{"id":27600,"date":"2006-09-24T04:03:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-24T04:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/?p=27600"},"modified":"2024-07-04T13:53:51","modified_gmt":"2024-07-04T05:53:51","slug":"the-60-second-plug-francesca-beards-chinese-whispers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/articles\/2006\/09\/the-60-second-plug-francesca-beards-chinese-whispers\/","title":{"rendered":"The 60 Second Plug: Francesca Beard’s “Chinese Whispers”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Who is this ‘Beard’ that gave you your last name? Did you have a rough\ntime as a kid with a name like that?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My dad’s family name is Beard. It’s\na Cornish name. I didn’t have a hard time in Malaysia, but when I came to\nschool in the UK, I was deeply unpopular. However, that was probably because I\nwas mixed race and it was an English boarding school in the 1970s. Or maybe\nbecause I was a Grade A Nerd. Either way, the whole Beard name thing was mere\nicing on the cake of my woe. In 1996, I gave up real life to become a fictional\ncharacter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Malaysian-born successes that live abroad are constantly appropriated\nfor national pride; do you think you qualify?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I definitely qualify to be\nappropriated; it’s just the national pride I’m not sure about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You attempted ‘real jobs’ before quitting to do what you do now. What\nwere some of these ‘real jobs’?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I worked for a commercials company\nmaking adverts. Then I was a researcher for television documentaries. Now I\nwaft around, thinking beautiful and obscene thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why performance poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed. Why? Why<\/em>? WHY?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are some of your influences?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My influences are bad day-time\ntelevision, third-rate celebrities, and feelings of anger and resentment from\nimagined traumas in the past. Also: my family, my beloved amah Ying Chair, and\nmy amazing friends. Not forgetting KL, the city where I was born; Penang, where\nI grew up; and London, where I live. Oh, and Shakespeare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tell us a little about how Chinese\nWhispers<\/em> came to be.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s a one woman show about\nidentity. I talk at length about my exotic past. There is an organisation in\nthe UK, called Apples and Snakes, that supports performance poets. Geraldine\nCollinge, director of Apples and Snakes, produced my show. The original idea\nwas to make it a spoof about Art — What\nis Art<\/em> was the working title. Yes, I know. What a must-see show …<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have always had a resistance to\ntalking about my exotic Malayan past; I didn’t want to be like the\nstereotypical Malaysian writer trying to make it overseas. However, the whole\ncultural identity thing proved to be an irresistible force — I just had to\nwrite it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Chinese Whispers<\/em> traffics\nheavily on the subject of cross-cultural identity. How would you identify\nyourself, now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would identify myself as Other.\nDefinitely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you anything in particular to prepare yourself for a reading?\nDescribe this ritual for us.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The ritual is secret and involves\nmany tiny, invisible things, some too tiny to be expressed in words, some too\nsecret to even think about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You were last in Malaysia to perform for Wayang Kata — A Night of Spoken Word<\/em>, in April. How often to do\nyou come back to Malaysia? What’s different this time?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This recent visit was the second\ntime in two decades. It was the first time I’d performed in Malaysia — I can’t\nremember being as nervous, before a gig!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Wayang Kata<\/em>, you asked the\naudience about how they preferred to die, providing them with six choices.\nConsidering all the audiences you’ve had from all over, which option is the\nmost popular?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing I love about the audience\nsurvey is that it changes so much, depending on the audience demographic. In\nSouth America, for example, everyone went for Death by Crocodile. The Nordic\nraces tend to go for Chainsaw-ed by a Nutter. Young people and Catholics opt\nfor Heroic Death under Torture. I found that Kuala Lumpur was similar to London\nin many important ways, not least because both cities show a preference for\nDeath as an Astronaut, followed by Death by Lion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Which would you choose, yourself?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Death as an Astronaut, followed by\nDeath by Lion, obviously. We are all products of our environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You are conducting a spoken word workshop on September 30th<\/sup>,\nat KLPac. What is it like, training aspirant performance poets for stardom? Any\nstories?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You know, seriously, it’s the best\nthing about my job: what I do. I believe that performance poetry is a truly\ndemocratic art form. Any one can do it — if they have the drive to communicate\nwith their audience, their society, and their peers about what really matters\nto them in the world. It’s a privilege to be part of the process where people\nfind their individual voices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where do you go, after Kuala Lumpur?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To Penang for a few precious days:\nto see old friends and take my daughter Lola Choo to visit the monkeys in the\nBotanical Gardens. After that, the Cheltenham Festival, on October 9th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tell us a really, really bad joke.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Come see my show, in which there is\nan Embarrassment of really, really bad jokes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s irony to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spinach. Liver, of course. And also,\ninterestingly, cherries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A really horrible Internet personality test determines that you are a\npre-20th<\/sup>-Century personality. Who would you be, and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would be some sort of serf or\npeasant. But famous in my village for telling really, really bad jokes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

~~~<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chinese Whispers<\/em> was commissioned and\ndeveloped by Apples & Snakes and the Battersea Arts Centre. Directed by\nArlette Kim George, written and performed by Francesca Beard, it comes to\nPentas 2, KLPac from Thu 28 – Sat 30, Sep 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An edited version of the above interview first appeared in the Weekend Mail’s Sat 23 & Sun 24, Sep 2006 edition. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First Published: 24.09.2006 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who is this ‘Beard’ that gave you your last name? Did you have a rough time as a kid with a name like that? My dad’s family name is Beard. It’s a Cornish name. I didn’t have a hard time in Malaysia, but when I came to school in the UK, I was deeply unpopular. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":3,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,3541,3752],"tags":[4043,3912,4047,3911,3925,493,509,4046,538,4045,4044],"language":[7523],"writer":[7623,7625],"class_list":["post-27600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literature","category-performance-art","tag-apples-and-snakes","tag-arlette-kim-george","tag-battersea-arts-centre","tag-francesca-beard","tag-identity","tag-klpac","tag-performance-art","tag-performance-poetry","tag-poetry","tag-spoken-word","tag-wayang-kata","language-english","writer-pang-khee-teik","writer-zedeck-siew"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27600"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39216,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27600\/revisions\/39216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27600"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=27600"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}