“Letting Lore Live Once More “

Reviewer: Cordelia Lee
Performance: 9 June 2019

It’s terribly lively when I slip into Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre’s multi-purpose hall for Ground Z-0’s Island Tales.

Inspired by the street wayang of yesteryears, director Zelda Tatiana Ng attempts to revive elements of this traditional street entertainment, leveraging on the concept of casual, interactive performance to reintroduce the forgotten folklores surrounding Singapore’s offshore islands.

In true wayang fashion, her cast of three are heard long before they are spotted on a small elevated stage. Complete with flailing arms and heightened energy, their amplified voices parkour off the walls as they compete to deliver the local legends behind the origins of Kusu Island.

On a bare stage, equipped with only their bodies and household items for props, the performers take turns at bringing their respective renditionof thislegend to life. Whenever one performer commences their storytelling, the other two assume characters in the tale. They buzz around the stage animatedly, interacting with each other and the space around them. Over the course of 30 minutes, three contrasting legends are expeditiously shared. Each actor is convinced of the legitimacy of their version, but the real work lies in convincing their audience to believe the same. At the end, weget to vote for the versionwe’re most sold on.

And boy, do they put in the effort to win us over.

Squatting down at one point, the performers transform into a couple of rokok-smoking fishermen, rowing away with great gusto in imaginary sampans. Seconds later, swaying bodies and a cry of mock horror accompanied by the crash of an opera gong indicate the beginnings of a storm. In another legend, the performers become orang laut, sea nomads of 16th century Singapura. With large, exaggerated strides, they venture into a mysterious, make-believe cave. More often than not, the realism that pervades the stage is magnified and heightened. Thankfully, it’s reeled inwhenever itbegins to borderon tacky, saving the piece from cloying melodrama.

What is perhaps most intriguing is the curious style of performance employed –one that embraces tiny lapsesin actingand openly incorporates moments of improvisation into its script. There areonstage nudges, giggles and tuts.Exchanges are brief yet witty, infused with a familiar smattering of local dialects and nostalgicpop-culture references. Responses appear scripted and rehearsed, but at timesbecome impromptu, catching even the performersthemselvesby surprise.

What then emerges is a performance that looks rudimentary and feels unpolished, butisentertaining all the same.

Devoid of mediatisation, the charm of Island Tales may very well lie in its overt liveness and ephemerality, where we get to witness blips and nicks as the performers strive to curry our favour. Either that, or that the allure of myth, storytelling, imitation and fantasy – coincidentally the very elements that modern theatre emerged from– is something we, like our ancestors, are primordially predisposed to.

“Always Every Time: transcending language, gender, time”

Reviewer: Liana Gurung
Performance: 28 March 2019

Always Every Time is an amalgamation of the names of its double-billed performances, Tiap Kali Aku… (“Every Time I…”) and <<我在你左右>> (“Always on my Mind”). Staged by Ground Z-0, an up-and-coming theatre collective devoted to the celebration of Singaporean narratives and multilingual theatre, Always Every Time makes an interesting decision to bring two seemingly disparate performances, told in two different languages, together.

Directed and written by Adib Kosnan, who performs the piece together with Saiful Amri, Every Time I… is a meditation on fatherhood that takes place in the ponderous 20 minutes before Saiful’s child is born. Saiful’s character wonders at the importance of fatherhood – and whether he can even become a father without having one of his own to emulate. Adib provides a sometimes sympathetic, sometimes challenging backdrop to Saiful’s brooding with a colourful rotisserie of characters.

Always on my Mind… features Liow Shi Suen and Lina Yu as a mother-daughter duo in another imaginary space: a metaphysical bus interchange, where Liow has been given three chances to board a specific bus. As the buses come and go, the exchange gets increasingly heated as Liow and Yu try to navigate a past rife with the limited time they have left.

I appreciate the intellectual challenge both plays offer, as they invited us to consider parent-child interactions – universal human experiences that transcend language, race, gender and time. The plays’ other similarities are also embedded quite elegantly in their structures, such as each narrative being hemmed tightly into finite amounts of time. In Every Time I… it is the 20-minute timer that counts Amri down to his child’s birth, and in Always on my Mind it is the three mysterious chances Liow is given to “board the bus”. The contrast of the universality of struggling parent-child relationships against the minute amount of time each protagonist is given to iron them out sharpens the performance’s sophisticated, collective argument about the complications that come in-hand with familial ties. This is what melds two distinct performances into one holistic production.

That said, the melodrama of Always on my Mind becomes almost corny against the minimalist musings of Every Time I… The former’s attempts to incorporate Chinese mythology and nostalgic golden age songs into the dramatic narrative results in a stilted and jarring storyline.

Beyond Every Time I…’s simplicity, which sought to show rather than tell, I also feel that more care was taken with the its stage direction and lighting sequences. Its final tableau is particularly striking, as Saiful faces away from the audience, and the harsh light throws his long shadow against the wall behind him. The Play Den at the Arts House is a challenging location to conduct a performance, being without a traditional stage and with the audience bordering three sides of the central performance space, but Every Time I… demonstrates what can be achieved with care: a performance that transforms into a shifting kaleidoscope, which changes from each angle and perspective.

“Old shadows in new light”

Reviewer: Lee Shu Yu
Performance: 21 February 2019

There is always something novel about entering a public building after-hours. I suppose it is the excitement of gaining access to an otherwise restricted area, or perhaps it is just the unnatural silence that makes the experience more thrilling. Maybe it is the leftover energy from the day’s events that echoes like a bell through the walls.

There is even the promise of seeing something that is not quite there.

GroundZ-0 Collective’s latest work, Shadows IN the Walls, ticks all these checkboxes. In collaboration with the National Gallery of Singapore (NGS), the work is presented as part of the Light to Night Festival 2019’s Bicentennial edition. We are taken on a 60-minute night tour at the gallery, led by Qi En (Tan Weiying) and there, we run into characters from the yesteryears of Singapore.

The pristine NGS feels distant and even clinical at first. But even before our kind tour guide can finish her welcome message, the ensemble of actors flit in and out of the foyer’s balconies in a cacophony of voices and sounds. Just as it hits a crescendo, the activity disappears like a teasing apparition. It is a chilling but effective start to the night.

Tan is an enthusiastic and sincere tour guide, and her passion for the stories is infectious. She takes us through the beautiful sites in the former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings, dropping nuggets of history and of her own life. It makes the walk a little more personal, and the intimacy of the experience is its strongest point. At every turn, characters from the past tell their tales in little vignettes delivered by the competent actors. Director Zelda Tatiana Ng uses the unique venue and its acoustics to her advantage, having the ensemble leave phatasmic echoes of themselves for us to investigate as they run through the hallways. Jing Ng’s masterful sound design is also crucial in setting the mood and enlivening the massive building. By their hand, history comes alive.

The stories of the characters range from the familiar to the obscure. Johan the Journalist (Joel Low), introduces Cavaliere Rudolfo Nolli, an Italian sculptor responsible for the pediment on the building’s façade. Munsyi Abdullah (Yazid Jalil) recollects his service to Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles in the glorious “Swearing Room”. Later, the tour group runs into a forlorn Blue Samsui woman (Catherine Wong) who laid the original rubber tiles for the building.

As we walk, our guide also problematises our squeaky-clean official narratives, which is refreshing and provides much needed balance to the work. But I am unable to shake off the cliché that Shadows IN the Walls, too, perpetuates the same diluted narratives. Perhaps the point of the work is to look beyond the light, and consider what is gritty and unsaid and left in the shadows. Still, given its length and scope, Shadows IN the Walls is a successful and confident piece of work that both locals and tourists enjoy. Against the backdrop of museum displays and the polished wooden floors, the anachronism of the live actors in traditional garb is provocative. It leaves me wondering about my own relationship with history, colonialism and nation-building in modern Singapore.

But by the end of the night, one melancholic thought trumps all: here in Singapore, it seems we have stories too big for the glass cases, and yet nowhere to put them.

One can only hope for more of such collaborations to refresh our collective history in the bicentennial year and beyond.