Reconsidering the Commandments with Wild Rice’s Animal Farm (2022)
In Wild Rice’s restaging of Animal Farm, Rebecca G finds a production that leavens the darker aspects of the text by drawing out the absurdities of the narrative.
Review
A Gap in the Telling: Review of Virgin Labfest 17
While acknowledging the value of art in addressing national trauma, Pristine de Leon raises questions about the limits, and ethics of representation on stage.
Ilham Art Show 2022: An Introspection Into What Was
From technological frustrations to climate catastrophes to queer representation, the Ilham Art Show has it all. Mira Sharon untangles the pieces which prize on the themes of family, love and loss.
Remotes X Quantum: Daring Collaboration Defies Cohesion
Remotes x Quantum, a Singapore-Philippines collaboration, is a daring, experimental work that never quite attains cohesion, which Jennifer Anne Champion finds is on-brand for SIFA 2022’s experimental nature. This performance is a part of the Singapore International Festival of the Arts.
MEPAAN: The Air Bandung Conundrum
Dr Shahril Salleh reflects on the challenges and rewards of intercultural collaboration in the Singapore Festival of the Arts 2022’s opening show, MEPAAN, using a beloved local drink as an analogy.
The Commission: Why do these three meet again?
By Eugene Tan (1,503 words, 5-minute read) As has become customary for every review of a Singapore International Festival of the Arts (SIFA) 2021 show (or as the festival programme now calls them, “content”), we should applaud the fact that these shows are happening at all. After all, COVID-19 restrictions are wildly challenging for artmaking …
AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency: Meet the Writers (Part 2)
We recently announced our selected resident writers for the inaugural AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency, focusing on the development and promotion of critical writing about arts and culture in Southeast Asia. They are: Nhuan Dong from Saigon; Dwiki Aprinaldi from Yogyakarta; Eddie Wong from Petaling Jaya; Wilda Yanti Salam from Makassar; Mariah Reodica from …
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AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency: Meet the Writers (Part 1)
We recently announced our selected resident writers for the inaugural AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency, focusing on the development and promotion of critical writing about arts and culture in Southeast Asia. They are: Nhuan Dong from Saigon; Dwiki Aprinaldi from Yogyakarta; Eddie Wong from Petaling Jaya; Wilda Yanti Salam from Makassar; Mariah Reodica from Las …
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Open Call for AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency 2021/2022
ArtsEquator and Goethe-Institut Singapore are pleased to announce the launch of the inaugural AE x Goethe-Institut Critical Writing Micro-Residency 2021/2022. This is a digital micro-residency focusing on the development and promotion of critical writing about arts and culture in Southeast Asia. The residency programme is unique in its positioning of the online editorial space as …
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ArtsEquator, Deadline Now
by Kathy Rowland ArtsEquator sometimes feels like a mythical creature. Looking back over the past 4 years, it takes the shape of a unicorn, a joyful improbability. With Covid-19, it can weigh like an albatross, cash flow statements instead of wing span, web traffic in place of talons. Perhaps it is a hippogriff, half earthbound …
The Artist-Curator’s Eye: Manit Sriwanichpoom’s “Rediscovering Forgotten Thai Masters of Photography”
By Elaine Chiew (1,600 words, eight-minute read) Art historian Patrick Flores first addressed the phenomenon of the artist-curator in his seminal essay Turns in Tropics [1] as someone who holds a certain power and who has become a key figure in shaping the art history of contemporary Southeast Asian art. Manit Sriwanichpoom’s exhibition Rediscovering Forgotten …
The Artists’ Colony: A Review of OH! Emerald Hill
In the assembly hall of Chatsworth International School hang six statues of Sir Stamford Raffles. However, these aren’t your typical heroic effigies of Singapore’s chief colonist. They’re headless, legless, composed of patchwork fabric with Javanese words stitched into their skins, dangling from the ceiling at odd angles, as if participating in an erotic rope bondage …
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Pangdemonium’s “The Father”: Dementia Becomes Us
By Akanksha Raja (780 words, five-minute read) Pangdemonium’s first play of 2018, The Father, revolves around the 70-year-old titular character, André (Lim Kay Siu), and the harrowing effects of his increasingly uncontrollable symptoms of dementia on daughter Anne (Tan Kheng Hua), her partner Pierre (Emil Marwa), and Laura (Frances Lee), one of a series of …
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“Kumar50”: More significant than SG53
Marking Kumar’s 50th year alive, and the start of Dream Academy’s 2018 season at the Capitol Theatre, Kumar50 is a celebration, a retelling of history, but most of all, a show meant to entertain — Kumar is the undisputed queen, and star, of the Singapore drag scene. Kumar50 is also here to make some money: …
“Talk to me and I slap you”: confronting intimacy and violence
By Chloe Chotrani (1,040 words, five-minute read) The one who loves you hits you. The one who hits you loves you. The one who loves you hurts you. This is a piece about relationships, unfortunately. (We can’t get away from them.) One woman, one chair, one microphone. And a chair opposite her, for you. In …
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From the lucid dream of “Cut Kafka!”, a promising new artistic path
By Bernice Lee (995 words, four-minute read) The Esplanade Theatre Studio is awash in red light. It feels like the set of a Marvel movie – gloomy and dystopian; a planet overtaken by villains, awaiting rescue. Red mechanical legs hang from above the stage. The audience sits in the round, beyond the reach of this …
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Life isn’t a beach in “Einstein in the Carpark”
By Corrie Tan (1,300 words, eight-minute read) This review has been translated into Mandarin by Liu Xiaoyi, artistic director of Emergency Stairs. Read his translation here. If the avant garde director Robert Wilson died and went to purgatory, Einstein in the Carpark is probably where he’d end up. Part performance, part installation, part misshapen creature stitched together …
Lui Hock Seng: The Past and Passing
By Akanksha Raja (920 words, four-minute read) On the heels of Objectifs Centre’s January showcase “we will have been young”, a group exhibition of works by fledgling Southeast Asian photographers themed on contemporary youth culture and the future, comes a very different solo showcase. This latest exhibition reverses its gaze, looking backwards on snippets of …
“Be Longing” moves between home and away
There is an unspeakable tranquil that washes over the audience seated inside the chapel at Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film in Singapore. For the first five minutes of Be Longing by Sara Tan and Yejin Kwon, the windows are thrown open and we watch the traffic of Middle Road roll past. Passers-by unknowingly become performers as …
“Adukku Veetu Annasamy 3”: a rip-roaring trilogy comes to a close
By Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai (1,150 words, 8-minute read) The final instalment in Ravindran Drama Group’s trilogy, Adukku Veetu Annasamy 3, picks up right after the lovers Rajendran (Annasamy and Kokilavani’s son) and Prema (Panchatcharam and Gunasundari’s daughter) have parted ways. Their incessantly nosy neighbour, Sathiavathy, is cajoling the family into finding Prema a groom in India. The …
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“Displaced” by Ground Cover Theatre at the Singapore Fringe: A Roundtable
The following roundtable discussion was held as part of the Lyn Gardner Theatre Reviewing Training Programme. Particpants Teo Dawn, Ezekiel Oliveira, Isaac Lim, Patricia Tobin, and Richard Chung discussed Displaced by Ground Cover Theatre, staged at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2018. The play examined the migrant experience through the lives of three women from different backgrounds, …
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“Platform Series: Journeys”: Of Skin and Sole
By Naeem Kapadia (885 words, 5-minute read) It’s an exciting time for the emerging playwright in Singapore. Workshops, residencies and other artistic opportunities abound to develop and showcase fresh work, often in collaboration with theatre companies. These include platforms such as The Wright Stuff by Toy Factory, The Orange Production by The Necessary Stage and …
“Cinta Tuah Jebat”: Love on the Rocks
By Corrie Tan (1228 words, 10-minute read) A man is rising from the water. The sea is birthing him: his closely-cropped hair, his bare chest and shoulders, his damp sarong clinging to his thighs. On land, another man with a shorn scalp is sitting cross-legged in the sand and mud, his distended lips pulled back …
“Forked” by Jo Tan: An Uneven Production
By Wong Wen Pu (600 words, 4-minute read) Forked by Jo Tan follows the experiences of one Jeanette Peh (played by Ethel Yap), a Singaporean student, as she heads to London to study acting, against the vehement objections of her father and the reluctant acquiescence of her mother. Already a minor celebrity in Singapore through …
“Forked” by Jo Tan: Shapeshifting Identities
By Bernice Lee (722 words, 5-minute read) Jo Tan’s first full-length play Forked hits plenty of right notes. High energy, uncomfortably honest and deliberately racist, it’s funny because it’s true. In spite of its great momentum however, the play’s pace feels weighed down by its thematic frames, just as the characters are stuck within their …
“Forked”: Privilege Gets Served
By Richard Chung (738 words, 7 minute read) Jo Tan’s playwriting debut offers a simple yet familiar story of one Singaporean girl with big dreams. In Forked, Ethel Yap plays Jeanette, a young aspiring actor who heads to London for drama school. Upon arrival in London, Jeanette gets the biggest culture shock of her life …
“Forked”: An Asian Crisis
By Isaac Lim (676 words, 6-minute read) Jeanette Peh promotes herself as a ‘star’, with ‘over 500 followers’ on her ‘Stage Whispers’ YouTube channel which promises straight-up, no-holds-barred confessions. Is that the reality, or is she just a wannabe? Jo Tan’s first full-length play, Forked, directed by Chen Yingxuan, is a laugh-a-minute comedy, albeit one that …
A Reaction Video to Jo Tan’s “Forked”
By Teo Dawn (736 words, 7 minute read) (Transcript for SunSh!neGurrl*94’s YouTube video – A Reaction Video to Forked by Jo Tan) Hello everybody, ni hao and welcome back to my channel. I have been reading your comments and you asked for more of my reaction videos. Love that you guys think so highly of …
“Forked”: Jeanette doesn’t do Asian
By Ezekiel Oliveira (546 words, 4-minute read) Jeanette Peh is determined to become an actor, but she already thinks she is something of a star on her YouTube channel ‘Stage Whispers’ which has 500 subscribers. She turns down a place at Law School in Singapore to fulfil her acting dreams instead. But in London, her …
Get “Forked”: Finding our Racial Identity
By Patricia Tobin (800 words, 6-minute read) When I was 19, I left Singapore to pursue my studies in Melbourne. I foolishly thought that any city, anywhere else in the world, would be better than this tiny island. In Melbourne, I became more aware of my “otherness”. At an Irish pub in St Kilda, a …