Digital Programme: KISS WITNESS / Elisabeth Gunawan – Prayers For A Hungry Ghost

Running time: approximately 70 minutes (no interval)

Age guidance: 14 +

This show contains a haze effect, coarse language, sexually suggestive scenes, depictions of violence, themes of bereavement and complex family dynamics, as well as horror imagery that some viewers may find distressing.

This show is performed in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Malay. Surtitles will be available.

Post-show talk
Thu 30 Oct, free to same-day ticket holders.

Accessible performances

Audio-described performance
Thu 30 Oct, 7.45pm
Touch Tour from 5.45pm – 6.15pm.

Captioned performance
Fri 31 Oct, 7.45pm

Presented by the Barbican.

Commissioned by Kakilang, with support from ArtsAdmin, Barbican Open Lab and curious directive's HYPOTHESIS retreat.

Interview with writer-performer, Elisabeth Gunawan

What was your journey into the performing arts and how have you arrived at your work and style?

I’m a Chinese-Indonesian writer-performer, and have lived in various places since I became an adult. Where I’ve moved to has always been guided by where I feel I’d have a degree of individual freedom, which is really important for making art. I came to the UK in 2020 to train at RADA.

I came to my craft as an actor – acting is one of the deepest, most mysterious, most beautiful crafts and it is very much like writing. You’re writing in space with your presence and your behaviour. Acting led to me making my own work, and writing has also become very important to me.

My company, KISS-WITNESS, is led by quite a specific ethos – not by the fact I’m the one making the work, but by a mode of philosophical enquiry and spirit of wanting to use theatre to create spaces of belonging for people who don’t have it in real life. There’s also a desire to shed light on stories and perspectives that have historically been marginalised or that have been silenced or erased. And to some degree to invite people to refresh the way they see the world, and to decolonise the imagination.

Are there any key influences on the way you make work?

I come from the lineage of laboratory theatre, similar to many practitioners in the UK. When I trained at RADA, my teacher had studied with Grotowski, and I have Le Coq and Gaulier training. At each turn, I rebel against this, while sometimes finding myself ending deeply entrenched in the astute philosophical statements they make about art being a way for society and individuals to reflect and penetrate beyond polite society. Levels of play and complicity with the audience are also very much in my work.

But there’s something important about doing it my way, as a younger and more inexperienced practitioner who tries to make theatre drawing from the school of life, not the school of theatre. I want to make theatre that speaks to people. There’s an attempt to draw from the well of knowledge and engage in my own knowledge-making and ultimately use that to empower people. There’s a kind of self-organisation to it – I won’t wait for resources or permissions and I’ll do it my way.

Your work is visually rich. Do you start with the visual image, or does the design stem from the text?

Aesthetics change with every story: they need to be told in a different way. I genuinely believe in allowing every show to inform you how it wants to be told. When you do that, the form informs the substance. Prayers for a Hungry Ghost and my last show Stampin’ in the Graveyard are described as visually rich, which comes from an intention and ambition to create a universe, immerse the audience and bring them into that world.

When I talk about trying to uplift perspectives that have been historically marginalised it’s not very ambitious or difficult to understand – often it is about just taking the audience’s hand and bringing them into a universe that might seem unfamiliar to them.

In Prayers for a Hungry Ghost, we’re bringing them into the realm of the hungry ghost. An underworld informed by images and ideas from Chinese cosmology, which believes that people who are revengeful or greedy in their lives will be reborn as ghosts with huge empty bellies, and with fire in their mouths. Everything they eat will turn to ash, and they are doomed to eternal hunger. One day a year there is a Hungry Ghosts festival, when the ghosts are allowed to return to earth. In Taiwan, and Singapore – mostly in Southeast Asia – people will leave offerings in their family altars and also in public places for ghosts who have nowhere to go home to. There are offerings of food, sometimes basins of water and a washcloth. They even stage concerts leaving the first row of seats empty for the ghosts. It’s a practice of compassion, showing compassion for a kind of suffering.

Being of an identity that is minoritised, Chinese-Indonesian (other cast members are British-Chinese or Chinese-Canadian), I want to bring audiences inside our experience. Often, when bodies of colour are put on stage, which is a public place, we are seen as social subjects. But I want to bring people into the lived experience, our consciousness, and show that people of colour are psychologically complex. Often, therefore, the visual worlds onstage are expressions of the psychological experiences of the characters.

Certain descriptions are made of our work – visually captivating, beautiful and grotesque, mysterious and dark, and also tender, hopeful. It’s possibly a cliche from a theatre-maker to say there’s a whole range in there – but I do think there’s something in the darkness, intimacy and sensuality of the worlds that capture this. The name of the company is KISS WITNESS, giving a sense of intimacy and of observation.

How do the audience play a role physically in the space?

Prayers for a Hungry Ghost is the first piece where I’m not overtly using audience participation – but it doesn’t mean they’re any less important.

During rehearsals, we discovered something about the nature of looking. There is very rarely a direct way of looking at ghosts: it all happens through some kind of filter – a mirror or a camera. If you look at a ghost directly, it will go away! Similarly, there are many indirect ways of talking to an audience.

The frame of the performance is that this is the day of the hungry ghosts festival – the one day when the portal between the hungry ghosts and the living opens. A curtain parts for you to see the inside this hell, but it will close again. Because they’re in hell the ghosts are not able to reach out. The audience is safe in that sense, they are witnesses. In the rehearsal room we try to be rigorous about the audience experience, the dramaturgy of the audience. A pause, a change of pace. You try to make a piece welcoming for an audience.

Are there other core themes to Prayers for a Hungry Ghost?

It also focuses on the experience of diasporic and migrant Chinese communities – though it’s not to say these are only experienced by these people. For that reason, the entire team is very diverse, but also includes a lot of people from different Chinese diasporic identities and countries. It’s because we want that lived experience to be coded into the piece. We are being supported by a small commission from an organisation called Kakilang which also supports Eastern and South East Asian arts, particularly multi disciplinary arts. We are engaging with the myth of the model minority, which is actively in the discourse right now: the idea that as an immigrant, you need to deserve your place in society through good behaviour, which is a dehumanising logic. The piece grapples with this idea through one immigrant family with a very ambitious father who believes you put your head down, and work hard, and money and success are the only ways you can protect yourself. He has two daughters – Big Sister and Little Sister – one of whom excels in every way to the standards set on women by a hierarchical, patriarchal society, and who blossoms into a world-renowned concert pianist. The other fails in every way, slowly becomes ill and turns into a hungry ghost. These psychological experiences also have a systemic root.

The idea of ghosts is interesting – who is to say that ghosts are the souls of dead people? A ghost is a quality of attention, the thing that demands a reckoning, the thing that lingers at the corner of your eye – when you have a thought, a fixation, a memory that you can’t let go. Who’s to say that isn’t a form of being haunted? The piece engages with the metaphor of ghost to give us the opportunity to speak about erasures, emotions and experiences we chose to marginalise and not discuss.

Can you tell us about the style of performance for Prayers for a Hungry Ghosts – and how you play with text and physical form?

We’re leaning into a very cinematic style. The play is set within the realm of the hungry ghosts, characters who have died and are in a personal hell in which they’re forced to relive memories – it’s like a film playing over and over. In a film, text is delivered, sometimes by actors in a scene, sometimes by a narrator, sometimes it’s read, like subtitles or chapter titles – all of which are very different modes of engaging with an audience, with different impact. Although I bring a script into rehearsal, we often find once we’ve staged it physically, that there are certain lines we don’t need to say anymore, because they are reflected in the body. That’s the uniqueness of theatre – you’re not writing just with text, you’re writing in the space; you’re writing images that unfold in a room.

Theatre is so special at convening us right here, right now. It’s human co-presence, in the space together. That’s why it becomes more important and significant to activate the aspects of writing that are not text. You write with the body, with sound, with silence. You can create a piece and build in a time for silence so audiences can take a breath. All of this is writing.

Some of the imagery in your work is dark, tinged with horror, but you’re also inviting the audiences to empathise with and understand your characters.

Yes, if I were to encapsulate what I’d like audiences to feel at seeing one of my pieces, it’s that they feel more human. My very first piece was very much like this, and so is Prayers for a Hungry Ghost. The characters are dehumanised in one way or another. Dehumanising is not a one-way street – how much are the audience complicit?

I personally don’t believe any more in an adversarial relationship with the audience. That has been in fashion – I have done it too – but it’s confronting for the audience and you risk losing them so that they are no longer vulnerable with you. I now believe in the power of consciousness-raising through inviting people to be vulnerable, and feeling safe to do so. In rehearsals we’ve found you can never know how the audience feel, but you have to imagine they are in the room when you rehearse, to guide your choices to ensure the horror scenes for instance aren’t gratuitous. There’s always a sense of play, a sense of wanting to engage the imagination of the audience.

You studied post-colonial discourse. Does that thread through all of your work? Absolutely. The desire to decolonise doesn't come from a theoretical place, it comes from lived experience – anybody who has ever felt oppressed doesn’t need a book to tell them they’re oppressed, that their freedom is being limited, or that certain things that seem to be freely available to others are not freely available to you. A lot of my art, from my first piece Unforgettable Girl until now, has come from a desire to speak back to a certain kind of injustice, at the same time as knowing that for the most part, there’s never somebody clear to blame: it seems to be the way the world is. Instead, theatre becomes a space where you can reflect on aspects of the human world and how even our most isolated traumas are created by forces that are systemic.

We are an independent company, which means that we make theatre with very little resource. We do get support from independent institutions which support artists at a grassroots level. I’ve never made art under a commercial model because the sustainability of the means of making art is really important to me. Ticket prices are cheap, so people come and it becomes about the exchange of energy and presence. Art shouldn’t be a capitalist exchange of goods; it should be about raising consciousness. Ultimately I am trying to invite people to think differently, to go deeper – whatever that means in that context.

What is your relationship to the Barbican?

It’s extremely significant. We wouldn’t be able to create this piece without the Barbican. The richness of the theatrical modes of storytelling were all made possible through Barbican OpenLab, which gave us access for a week to the Pit, and technical support to make the most of the space. That’s almost unheard of at that scale.