The Uncommercial Traveller

A group of 10 university students are sitting around a large courtyard in a heritage building behind China House on Beach Road in Georgetown in groups of three and four. One designated writer per group is tapping away on a laptop. It’s a balmy afternoon, the sleepy space between lunch and teatime and except for the tapping of the keyboards, there is a hushed silence.

The students, who are both literature and mass communications students from Universiti Sains Malaysia, are plugging away at their scripts, which will mostly run from eight to nine minutes, putting the finishing touches. The scripts will then be recorded by the students themselves, edited by the Punchdrunk Enrichment sound and graphics designer Stephen Dobbie and uploaded onto the British Council website.

From there, they can be downloaded to your various MP3 devices to serve as an audio guide through selected streets in Penang. Except that they’re nothing like any audio guide created by a tourism authority.

Take the following excerpt from the first journey uploaded onto the British Council website, simply entitled “Walk to your present”:

Here is an old unkempt workshop. The piercing sound of the hammer against the rusted cage-like metal is rhythmic and precise. You begin to wonder how much experience is in the rhythm of the hammer. I peered in to see the man wielding the hammer. He wore dirty blue shorts and a t-shirt. Is the workshop open? Is he there today? He caught my eyes with a knowing smile. He stopped his labour and he leaned against the wall.

I wanted to listen to his story and he was waiting for me to ask the right questions. How long had he been working with metal? Was he content? Are you content? Can anyone be capable of contentment hammering metal for life? What is in his future? Surely, he is a dying breed. These are the questions I asked that day. What questions would you ask that man?

The students are being guided by three people from Arcola Theatre and Punchdrunk Enrichment, who help them open their minds to a different way of responding to space, with reference to Charles Dickens’s The Uncommercial Traveller. The whole thing is part of the Dickens 2012 programme. Why Dickens 2012? The great writer was born in 1812. This is his 200th year anniversary. It’s kind of a big deal.

So far, there have been screenings of adaptations of his novels and a 24-hour read-a-thon where excerpts of his various books were read out by people in 24 countries (each country was allotted a five-minute slot in the hour) on February 7, his birthday. In fact, more of what you would expect for a celebration of Dickens and his works.

The Uncommercial Traveller is something a little different. The text is one of his more obscure. And as Anna Dever, project director of Dickens 2012 points out, it is taken as a leaping off point rather than a hard and fast guide.

“For the Dickens 2012 programme, we wanted to reinvent the idea of heritage and reimagine quite a classical figure and try to think how he would relate to a contemporary audience. We were quite keen to invent different strands of the project that toyed with certain skills that you have and ideas you use.

"With this one in particular, we were not looking at Dickens’s style of writing which is very dense and detailed and a massive skill but rather, the way he could go through the streets of London and places he’d never been before, places other people might not recognise or may just walk past, like a dusty alleyway and go in there and respond to it.”

What the project wants to do, from Karachi to Melbourne to Singapore to Georgetown, is in fact, trigger a sense of curiosity about space and responding to these spaces in a non-traditional way.

The idea for incorporating this non-traditional aspect of Dickens into the Dickens 2012 project came about when Dever saw a version Uncommercial Traveller performed by immersive theatre groups Punchdrunk and Arcola in London. “I thought it was fantastic and it was split in two halves. The first part was this audio journey where you plugged in your iPod and downloaded these voices and they showed you around these different places in London.

“The second part was the end of the performance where you ended up in a Victorian soup kitchen. You were showed in and put next to a random performer who was in Victorian costume and sitting before his bowl of soup. This performer would interact with you. They’d immerse you in their story and their journey. So it’s really this idea of wandering somewhere you hadn’t been and being guided by somebody. I just thought it would be so interesting to take that to different cities.”

Basically, what they are creating is known as “immersive theatre” which is the latest thing in performance. What is immersive theatre? “It is a really interesting contemporary theatre model which blurs the line between what’s real and what isn’t. The audience does not sit down and absorb the performance but is very much a fellow performer. Your experience is the show and how you respond to it.”

The interview with Dever is being conducted at China House, a café rich in puddings with a particular penchant for salted caramel, which is apparently, the latest fad in deserts in the UK. Then the theatre people drop in for lunch in between sessions with the students.

Raquel Meseguer is a project director for Uncommercial Traveler. She’s been a performer, a choreographer and an assistant director with Punchdrunk, but like any bona fide artist, is not quite sure what her actual designation with Punchdrunk is.

It’s Day 3 and she has been working flat out with the students to get them to interact with spaces in a whole new way. Like Dickens. “They’re writing and going over their routes and writing again. They’re really being pushed.”

Dobbie, the sound and graphics designer, agrees: “They are taking on a lot of new stuff; new ways of working, new ways of thinking.”

But just how does Dickens figure into all this? Meseguer points out that he doesn’t, not directly, not in terms of the actual text. It’s more a way of seeing. “That is the approach, the technique; to rediscover places, to see things in a different angle, in a different light. So it’s taking his approach and using it with a group of students in a contemporary way in a new place.”

Basically Dickens was an insomniac. The Uncommercial Traveller was a series of articles born of his restless night wanderings. He was especially interested in the hidden spaces, the underbelly of life, and the characters who inhabited these places.

Have the students read Dickens? Are they familiar with his work and how he writes?
That, as Dobbie points out, is beside the point. “In so many ways, it’s not about referencing and being aware of the text. This whole project is about drawing out his approach and going to those places. We’re not asking them to write in the style of Dickens or set their journey in the Dickensian era.

Meseguer agrees: “No, it’s very much contemporary. It’s very much a ‘here and now’ snapshot.”

Straight ahead past the red Penang culture house with the broken and abandoned furniture. The building holds a lot of sad memories. Uncle Tan, who lives around here, stands topless in his shorts, throwing orange peel into the gutter as he whistles. He throws his luck away as his wife calls him into the house.

Dobbie adds: It’s a personal response to an environment, like Raquel said, a period of time.”

Bryn Jones, director with Arcola Theatre expands upon the idea: “We’re interested in looking at the things that we’ve been encouraged not to look at, or perhaps, that we prefer not to look at. We engage with them, reflect upon them and mix them with our creative imaginings and create new and original perspectives of familiar places.

“And from there, you discover what unfolds, what occurs in those explorations and excavations and what you unearth. Then you have the whole logistical thing because at the end of the day they have to come up with a piece of work, 10 minutes of audio that people have to be able to download to their MP3 players, plug in and do the actual journey.

"It has to work for those people to be guided and orientated through that space. It has to be timed so they’re travelling and what’s being said keys in to the moment-by-moment environmental journey through the space. And it also has to work for somebody listening to it in Karachi or Melbourne or Toronto, online or in their bedroom. It has to have a kind of internal life as well as external life. So there’s an awful lot of really complex components to bring together in one piece of work. In the traditions of Punchdrunk and Arcola, it’s truly intensive, it’s truly immersive as a piece of theatre, as a process."

And the band plays on: “A lorong belakang. Yes, you have arrived. Looks like nothing much happens here. The large tree offers natural shelter. Walk there and lean your back against the close shuttered doors. Hmmm…nothing to see. The branches of the tree keep the heat away and there is an old abandoned building in front of you. Walls, sounds of water, trees are growing out from that building.

“Notice the crack on the wall? Move forward and peek inside. It is dark and lonely, a cold breath on your face. Smells of dust and old brick. Lean against the wall and allow the wall to lean against you. But be careful! The wall is falling.”