Reviews

Class Conflict: “Those Who Can’t, Teach” by The Necessary Stage

By Marcus Yee (904 words, 9-minute read) The Necessary Stage’s most recent production, Those Who Can’t, Teach makes a strange journey to its eventual arrival as a “play that salutes teachers”. For one, Haresh Sharma’s script distances itself from the conventional narratives of a teacher’s struggle over a difficult student, with the student’s future success […]

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Empire Strikes Back: “Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacies”

By Akanksha Raja (1500 words, 15-minute read) There is a distinctive break made between the modern, sans-serif typeface of the word “Artist” and the classical serif typeface of the word “Empire” in the title/publicity material of the National Gallery Singapore’s reinterpretation of the 2015 Tate Modern’s exhibition “Artist and Empire”.  The typographical split signifies a

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OzAsia Festival: Celebrating Asian Dance and Theatre Down Under

Six performance works stood out for their bold placement of the body center-stage: Softmachine Rianto, an Indonesian-Singaporean dance and video collaboration; Skin, a challenging work from Malaysia on human trafficking; Cambodia’s Phare Circus, in which performers perform the seemingly impossible; As If To Nothing, a Hong Kong dance piece on the mutability of memory; Twelfth

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Everything Points Inward: Capitalism and Its Discontents at an Art Fair in Singapore

A pop-up market of contemporary luxury goods being sold to a wealthy elite doesn’t begin to encapsulate the diversity of languages, countries, and cultures of the region, not to mention the many kinds of artistic spaces and projects embedded therein, all of which are largely unseen at Art Stage. Like Singapore’s mega-city aspirations of being

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Podcast 10: HATCH 2017 and Release 6.0

Duration: 27 minutes Dance educator and writer Stephanie Burridge joins Matt Lyon in discussing Dance Nucleus‘ HATCH, a showcase of works-in-progress by the company’s artists-in-residence: Felicia Lim, Wayne Ong & Leia Ang and Yarra Ileto as well as Maya Dance Theatre’s Release 6.0. They share their thoughts on each of the works, also discussing the role

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Lavish production of Rizal’s ‘Noli Me Tangere – The Opera’ at Cultural Center of the Philippines (via Inquirer.net)

The successful staging in 2014 of the opera adaptation of Rizal’s masterpiece by National Artist for Music Felipe de Leon, with libretto by another National Artist, Guillermo Tolentino, led to Sibal’s decision to mount another, and bigger, production under his own outfit J&S Pro ductions. And this time he is the director, artistic director, stage,

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3 #Millennials Read “Fight Club”. You Won’t Believe What Happens Next!

By Akanksha Raja (1200 words, 20-minute read) There are so many performance modes packed into the approximately 70 minutes of FIGHT! PALAST #membersonly  – confessional monologue, workshops, live fighting, interactive sketches – that it is difficult to classify. Performance makers have been using this form of super-hybridity for a while now, but it still takes

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Art that Moves: Time and Tuition

This essay is the first in a new series where artists and writers reflect on artworks that were personally important to them. Syria, climate change, Brexit, Trump, the loss of beloved public figures from Prince to Muhammad Ali — my friends and I couldn’t wait for 2016 to end. But the sense of renewal that

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Podcast 9: 2016 in Theatre

Duration: 45 minutes Theatre practitioner, manager, educator Noorlinah Mohamed joins podcast co-hosts Kathy Rowland and Matthew Lyon in a discussion about their favourite shows of 2016. Listen in to find out which productions and performances caught their attention and why. Stream Podcast 9: Download Podcast 9 here. (right-click and select ‘Save Link As’ on Windows;

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Podcast 8: 2016 in Dance

Duration: 50 minutes Podcast co-hosts Kathy Rowland and Matt Lyon are joined by LASALLE School of Dance programme leader Melissa Quek, dance critic and educator Stephanie Burridge, and alumni of LASALLE’s School of Dance, Meta Setiawan, as they recap the past year in dance productions: their favourite shows of 2016, how Singapore audiences have received them, the

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