Fieldnotes from The LASALLE Show Exhibition 2017
By Elaine Chiew (970 words, 9-minute read) The biggest show of the year for Lasalle College of the Arts opened on the evening of the 18th with fanfare: speeches, tinsel, music, a buffet of food, tons of people. The variety…
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…
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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…
Garin Nugroho’s ‘Satan Jawa’ Flirts with the Dark Side
By Nuraini Juliastuti (1124 words, 12 minute read) Satan Jawa (Garin Nugroho, 2017) a silent movie, in black and white (inspired by Nosferatu and Metropolis), had its world premier with the ‘live’ performances of Gamelan Garasi Seni Benawa and 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…
Menyanggah yang Ditegah dalam ‘Teater Modular’
Oleh Fasyali Fadzly (900 patah kata, 10 minit bacaan) Ridhwan Saidi mungkin nama yang agak asing bagi penggiat teater Malaysia namun beliau telah lama menempa namanya dalam penulisan kontemporari di Malaysia melalui penulisan novel, cerpen, artikel dan puisi. Beliau yang…
Overstuffed: Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman” by Pangdemonium
By Matthew Lyon (513 words, 5-minute read) I first saw Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman – in which writer Katurian is questioned by police-state detectives about a series of child-killings that mimic the plots of his stories – in Singapore Repertory…
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…
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…
Kochi: the City and its Biennale
By Sharaad Kuttan (1020 words, 10-minute read) Don’t all Biennales compete with the cities they are sited in? It’s certainly true of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, a state located on the south-western coast of India. Set largely in the increasingly…
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…
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…
Zoned Out at the Singapore Biennale 2016
By Jay Mar Albaos, Antonín Brinda, Petros Konnaris, Ray Langenbach, Jamie MacDonald, Harriet Rabe, Jolijn de Wolf (4350 words, 40-minute read) Institution ° Preparations are ongoing. An assistant paints the white wall a bit whiter. Spelling mistakes in the text on…
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…
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…
Sonic Multiplicity: Reflections on “Sounds of Singapore”
By Pavithra Raja (1695 words, 20-minute read) What are the sounds of Singapore? It’s hard to pin down, given that Singapore is the site of a number of different musical influences, many of them rooted in the different ethnic communities…
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…
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…