“On the memory of objects“

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 25 January 2019

In Catamite, Loo Zihan investigates the histories and futures of objects. The format is relatively straightforward: he shares his own artistic journey and stories from his research, and interspersing them with exercises to excavate our relationship with our objects.

Loo starts by asking us to lay out all of our personal belongings, and contemplate which object is most special. He then recounts his art-activism related to his research into Section 377A, while sharing with us objects such as a bellydancing vest, a BDSM whip, and a prop candle from his interpretation of the late Paddy Chew’s Completely With/Out Character. We are invited to feel and even take in the scent of each object.

This act of holding objects feels matter-of-fact at first, but when I hold Chew’s candle, it becomes unexpectedly sentimental – the candle was present in all three versions of Chew’s and Loo’s monologue. It is blockish, and holds the weight of many hearts.

Back to our own objects. We are asked to leave something of ours on a table, and choose something that belongs to another audience member. I leave my iPod, and pick up someone’s keys.

After this brief exercise, Loo returns to the more factual elements of the piece, and tells us his research on Section 377A culminated in the case of one catamite – a young male prostitute – in colonial Singapore. We are then roped in to reenact the catamite’s trial using Loo’s objects. Taking on the role of the judge, I wear the wig from Loo’s earlier work, I am LGB. The effect is silly, but it adds an uncomfortable sense of momentousness to the whole thing.

For Loo, the story of the catamite essentially embodies what Section 377A stands for: a law borne of colonial inequities. It was an unfair trial where the local catamite – the receiving partner in the act of sodomy – was portrayed as a deviant who tricked the colonialist.

However, I find that it was rather limiting to reenact the trial scene, as it seems to suggest that object-memory is potent because humanity is constantly in flux, not because the colonial fictionalisation is inherently bad. What, for instance, was the judge feeling when he examined the catamite? The drama of Loo’s point loses steam here, since the performance is unrehearsed and not embodied.

In the end, it is the object exercises – and not the catamite’s story – that pieces my emotional defences. In the last segment, Loo asks us to write a letter for the object we picked up from someone else. I examine the Tokyo Disneyland keychain attached to the keys, and a rush of worry washes over me as I feel that I cannot do its memory justice.

So I write about where the metals were mined. I consider the keys’ purpose. Are they are even for their owner’s house? Maybe they unlock her parents’ door? I imagine that perhaps she has not even been to Disneyland.

Loo’s triumph lies in weaponising our imagination to see our own stories, and the possibility of others’. Like me, the owner of the keychain picked it up somewhere. But here I am, thinking about where it came from, and where it would go.

《突破生命的局限，超越时空的约束》

Reviewer: Neo Hai Bin | 梁海彬
Performance: 26 March 2017

倘若你将死去，你会选择怎么死，你临死前会选择过什么样的生活？

导演罗子涵在2017年重新演绎1999年《周丰林的独白》，通过录影、摄影和投影，让原本线性的时间呈现不一样的可能性。

导演在剧场内放映当年的舞台演出，让观众在此时感受当时的演出—— 这是摄影的传统功能，也是观众熟悉的方式。

当演员（许优美）演绎《周》的原文时，几乎全程对着镜头演出—— 摄影的“即时作用”是这个时代独有的影视功能，观众于是在此时观看即时的演出。

观众在看即时演出时，也能够意识到，此时的演出被正在记录下来。此刻即永恒—— 过去与现在都被保存，投射到未知的未来。

“时间”在罗子涵的演出中变得非常重要。我们不断被提醒“当年”与“现在”之间的距离。1999年的社会，到了2017年是否有改变？改变了多少？

周丰林以有限的生命，为一整代的艾滋病患者努力；罗子涵以录影的保存功能，让周丰林的故事有超越时空的可能性，让此时的我们有机会体验当年舞台演出的震撼性。

观看 ”With/Out”，观众经历了一趟时光之旅。

观众固然必须通过科技和荧幕去穿越时光，但是导演也安排了演员许优美在舞台穿梭。当演员用此时的肉身承载当年的故事，我们看到了一种更原始、更触动心灵的保存方式。

这是剧场的精髓—— 用一个个短暂易逝的肉身承载故事，让故事有延续性生命的可能。

戏末，演员邀请观众点亮一根根的蜡烛。在黑暗的剧场里，我们看见火光慢慢传到每一根蜡烛上，恰如演员通过身体把故事传到了现场每一个观众心里。

2017年的”With/Out”，罗子涵看似在剧场破格，其实是延续了剧场的本质：以有限触碰无限，以精神超越肉体。导演成功让身处不同时空的生命相遇，激发了无限的剧场可能性。

“Do not go gentle into that good night…”

Reviewer: Christian W. Huber
Performance: 23 March 2017

Loo Zihan’s With/Out made its debut in 2015 at Centre 42 as part of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. And now, it’s back as part of The Esplanade’s The Studios festival with a bigger budget and added collaboration from seasoned stage and screen performer, Janice Koh.

The work is a reimagining of Completely With/Out Character, a docu-theatre monologue performed and devised by Paddy Chew – the first AIDS patient in Singapore to publicly declare his disease – 18 years ago, with Haresh Sharma and Alvin Tan from The Necessary Stage. With/Out is an evocative piece, albeit not in the traditional form of sitting down and getting comfortable in your theatre seat. Nay, this meticulous homage to all things Paddy is best felt by exploring the space, so one can view multiple perspectives of the piece and participate through active engagement. The audience clearly becomes an element of the performance.

With headphones a necessity throughout the piece, audiences can choose to follow one of three channels – be it Chew’s original performance that’s telecast on the screen, the version enacted live by Koh, or both versions at the same time. This multi-media performance installation piece engages not only the community of audience members in-house, but also online, as live streaming is conducted at each performance.

Koh is an extremely focused and dedicated performer, and it is nice to see her challenge herself. To perform the piece without the histrionics and gestures that Chew provided so effectively in his, Koh’s performance is technically polished, and emotionally restrained. She manoeuvres the space effortlessly, and guides the audience members (who inhabit her space) assuredly.

Truly time feels wrinkled, as you see both versions of the monologue unfold. Whilst it feels like a jigsaw puzzle you have to piece together, certain fragmented moments (such the memorial scene, where audience members are invited to light a candle) are powerful.

With/Out has been a labour of love for Loo, Koh, and the rest of the creative team, and they’ve clearly invested a lot of heart and time in archiving, researching, conceptualizing and making it accessible and relevant. It is heartening to know that the quality of life for HIV positive patients in Singapore has improved since Chew shed his clothes and gave AIDS a face.

However, the alienation and isolation remains.

What the documentation of this piece will say about our community’s view on AIDS in the next 18 years is anybody’s guess. But one thing is for sure: Chew’s monologue on his life – warts and all – is his legacy, and will endure for generations to come.

“I am LGB”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 20 August 2016

“Index number 21 please go to the podium you have 90 seconds to justify why you should be the next LGB.” I walk to the podium entirely uncertain as to what I will do next. I stand at the podium, looking down upon my fellow final contenders. A hesitant ‘hmmm’ escapes my mouth, I fall silent, ‘hmmm’…’hmmm’ again, the buzzer sounds.

I am LGB is a performance/game show/social experiment. It tests our confidence/knowledge on what is real, what is deliberate, and what role we play in all of it. It is immersive, frightening, intimate, curious, and unpredictable. It demands a sort of playful investment from the audience – an active creativity commanded by indifferent facilitators in lab coats.

Throughout the experience, there is an omnipresent droning of intellectual musings (on Zhuangzi, Plato, the Turing machine, distorted memories, and peripheral vision) recited by the facilitators atop a colossal podium in the centre of the space. Meanwhile, we are broken into color-coded groups and guided through challenges. We are asked to draw a window, then another window then another. We are asked to dance ballet, then the foxtrot, then ‘yellow’, then ‘3.84’. We are asked to choose an object that proves we are collectively dreaming. All too quickly, I find myself utterly invested, intrigued, and full of anticipation.

Throughout the experience, there is the impending threat of ‘liberation’ – an ambiguous process of elimination where audience members are required to leave the chamber and never return. It is never clear whether liberation is better than continued existence within the chamber; my mind moves to Buddhist philosophy and the Matrix.

When a person is liberated, the facilitators applaud a bit too forcefully, and I find myself (and everyone else) clapping along. There are layers and layers of the unsaid, and unknowingly we begin to abide by a new status quo imposed by latent authority figures from the moment we enter the room.

We do not question, but simply follow – afraid of the consequences of social rebellion.

I am LGB is fresh, offbeat, political, and inventive. It brings strangers together in a sort of intimate yet desperate struggle for victory towards who-knows-what. It exposes the inner-workings of our minds: our tendency to judge, delineate, and categorize. It ties up the existential and the absurd, posing questions like “do you belong here?” and “have you ever really felt at home?”

‘hmmm….’

“I am LGB”

Reviewer: Dawn Teo
Performance: 20 August 2016

Commissioned by the Singapore International Festival of Arts, I Am LGB is a collaboration between Loo Zihan and Ray Langenbach.  Addressing social constructs, self-identity and propaganda, this is a social experiment of questioning ourselves and our environment.

In the vein of participatory performance art pieces, I Am LGB demands direct engagement from the audience, as the audience become the very subjects that perform tests and produces outcomes.

The experiment starts immediately upon stepping through the entrance of 72-13.

Personal belongings are removed and in their place a textbook and a pencil. The audience are asked to put on a lab coat with an index number that will be their marker for the night. A mug shot is taken and the audience walks into the chamber – a sterile white room with chairs, tables, facilitators and a huge podium that requires you to look so far up that aches your stiff neck.

Everything is very surreal, in the sense that you will be listening to lectures and taking tests with your peers in this confined space. To leave the chamber is to be liberated and to never step back into this space again. Oddly enough, it is rare for anyone to voluntarily ask to be liberated. After all, that will mean missing out on what is to come and the thrill of the unknown.  The audience members will slowly be liberated throughout the four hours of the performance, with only one left and named LGB for that one night.

Despite its strangeness and claustrophobic nature, the performance turns out to be a microcosm of society today and that makes it eerily pertinent. Facilitators will constantly watch over you, liberate you for reasons that you are unaware of and you repeat the cycle all over again with different activities.

This piece of work set me thinking about what it really means to be liberated. It sets me thinking about my place in this complicated web of politics, social networks and home. It is a journey of self-discovery  and a  realisation of how art truly imitates, or is, life.

“Paddy’s Struggle Lives On”

Reviewer: Isaac Tan
Performance: 14 January 2015

In 1999, Paddy Chew spoke about living with aids through his one-man show, Completely With/Out Character.

Back then, a pervasive silence clouded over the subject.

Sixteen years later, silence also greeted the end of a re-creation of Chew’s performance.

But this time, it is broken by the buzz of conversations and discussions when the audience left the black box.

Loo Zihan’s re-creation is hard to pin down as the set-up would not look out of place as an art installation. The original production was projected on three screens in the black box while Haresh Sharma, playwright of the original script, did a voice-over from the rehearsal room flushed with clinical fluorescent lights.

The audience is thus challenged to decide if what they are watching can still be considered theatre and also; who exactly are the players in the performance? While there are no easy answers, one thing is certain; Loo’s ambitious endeavour to recapture Chew’s presence—however mediated and fragmentary—is anything but an elaborate film screening.

The whole production is meticulously thought through. The free standing event prevents the audience from being too transfixed by what they are watching as they have to negotiate the space between each other and the two rooms. The audience are also empowered to choose how they wish to engage the production.

This is complemented by the placing of similar/replica props that were used in the original production within the space. These ‘relics’ reminded us that what was presented was not just a flat celluloid projection but that Completely With/Out Character actually happened; Chew did perform the show.

Loo’s decision to invite Sharma to read is a significant one. It is fitting that Sharma gives voice to the words that was collectively generated by him and Chew. The conscious effort by Sharma to replicate the cadences and inflections of Chew’s voice presented a chilling illusion as if it was Chew who was speaking. At the same time, the audience are confronted with Chew’s absence whenever the voice-over was not in sync as his voice trails off as an echo.

As there will be a different reader every night, it would be interesting to see the different effect each reader brings to the show.

Some may find this production overwhelming as it makes so many demands: but life, sickness, death, and loss are never comfortable subjects.

With/Out is a fitting and wonderful tribute to the memory of Paddy Chew and I cannot help but wonder:

What would Paddy do if he were still alive?

Can we, as a society, truly love Paddy?

What can we do now?