Singapore Arts Festival: The end of the world in Lion City
I am in Singapore and it’s right about the end of the world.
Well, here is the scenario.
You’ve joined me in an abandoned school building in suburban Singapore, one of a hundred or so survivors, our world being overrun by — stick with me on this — “vampires.” After conspiracies upon conspiracies, a series of glitches, and the triumph of evil, humanity has been reduced to this: people crammed into a schoolyard, in a sweaty cower, fearing what lurks in the shadows, not knowing who among the speakers are worth following. Which among the last of the walkie-talkie-carrying Mohicans. Is it Chester Rickwood, the self-styled “personality philosopher”? Is it Grace the vampire-killer (cape, check; samurai, check)? Is it hot former industrialist Maggie Tan (an Asian version of Lara Croft)? Or is it the mighty Quinn (50 percent man, 50 percent legend)? As we debate the issue, the anti-vampire warning devices sound off, and all hell breaks loose.
Well, supposedly.
This is one of the interactive productions that are part of this year’s Singapore Arts Festival. Such is the nature of performances in the festival. Audiences don’t just get to sit, peruse the souvenir programs, watch the play, eat chili crab in a hawker center before going home, and then forget about everything. They are in the play itself. We are in a play itself. Oh what fun: we are the Dane, we are the Salesman, and we’re waiting for Godot.
Singapore Arts Festival general manager Low Kee Hong says this is the strategy for this year’s fest.
He explains, “The interactive and/or multimedia nature of any work considered for the festival is one of the considerations as we hope to expand the experience of theater and performance for our audiences. From past experience, such works have their fans and because of the novelty factor, they seem to do well. Most importantly for us there must be a clear and key conceptual reason to create an interactive or site specific work. Hopefully through the interactive nature and with the work created in-situ, they illuminate something about us, challenge our assumptions and provoke us to think beyond our comfort zones.”
Thus, we — locals, tourists, as well as journalists on assignment — on this hot and humid Friday night are being shepherded into safety by protagonists straight out of survival-horror comic books (think 30 Days of Night), role-playing video games (think Resident Evil) and zombie movies (28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later). Never mind the fact that I got a glimpse of the “vampire”: a skinny bloke in black. (Petite Jewel Chuaunsu, one of the visiting journalists from Contemporary Art Philippines, could kick the living daylights out of that night-stalker). And this has dulled my sense of dread at the entire proceedings.
The hammy acting and the B-movie-like script don’t help either — but, overall, it’s such a novel idea and an exhilarating experience. (When two characters lock lips during a vampire assault, Italian journalist Matteo Lucchetti roll his eyes, quite stunned. “Watdafak!” he seems to say.) And when we are given a choice to fight or flee, almost everybody chooses to make a stand. Bring it on! In the distance, a malnourished vampire is calling for his momma.
The play is called They Only Come At Night: Pandemic and it is staged by a Brit theater group called Slung Low (UK).
Artistic director Alan Lane would reveal afterwards that transforming the Old School building site is truly daunting. “There is a bar-restaurant (in the building) that is still operational, which is difficult since (it is supposed to be) the end of the world, and there is a band playing Beatles covers (laughs).”
Australian-British journalist Jeremy Eccles says he can see two blokes having dinner near “ground zero.” But despite this, Lane feels it should be more fun going to the theater than it sometimes is. And I am looking forward to seeing more from this theater company. Especially the next play to be staged in a medieval castle in North Yorkshire with two protagonists summoning a spirit of a friend. A 21-piece choir is singing somewhere. Through the headphones. Right to your nerves. Boo!
Interactivity is a hit-or-miss affair. Pandemic works for me because I grew up on vampire movies and video games. I like a petrifying scare or two. (The play would’ve worked better if the strategy were similar to The Blair Witch Project where you create your own monster, but I dig it just the same.)
And now this…
We are in pursuit of a beautiful but troubled singer named Sherry who is about to make her concert debut. This is Songbird by Tara Tan of Studio Now & Then, another interactive and multi-media performance.
The flight path goes thusly: Audiences assemble at the top of the Bridge Café and walk around the Esplanade; set forth around the Festival Village armed with an iPad or iPhone with the downloaded Songbird app (pretty cool idea); sniffing for clues, looking for QR codes, watching videos detailing a story of love, passion, betrayal and a star-crossed singing career (pretty lame this); and wishing at the tail end of the tale (knackered from all the walking and all the schmaltzy dialogue you get to endure) to finally catch up with the Songbird and give her a piece of your mind. Or clunk her in the head. But wait… She’s gone. This bird has flown to the tune (hmm, actually the lyrics) of The Beatles’ Blackbird.
Well, take those broken wings and never come back.
But let’s give props to Studio Now & Then for sheer ambition. Are there any plays or performances in Manila that demand not just attention but also pathos and participation?
And do we even have a theater festival that champions innovation and novel ideas, and is — to quote that critic in Ratatouille — a “friend of the new”?
Do we get to go room to room in a hotel (Ibis) and be confronted with the multi-textured biographies of hotel maids — one read Jane Austen in her youth, while the other dreams of the beach in his hometown, one had a bomb explode near her as a young girl and robbed her of her hearing, while the other finds dildos under the bed and feces all over the bathtub? Ah, the loneliness, the homesickness and the automatic drudgery of clockwork labor. So by the time a visitor finishes his or her Parallel Cities tour, that person will get the urge to give hotel maids a warm hug. To acknowledge someone who has been treated like a “ghost” all along. Well, I did. Brilliant work by Stefan Kaegi, Lola Arias and Gerardo Naumann.
Do we get to meet intelligent teens coached by no less than envelope-pushing artist Heman Chong (who, as part of conceptual work, reportedly put money in a library book by one of his favorite authors, so that whoever borrows that book gets a jolting reward)? Do we get to hear those School of the Arts (SOTA) students lecture us adults about The Possible Meanings of Life (reading material: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut), Existentialism (Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre), and Alternative Histories (The Man in The High Castle by Philip K. Dick), among other eyebrow-burning topics (in Heman Chong’s Advanced Studies In… Ten Lessons for Life).
(A digression: My student mentor was Rachel Chew, who had been tasked to talk about Poverty based on a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Now, a kid [a Singaporean girl who comes from a well-to-do family] teaching me [a struggling, self-supporting Filipino artist-writer] about poverty is like Clarice Starling teaching Hannibal Lecter about cannibalism. But Heman would carefully point out that the entire exercise is for students to be teachers for 45 minutes, a role-reversal.)
Do we Filipinos get to learn about the strange case (its history, culture, currency, archeological digs) of an entirely-made up republic (Lan Fang Chronicles )?
In Singapore, it’s that time of the year again and there’s a whole lot of unearthing going on.
Low Kee Hong explains, “For a long, long time, the festival was very much a festival of consumption. People would buy tickets, go watch the shows, and say, ‘Yehey!!!’ (while doing a clapping motion). Nothing changes, though. I am so not interested in that (laughs). The point of art, I suppose, is (to present a way of) seeing. So we needed to look at projects that would activate some of these things. You don’t need to be a PhD-holder in cultural theory to access that, but the point is to start the process. So, it is important for a festival to start to excavate, to dig into something that must be thought about.”
Thus, we are able to catch a trilogy of sorts in terms of themes. “Between You and Me” (2010). “I Want to Remember” (2011). And “Our Lost Poems” (this year).
“The third (installation) is about going even deeper,” adds Low. “Of stories, of nursery rhymes, of legends and folktales. When you talk to the Singaporean youth about Twilight or Harry Potter, they’d say, ‘Sure!’ When you mention the Ramayana, they’d say, ‘What the f*ck is Ramayana?’ (laughs). You know (these are essential —) the hidden stories that inspire us, legends that have deep cultural roots, and the lost riddles that reveal the secrets of the world. The festival finds us at a crossroad, waiting to reaffirm our sense of place and time as we uncover refreshing facets of ourselves.”
We find ourselves afterwards at an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Stephen Earnhart and Greg Pierce. It starts with Toru cooking pasta and thinking of his runaway cat, and ends in a twilight zone that is part David Lynch, part Ringu, and overall strange and scintillating. The sights, the sounds and everything in between what you see and you hear. The sound artist (Bora Yoon) with plumed hair; an eerie marionette; the dream police (they’ll live inside your head); the lounge singer from hell; all inside this shadowy theater of dreams.
The man in the seat in front of me wakes up after the play, stretches, scratches and asks what just happened.
A dream within a dream.
What strange flight it must have been.
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Special thanks to Singapore’s National Arts Council (NAC), the presenter of the Singapore Arts Festival, as well as the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB) and Edelman.
