Review: Stories Then and Now

 
(L-R) Annette Shun Wah, Jenevieve Chang, Michael Park, Sheila Pham, Ien Ang, William Yang, Paul van Reyk

There are many ways to tell a story and there are many types of storytellers.  An incredible storyteller can make a boring story the most dramatic experience you’ve sat through, a poignant story can fall into a dead pit in the wrong hands.  Luckily, under the deft direction of Performance 4A Executive Producer Annette Shun Wah and acclaimed photographer William Yang, Stories Then and Now showcased six incredible stories from six dynamic storytellers full of poignancy, drama and humour.

In the storytelling mix was performing artist Jenevieve Chang, social worker and food writer Paul Van Reyk, video journalist and writer Michael C.S. Park, civil marriage celebrant Willa Zheng, academic and author Ien Ang, and producer and writer Sheila Pham.

The format of the show was broken into two parts: “Then” with stories framed around the storytellers’ parents’ lives and journeys across generations, before moving to “Now” which focused on where the storytellers are at in their lives presently.  The presentation of the stories was minimal, with wall-sized slide projections and the storyteller and a microphone in front on stage.  Recorded music from Nicholas Ng enhanced the unfolding stories and was a perfect component in the presentation.  This simple framework enabled a level playing field for storytellers with or without performance experience.  This format of storytelling and slide show presentation is drawn directly from William Yang’s own method of successful performances over two decades.

Autobiographical stories can be a landmine of sensitivities – skeletons in the closets and family secrets. While this territory can be a rich source of inspiration, it can also render a lot more pain if done without integrity and dexterity.  A storyteller can render meaning to a fictional tale, however it’s harder to neatly package life experiences. It was great to hear the process of story selection and curatorship in the post-show talk.  Each of the storytellers felt that their stories were a process of discovery. Some found the “Now” part of the section more challenging as it was an intimate reveal of their own stories, rather than somebody else’s.

While it’s hard to encapsulate the richness and depth of each story in a short review, I’ve outlined some moments that stood out for me.  For Willa Zheng, her ‘Now’ story was still unraveling as the workshop process was near its end.  While blessing others with marital happiness as a marriage celebrant, Willa herself had yet to find the ‘right man’.  With the blessings of her family, she’d made a trip to China, staying with her grandfather to meet potential suitors.  However, when she came back, the structure of her story had to be re-shaped to mould to her change of heart. As she says in the show, “rejection is God’s way of protection”.  For Sheila Pham, going back home to Vietnam was a circuitous journey, her initial embarkment thwarted by her father’s disapproval and her decision to honour her father’s wishes and his experience of fleeing a war-torn country.  Instead, she traveled elsewhere and furthered her education and work experiences – to the UK and Thailand.  And when she finally made it to Vietnam years later with her partner, she spoke poignantly of the moment when she agreed to pay too high a price for fruit from a local fruit seller.  This realisation of her own ignorance as a foreigner caused her upset, and questioning of her own sense of belonging. Being perceived as a foreigner in what is supposed to be one’s own ‘home’ country, also echoed with Dr. Ien Ang’s story and her reluctance to return to Indonesia for the lack of language proficiency and discomfort of being treated like a foreigner.  While Ien is known and celebrated academically, it was incredible to hear the personal narrative behind her academic work. Paul Van Reyk’s story is part of the making of gay and lesbian history in Australia.  Paul was a donor to a range of friends who wanted children in their lives.  For the first time he was able to show the faces of all of the five children, without fear of persecution or discrimination for himself, the children’s parents or the children themselves.  For Jenevieve Chang, burlesque and performance was a means of escape and travel to other worlds, however, the unraveling of her story was also a process of negotiating a fraught relationship with her family.  For Michael Park, the youngest of three children, his coming into the world was spun with humour, his mother ‘tricking’ his father into having a final baby.  While Michael experienced awful racism and persecution by peers and teachers in high school, his sense of righteousness against injustice and law school training facilitated him in assisting his sister legally against a violent relationship with her husband.

It’s incredible how powerful storytelling can render ‘ordinary lives’ so extraordinary.  Each story spanned across generations and continents, the origins of the stories drawn from the storytellers’ parents’ homelands – China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Korea and Sri Lanka. And while we can read history textbooks for insights on war and conflict, being privy to a person sharing a story with you and personifying an abstract experience can move you in a way that a piece of text can’t.  In a Western nation where information is at our fingertips (for those with access and privilege), these Australian stories unfortunately, are still rare and hard to come by.  Congratulations to Performance 4a and their enterprising project of bringing these Asian-Australian stories and representation to the mainstream stage.

Stories Then & Now was presented by Performance 4a and Carriageworks, and  premiered at Carriageworks 22-25 May, an umbrella event of the Sydney Writers Festival. 

Author: Lian Low

Lian Low is a writer, editor and spoken word artist.She’s currently at large in Peril‘s outer orbit. Previously editor-in-chief (2010-2014) , prose editor (2009-2014) and on Peril‘s Board until 2016.Find her on http://lianlow.weebly.com/ and Twitter @Lian__Low