Review

Eisa Jocson at da:ns festival 2017: The Body as Archive of Filipino Labour

By Chloe Chotrani (927 words, 7-minute read) To witness the work of Eisa Jocson is an absolute privilege at this point in history. The double-bill pairing up Jocson’s internationally acclaimed Macho Dancer and the new Esplanade commission Corponomy, investigate the economic body as archive of labor and service in the Philippines. It is said that […]

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Choy Ka Fai’s “Dance Clinic”: The Dance Doctor Is In

By Bernice Lee (800 words, 5-minute read) Dance Clinic by Choy Ka Fai is thick with information and ideas. The choreographer performs a trickster role in an artistic approach similar to his previous offerings of SoftMachine (2015). Dance Clinic projects into the future, and digs into the past. It is in conversation with a curated canon of dance, with neuroscience, with

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Lessons in “Grandmother Tongue”

By Patricia Tobin (483 words, 4-minute read) “Have you eaten?” is the go-to greeting for Singaporean Chinese families. Typically asked in dialect (“Jiak ba buay?”), or sometimes Mandarin (“Chi bao ma?”), “Have you eaten?” is a sign of courtesy towards your parents or grandparents, a simple question that bolsters familial bonds. W!ld Rice’s Grandmother Tongue

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W!ld Rice’s “Hotel” at Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival

In 2015 Singapore celebrated ‘SG50’, the city-state’s golden jubilee, marking 50 years of independence as a sovereign nation. Commissioned by the Singapore International Festival of Arts to respond to that year’s theme of ‘Post-Empires’, W!ld Rice created Hotel, a sprawling, four-and-a-half-hour-long play in two parts intended to subvert the nationalistic triumphalism of the jubilee’s official

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Tan Pin Pin’s “In Time To Come”: On the Edge of a Snow-Globe Starburst

By Marcus Yee (872 words, 8-minute read) A time capsule of a film on time capsules, Tan Pin Pin’s latest film In Time To Come is underpinned by a confounding observation: Singapore’s national obsession with time capsules, despite the nation-state’s short post-independence history. The otherwise plotless film follows three time capsules, the sealing of two time capsules

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“Ghosts and Spectres”: The Burden of History and Artistic Narration

By Elaine Chiew (1350 words, 10-minute read) The stitching together of alternative histor(ies) within artistic exploration as a kind of “false radical chic”, to borrow Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen’s term[1], can cloud the tougher question of where lies the artist’s burden of truth when playing with history. The four artists showcased in Ghosts and

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