I always enjoy working with veteran director and theatre maestro Peter Sau, probably the only director in Singapore that I love working with, because he understands my artistic/creative foci and my needs arising from my disabilities.
Here’s a video clip of my performance at the Singapore Writers Festival 2022 presented by ART:DIS, directed by Peter Sau. Small bits of it have been edited out, but it’s mostly intact. Watch it on ART:DIS’ Instagram page. The beautiful soundscape is by the talented Niran Jierapipatanakul, intern at ART:DIS.
For those Deaf/deaf and hard of hearing, or those unable to make out the spoken word because of the echo in the soundtrack, here is the script. For the blind/visually impaired, the sharp sounds you hear intermittently are made by my placards of key words falling to the ground.
“Scheherazade’s Sea” is the main title of my series of autobiographical multisensory, transdisciplinary work. Scheherazade, the charming storyteller in the Arabian Nights fairytale, symbolises for me the Autistic woman in many ways: a young woman, betrayed and abandoned by her own father, handed over to an evil, violent monarch. Alone in a perilous situation, she must improvise, pretend, perform, weave compelling stories and tread carefully between reality and fantasy. Her life depends on it.
A similar conundrum faces the Autistic woman. Women throughout history have been exploited and subjugated. Autism is largely male dominated, Autistic women are a minority within a minority.
How may she survive intact, without parts of her integrity and selfhood being erased or broken? How much of myself is “I” and “me”?
I describe my struggle in this way: “Performing the unnatural as naturally as possible.”
Is it even possible, now, to separate “I” and “me”? Am I really Me? What if “I” is not “Me”? What if there is no more “I” or “Me”?
Perhaps now, after 57 years, there is just “her”?
Scheherazade moves onward, inside her vast Sea. Regardless.
(A resonant, dark soundscape begins.)
Who am I?
I am…
Amazing.
Mundane.
Modest.
Haughty.
Compliant.
Naughty.
Generous.
Selfish.
Talented.
Inept.
Withdrawn.
Confident.
Enabled.
Disabled.
I am
Perpetually,
Consistently,
Instinctively,
Performing the unnatural
As naturally as possible.
But am I me?
And what,
Or who is
A “me”,
Anyway?
This me…
Sucked into
Your orbit
Of deceit:
Tiny child,
Defenceless,
Gullible,
Trusting.
You said
You loved me.
You said
You’d take care of me.
And I believed you,
As you robbed
Of half a lifetime,
Both I and Me –
Manipulated,
Made your servant.
Trapped inside
Lavish, opulent
Golden Cage!
You the Mistress,
I subaltern.
Resplendent brilliance,
Fragile, broken body.
Hapless dichotomy,
Yearning to Become,
Mourning the loss
Of one
Called, “Me”,
A person I did not even know.
A soul longing to be free.
And then,
Staring into roaring Abyss,
Life and death
Called to me.
Choosing death
In order to live…
I caught a glimpse,
A fleeting vision,
Of Me.
“Run!” I whispered.
“Flee!” cried Me.
And so, I and Me together,
We did.
As far and fast
As we possibly could,
As you pursued.
Hell hath no fury…
Heaven hath no peace…
Now, you want to destroy me, because I dared to leave you?
I am Bunnyblu – naive child.
I am Little Duckling – innocence betrayed.
I am Mermaid – hungering, thirsting.
I am the Seer – watching, waiting.
I and Me, we are
Scheherazade of the Sea:
“Slave to no master,
Owned by none!”
I am Nothing, Nobody –
Yet Everyone lives in Me!
Dawn-joy Leong 