Billed as a “live documentary theatre show”, OTHER [chinese] is educational, gentle and filled with off-the-cuff humour.   

A group of mostly young, mostly middle-class people of Chinese descent (born in China, Aotearoa and elsewhere) tell snippets of their own stories of cultural identity, in between sound bite screenings of the likes of Mai Chen, Lynette Forday, Mua Strickson-Pua and Manying Ip.

Earnest? Yes, but also interesting, candid, occasionally bawdy and often surprising. [More] 

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There is no doubting Alice Canton is an artist with a considerable range of skills and experience to work with. She has a toolbox that many artists would be envious of. She is a conceptual artist, a theatre director, a performance artist, and she has ethnicity on her side. 

For her latest piece, Other [chinese], it was all on the table, or tableau. Once upon a time in Aotearoa, it used to be that being Chinese in New Zealand meant being Cantonese. Most local Chinese can thank the diaspora of Southern Chinese that started in the early nineteenth century and continued in fits and starts until the 1970s for this. From the nineties onwards, immigration from China has been from other parts as well as the Guangzhuo province. The hegemony of the long time Chinese population, read Cantonese, was being challenged. Fast forward twenty years later and we have the context for Other [chinese] — urban and diverse.

We can loosely bracket the show with having its conceptual origins starting about that time. This may be the subtext for the title, Other [chinese]. The juxtaposition between the old timers and the newcomers may not have been apparent for the most part, but cue Connie Kum’s video excerpt and her feelings are made plain.

The key structuring device is an imaginary questionnaire run by Alice Canton who is asking questions about what it means to be Chinese in New Zealand. Out of the chorus of forty or so, eight or nine key performers offer responses to the questions while the larger group (40 altogether) positioned themselves across the stage according to where their views matched. Strongly agree: stage left, strongly disagree: stage right, and places in-between. That works as a device to keep the bodies moving through space. Most onstage are either international students or first generation New Zealanders; even the sole Hokkien speaker, Paul Teo, a retiree grandfather, was in this category. There was one performer who identified as 7th generation New Zealand Chinese. Their responses were varied, ranging from verbal selfies, to more explicit accounts of sexuality, minimalism, intergenerational politics and art school.

Above the stage were five square screens that play the talking heads of some very well respected Chinese New Zealanders, with the exception of one who describes herself as 1/16th Chinese, whose account of visiting the ancestral hall of her family village in Guangzhou really did connect. The rest of the video interludes are somewhat hubristic. I would have been happy for those voices to have been omitted, with clips of lesser known people speaking. It felt like they were there to add heft and authority to the stories that the performers on stage were telling. That’s not meant out of any disrespect for Manying Ip, Connie Kum, Mai Chen or Mua Strickson-Pua, but the show would have been edgier without them.

So did Other [chinese] hit its mark?

It did. Alice Canton has created an impressive platform, or framework from which to interrogate Chinese identity in New Zealand in 2017. There is a bunch of stuff to parse before we get to the carthartic onstage confessionals, but maybe that is the fat we had to chew before getting to the meat and crunchy bits.   

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A richly representative array of Auckland’s Chinese residents share the stage of Q Loft in Alice Canton’s OTHER [chinese], an intriguing investigation into what it is to be Chinese in Aotearoa at this moment in time. A sequel to Canton’s 2016 White/Other, which considered the nature of own her dual white/Chinese identity, OTHER [chinese] extends the inquiry into the collective nature of cultural identity by engaging with many different voices and viewpoints to form a montage of multiple possibilities.

Forty-or-so individuals dressed in everyday street wear spread across a padded, red-carpeted stage, facing the audience who sit church hall-style in rows of chairs on a red carpet. The audience remove their shoes before entering the performance space and the performers are also in bare feet. Later we are told that taking your shoes off when you enter a home or formal space is a widely accepted marker of Chinese-ness.  

The performers are mostly members of the 1.5 generation, ranging from quietly spoken high school and university students to more assured teachers, passionate parents and a retired grandfather from Kuala Lumpur. There are new migrants, international students, Chinese community leaders, senior citizens and a seventh-generation Chinese New Zealander. Most of the text is English. Utterances in Mandarin and Cantonese are also part of the mix, sometimes translated and sometimes not.

The opening sequence features five graceful, smiling young women in a formal Chinese folk dance, followed by the large group filing onto the stage to participate in a syncretic Chinese line dance, very rhythmic and joyous, with flowing arms, detailed hand gestures and sideways steps, and a feeling of collective energy, focus and commitment. The same dance appears at the end of the show, in celebration and release.

Clustered almost randomly as a mass of bodies when the dance ends, individuals step forward to briefly reflect on their personal experiences, sharing anecdotes drawn from their family histories and everyday lives, or completing sentence stubs such as “I feel most Chinese when…”. Some of these personal commentaries are very brief and intensely personal, specific to a particular family, often examining the gendered nature of parental treatment of sons and daughters, the challenge of meeting your own goals and those of your parents at the same time, the frustrations and challenges and ambiguities of finding your place in the world, and ways of combatting the racist attitudes of fellow students.

Every now and then, the performers sit on the floor with their backs to the audience while watching video clips projected above them on five small screens on the back wall. These clips present statements from 20 or so well-known members of the Auckland Chinese community, ranging from stalwart seniors Natalie Sew Hoy, and Connie and John Kum, to respected authorities including lawyer Mai Chen and the Reverend Mua Strickson-Pua, and writer Mei-Lin Te Puea Hansen. Their video statements are more extensive, juxtaposing personal experiences, achievements and wishes for the future with references to contested issues in Aotearoa’s history involving prejudice, abuse, racism and bias against Chinese New Zealanders.

The various narratives are interspersed with a series of survey questions tossed out by Canton in her role as director of proceedings and leader of the large group.  The performers respond by placing themselves along a continuum to show whether they Strongly Agree, Strongly Disagree, or fall somewhere between the two positions, and Canton seeks elucidation from people at each end of the spectrum. These questions explore attitudes to factors of life in New Zealand, topical issues, and aspects of Chinese-ness.

The collective effect of the multiple narratives, varied viewpoints, conversations, video statements and responses to the survey questions is both an assertion of and a making visible of the many forms of Chinese-ness. This acts as a valuable provocation, whether your own background is Chinese or not, helping you to consider where you fit into the scheme of identity. And the rich array of experiences and ideas presented also serves as a reminder of ways in which particular qualities, values and aspects of identity can transcend cultural identity to contribute to our essential humanity.

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Following her solo show White/Other, Alice Canton has expanded her exploration of identity into a multifaceted production driven by a variety of voices. In her attempt to tackle the question of what it means to be Chinese in Aotearoa, she has made the logical jump to recruit a massive cast of ‘storytellers’ to share their own experiences in order to figure out an answer.

Featuring a huge cast, OTHER [chinese] is a mix of documentary, focus group and improv session. [More] 

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