Walking towards the Toa Payoh ampitheatre this afternoon to catch the third and final performance event on today’s (enforced) schedule, I thought: Aside from budgetary constraints, what’s to stop anyone from spending a whole Saturday (or Sunday) from going on an art marathon?
Couch potatoes do it. Movie freaks do it. And if you time it right, you still have time to go to Zouk. If you wanted to.
***
But I digress. It’s been an interesting day, to say the least. I started it surrounded by people a third of my age and ended it surrounded by heartlanders.
Now, watching a children’s play at 11am may not be everyone’s cup of tea – particularly if you don’t have one yourself and you don’t personally know any of the cast members enough to make that penultimate sacrifice, but hey, there’s a first time for everything.
And so it was that I found myself at The Jungle Book, which was staged by SRT’s The Little Company.
It was fairly amusing (although I couldn’t help but wait expectantly for The Bare Necessities song, which of course, didn’t come out) and confirms my belief that Timothy Nga, who played the tiger Shere Khan, is effective in playing silly.
Two other points.
Sitting directly in front of me was Adrian and Tracie Pang and their two kids. If children’s theatre needed a poster family, the Pangs are it. They give credence to the adage: The Family That Watches A Play Together Stays Together.
Sitting directly behind me were two imps who, during intermission, screamed in my ears. They give credence to the adage: The Family With Two Brats That Watches A Play Together Should Be Banned From Theatre.
Luckily, the heartlander families that watched Melt, Cake Theatrical Production’s free public performance at Toa Payoh were well behaved. The only crazy thing was the show itself.
The creative tagteam of Rizman Putra and Natalie Hennedige put on a Dr. Seuss-like piece that was basically five people dressed up as facial body parts running around like crazy to the uber-cool rhythms of Bloco Singapura – who were dressed like KISS members. Like I said, crazy. Now if only all public theatre performances were this out of this world.
Walking towards the Toa Payoh ampitheatre this afternoon to catch the third and final performance event on today’s (enforced) schedule, I thought: Aside from budgetary constraints, what’s to stop anyone from spending a whole Saturday (or Sunday) from going on an art marathon?
Couch potatoes do it. Movie freaks do it. And if you time it right, you still have time to go to Zouk. If you wanted to.
***
But I digress. It’s been an interesting day, to say the least. I started it surrounded by people a third of my age and ended it surrounded by heartlanders.
Now, watching a children’s play at 11am may not be everyone’s cup of tea – particularly if you don’t have one yourself and you don’t personally know any of the cast members enough to make that penultimate sacrifice, but hey, there’s a first time for everything.
And so it was that I found myself at The Jungle Book, which was staged by SRT’s The Little Company.
It was fairly amusing (although I couldn’t help but wait expectantly for The Bare Necessities, which of course, didn’t come out) and confirms my belief that Timothy Nga, who played the tiger Shere Khan, is effective in playing silly.
Two other points.
Sitting directly in front of me was Adrian and Tracie Pang and their two kids. If children’s theatre needed a poster family, the Pangs are it. They give credence to the adage: The Family That Watches A Play Together Stays Together.
Sitting directly behind me were two imps who, during intermission, screamed in my ears. They give credence to the adage: The Family With Two Brats That Watches A Play Together Should Be Banned From Theatre.
Luckily, the heartlander families that watched Melt, Cake Theatrical Production’s free public performance at Toa Payoh were well behaved. The only crazy thing was the show itself.
The creative tagteam of Rizman Putra and Natalie Hennedige put on a Dr. Seuss-like piece that was basically five people dressed up as facial body parts running around like crazy to the uber-cool rhythms of Bloco Singapura – who were dressed like KISS members. Like I said, crazy. Now if only all public theatre performances were this out of this world.
***
In between those shows was expo zero, that kicker event for TheatreWorks’ The Flying Circus Project.
I was just as curious as everyone else to find out exactly what an empty “dancing museum” was.
True enough, nothing inside TW’s 72-13 except for audiences and participants, who problematised the idea of what a “dance museum” (or in fact, a “museum”) should be.
I stayed for three hours but still missed out on TW big boss Ong Keng Sen and Indian dancer Padmini Chettur’s presentations. I also wasn’t quite sure about actor-director Yves-Noel Genod’s proposition, where he, all resplendent in pink and wearing a crocodile hat, basically took a photo of me.
Anyway, here’s one of Keng Sen having a discussion with folks beneath the lighting rig.
I caught the others, though, and they’ve all got interestingly varied approaches to the proposition. And all invariably entailed some kind of participation from the “museum visitors”.
Boris Charmatz, who concocted the whole concept, was pretty straightforward in his intentions – if not in his presentations. One of his schemes was to, erm, drag people to take charge of this so-called dance museum. “Taking charge” of course, meant, trying to replicate the dance choreography of the “museum”’s previous owner – which meant I had to memorise a simple but rather physically exhausting piece, which I would then pass on.
Design collective FARM’s Torrance Goh did a playful “hide n’ seek” with participants, encouraging them to explore the different nooks and crannies of this supposed “museum”.
Choreographer/dancer Joavien Ng turned one section of the warehouse into a space for her to recreate her tableaus, which often looked hauntingly pretty in the shadows. Here’s an interesting one.
I didn’t actually get to see dancer/choreographer Francois Chaignaud. But that’s because he was inside this literally “black box” the whole time. Lovely (albeit a bit creepy) piece where you enter this pitch-black room and hear this disembodied voice inviting you to imagine your own museum of dance… while he, erm, somewhat massages you.
Danish choreographer/dancer Mette Ingvartsen was the group’s wild card, focusing more on the “dance” aspect of the “dance museum”.
At one point, I was lying down beside her after she said she had no one to do her contact improvisation piece with. So instead, she recounted her various performances in New York. Another time, she invited a group of people to walk with her around the space – and went around a pillar around three times.
The said pillar also became part of another of her performances. A reconstruction of a previous performance, the butt-naked Mette repeatedly walked into the pillar. But gave up after a while because, in the original performance, the pillars were heavy but actually moveable.
The last time I saw her, she was all blue. Literally.
Filipino dancer/choreographer Donna Miranda, meanwhile, was upstairs at the rooftop behind TW’s actual office. Hers was part-formal confessional speech (she had it all on paper!), part- intellectual discussion and part-dance, that began with questions on just how effective dance is as a means of communication. One of her tactics was to literally translate a piece of text (if I remember correctly, it had something to do with the turn of the century invasion of the Philippines by the US) into dance.
But the most ingenious (and arguably the sneakiest) piece has got to be from artist/curator Heman Chong.
What he basically did was write a 500-word short story, which will never be published.
If you’re game enough to hear the story, you go inside this room, which will then be locked. It’ll only be opened once you memorize the story.
It’s a very interesting proposition of how a “museum” should be (a place where there is an extremely personal unfolding of knowledge and wonder – since you and you alone discover something new at that point in time. After which, it’s up to you whether or not you want to pass on this (memorized) experience).
But of course, it comes with a price. As I told him, it sounds suspiciously authoritarian. But at the same time, it’s a pretty cool concept.
But I’ve got the memory of a guppy so I didn’t take up the challenge. My fellow art journo Tara Tan was game though. Except that she didn’t know she was memorizing a 500-word piece of text. Yikes! (Note the ironically positioned ‘Exit’ sign.)
It’s a very interesting showcase. There’s one minor point I’d like to ask the organisers, though, which I had discussed with Donna and brought up briefly with Keng Sen.
expo zero centres around questions of a “dancing museum” but how come no one thought of interrogating or questioning the notion of the building-as-museum itself. That the idea of a “structure” to house “dance” (in this case, TheatreWorks’ very own 72-13) is taken as a given. It seems to me that there is freedom to explore everything, but at the same time, it all still takes place within the four walls of an implied institution.
In any case, this is probably one of the last mind-bending artistic experiences you’ll see in Singapore this year. So I urge you to drop by tomorrow (Sunday). It’ll be open until 6pm at 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road.
Tags: Adrian Pang, Bloco Singapura, Boris Charmatz, Cake Theatrical Productions, children's play, contemporary dance, Donna Miranda, Flying Circus Project, Francois Chaignaud, Heman Chong, Joavien Ng, Melt, Mette Ingvartsen, museum, Natalie Hennedige, Ong Keng Sen, Padmini Chettur, public theatre, Rizman Putra, Singapore Repertory Theatre, Tara Tan, The Jungle Book, TheatreWorks, Timothy Nga, Tracie Pang, Yves-Noel Genod
