C'est du Chinois: Crossing communication barriers with Mandarin

Directed by Edit Kaldor and performed at the Falaki Theatre on 28 and 29 March, C'est du Chinois challenged communication barriers with the audience's participation

In its Arab world premiere, C'est du Chinois brought five Chinese actors before Cairo's audience. Directed by Edit Kaldor, the play was staged at the Falaki Theatre for two consecutive evenings, on 28 and 29 March, as part of the 2014 Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF).
The interactive play premiered in 2010 at Lisbon's Alkantara Festival, and has since been performed in theatres and participated in the festivals of over 12 countries around the world.
A performance strictly delivered in the actors' native Mandarin Chinese dialect, in Egypt, with a French title, by a Hungarian director, who lives in the Netherlands, is preliminary evidence of the play's disregard to the boundaries of language.
The French title translates to "It's Chinese," indicating what is impossible to understand, while in Mandarin this idiomatic expression parallels the "Martian Language" -- a popular way of describing the scope of words used by youths in cyberspace -- incomprehensible to older generations (or the people of Earth).
"Thank you for your interest in learning Chinese Mandarin," the performance began to the audience's surprised laughter, proceeding thereafter without translation.
C'est du Chinois tackles concepts of communication which, though difficult, was still possible due to the link created between the performers and spectators. In the execution, the audience found itself in an interactive play which broke the fourth wall as the Mandarin crash course began with easy words – some of which, such as "Kung Fu", were already familiar to international audiences.
The actors on the bare stage used props to illustrate the foreign words before the audience was requested to repeat them. As the theatre became a live classroom for the 80 minutes of the play, spectators exchanged guessing murmurs, trying to decipher the words being acted out.
Learning a language on the spot may seem absurd, yet the initially easy vocabulary soon introduced verbs, and collections of words started to form sentences, as though the purpose of the Mandarin lesson was to allow the unravelling of a Chinese family's story.
Detached from ethnic boundaries, numerous details soon began to tell the tale of how the suffering family moved to a strange country to leave their old troubles behind and start anew.
The idea sprouted from Hungarian writer and director Edit Kaldor's experience as an immigrant who moved from her homeland to the United States, then on to the Netherlands.
By engaging the audience in the performance, Kaldor made spectators feel like foreigners to recreate the immigrant's experience she went through while attempting to communicate and relate to the people of a different culture.
Analysing language discovery and learning, Kaldor also pokes some fun at the recurring patterns she finds often characteristic of the process, such as the constant repetition of words and raising of the voice (something her Belgian husband light-heartedly endured from her Hungarian grandmother).
Having herself lived in countries where she couldn't understand the language, she reflects on the event of fantasising about the meaning of foreign words and the special mixture of delight and frustration this subjected her to.
"You get the space to daydream a lot. That experience, that you don't understand everything but you do understand a little, is what I wanted to give the audience," Kaldor commented in an interview with Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland.
With Kaldor's thoughtful structuring of the piece, the organic interaction of the play does not disregard dramatic development.
"I start the play with a wide distance between actors and audience, as they repeat words that are dry and out of context. Gradually, they bridge the communication gap to finally present a drama that the people can relate to despite language," Kaldor explained to Ahram Online.
Since her first production Or Press Escape, which features one actress using her personal computer on stage, Kaldor's previous work in theatre has repeatedly tackled immigration and identity.
With her actions visible to the audience on a wall-sized screen, including her futile attempts to write a letter to the immigration service, her private interactions are observed through the computer. In another performance, New Game, Kaldor's actors face bureaucracy as they walk around with immigration papers that endlessly need to be submitted to different offices.
Aside from the themes of immigration and language in her work, Kaldor invariably takes full advantage of the theatre space which she uses to recreate live experiences, with little if any artistic manipulation.
Similarly, C'est du Chinois is one of those thoughtful, truthful, whimsical and above all engaging reproductions of situations that many of us experience at least once in a lifetime. The play carries much bigger lessons than the Mandarin session – lessons about solidarity and oneness crossing language or cultural boundaries.
http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/97920.aspx