Looking for the Idiot Inside of You…
They are street performers, directors, teachers, writers and producers. They believe in education through the theatre and arts from an early age, and stand for performances accessible to everyone, that talk about everyone’s lives. Above all, Kami and Chad Leslie are idiots and proudly so. Closer finds out why…
Clowns in the old town? That’s what probably came to the minds of most people who crossed Kami and Chad Leslie’s way recently in the Sao Lourenço area.
And possibly to yours also, looking at these photos.
These clowns have a peculiarity though: they are self-proclaimed idiots, with no past and no future. There’s only the present, and as Blanche Dubois* famously said, they pretty much depend “on the kindness of strangers”.
It had been a while since Kami and Chad did a street performance and they were a bit worried about being out of practice, but as soon as they put the clown clothes and red noses, “something began to spark again,” Chad says, and what’s better, people engaged with them.
CHAD: “It happened as it usually does in this kind of situation: this time we were in a street noodle stand, with a bowl of noodles in our hands. But we are idiots, so we didn’t know how to use chopsticks. Then a woman sitting there came to us and started teaching us how to use them. She forgot our outfits and red noses and just helped us.”
It wasn’t a typical gweilo / Chinese situation. In a way the lady became an idiot as well, not “an utterly foolish or senseless person” as the dictionary defines the word “idiot”. It was more, in the Latin definition of the word (idiota), “an ordinary person” relating to and helping other ordinary people.
That’s the essence of the message that Chad and Kami Leslie pursue in their work in the theatre: to bring out the idiot inside you and consequently what’s best and real in you. Complicated? Risky? Not so much if you know the story behind this couple, united by work and love.
A Shaky and Unique Encounter in Taiwan
Trying to fit Chad and Kami into a specific category is a useless exercise, even within the theatrical world where they do street performance among many other things.
He is American, she is French-Brazilian. Both have a classical background: Chad graduated from the North Carolina School of the Arts (one of the top three Arts schools in the States), Kami in France where she studied Chinese. But the Paris and Broadway limelights didn’t attract them. Instead, Kami received a one-year scholarship in Taiwan and Chad ended up in Taichung, not because he had a particular interest in Chinese culture, rather to try an experience with puppetry theatre that would take him to Asia. Taiwan just happened to be the place of residence of a friend, and teaching English classes became his bread and butter (and a profitable one!) for Chad while exploring the Taiwanese theatrical scene.
But it would take an earthquake to allow the two to find each other. And it was a big one: 7.6 on the Richter scale, followed by five aftershocks measuring 6 degrees of magnitude. The house where Chad was living was broken and unlivable for a while. During the following days and nights he, like thousands of Taiwanese, was forced to live in the streets until he got a temporary shelter. Kami went to visit a friend and found Chad living on his floor, clad in typical Texas Cowboy attire. The rest is pure theatre, or at least that’s the way Chad’s remembers it.
CHAD: “When I came to Taiwan, I thought it would be funny to come as a cowboy, I came with my big cowboy hat, my big Texas belt buckle, my moustache and cowboy boots. After the earthquake, I was quacking around, sleeping on the floor with no shirt on, my Wranglers (jeans) on, my boots on, hat over my face. One morning I hear a knock on the door about eight o’clock, and I got up and opened the door. The light came in and I just saw a silhouette of her (turning to Kami) and I was like, ‘Ooohh!!’ and I pretty much knew that she was the one and I was sold. She has a very different story…(laughs).”
KAMI: “I didn’t like very much the cowboy style, I was not very impressed (laughs). But I was surprised though because we talked about theatre, and he wanted to take me to the museum. We had a very interesting discussion that didn’t match his looks and I thought that maybe he was trying to find his way (laughs).”
Actually it was Chad’s theatre classes that hooked Kami. “One day he called me and said ‘I have a theatre class’, after two months of not really seeing each other. There was no theatre at that time and I said, ‘great, let’s start again’. It was a great chance and I went to his class and that was my dream, I realized who he was,” she recalls.
With the quake, life as it was vanished and in a way, interaction with people surrounding them in the street became the sole way for the two actors to
communicate their art. Later, already together, they moved to an artist village in rural Taiwan where they developed the oddities and wonders of multicultural communication, trying to answer questions like, ‘which language should you use to express yourself and communicate?’
They were the only foreigners in the village and people would literally come to see how they would eat and sleep in their own house. “We began to feel like zoo animals,” Chad says.
They eventually decided to open their doors to the community and explain their lifestyle through a combination of visual arts, movement and audience interaction.
“So we got into very strange encounters with the community,” Chad reflects, “and I am sure they walked away thinking, ‘these foreigners, uhhh!!!!, they were left off the hook,’, but that inspired a number of pieces, and actually inspired the first piece that we initially brought to Macau.”
A Cube at San Ma Lou
When they arrived in Macau five years ago, Chad and Kami knew they wanted to develop theatre outside the classical structure. Their preferred stage is the street and the audience is potentially the world, as long as one is around, stops, looks and interacts. Viewers become involuntary actors in a play where they decide how the next act is going to be. No time constraints, no special lights or setting.
Much of this style was forged in their formative years in Taiwan, where there’s an exciting experimental theatre scene. “There’s a incredible bastardization of the western ideas and a willingness to try new things in Taiwan,” Chad explains, “so the blinders are off. They don’t have the constraints of thinking, ‘you’re not doing it according to this or that’ like happens in the west. They go for it and in many performances I saw I was not blown away by the overall product, but I always saw something new, something I’d never thought about before.”
That’s why they decided to introduce themselves to Macau audiences as idiots living for three days and two nights in a cube in Leal Senado Square. On the top of the box a sign launched the challenge in Chinese: “Can Macau People Keep the Idiots Alive?”
They were not allowed to use words or mime to indicate hunger or any other need. They were just idiots with red noses staring at the curious passers-by.
CHAD: “Hundreds of people surrounded us 24 hours a day and tried to keep us alive, we were under constant observation and you can always imagine ‘I’m hungry now’, but how do you communicate that? They expected us to juggle, we never juggled, so they became very interactive with us.”
KAMI: “The culmination of all the things that we had done, could be explained by this work, it was a catharsis, pure and simple”.
CHAD: “Eventually someone realized that we might have to go to the bathroom, so they started with a new argument – ‘how do you take them out? Where’s the hole to take them out? And where do we take them once they are out, and what are they going to do once we take them there?’ So they took us out of the box, they figured out how, they worked together as a community and took us to the toilet and were with us the whole time. They really took on the mission of caring for us.”
Macau’s Theatre Dramas and the Entertainment Challenge
This spontaneous acceptance of the community at large starkly contrasts with the closeness of the local theatrical community. The fact that Kami and Chad are not fully accepted by their peers is as ironic as it is revealing of what Macau still is.
“We are definitely gweilo, we’re definitely on the outside,” Chad says. “I have a pretty strong criticism of the local theatre community in the sense that it’s very Chinese centered. There are so many different cultures in Macau, so many people who would like to speak for the theatre. It could be more inclusive of the entire Macau community, but at this point, there’s not a lot of work for outsiders,” he concludes.
The environment is not the best for local production to flourish: a small city where actors must have other professions to make ends meet and deal with their passion as a hobby, and a very rich government that doesn’t really understand the purpose of theatre, and a population generally uninterested in the shows in town, according to Chad.
But all that is about to change due to the most improbable of sources. The casinos, especially the American and Australian companies, need classy and arty shows, which opens a whole new world of possibilities for local artists, or at least that’s the way Chad sees it.
“The casino entertainment will push up the professional standards, it will insist upon a certain strain to be developed and a certain amount of the quality of work, and it will provide jobs to people who want to pursue a career in the arts,” he claims, adding that he doesn’t buy the debate that it will be a struggle between entertainment and art. He presents Le Cirque du Soleil, about to make its debut in Macau, as the best example of an arty entertaining show.
For him the real question is how to avoid the easy temptation of cloning Vegas productions.
“Our challenge here is, how do we train people in the arts in Macau, without losing the Southeast Asian, Chinese traditional influence? How do we work in both western and Asian worlds and bring them together artistically, so that they are still going to generate artists and performers who can go up and pursue a career in entertainment, but also have certain artistic merits of what it is that they’re doing?” he asks.
The first good news is that the casinos are desperate for local talent, which would stop forcing them to go to Hong Kong, Singapore and beyond to bring what they cannot find here. The second one, especially for Chad and Kami, is that their production company, Worldwide Art Collective Macau Productions (acronym MACWAC) will be in the pole position to train artists and performers. Its focus will be on entertainment events, handling talent and creativity within any type of event program. It could be a performance in a casino, anything related to creativity on stage, writing the scripts or training people who need to be trained, up to stage management. They also rely on a worldwide network of 600 artists who they have brought to Asia over the years.
Education through Theatre
Training adult performers might prove to be more difficult than teaching children through the arts. That’s a job (another one!) that Chad and Kami do at the IIUM.
Chad is the artistic director of the Centre for Arts, Technology and Education, where he organizes, among other projects, theatre summer camps for children. Helping them to express their feelings, energy and creativity theatrically, is perhaps the best way for Chad to demonstrate what his art means to him.
“Theatre is an educative communication tool, and my responsibility as an educator in the society is to help people in the community to find their voice, and I believe that theatre is the vehicle for young and old people of all types, to find their voice and help them to clarify it, so that they can make clear how they feel, it’s a matter of empowering them,” Chad explains.
So it’s not surprising that if he and Kami had to put together a production to reflect today’s Macau, it would be something like this:
Chad's script introduction:
“I think that it would be a performance of the people by the people and it might not be just one, but a multitude of performances, where they would speak their minds, their situations in a form that could be heard by the powers of Macau.
There are a lot of deals being done without the consultation of the people and you hear them talk about this, but they have no voice, so it would be a kind of an uprising.
Theatre is a very closed door, if you do something in the Cultural Centre it’s not going to reach my neighbour downstairs. That’s not the theatre that I am interested in. For activism or democratic work or towards the development of the community, it’s just the stuff that happens in everyday life, out in the street and bringing more of that into focus, and taken into more serious consideration, it’s a huge step.”
It actually sounds like a manifesto play. From two idiots to us all.
* Main character in Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar named Desire”
To find more about Chad and Kami’s work, check www.macwac.com
