5. Going Out: In the museum (17 Jan, 2024) and the Maker Space (24 Jan, 2024)

And then, the museum—like the classroom and the theatre—is also a place “separated” from the real lives outside. But even more, this exhibition seemed to be about objects that looked like everyday (useful) objects that are not, or cannot be, really useful. A double “off”! OK, complicated: In a non-daily space…displaying objects that appear daily and useful…but are actually not!

Here I experienced and learnt what Brecht’s idea of dialectics could be like. The sense of “off” is to be extended and further developed in a multi-layered manner, continuously de-stabilizing people’s daily consciousness that is unreflective. Or say, for Brecht, reflection does not mean going inward to meditate or contemplate, but staying with, keeping on tracing, and going deeper into these offs. When things cannot get into a perfect fit-ness or a simple unity or plain harmony, they become richer in texture and complexity; or more precisely, our experience and our thinking about them are richer.

(Exhibition of Magdalene Odundo's works at Gardiner Museum, "A Dialogue with Objects” )

But not just this! There were at least two more things to learn, regarding Brecht’s vision of theatre, from the exhibition. One was about the duality of the event of the exhibition itself, or say, any act of displaying. When something is presented/displayed at the foreground or in focus, something else are either hidden or become unconscious/sub-conscious/invisible/less visible, especially the framing of the display and all the labor involved that makes the display happen, or say, materially actual. This applies also to the street scenes. We can always ask: What is presented and what is pushed behind the curtain or marginalized? What could be the costs or consequences of not seeing/knowing about what is concealed?

From this duality, the fifth learning in this lesson (including the discoveries on the street) was about this labor off-stage and the whole infrastructure involved; this also deepened the awareness about the apparatus, as the mediation of labor that makes any idea or intention actual. This awareness about the apparatus, labor and also craft, work, etc., got further deepened in the next class when we visited the Maker Space (24 Jan 2024). New light was shed on the topic of technologies also when the apparatus and the act/process of making were found to be constitutive to any creation.

This reminded me that, among theatre artists, there is usually a conceptual separation between the artistic team and the technical team, the aesthetic and the technical, but should it be like that? How can aesthetics be transformed if the apparatus, labor, work and technologies are considered as artistically constitutive? A great reminder to myself: Theatre is theatre-making, and that is why we call it also “production”. The means of production and the mode of production produce the products and leave their traces therein, or even, shape the products and condition the products. A production is much more than ideas, be it clever ideas or not.

Reference: "Magdalene Odundo: A Dialogue with Objects” Gardiner Museum. YouTube. Nov.1, 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_Uh5F_PwO4