New age theater B-Floor makes you question your own thoughts with their latest production of “OXYGEN” which heads to the Big Apple this week to represent Thailand at the Undergroundzero festival. For over ten years, the local theater group has been creating thought-provoking shows that often use visuals over speech to convey their often political messages. “OXYGEN” is the last part in a trilogy that started with “Flu-O-Less-Sense” (2010), which was more theatrical and narrative, and “Fool Alright” (2011) which was more conceptual and deconstructive but still based on past events that were concrete. Director Teerawat Mulvilai explains that “OXYGEN” is “much more fluid, the scenes float around and connect to one another in an abstract way. So the performers had to train their bodies to represent different conceptual ideas.” Actress Sasapin Siriwanij confirms the intense training that was involved for this particularly physical play, “This is a show that you can’t jump into unprepared… I can say there has been no easy day – everyday it takes the same process in order to reach a good and worthwhile rehearsal, run, or show. It’s tough but challenging, and I learn a lot every single day. Even now, new things keep popping up while we perform. I think this is one of the great things about physical theater and devised theater. It’s a development that’s constantly in progress. What’s finished is the structure, but the actual performance is always in dynamic.”
The play revolves around the idea that we are indoctrinated by ideas given to us from our families, education, personal life experiences, books we’ve read, films (and plays) we’ve seen, and the history we are taught. The world is full of thoughts and ideas floating around everywhere, but we can choose to take in what we believe. Teerawat reminds us that we can learn from the past so we don’t make the same mistakes again. In one scene the actors and actresses run around spastically as if they are chickens with their heads cut off. According to Teerawat, this is a sort of blessing because “it’s like their spirit is free in some way”, however, the problem lies in the fact that other people catch them in this state of freedom and “calm them down, comfort them, taming them and placing them in a type of cage where everybody is the same… for me it is a dangerous moment.” Actress Nana Dakin enjoys acting totally crazy on stage, “It’s really fun! You get to release so much pent up tension. But it’s also exhausting – it requires huge amounts of energy to go wild!”
Another memorable part of the play was the humorous reference to famous historical works of art like Michealangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam.” Teerawat explains that the significance of this segment of “OXYGEN” reflects upon the notion that “everything is related to the idea of what it means to be human. A long time ago we believed that the world was flat, until scientists proved the world is round and the Earth is not the center of the universe. We also have many ideas about the origins of humans and life… they come from our beliefs and religions ….so the reference to the Michealangelo painting, which shows God giving life, is an image that refers to how life might have begun… it’s part of a scene that is looking at ideas of breathing, of birth and death, and imagining how our thoughts are connected to our breath.”
Get show times and updates on B-Floor’s performance at Undergroundzero festival here.
