At the start of Tell Me When To Laugh And When To Cry, Peter Sau reminds us that it’s been a decade since the Esplanade opened. And that it’s also been a decade since Kuo Pao Kun passed away.
With so many things going on, that’s one connection that I, somehow, always keep forgetting, compartmentalising these two significant events when the link is obviously highly symbolic. In September 2002, KPK passed away. A month later, the Esplanade’s opening ushered a new phase in the local arts landscape.
But at the same time, Sau’s one-man performance proves that it needn’t be seen as a passing of an era. Despite minimal reference to a KPK play (making it, on the surface, one of the most unusual works at the ongoing KPK fest’s line-up), what makes Tell Me When To Laugh a wonderful homage to the late theatre doyen is that you have an actor who has created a new work inspired by the very ideals that his mentor stood for and consciously frames it within an artistic practice that is still ongoing.
Continue reading ‘Peter Sau laughs, cries, and holds a reunion!’
As a lead-up to the Man Singapore Theatre Festival 2011, I thought it’d be interesting to have a roundtable discussion with the three participating playwrights on the idea of The Great Singapore Play. The extremely condensed version came out in today’s papers but I thought, why waste the rest? Here’s the first part of The RAT’s (almost) two-hour-long “chat” with Alfian Sa’at (Cooling Off Day, Nadirah), Huzir Sulaiman (The Weight Of Silk On Skin), Chong Tze Chien (Charged) and Joel Tan (Family Outing).
Continue reading ‘S’pore Theatre Fest 2011! Playwrights talk shop! Part 1!’
This blog entry’s headline doesn’t really reflect anything – except my tendency to come up with bad puns.
That and the fact that you’ll need to go and get tickets now because the only ones left are for Saturday’s matinee. But I’m not going to say it’s a pity should you miss Pariah because, hey, if Teater Ekamatra’s two previous blackbox shows Charged and Nadirah got a restaging at the Man Singapore Theatre Festival, then who knows?
Else, you can always fly to Kuala Lumpur next Thursday where the racially-charged production will be staged again (Malaysia’s Instant Café Theatre Company artistic director and Cake/TNS fave Jo Kukathas directs the piece on both runs and it’s an all-Malaysian cast).
Inspired by the idea of mashing up the late Yasmin Ahmad’s final film Talentime and the controversial 1971 novel Interlok by Abdullah Hussain, playwright Alfian Sa’at concocts a scenario of a multi-racial group of Malaysian student friends whose coming of age moment is sparked by the discovery of a missing page in one of the character’s copy of Interlok.
Continue reading ‘Race ya! Haven’t got a Pariah!’
Ladies and gents, the new logo for this year’s Singapore Theatre Festival.
As W!ld Rice artistic director and fest director Ivan Heng puts it: “Fierce. With good hair shampoo.”
After last year’s break to give way to the theatre company’s 10th anniversary season, their theatre festival is back and will run from Aug 3 to 21.
And you should now be calling it Man Singapore Theatre Festival.
Continue reading ‘S’pore Theatre Fest 2011! W!ld Rice has a new Man! Fierce!’
Can an experimental theatre group get even more experimental? Looks like it, with Cake’s new series in partnership with The Substation. Their theoretically promising three-year project Decimal Points will see four artists take a shot at directing a theatre piece from the vantage point of their respective disciplines. Somewhere down the road, you’ll have Rizman Putra for performance art, Philip Tan for sound, David Lee for fashion/design, and earlier tonight, it kickstarted with film-maker/video artist Brian Gothong Tan’s cinema-meets-theatre directorial debut 4.44. Continue reading ’4.44! Cinema and theatre face off!’
