Reviews Archives

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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Solo Rites: Asian Degustation Menu Causes Indigestion

By Kathy Rowland (529 words, 5 minute read) Solo Rites: Seven Breaths by Jen Shyu, a highly acclaimed experimental jazz vocalist from the US, was staged at the Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama on 14 February 2017. Shyu, who is of East Timor-Taiwanese ancestry, has spent years conducting research and learning the traditional musical and

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Toy Factory’s “Prism” refracts social reality

By Akanksha Raja (630 words, 6-minute read) Penned by writer Goh Boon Teck, Prism was conceived in 2003 under a commission by Japanese theatre company Kageboushi, to become a grand-scale million-dollar touring production with performers from six Asian countries, featuring a variety of Asian artforms (such as martial arts and gamelan music). Essentially, Prism tells

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How Sensitive is this Banner Artwork by Pangrok Sulap, Really?

Earlier today Malaysian landscape architect, Ng Sek San uploaded several images of Pangrok Sulap’s artwork, a collective of woodcut print pieces that had been removed from an exhibition for being err… too sediyes. To read the rest of this article click here. Tags: censorship

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Cosmologizing Social Evil in Dulaang Up’s “Faust”

Dulaang UP’s current production, Rody Vera’s Filipino adaptation of Faust, directed by José Estrella, at once seeks to stay true to the spirit of and attempts to contemporize Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous Manichean drama that was resolutely rooted in the Romantic vision of its own time.

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Warming Up to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ‘Fever Room’

In many of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s films, the membrane that separates dream from reality is a porous one. In Syndromes And A Century, snatches of dialogue are repeated, with slight variations, as if to recreate the sensation of déjà vu. In Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a long lost son returns

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Podcast 11: Cloud Gate 2, “A Triple Bill”

Duration: 21 minutes Dance practitioners and educators Stephanie Burridge and Susan Sentler discuss Cloud Gate 2‘s A Triple Bill, including the interplay of music and choreography, references to Martha Graham’s aesthetics, and the many ways bodies can “carve the architecture of a space”. Cameo mentions of other dance groups and productions in this podcast review

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The Phnom Penh Post Guide to the Cambodia International Film Festival

For the first time, this year’s edition will be held in the spring, where Eloy expects it to remain in coming years. The lineup is an intoxicating mix of local and regional films, with Western offerings sprinkled throughout, as well as a celebration of local music, arts and dance. Because of the range of films,

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Review: Theatre Company shelf’s “GHOSTS-COMPOSITION/IBSEN”

‘The Cave’, a converted bar and restaurant that is the venue for the performance of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, is small. Audiences sit on three sides, around five persons abreast, ever mindful that to stretch their legs would be to trespass into the performance area. How does one perform Ghosts in such a space, with its

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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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Manila’s Poklong Anading: Chaos, Junk and Art

Poklong Anading is a 41-year-old Filipino artist with an unruly mop of hair and an extremely diffident manner. Featured in the “No Chaos, No Party: 28 Artists in Metro Manila” book (a project by Valeria Cavestany edited by Eva McGovern-Basa) and also participating in the ongoing 2017 Art Fair Philippines, Poklong has emerged as one the

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Your underwear is showing: Foreign Bodies

By Kathy Rowland (1030 words, 15 minute read) Skin in SIN, a new burlesque group, made its debut at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival (M1SFF) last month. Members of the group had spent several months learning the art of burlesque whilst developing their stage persona and performance, under the mentorship and training of Singaporean drag

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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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Judith Butchler – Review of Tan Liting’s “Pretty Butch” at M1 Fringe

“Sensitive and nuanced, this piece is almost like a Judith Butler essay, popping at the seams with its investigation of gender and the way it is performed, mimed, mocked and torn apart basically.” Tags: LGBT M1 Singapore Fringe Festival Tan Liting

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Faith in Tokyo: A review of ‘Nadirah’ and ‘Family’

2016 was a busy year for theatregoers in Japan, and an especially fruitful one for those with an interest in Malaysia. The Kyoto Experiment 2016 (22 Oct – 13 Nov) featured the documentary theatre work, Baling by Mark Teh as its festival opening piece. It was produced by Five Arts Centre, one of Malaysia’s most

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Learning the Ropes: A Review of ‘Apprentice’

By Satpal Kaler (630 words, 6 minute read) Back in university, my Botswanian friend told me that there is a high demand for executioners back in her country, because very few locals want to do the job. They see it as murder; even if it is done in the name of the law. Boo Junfeng’s

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Die Beautiful Film Review

Tags: Die Beautiful Metro Manila Film Festival

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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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Scattered Thoughts on Indonesian Music and Romanticism

By Azzief Khali for The Wknd Indonesia tends to loom large in the Malaysian cultural imagination, and likely for good reason: the quality and quantity of cultural production coming out of Indonesia tends to dwarf what we can produce ourselves. This perceived gulf in quality and mentalities has been the topic of many a

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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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Mattie Do: Horror Film? It’s all Ballet.

By Chan Sze-Wei (903 words, 5 minute read) Many things have been written about Mattie Do, the pioneering female film director from Laos. She’s put her country’s horror films on the world festival map. “She wears international laurels including the BFI London Film Festival and is an alumni of the Cannes Film Festival’s Les Cinemas du Monde

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Freaks and Greeks: Electra by Cake Theatrical Productions

By Matthew Lyon (504 words, 6-minute read) Over the years, my reactions to Natalie Hennedige’s work for Cake Theatrical Productions have ranged from adulation (Nothing, 2007) to anger (Versus, 2015), with her recent productions tending towards the latter. How wonderful, then, to see such an abrupt reversal of this trend in a rough-hewn, sharp-edged version

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Phnom Penh Post reviews Kampot Writers and Readers Festival 2016

Tags: Kampot Writers and Readers Festival Literary Festivals

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Outside Looking In: “A Yellow Bird”

By Akanksha Raja (810 words, 8-minute read) First screened at the International Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival 2016 this summer, A Yellow Bird is K Rajagopal’s first feature film after many acclaimed, award-winning short films. His body of work shows a concern for the lives of Indians in Singapore, drawing from his experience

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Mula Sa Buwan: Cyrano de Bergerac adapted as a sarswela

Tags: Cyrano de Bergerac Sarswela

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