Checkpoint Theatre's Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong. Photo courtesy of Jason Ho.
Yes, we know. There’s more to Checkpoint Theatre than Atomic Jaya. Kidding. Of course there is!
Anyways, our story’s out in the papers and here’s the transcript of our long chat with husband-and-wife team Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong. Word. Lots of word.
Continue reading ‘We RAT on Checkpoint Theatre’s Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong!’
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!’
And so it begins. Man Singapore Theatre Festival 2011 officially kicks off at Drama Centre with Chong Tze Chien’s Charged and Huzir Sulaiman’s The Weight Of Silk On Skin — two plays which could not have been more different.
While the former, played at the black box upstairs, dealt with racial politics in the military – explosive, gritty, confrontational – the affair downstairs at the theatre was, erm, there’s no other way of putting this, very bourgeois.
Stripped naked, this W!ld Rice production in collaboration with Checkpoint Theatre and directed by Claire Wong is a monologue about an upper-middle class bloke seemingly going through a mid-life crisis, boasting of his exploits, yakking endlessly about his uber-privileged life and hankering for the One True Love –who happens to be The Ex.
Yawn, right? Not quite.
Continue reading ‘S’pore Theatre Fest 2011! Clothes make the play!’
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!’
Don’t you just love this photograph? Ong Keng Sen in drag. Woot. Anyway we had a chat with him last week to coincide with TheatreWorks’ 25th anniversary celebrations which begin this week. Interviews with some of the theatre company’s prominent ”alumni” are out in Tuesday’s paper. But here’s the rest of our Q&A with OKS. Bombs away!
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You and your company have alternatively been getting flak and praised to high heavens in the press. *Cough cough* What are your thoughts on this?
It’s the media’s way of check and balance (laughs). It’s always a kind of schizophrenia of the media. One report is very glowing and another, you’re slammed to hell and back!
For me, I was very interested in how the media was also very experimental in the `90s, I think now the media is much more judgmental about the kind of theatre it wants to support.
In the `90s, there was a much more experimental spirit in the media. This then led to many surprising things happening in the arts and culture. What’s amazing in the `90s, which I think we’ve lost, is that very mainstream productions that had say, 10,000 or 20,000 people attending, there were very experimental (moments). And the media was equally experimental and supportive.
I miss those days because I feel the media right now decides, “Okay we want to support the commercial stuff, the Chicagos…” There’s already a kind of “mainstream” and “fringe” (labeling) whereas in the `90s it was very open. I think many countries looking at Singapore were amazed. Singapore was very unusual at that time.
These days, TheatreWorks’ productions are, dare we say it, so “out there” that sometimes people leave baffled.
TheatreWorks has always been… twenty five years was a big experiment. I think every time we wanted to try something out, we would do it. We didn’t wait. We very seldom waited.
Do you think there are any TheatreWork babies out there, in terms of companies?
We had a very clear inclusive policy so in a way, people who joined us complemented us, like (Low) Kee Hong or Casey (Lim). They did leave to do the Biennale or Checkpoint Theatre – and (Choy) Ka Fai would go on and may be start his own company, but I don’t see them as TheatreWork babies. When they already joined us, we wanted to have the different takes on theatre. In that sense I don’t think we’ve created clones.
Again, these days, you’ve basically been deconstructing or dismantling theatre as Singapore audiences know it. So I’m just wondering, after you’ve dismantled it, what’s next?
I am thinking of deconstructing all these premises of theatre… Flying Circus (Project) is very much that. I think that what happens when theatre evaporates, what does it leave behind? Deconstruction’s happening all the time, but I’m interested in what happens when theatre disappears, and when do we say that it is still theatre? Does it still have to be people in costumes? Theatrical?
We have been constantly rewriting what is theatre. And in that way we have moved towards visual arts, video, site-specific (works) – all these are different experiments.
If you weren’t in theatre right now, what do you think you’d be doing?
I think I would have probably gone on to become a lawyer. I don’t know! (laughs) I would have continued theatre on the side, then I would have quit and I’m not sure… I feel that I would have definitely stuck in law for a few more years and I would have enjoyed that. I was in Lee & Lee and kind of enjoyed myself as a lawyer.
Do you miss the good old days of TheatreWorks with its Beauty Worlds and those Michael Chiang plays?
Not really because in a sense, for me, I think that I’m very clear of what I want to do. So I know that what I want to do does not necessarily mean people will be lining up to buy tickets. I have a very clear sense of purpose, not doing things just for popularity.
What was the first TheatreWorks show you watched?
I was in university, maybe 22 years old. Be My Sushi Tonight. Me and TT (TW’s general manager Tay Tong) queued up to get tickets and it was at the World Trade Centre. It was quite expensive and we sat in the back. We were quite far behind.
And your impressions were…?
This is our professional theatre company — this was the first thought that came to my head. There was the feeling of the audacity of starting a theatre company was the way we perceived it. We were watching a lot of amateur groups as well at that time, it was very, for me, “Oh this is supposed to be professional now? But it didn’t feel it was different from the groups at that time. I was cynical at that time. It got more and more exciting.
When you joined TheatreWorks did you think “Oh, at some point we’re going to do experimental stuff”?
I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I was very happy to continue with theatre. I had left university (NUS) and in university I ran the Varsity Playhouse. TheatreWorks allowed me to continue theatre even though I had left uni. The whole of 1988, I was already doing my law exams and first months of pupillage.
So looking back at those 25 years, what are you thoughts?
Well I suppose that time flies and it just keeps going. And Theatreworks for me, I never saw it as an institution, I saw it as a place where we could make theatre. For me it was always about an avenue of continuing to express yourself… I never saw it as a company or institution. That never appealed in my mind.
For more information on TheatreWorks’ 25th anniversary events, go here.
