Vico Thai As Mariatu, Michael Mohammed Ahmad As Prudencia
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Vico Thai as Mariatu, Michael Mohammed Ahmad as Prudencia and Katia Molino as Joan in the Urban Theatre Projects 2005 production of FAST CARS & TRACTOR ENGINES at the Bankstown RSL, Sydney. (Photo: © Amanda James) The Complexity of Courage: Roslyn Oades’ Headphone Verbatim Trilogy Caroline Wake Courage exists in application. It is an action, not an attribute. —Katherine Platt In a new millennium that has thus far been defined by irrational fears of the other and even more irrational wars in countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, 7/7 or any other traumatic event that we have sought to name and contain through numbers, the topic of courage seems an odd but apt choice for a trilogy of plays. Or perhaps it is the only choice, for what else are we to do when caught in a depressing spiral down, except to summon our courage and try to arrest the spin? The verb summon suggests that courage is not found close to the surface, but rather deep within; it doesn’t just appear like a gift or even a ghost, courage has to be called for, gathered, mustered and maintained. The word itself derives from the Latin cor, meaning heart, but to have heart and to have courage is not the same thing these days, if indeed it ever was. To have heart is to have empathy, compassion, perhaps even wisdom; to have courage is to have strength, purpose, and conviction. To put it bluntly, the former is feminine while the latter is masculine. Indeed, as William Ian Miller remarks, ‘so bound up is courage with manhood, that it is nearly impossible to speak of it without invoking male body parts or the word man itself.’1 Regardless of gender, the coward is called a ‘pussy’ and told to ‘man up’ or ‘grow a pair’. This is a rather limited and limiting way of thinking about courage. In her recent book on the topic, Maria Tumarkin makes the case for an altogether more modest version of courage; one defined by ‘guts, grit, spine, heart, … [and] verve’ as well as ‘balls’, bravery and their ostentatious sibling, bravado.2 I am not sure how familiar Tumarkin and Roslyn Oades are with each other’s work, but it seems to me that they have been pursuing the same project, albeit through different media. Together and alone, these artists ask themselves as well as their audiences: What is courage? What does it look in contemporary life and how might we recognise it as such? Who possesses it and how did they find it? Could I be courageous too? For more than a decade, Oades has been tracing the secret life of courage through the public art of theatre. More specifically, she has been talking to people viii ACTS OF COURAGE whose lives have been defined by courage and then putting their words on the stage. Oades works in a form she calls ‘headphone verbatim’, which is a subgenre of verbatim theatre.3 The larger genre has been around since the 1980s, when Derek Paget defined it as ‘a form of theatre firmly predicated upon the taping and transcription of interviews done with “ordinary” people, done in the context of research into a particular region, subject area, issue, event, or combination of these things. The primary source is then transformed into a text which is acted.’4 More recently, Oades and others have been developing headphone verbatim by bringing the recording devices out of the rehearsal room and onto the stage.5 In headphone verbatim, the actors perform wearing visible headphones, through which they receive the audio-script. Their task is to repeat what they hear as immediately and as accurately as possible, including every mutter, stutter, cough, pause, and breath. The effect, according to audience members, ‘is somewhere between acting, “being”, and possession’.6 Fast Cars & Tractor Engines The first instalment of the trilogy,Fast Cars & Tractor Engines (2005), started life as part of the Bankstown Youth Development Services’ Oral History Project.7 For readers who are unfamiliar with Sydney’s geography and demography, Bankstown is a suburb located approximately 20 kilometres west of the city centre. It is home to approximately 196,000 people, of whom 37.5 percent were born overseas and 34.5 percent speak a language other than English at home (the national averages are 24.6 and 18.2 percent respectively). People move to Bankstown from Lebanon, Vietnam, China, New Zealand, Greece, Italy, Macedonia, India, Korea and the Philippines, among other places.8 In other words, Bankstown is a suburb full of stories of quiet, quotidian courage, which is part of what the Oral History Project sought to capture. The seed for Fast Cars & Tractors Engines was planted at the project’s launch, where three young artists from the area performed some excerpts for the occasion.9 Two years later, in 2002, the company Urban Theatre Projects included a 15–minute version in its Short and Sharp season, before deciding that it would support the development of a longer performance. In 2005, a fully-fledged production made its debut in the Sir Joseph Banks room at the Bankstown RSL. The performance begins with the three actors welcoming the audience members to the space. Once everyone is seated, the performers walk to the stage, put on their headphones, plug into the DVD player and start. The first characters we meet are Jeff and his two teenage sons, Ali and Mohammed; their mother Fay also puts in a brief appearance. The two boys listen as their father tells stories of his teenage self, stealing cars and speeding off into the night. The boisterous conversational INTRODUCTION ix style of this first scene contrasts with the second, where the character of the Maori Boxer (he is not named) addresses the audience softly and directly. In the third scene, we meet Hilda, 83 years old and originally from Germany, and her daughter Linda, born and raised in Australia and now in her 40s. Though they probably haven’t met, Hilda and Jeff might get on, since they both love their cars not to mention putting the pedal to the metal (17–18). In Scene 4, we sit with three young women of African heritage—Mariatu, Joan, and Prudencia—who giggle about boys and groan about parents. Having introduced most of the characters, we then start to loop back, revisiting the Ahmads and others, before meeting a second set of characters midway through the play. These include Margaret and Shannon, an Aboriginal mother and son in their 50s and 20s respectively; Greta and Ken, an Anglo-Australian couple in their 70s; and the Bankstown Mayor and her Mum, who are also Anglo-Australian and roughly the same ages as Linda and Hilda. Of all of the stories we hear, the most stereotypically courageous is that of Ninh, a former solider who arrived in Australia as a refugee in 1982. In Scenes 13 and 15, he tells an extraordinary story about an incident in the Vietnam War. He and his men were standing outside a village, when they came under fire. While his men hit the ground, he stayed standing, managing to dart behind a tree and radio for assistance (32; 34). Had he not done so, he and his men would have died, just as three other platoons had in earlier ambushes (32). It sounds heroic and of course it is but the way Ninh tells it, it was also accidental: he was young, inexperienced and most of all indecisive. Caught standing between a shrub of prickles on one side and a pile of poo on the other, he couldn’t decide where to go and so involuntarily stayed where he was. Contrast this accidental courage with the deliberate and decisive courage he needed to get on a tiny boat powered by a tractor engine (48). The migrant’s courage is generally not as culturally visible or as valued as that of the soldier, but Ninh’s boat story in the final scene of the play reveals that it takes just as much guts to go to sea as it does to stand in a battlefield. Yet even here, Ninh is modest, telling us that when your water, food and fuel have run out the only thing to do is pray. In this moment, courage has as much to do with hanging on and hoping, as it has to do with boldness and bravery. Whatever the nuances of Ninh’s story, he is still an adult male, which is to say someone who is expected to display courage. This makes the inclusion of the teenage girls Mariatu, Joan, and Prudencia all the more intriguing. It is no accident that they appear in a group and it serves to remind the audience, as psychologist Maria Osorina does, that children and teenagers often find their courage together. Or, as Tumarkin puts it, in her gloss on Osorina, ‘every child feels stronger, bigger and braver as part of a collective “I”.’10 This is evident in the story Mariatu tells about being summoned to a meeting with her boyfriend, her parents and her x ACTS OF COURAGE boyfriend’s parents. Having explained why the two can no longer see each other, the parents turn to the boyfriend and ask if he will now stay away from Mariatu (24). Many months later, she confesses to the interviewer, ‘Seriously, if they’d’ve asked me that question first I would say yes, ’cause then if I say no, right there, I’ll get the hiding, right there, I’ll get smacked across the head.