applause

At 陈珊妮Sandee Chan's Esplanade performance (as a friend CT puts it, it's been a more than 10-year wait for fans on our island!), she used the words 認真 to describe how she had selected the songs lined up for last evening's fantastic concert.

Most online dictionaries define 認真 as "serious", "earnest" and "to take seriously." The problem with Chinese-English translations is that the word often means all of this and more. 認真 suggests a degree of genuine care that is less removed than seriousness and more calculated than just earnestness.

I would like to think that the folks behind Friday night's play Invisibility/Breathing, also at the Esplanade under its HuaYi Festival, were equally 認真. There was a precision and detail in actor Oliver Chong's performance that warranted the adjective. And despite the work's weakness, the same professional dedication was apparent in the set design and construction, the sound and direction.

All of this makes the weak applause - particularly at Invisibility/Breathing - rather depressing.

Friends, the next time you attend a performance, be it a play, a dance or a concert, if you recognise that what happens on stage is taking place with the utmost of dedication, thought and craft of the performer sustained over an hour or even two, please do not be stingy with your applause. It won't cost you much.

remembering

lyrics from the folksong 青春舞曲 should read 我的青春小鳥一樣不回來.

It was 2002. I was in Hong Kong for a work-related visit. I don't remember where exactly in Hong Kong it was or what led me there, but there I was, in the audience of a kind-of remembrance event on the passing of Singapore theatre practitioner Kuo Pao Kun. A mic was set up in front of the small auditorium. The carpet and curtains were a deep dark blue. There may have been a lit candle (but memory plays dramatic tricks). A group of Hong Kongers were in the audience. There were some speeches in Cantonese.

Recent discussions about LKY's legacy, civil society (ah, the AWARE saga) and an arts NMP brought back memories of this experience in Hong Kong, as well as those very brief, by-the-way encounters with Mr Kuo. I wonder if younger folks on this island will remember and study his works? Because it was reading Kuo Pao Kun's Papers and Speeches, Volume 7 from his Complete Works (ed. Quah Syren, World Scientific Publishing) that made it clear why he is often missed - not just as a dramatist, but as a kind of cultural voice, the closest we get to a public intellectual.

Perhaps his plays, essays and speeches come across as powerful because they carry with them an equivalent weight in action and in a life well lived. He thought, he wrote, he felt, but he also interacted, taught/mentored, acted on his vision, and influenced and inspired private individuals and public officials to contribute. In addition to his plays, he founded the Practice Performing Arts School, the Theatre Practice, the Substation (this island's first independent art centre), and the Theatre Training and Research Programme.

It is 2am and I realise now I was being too ambitious in wanting to highlight some of the observations about the arts, culture and civil society he has made! Far wiser to simply recommend the 10-volume complete works, including the 7th volume containing his essays and speeches. There is also Kuo Pao Kun: And Love the Wind and Rain (image left), a 2002 volume with a few of his essays, some recordings, and the reflections of his peers and other artists. The books are guaranteed to start you thinking... and hopefully, acting! After all, Kuo Pao Kun's most quoted phrase (the title of an essay/article he wrote?) is "Better a worthy failure than a mediocre success".

dry season

It hasn't rained at all since Chinese New Year on 7 Feb.

But at the Esplanade's Huayi Festival, there was thunder and a chorus of falling rain during Sound seed, Taiwanese actor/musician-composer Lim Giong's collaborative performance with a sound engineer and 3 young Singaporean lighting designer, interactive designer and installation artist. As Lim Giong himself hinted at, this attempt to create an immersive aural, visual and spatial experience of positive energy could have worked better in a museum/gallery than as a 1 hour performance. [left: cover of Lim Giong's latest CD insects awaken]

The next day, J and I watched renowned Taiwanese director Stan Lai's thoroughly enjoyable and admirable new production Like Shadows. Much has been written about it in the papers, so I won't go into any details about the play.

Walking out of the theatre after one of the better post-performance discussions I've attended, the intellectual and emotional energies the play obviously inspired from the audience lingered. I asked J's opinion of what he thought were necessary to achieve a production as accomplished and almost faultless as Like Shadows, say, compared with many of the lesser works we have seen from our fellow-islanders.

J's immediate response was this: "no shouting." [Our constant complaint after many Singapore plays we watch is the amount of shouting that goes on] Prompted to elaborate, he explained that it was not just literal, but a general sense that playwrights and directors were shouting their "messages" at audiences, pounding a singular perspective and vision across to an audience that somehow the playwright/director mistrusted - maybe even disdained. This is a generalisation, of course. Lai's work should also not be assumed to be representative of the state of Taiwanese theatre and arts scene. But thinking back on many of my experiences in our theatres, I could not help but agree with J.

How I enjoyed the open-ness of Lai's play, the respect it had for its audience's ability to wander around its characters and ideas, to form connections. I enjoyed too the particularity of the play's context - Taiwan's Sun Moon Lake, the practice in Taiwanese cinemas 10-20 years ago of playing the national anthem before each screening, the superstitions and Taoist rites that China would have lost after the Cultural Revolution - and its ability to reach also beyond its particular context to communicate the universal doubts, questions about desire, violence, immortality, death, imagination.

For me, the other reason is that every single aspect of the production was equally excellent - every actor in the ensemble cast; the set and lighting designers; the stylists; the music... For this, you need talented professionals working in every single aspect of the production - and not 1 sensitive playwright or 1 visionary director or 2-3 impressive actors. As in a dance, no 1 dancer could afford to be out of step.


days of being young!

Maybe it would only be a matter of time. We would only need to wait for our artist(e)s - literally - to age.

And alongside this, Sound Seed reminded me that there should always be room for and a need for experiments, learning, growth and failure in the arts. For all the weakness of Sound Seed as a performance, I respected and also learned from Lim Giong's gracious acceptance of criticism at the post-performance discussion with his younger collaborators. It was an experiment, he pointed out, and we would work towards something better.

give the public the public star

image by J

Sunday J and I caught the last performance for the 2nd run of W!ldrice's The Campaign to Confer the Public Star on JBJ. A simple 2 act structure with 2 actors, each playing multiple roles in 1 of the 2 acts - the first act on the unintentional public life of a private individual, the other on the private life of an unintentional public servant - both martyred, relunctantly or unwittingly, by their own play in the system.

Described as a satire, the humour is biting, intelligent and knowing, yet also accessible, owing to Pam Oei's dynamo-like costume changes and everyone's favourite digs at the dynastic Lees/politicians/complicit civil service. In this way, the play's also a romance. A romance about that other JBJ, the hapless Singaporean, the undead Lee, the absent father, heck, the system, the clueless public, the clued-in repressed media...

Still, it was an enjoyable, well-conceived play with the wordless ending (finally, quiet in a hyper-wordy play!) so aptly capturing the sense of 無奈 (what will the equivalent of this be? frustration?) amidst images of fireworks.

For all the global posturing, what has proven to work - 881 as a good example - is defining a vernacular, a folk theatre. Even if it is a vernacular where the senior civil servant character (unless I heard wrong) in a post-coital tiff with her journalist boyfriend, exclaims - "Tis not enough?" And on an island where English is an adopted "first" language, a Shakespearean "tis" is part of our vernacular, however stilted.

a light spirit

light spirit - from an old sketch

Walking home after lunch today, we saw 2 boys walking toward us, one holding a can of lemonade. We did not know them, but they were - without doubt - neighbourhood boys.
Y: Hey, did you smell that?
J: Yup.
Y: Those boys just sniffed glue huh?
J: [turns around] He's still sniffing. See.
Y: I wonder why...what on earth can be so compelling about that smell? And the damage to your brain cells!
J: I don't know. It's the same for people who wake up and immediately start to drink beer, or need to have a smoke. Maybe it numbs or relaxes, leaves a good feeling.
Y: I guess, I can understand how having a smoke can be relaxing... but things at the human level - they're strange, aren't they - smoke, glue, alcohol. Whichever government or culture, for all the talk the big time folks do at parliament, it can seem so removed from these smaller realities.
J:...

So this explains the empty tins of tiger brand glue or some other solvent by the large monsoon drain, their contents poured into less conspicuous lemonade cans.

Later that day, J and I overcame our dislike of musicals and watched Georgette, a musical by a young writer and a team of "volunteer"/amateur performers. It was surprisingly enjoyable - well-paced, clever funny lyrics, and a spirited performance by the cast. Of course, that it was about one of Singapore's pioneer artists that had probably the most dramatic biographies helped. (Picture on the right is a Self-portrait of Georgette Chen from the SAM collection)

There's a song I'll call "a bowl of fruit" - this being the refrain. Anyway, "a bowl of fruit" is sung when Georgette Chen is at her own gallery show in New York and she introduces a painting done in Malaya of rambutans and jambu fruit. The artist, apart from her husband Eugene Chen (a Chinese foreign minister - picture on the left is Georgette Chen's portrait of him), had wanted to preserve a slice of her Malayan experience for him. Fruits may rot, but a painting of them will not. But there is nothing really striking or radical about it - it is, after all, just another still life. In the play, however, her husband, upon seeing the painting, launches into song about "a bowl of fruit" -praising the solidity and assurance of the painted "bowl of fruit" against the chaos and confusion of the impending war between China and Japan.

OK, so it's really rather corny. But I wonder if a part of modernism was this - a belief that the artistic form is of an enduring reality and meaning, even if it cannot hold off a war. And that war itself, not art, was the ephemeral one, its devastation will be powerless and can eventually be overcome.

A can of lemonade, a bowl of fruit - intoxicants all.

------------------
See some of Georgette Chen's works here.

dream community

This morning I was strangely awake despite the short sleep and perhaps because it was a dreamless sleep. On the train to work, I read in the Mar/Apr issue of Art Asia Pacific an article about Gordon Tsai Tsung Ming and his dream community or 夢想社區.

A farmer's son in Hsichih (Taipei County), a place previously devastated by floods, Gordon Tsai had a dream about a community completely energised by the arts - not necessarily the kind in museums, but of the street and parades. 5 years ago he also created a dream parade, and with his own money (supposedly US$500k per year), creates residencies for foreign and Taiwanese artists, and organises workshops and activities for the community.

According to the article, he's a businessman (real estate?) and

"anyone interested in one of his apartments must sign a contract agreeing to 3 conditions: a prospectivetenant must go to a worldwide arts festival...and return with photographs documenting his or her participation; the tenant needs to organise a group of at least 10 people under a unified theme to martch in the Dream Community parade; and...should the tenant wish to resell, any increase over 3% of the original price goes back into the community."

Wow. This dreamy man clearly walks the talk. He drivesa scooter, and rents his home. "I want to change society through the arts and destroy values of desire and luxury. Rich people are a bad influence on society, teaching others to be big consumers and destroy the environment."

If you are going to be anywhere near Taipei, here's a review of the Tree Cafe at the Dream Community with some travel instructions. The website may have more travel details.



J and I, we are definitely living in no Gordon-Tsaish dream community. (photo above by J)

There're no street parades by generous, maverick businessman here. Instead, 2 nights ago, we had a traditional puppet Hokkien opera troupe perform by the taoist temple nearby. There were tables of men sitting at the temple, chatting, staring into space. They were definitely not watching the action of the 2 tiny puppets at a distance. They had no audience - just us and the occasional kid. The middle-aged women behind the stage, however, didn't seem to care. They sang, improvised the Hokkien script and seemed to enjoy each other's company. The row of musicians behind them - white-haired men - were in a different world. They played their instruments, with one ear plugged into their handphone.



A few streets away, between 2 blocks of flats with shops on the ground floor, was a nightly/daily gathering of middle-aged men and women for beer and groundnuts. Not far away from them will always be 2 cats and a giant black wolf-like dog. They belong to a tiny old woman who lives with her trolley and chairs by one of the blocks. Above her are 80 square metre apartments of working class Singaporeans, similarly asleep. No rich person here to be a bad influence on society!

distracting time

Nostalgia a wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one's life, to one's home or homeland, or to one's family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time

Other dictionary definitions replace the wistful with a taste "bittersweet", or more simply, "The condition of being homesick; homesickness", which in 1770 was classified a disease.

J: You know, people like to talk about the past.
Y: Yeah?
J: They seem happiest when they talk about the past.
Y: As in...
J: Like how guys talk about army, your mom likes to tell us about her childhood...
Y: So?
J: Well, the thing is that those times are probably rather miserable, but when they talk about it, all that is miserable feels like it wasn't there or wasn't as miserable. People love to reminisce,
Y: I see,
J: I wonder if it's only like that here. I've never lived anywhere else before.

Wistful.

Typically, the most popular chinese language drama series on TV is set in Singapore's past, the pre-independence years. Those were tough times of war, colonisation, poverty - and hardship makes for good drama.

Disease.

Some of the most popular and mainstream works on the Singapore stage are also set in similar times. I remember Kuo Pao Kun's Lao Jiu, recently made into a mandarin musical, on the lost traditions of puppetry. Of course there's Dick Lee's musical Fried Rice Paradise. The past was something you could sing, dance, laugh and cry about - the distance made it easier to mourn or celebrate.

A homesickness.

Last Saturday, J and I watched Toyfactory's 3rd staging of Titoudao. Titoudao is the name of a comic role in Hokkien opera (literally
shaving knife/blade), a hardworking and loyal servant of a family that has seen better times. In Goh Boon Teck's script, the scenes of this opera are interspersed with scenes from each stage of opera actress Ah Chiam's life - growing up in kampong
Singapore, joining an opera troupe, marrying, growing old, reminiscing... An economical script (save for 1 long childhood scene) that resisted the temptation to lament.

I remember when it was first staged in 1994, a friend visiting me in the UK then had brought its publicity brochure for me as a gift. In the early 90s, the two of us would watch every single play that was produced in Singapore. 2001 was its second staging, a staging that won the play several Life! Theatre awards (Click to readThe Flying Inkpot's Review of the 2001 performance).

But last Saturday I was sceptical. The TV trailers seemed to suggest this was going to a noisy play. And it was. But in the context of the play's street opera premise, the noise seemed apt (or else I am biased). Exposing the backstage of an opera stage, the overall stage design was effective in transiting between 3 worlds of a play within a play, the play itself and the "live" interaction between some actors and the audience. The cast was likable, their performance was energised yet practised.

Today, when I met an old gentleman who had watched the play on Sunday I asked him if he enjoyed it, he answered in the affirmative. Then he qualified, smiling gently - "as a distraction".

Perhaps he had on his mind weightier issues - business, health, family, today's Sumatran quake.

Some folks are better able to keep their eyes fixed firmly on the horizon, if not the next couple of steps. Their bodies may wander or fight some currents - maybe even remain unmoved - but it is their gaze which remains fixed. When we reminisce, tell a story, play another's part, we look inward and around, forward and back, in space and time.

========
p/s - Titoudao is showing until 31 March, everyday except Monday, at the Drama Centre. Tickets are available from Sistic.

who's more tired - mama or her cat?

After a Saturday playing cleaning lady for J's ampulets studio while he played IT technician trying to overcome some ridiculous Mac/Intel/Adobe bug, we visited the mentally and physically exhausted Ma J at the hospital before rushing to catch Theatre Practice's re-staging of the late Kuo Pao Kun's play Mama Looking for her Cat.

Mama Looking for Her Cat was first staged in 1988. It is often referred to as the first multilingual play in Singapore. From watching a short clip of that original staging screened as part of Saturday's new staging, how I wished I was in the 1988 audience!

In the 1988 staging, Sasitharan (current director at the Theatre Training and Research Programme ), played an old Indian man Mama bumped into while searching for her cat. It turns out both of them are in a similar predicament, having had their cats "chased out" by their children. Though not speaking each other's language, they gestured and "meowed" their way into an understanding. In the bare black box setting, their physical distance across the length of the stage gradually was closed (on all fours, they moved) until Mama laid an understanding hand on the old man's shoulder - resolving a very well-acted comic exchange.

Kuo Pao Kun was attuned to the fractures of Singapore culture and history. These are breaks and disjunctures the island's people and leaders have intended or had to contend with. There are the cultural break-ups with the languages, traditions and heritage of each migrant community. These accentuate generational breaks, familial tensions. There is also the fractured relationship between people and authority, as well as the break between the island's post-65 history and everything else before. In Mama/Cat, the physical absence of a cat, Mama's loneliness, the children's busy-ness, the multiple languages and the use of nursery rhymes/games - through both extremes of absence and profusion - dramatise the fractures between generations and cultures. Yet those same strategies of rhymes/games and multilingualism offer the possibility of reconciliation.

In this way Kuo Pao Kun was larger than this small island.

Watching last Saturday's staging adapted by Singaporean cast and Austrian director Martina Winkel, there were moments of simple brilliance. The multiple languages and multiple media, when simply used, worked. The simulcast with Austria, including a moving telling of a migrant Turkish family's experience of dislocation in Austria, sounded on paper a tad fussy. But it added to the performance brief stretches of emotional and narrative simplicity and silence (ah, paradox) amidst the theatre studio's noisy dramatics.

And what a noisy 1.5hrs - visually, aurally and "poetically"! The set by artist Brian Gothang Tan (with its suspended screens and multiple TVs showing a live feed of the play), the soundtrack (audience could bring music to be mixed by a DJ), the "guest appearance" by Sasitharan (who sat typing his stream-of-consciousness laments on language and national identity onto the screen) and the actors' performance... noise noise noise.

Perhaps this staging wanted to drive home the point that in 2006, the communication barriers we face are not mitigated but built by the many more channels of information and translation.

Perhaps Sasi wanted, through his palimpsest, to make obvious the analogy between the impatience of Mama's children with our wilful insistence on being cultural orphans - our disregard for the langauge of our national anthem, our national amnesia...etc etc.

Perhaps it was just a long day. So I walked out of the studio a little tired by the noise and lamenting. It was quite opposite to reading Kuo Pao Kun's script and watching that short clip of his 1988 staging where theatre itself - its process and the possibilities of engagement between work/audience/actors - seem to be able to present possibilities, not quite of healing, but at least of learning.

-----------
Some other links on the play here:
> Malaysian arts website Kakiseni
> NLB's Infopedia page
> Ng Yi Sheng's Review at the Flying Inkpot

trash

images by J

This play by Dramabox is ending its run at the Esplanade Theatre Studio with the last show pm 3rd Sept, 8pm. If you have no plans this evening, take your mom/dad/kid out to this play.

J and I had watched Dramabox's A Stranger at Home earlier this year at the Arts Festival, and even earlier, their, er, Shithole. The former suffered from an over-worked script, but the latter had enough wit, inspired delivery and puppetry to cheer me up about the future of Chinese-language theatre in Singapore.



Trash supposedly follows from Shithole - but there are no direct links, except maybe the idea that the idealism of heroes is not enough. In the foreword to Trash, Director and playwright Li Xie (this must be her stagename! The Chinese translates literally as "Evil Lee"...haha) wrote:

From Meyerhold and Chaplin to these idealists, from art to the society, there exists a common yearning: live and let live. It is this simple.

In the play's concluding scene, "Superman" (which puns, with a slight variation in intonation, with "Useless People") finally gives up his 1000-year effort to convince humanity that there can be a 人人囯, a socialist utopia where equality and justice prevails. But his giving up is re-framed as "live and let live" instead. He gives up a personal pursuit to let humanity decide which way it wants to go - and in so doing, reclaims his own human-ness.

The narrative of Trash is simple, told through archetypes, but nonetheless superbly acted by the entire cast. The weakness of the script is in its half-veiled references to the social and national engineering of this island-state - and the ease with which meritocracy can be misapplied and paradoxically act as a cover for discrimination. This is a weakness only because it can and has become a familiar and predictable rant. Of course, this at times is also the script's strength. Because this is also the premise for the sort of Chaplinesque comedy and commentary - a disarming comedy that entertains and amuses, but can also rebuke, awaken and move.

I like the way Chinese theatre in Singapore has developed. With Dramabox, Theatre Practice and The Finger Players (these groups are bilingual), I see a theatre that is engages and deliberates, and thus so conscientiously in communication and collaboration with its audience - without condescension - a people's theatre.

--------
afternote Charles Isherwood writes "The Culture Project and Plays that Make a Difference" in NYT about the social and political potency (or rather, lack there of) of theatre, but argues that theatre must nonetheless continue to engage and not degenerate in today's "pervasive [cultural] vacuousness". Because even if art can never realistically effect political change or resolve human conflict or suffering on the scale of war/starvation/disaster, Isherwood writes "Art can inculcate empathy, and empathy directed not at a generalized humanity but a specific person or persons keeps healthy and intact our alertness to immediate evils, not general ones. It reminds us that history doesn’t happen in newspapers but to people."

Drama(grand)mama

Today is my Grandma's birthday. I think 85 year-old Tan Poh Choo is the only bona fide artist in my family. For a long time, she was able to state on official forms that her occupation was "actress", or to be exact, "opera artiste".



Sold when she was a child to one of the oldest Teochew Opera Troupes (Lao Sai Toh) in Singapore, Grandma Amps was its star in the 50s and 60s. Her popularity was attested by a series of photographs (one above), commissioned by a wealthy fan to be taken on the grounds of his house. Once, looking through her chocolate boxes of photographs, I had also spotted one of her receiving a congratulatory banner from the now Minister Mentor himself!


L-Court of the Emperor (Centre: Grandma; 2nd from left: Grandpa)
R -The Rare Tear (Right damsel: Grandma)
Click for larger pic

Since her strong features were made even more striking by the mask-like opera makeup, it was seldom that she played the role of the damsel, whether in love or distress. Instead, in a twist of the gender-bending tradition(as on the Elizabethan stage and still so for the Noh stage, Chinese opera was traditionally practised by only male actors, including those who played only female roles - the "hua-dans"), she was more often the young scholar turned general; the general, first gravely misunderstood, then re-affirmed as the true hero; or the hero revealed to be the emperor in disguise.

Grandpa Amps must have been the envy of the troupe - married to the Emperor-girl! He, on the other hand, was only a bit-part actor. A skinny, monkey-like man, he would play the role of comic/servant/foot soldier or, at best, a nameless warrior. Off stage, they had seven children, the third my mother. (She was the only child whose features seemed made for opera: slim almond eyes, a slender chin and lips that pout to form a single rose petal). My mother told me once how sly Grandma Amps would have succeeded in taking her away at the age of ten to join the opera troupe, had she not ran through the village screaming her protests, leaving the embarrassed Grandma Amps to slink away.)

And when all six children had started school and the last female child was successfully placed in a wealthy family in Penang, Grandma Amps retired from the stage. Even then her theatre career did not come to an end. Rather, it continued with her reincarnation as a medium for the Sea Goddess. I suppose this was an upgrade - from Emperor to Goddess! From her new 14th storey HDB apartment, she entertained devotees before the altar with messages from the dead for the grieving, told the future to the curious, foolish and fearful, and gave advice (perhaps from a wisdom culled from opera scripts) to the troubled.

Today, the shrunkened and widowed Mrs Tan Poh Choo still keeps a healthy sense of drama, leaving her family guessing if she is somewhat senile or merely playing the part. Months ago at the crematorium, she stood before her husband's ashes and had an animated conversation with him. When he was alive, they had spent their days playing chup tzi ghee (a type of chinese card game, the cards slightly longer than a domino) in silence, speaking only to accuse the other of cheating or refusing to pay up. At the elderly care centre, she sang opera melodies for the other old folks and staff (this was quite contrary to her earlier refusals to sing or take part in any vaguely related opera activity). Now that she was alone and with the excuse of age, she generously kissed her grandchildren (whose names she could barely remember) on their cheeks - very modern.

Ah, xi4 meng4 ren2 shen1 (anyone has any idea how to get Chinese script?), literally, theatre dream life. Though theatre was clearly Grandma Amps' territory, I am glad dreams and life lie in public domain.