globalization resonates differently in impoverished
Myanmar, where possessing a television, mobile phone, and especially a car is far beyond the means of most people. Yangon is one of the few Southeast Asian capitals that is not chock-ablock with McDonald’s, 7-Elevens, KFCs, and Starbucks; the appearance of a single foreign franchise is usually hailed in the local press as a sign of progress. While Burmese have hardly tasted the questionable fruits of global capitalism, they have certainly tasted its bitterness as the country’s natural resources are being sold off at a frenzied rate to supply the booming economies of India, Thailand, and especially China; and less openly to Canada, Japan, Korea, Russia, France, and the United States. The money earned props up the military dictatorship as the people helplessly watch their country being leeched.
NICA miraculously managed to carry on for four years free from harassment by a government exceptionally paranoid about any foreign activity and rarely allowing nongovernmental organizations to operate. It was a brave and bold experiment to help Myanmar’s artists overcome their isolation, with the intention that the connections made through NICA’s activities would assist them in receiving invitations to work and exhibit abroad. NICA closed its Yangon headquarters in 2007 and Koh and Chu left Myanmar, but they still assist Burmese artists on an ad hoc basis.
The trend of opening up more avenues for international interaction in the arts has continued. The Gitameit Music Center, cofounded by American pianist Kit Young and choral director U Moe Naing in 2003, accomplished for music what NICA implemented for the visual arts. The school provides classes and performance opportunities for dozens of young instrumentalists and vocalists. Gitameit (meaning “music friendship”) has also set up a nurturing space for experimental performances of poetry, music, and dance. Supporting interactions between older established musicians and young students, foreign and local musicians and composers, as well as among other types of performers, Gitameit is another exceptional haven, appropriately housed
Figure 1. (previous page) Ionesc o ’s Rhinoceros, eatre of the Disturbed. Yangon, 2007. (Courtesy of e eatre of the Disturbed)
Catherine Diamond teaches theatre in T a ipei, T a iwan, and writes on the contemporary theatre through- out the Southeast Asian region. She also directs Phoenix eatre, an English-language company. A flamenco dancer, she has recently directed a flamenco dance-drama, e Daughters of Bernarda Alba, in T a ipei.
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in the former offices of The Mirror, a liberal newspaper shut down when military junta took over in 1988. Inside, there are no private studios and the young musicians practice side-by-side. But despite the cacophony, Gitameit exudes joy, hope, and a positive sense of the future—which is not a prevalent sentiment among most of Myanmar’s young people.
In 2005, Gitameit presented Nya La Ka (Night Moon Dance)1 based on three poems by Nyein Way. The collaborative performance utilized the talents of musicians and dancers from India, Thailand, Hong Kong, and New York as well as local musicians, composers, dancers, and
Figure 2. Maung Pauk Khaing returns to court to answer the Quee n ’s riddle after he receives help from his parents, who heard the answer from a pair of crows. Rehearsed by Daw Khin id a ’s students in Insein. Yangon, 2007. (Photo by Catherine Diamond)
puppeteers. One segment, “Tawaya La” (Forever Moon), was danced by Shweman Chan Tha, one of Myanmar’s beloved and best-known performers. A professional mintha (literally “prince” but meaning the star/manager of a troupe), Shweman Chan Tha is the performer par excellence of the Burmese traditional zat pwe, an all-night variety show featuring song, dance, comedy skits and modern dramas. The son of Shweman U Tin Maung (1918–1969), the most famous mintha of the late 20th-century, Shweman Chan Tha primarily reprises his father’s famous works while managing the company that his father founded. Usually burdened with the responsibility of keeping the 70-odd-member troupe afloat, Shweman Chan Tha had the rare opportunity in “Tawaya La” to experiment in a personally expressive modern style not often seen in Myanmar. In his mid-40s and solidly built, Shweman Chan Tha danced first in silhouette, using the percussive jerkiness of arms and elbows that usually indicate the Burmese dancer’s imitation of marionette movement, but here suggesting the movements of birds’ wings. His costume, too, was derived from the traditional mintha attire—but the gaudy and glittery costume based on the dress of 19th-century princes was pared down to a simple black pasoe (a leg-length piece of cloth wrapped around the waist and tucked through the legs to allow the dancer more freedom of movement) and gong baung headdress.
Dancing to the lyrical music of piano, sax, and violin, Shweman Chan Tha changed tempo when the pat waing—the Burmese drum circle—joined in. Comprising 24 suspended drums, each tuned to a different pitch and set in a wood frame around the player, it is the lead instrument in a traditional Burmese orchestra. Shweman Chan Tha rolled on the floor, hung off the edge of the stage, and stepped down into the audience, still sustaining the abstract bird motif. This beautiful piece by a veteran performer thoroughly trained in his traditional technique, but not limited by it, leaned toward modern dance and yet retained distinctly Burmese characteristics. Shweman Chan Tha does not get many opportunities to innovate because he must fulfill his audience’s expectations as well as follow the traditional program set by the 40,000-member national Drama Association. Established in its present formation in 1980, the Drama Associa-
1. Where the original language of a performance was Burmese, the Burmese title has been included when available.
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tion not only oversees financial matters such as troupe and performer contracts and the stabilization of ticket prices, but also monitors the content of the shows as well as individual performer’s behavior onstage.
At the end of the program, Shweman Chan Tha returned in his customary mintha costume to accompany Thai dancer Pradit Prasartthong, the director of Makhamporn, one of Thailand’s leading theatre troupes. The two men alternated dancing each others’ classical dances, an exchange that would not seem so unusual unless one knew that hundreds of years of enmity festers between the two countries, stemming principally from the 1767 Burmese conquest and destruction of the ancient Thai capital, Ayutthaya. At that time, the forced transfer of Thai dancers, musicians, and dramatists to the Burmese court had a great influence on the development of Burmese arts. Even today, cultural relations between Myanmar and Thailand remain frosty, with many Thai films still harping on the infamy of the Burmese. Witnessing the rapport between the two dancers was moving for the Burmese audience, which rewarded them with rapturous applause. This détente, however, was not sponsored by either the Burmese or Thai government; it was promoted by Gitameit’s Kit Young and financed by the Asian Arts Council whose headquarters are in New York.
Both NICA’s Borders: withIn withOut Festival and Gitameit’s Nya La Ka included a popular new genre. Since the mid-1990s, Yangon’s artists and dramatists have been creating “performance art” by combining visual arts with acting. These artist/dramatists take their performances out of the galleries and into the
Figure 3. Japanese Arai Shin-ichi washes a spectator’s feet in ketchup. Borders: withIn withOut. Yangon, 2005. (Courtesy of Jay Koh/NICA)
streets, where they are not well understood by ordinary citizens and provoke the ire of authorities. Both groups sense that whatever the artists are doing must be a form of sociopolitical satire. Htein Lin has become among the most well-known for combining his two talents:
Around 1996, I was simultaneously both painting and acting in video films. I was in “University Ah Nyeint” [Burmese performance that features a classical dancer and a team of comedians]. Aung Myint, San Minn, Tito, Khin Swe Win, and Ko Myoe were all artists that I met at Inya Gallery, and special to my life as an artist. They said that I should be a performance artist since I was an actor. When I asked what performance art was, Aung Myint explained and showed me performances by other artists. I had found a lot of barriers using brushes and paints, and depicting characters in films. I realized that performance art was a new art for me. And then I experimented with it. (in Ko Thi Aung 2006:54)
Htein Lin’s first experiment was The Little W o rm in the Ear at the Lawkanat Gallery, based on a fable: Once, there was a big elephant living in a big forest. In its ear there lived a little worm. While traveling, the elephant had to cross a fragile bridge. As it was crossing the bridge, the whole bridge shook. The worm said, “The bridge is shaking because of you and me” (Ko
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Thi Aung 2006:54). Only a few people from art circles came to that first performance in 1996 in which he tied up his painting, The Little W o rm in the Ear, with a plastic rope and also wrapped himself in plastic. Then he put his barbed wire–wrapped paint brush in a vase. He carried the painting and the vase along one of Yangon’s main thoroughfares to a tea shop, where he sat with friends. When he returned to Lawkanat Gallery, he changed the street performance into a still performance and posed staring at the vase (54).
Several of Htein Lin’s first performances were sponsored by the local magazine Tharaphu, which also covered the events. Later, he was also sponsored by the cultural wings of foreign embassies, such as the Alliance Française and the Heinrich Böll Foundation. In 2007, Htein Lin moved to London where he now exhibits.
Foreign embassies—primarily the French, English, German, Japanese, and American—have been instrumental in promoting “soft” nonpolitical cultural events that allow for greater interaction between Burmese artists and their foreign counterparts. They frequently sponsor smallscale performances—hiring local musicians, dancers, and puppeteers to perform at embassy events—or host exhibitions of local artists’ work. In 2006, some of the embassies began to assist in larger theatre productions. The American Center contributed to the staging of Rent, the largest show staged in English since 1988, directed by Ko Thila Min and New York actor/writer Phillip Howze, who had also collaborated on Romeo and Juliet (2004) with a mostly Burmese cast. The Alliance Française sponsored Theatre of the Disturbed’s director Nyan Lin Htet’s English production of Sartre’s No Exit the same year, as well as his Rhinoceros in 2007. These performances initiated the formation of The People’s Theatre, a group of committed dramatists led by Ko Thila Min who in 2007 opened a local space for community theatre and experimental work.
Even within the official institutions, there were signs of change. In the conservative University of Culture, Myanmar’s premiere school for the performing arts, students learned traditional Burmese music, dance, puppetry, and classical verse drama, but they had no program in acting and modern spoken drama until 1995 when, with the sponsorship of the United States Embassy, U Ye Htut, the director of the then drama department, invited American drama professor Craig Latrell to give workshops in realistic acting. In 1996, U Ye Htut lost his job and the majority of universities were closed down for four years in response to the large protests by students demanding their own student union and more political freedom. When the University of Culture announced in 2007 that it was going to open a Department of Modern Drama and Film, the news signaled a significant development in actor training and also playwriting, a craft dormant since 1988. But these promising trends were seriously jeopardized during two calamitous months.
On 15 August 2007, and without any prior announcement, the State Peace and Development
Council (SPDC), the official name of the military dictatorship, eliminated state subsidies for fuel oil and natural gas, doubling prices so precipitously that many people were left stranded, unable to afford bus fare to get home. As a consequence, food prices also rose. The sudden increase pushed an already destitute populace—roughly 75 percent live below the poverty line— to take to the streets in protest on 19 August. In September, the people of Myanmar were given hope when thousands of young monks poured out of the monasteries chanting the metta sutra, a prayer that sends out the Lord Buddha’s loving kindness to all sentient beings, and holding their begging bowls upside down to signify their refusal to accept alms from the government when ordinary people could no longer afford to eat.2 The monks were joined by students, who shouted militant antigovernment slogans, and by some of the country’s important writers and intellectuals.
2. e gesture was not only symbolic, but pragmatic. Monks depend upon alms for food; when ordinary people do not have enough to feed themselves, monks go hungry too.
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Hailed as the largest popular demonstration since 1988, the elation increased each day as growing numbers of ordinary people entered the protest while the military, in power since 1962, did not make a move. But no one was under any illusion, and a violent crackdown began on 25 September.3
Although Tatmadaw (the military) has played a vital role in filling the vacuum the British colonial government left behind when Myanmar became independent in 1948, the fact that the popular leader and war hero General Aung San and his six cabinet members were assassinated by discontented officers within months of the British departure in 1947 signaled that the military’s position in the new republic was not settled. During the 1950s, Myanmar showed signs of growing prosperity and democratic development, except in the regions where the army continued to fight ethnic minority insurrectionists who wanted to form their own independent states— a condition they thought had been promised by the British. Since independence, the army has taken credit for being the force that has kept the nation intact. Though elections were held in 1960, the generals ousted the winning civilian candidate, and in 1962 General Ne Win took over. Students barricaded Yangon University in protest. Many were killed; the student union building was blown up and the university closed. It was one of the first such demonstrations, setting up the now unfortunately familiar pattern of civilian resistance met with military force and then followed by relentless secret arrest.
Ne Win remained openly in power until 1988 when he announced that elections would be held. But first he arrested Aung San Suu Kyi, the National League for Democracy’s (NLD) candidate, and then killed thousands of demonstrators who protested the arrest. Even while she remained under house arrest, Suu Kyi’s party won the 1990 election overwhelmingly. But the generals annulled the election, arrested opponents, and maintained tight control. In 1989, the generals also changed the name of the country from Burma—the English derivation of Bama— the colloquial oral name, to Myanmar (Myanma), its literary and written name. Though the latter had previously been considered in the years leading to independence, it is now associated with the current military government. Both the United States and the United Kingdom have rejected the use of “Myanmar” because they do not recognize the government’s legitimacy.
Despite the house arrest and death of Ne Win in 2002 and the power struggles within their ranks, the generals have retained a firm grip on power. They employ an extensive network of spies through the civilian group Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA),4 which operates as a secret police, and they control the sale of the country’s natural resources— oil, natural gas, tin, tungsten, timber, rubies, jade.
At the time of the 1988 coup d’etat, the military was relatively small (about 100,000); if all of the dissenting groups had made a concerted effort at the time, they might have been able
3. e 1989 protest for democratic reforms in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square was also sparked by unprecedented price hikes and, similar to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army massacre of demonstrators, the Burmese soldiers brought in to deal with the demonstrators were carefully selected because the government was unsure of some divisions’ willingness to fire on monks. In China, the government sent in units of privates from the countryside who despised and envied the young city intellectuals of Democracy Square; in Myanmar, it was the elite units who had been fighting ethnic minority insurgents for the past 50 years and whose loyalty to the ruling regime was unquestioned. Still, some of the less committed officers and soldiers refused and chose to make the hazardous journey to refugee camps on the border with ailand rather than kill monks. Given the number of times since 1962 that unarmed demonstrators have been violently put down, perhaps the only hope Myanmar has left is an insurrection from the lower ranks. Some soldiers now in ailand have voiced discontent via the internet.
4. After the demonstrations had been halted, the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA) held a rally marking the completion of a new constitution that took 14 years to draft. Every family was required to send one person to attend, and although the stadium was filled to capacity, individuals still expressed their disgust by holding the anti-foreign banners they had been handed upside down (Kristalis 2007).
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to overthrow it. But over the past 20 years it has increased to more than 400,000 troops. The military not only controls all state institutions, it has also established townships, schools, hospitals, and recreation centers for the exclusive use of its members. And because state-owned companies are dependent upon military supply orders, today one in ten Burmese is involved in the military’s activities or business. The sangha, the 400,000-member Buddhist clergy, is the only institution of comparable size, and much more highly respected by the populace. But when the monasteries were raided after the 2007 demonstrations, the arrested monks were forced to exchange their robes for civilian clothes so that the military could treat them as ordinary citizens; they were no longer protected by the sanctity of their vows. The military claimed it found caches of weapons in the monasteries to further discredit the monks’ peaceful aims. Moreover, the generals have been careful to cultivate good relations with the senior monks at the top of the sangha hierarchy, many of whom condemned the September 2007 demonstrations.
Myanmar’s infamous isolation has been intensified both by the sanctions imposed by Western governments and by the generals’ xenophobic fear of invasion. Their paranoia culminated in the 2005 decision to remove their headquarters from Yangon—the former colonial capital Rangoon— to the newly constructed capital of Naypyidaw (Royal City) in Pyinmana, 200 miles north of Yangon and closer to the troubled states where the army is engaged in putting down rebellions of ethnic minorities. Rumor also has it that the generals, worried about a U.S. attack, have built both extensive underground tunnels and jungle hideaways. The new, absolutely encapsulated capital is populated only by military and displaced civil servants, which further isolates the government from ordinary citizens and entrenches its power against internal dissension.
The country’s isolation, however, is not only due to the SPDC’s inward-looking policies.
Aung San Suu Kyi has also requested that foreign companies not invest and tourists not visit as their money and presence lends legitimacy to the regime. Yet over time, she has had to soften her position, recognizing that foreigners have a part to play. Her hope that sanctions would force the military to relent has not panned out since they have not been universally observed. In a 1996 interview with novelist Amitav Ghosh, she dismissed the possibility of Asian companies filling in the void left by their Western counterparts. “‘Without Western investment,’ she said, ‘I think you will find that the confidence in the Burmese economy will diminish. It is not going to encourage the Asians to come rushing in. On the contrary’” (in Ghosh 1996:54).
She was wrong. Not only are India, Thailand, and China very involved in buying up Myanmar’s resources, the latter also has numerous infrastructural building projects to expedite its exploitation. The Burmese generals can snub the Western powers and the toothless pleas from the United Nations as long as China maintains its stance not to interfere in Myanmar’s internal affairs. The prevailing dictum that business must proceed as usual and the appearance of normalcy must be preserved at all costs was reinforced during the September 2007 demonstrations when Indian and Chinese companies entered into a bidding war for rights to the develop the Arakan natural gas fields. China won.
In his book The River of Lost Footsteps (2006), Thant Myin-U, the grandson of Myanmar’s great statesman, United Nations Secretary General U Thant, advises the West to embark on a policy of selective and informed engagement. Open interaction would at least make the government’s actions more visible and therefore susceptible to outside scrutiny. He advocates a policy of ethical trade and tourism leading to gradual economic reform and the building up of civil institutions. He intimates that Suu Kyi’s stance, however well intentioned, plays too much into the hands of the generals. Myanmar’s pariah status allows unscrupulous foreign powers to take advantage without conforming to any of the minimal regulations agreed upon by international organizations. He observes, “The assumption is that Burma’s military government couldn’t survive further isolation when precisely the opposite is true. Much more than any other part of Burmese society, the army will weather another forty years of isolation just fine” (in Lanchester 2006:107). During the September 2007 demonstrations, people desperately tried to alert the rest of the world, putting their lives on the line to send photos and reports out of
