Fresh Blood: “Move ____, as we move” by The Kaizen M.D.
By Akanksha Raja and Clara Cheong (1200 words, 8-minute read) There’s fresh blood on the theatre scene and ArtsEquator sent out two young reviewers to watch emerging performing art collective The Kaizen M.D.’s latest production “Move ___, as we move”,…
Review of “Every Brilliant Thing” by Bhumi Collective
By Akanksha Raja (870 words, 8-minute read) Every Brilliant Thing is a (primarily) one-person monologue of an unnamed narrator (Andrew Marko) coming to terms with his mother’s depression and suicidal tendencies. His effort to reconcile with his mother’s instability takes…
Completely With: Remembering Paddy Chew, Reflecting on Loo Zihan
By Sean Tobin (2150 words, 12 minute read) Recently, I caught Loo Zihan’s second iteration of With/Out at Esplanade Studio Theatre. Zihan’s work is an artistic reconstruction and reimagining of The Necessary Stage’s 1999 play, Completely With/Out Character, based on…
Review of Tropicana, The Musical: Memory Malfunction
By Felipe Cervera (910 words, 9-minute read) Theatre is a memory machine. Its engines run with dialogues and recollections, fuelled by the invisible streams of thought and emotion that run in and out, through the minds and bodies of the…
Review of ‘With/Out’: AIDS, Archives, Activism
by Ng Yi-Sheng (1450 words, 10 minute read) The year was 1999, and I was an awkward little eighteen year-old virgin, still sweating my way through National Service. I’d only recently become involved in the Singapore theatre scene, and in…
Dogged Delirium: “Petty People” by NUS Theatre Studies
By Akanksha Raja (760 words, 7-minute read) Petty People marks the culmination of the undergraduate course for the graduating class of NUS Theatre Studies 2017. The play begins with a quadriptych of scenarios strung together by the enigma of a…
‘Hope (Harap)’: No Hope in Contemporary Hell
By Kathy Rowland (728 words, 8 minute read) Teater Ekamatra’s Harap opens with its five characters frozen in the shadows, standing on low plinths. Taking centre-stage is a series of monochromatic, indeterminate images, projected on the backdrop and over their…
Who’s Normal Anyway?
By Akanksha Raja (920 words, 9-minute read) Normal opens with a dreary, dull morning assembly at Trinity Girls’ School, immersing the audience in a mise-en-scène that is all too familiar to anyone who has been through any part of public…
Political Acts review: Artists weave defiance into performance art [SEA]
Review of POLITICAL ACTS: PIONEERS OF PERFORMANCE ART IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, Arts Centre Melbourne Steven Tonkin has curated a useful survey of Southeast Asian performance art as part of the inaugural Asia Triennial of Performing Arts. The photographs and videos…
Australian Play “The Age of Bones” puts Indonesian refugee issue in spotlight (via NT News)
The Age of Bones, written by Sandra Thibodeaux and directed by Iswadi Pratama & Alex Galeazzi, follows the story of an Indonesian boy, Ikan, who goes fishing one day and fails to return. Sandra Thibodeaux latest production to hit the…
Review of “Fundamentally Happy”: Shame and Scandal in the Family
By Kathy Rowland (920 words, 8 minute read) Eric, a social worker based in Australia, has returned to Singapore for his father’s funeral. He visits an old neighbour, Kak Biba/Habiba, whose home was a childhood refuge from his own impersonal…
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…
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…
PETA’s “The Care Divas” and the Ethics of Care
Written by Liza Magtoto with music by Vince de Jesus and directed by Maribel Legarda, The Care Divas revolves around the struggle of five Filipino caregivers in Israel. However, this struggle is a mere background to the real struggle with…
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…
Warming Up to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ‘Fever Room’
By Alfian Sa’at (1244 words, 15 minute read) 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,…
Review: Theatre Company shelf’s “GHOSTS-COMPOSITION/IBSEN”
By Alfian Sa’at (1100 words, 15-minute read) ‘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…
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…
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.”
Faith in Tokyo: A review of ‘Nadirah’ and ‘Family’
by Mio Yachita (1,260 words, 10 minute read) 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…
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,…
Losing My Religion: “Disgraced” by SRT
By Akanksha Raja (1000 words, 8-minute read) When SRT Artistic Director Gaurav Kripalani revealed that the Media Development Authority approved of Disgraced without making any edits to the script, in answer to a question about censorship, there was an audible…
Low Octane: SRT’s Disgraced
By Matt Lyon (482 words, 6-minute read) Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, a modern tragedy about the fall of an apostate Muslim-American lawyer, is a notable inheritor of the realist theatrical tradition. Sadly, it inherits the worst traits: Ibsen’s machine-cut-jigsaw plotting and…
Crisis of Masculinity: Best Of (His Story)
By Matthew Lyon (480 words, 6-minute read) The Necessary Stage’s Best Of (His Story) is a response to the company’s 2013 monologue, Best Of that detailed a day in the life of a young Malay-Muslim woman. The project of the original…
Changing Notions: On the Back of a Raging Bull
by Pawit Mahasarinan (1045 words, 12-minute read) Asian works were part of the main programme in this 50-year-old festival From 24 September to 2 October 2016, the jubilee edition of the Belgrade International Theatre Festival (BITEF) with the subtitle “On…
Necessary Nuance: Best Of (His Story)
By Kathy Rowland (1010 words, 10-minute read) Best of (His Story) is a monologue set on a crowded stage. A young man, alone in an apartment decorated by his wife, reflects on his marriage on the day his divorce is…