“Patchwork Histories”

Reviewer: Jevon Chandra
Performance: 20 April 2018

Sitting around a Chinese banquet table, I am sipping on hot tea served in a porcelain white cup when Jodi Chan barges into May Blossom Restaurant, crying for her husband. I crane my neck to watch the proceedings, and forget that I am watching a theatre production. A car dashes past Waterloo Street. Yadid Jalil re-enters the scene, warning the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) members of incoming soldiers. He dashes off after delivering the message, ending the sequence in suspension, dream-like. I leave the cup of tea unfinished to follow my guide, who is armed with a light blue kerosene lamp, to the next location.

Four Horse Road successfully presents the complexities of historical narratives, and the tensions that arise from excavating the disparate spatial memories of Waterloo Street. True to the impossibility of grasping a complete history, the production is unapologetically void of subtitles. There must be bits of narrative that I missed, especially in conversations exchanged in Teochew and Japanese. In those moments of opacity, I find myself appreciating the textures created by the set, and the lingering air of a time past. I become an almost-witness to the tales of the very ground I am on.

However, at times, the haphazard sequence of narratives leaves me desiring for more than site-specificity to hold the production together. After two consecutive segments of foreshadowing, the mystery of the Orang Minyak, evoked by the Nantina Home and Convent School sequences, is left dangling. Moving from place to place feels random, despite having an initially promised overarching narrative thread.

What holds Waterloo Street together? Perhaps nothing, given how different the communities who have lived there are. It leaves me wondering if I am trying too hard to find an overarching coherence when there is none, and my attention is split from the immediacy of present events unfolding before me.

In some moments, I find myself pleasantly surprised by the nuance packed into short sequences. An honest statement from a Jewish Singaporean to a Catholic priest punctuated the air: “I don’t know what Catholicism preaches, but if you think I am refusing [to help you] because of my faith, you are wrong”. Igor Kovic struggles to reconcile real-world urgencies with moral principles – to be a good father by trying to protect his family while abiding by the commandment of “love thy neighbour” – is easily relatable. Elsewhere, a Chinese hotel employee learns about Guan Yin from an Indian temple worker while exchanging stories of belonging. The exquisite weaving of emotional detail within each scene refuses simple interpretation – each is fraught with dilemmas that I may, have, or will relate to at some point myself.

Amidst the shuffling between locations, sitting by the roadside, or on the pews, Four Horse Road is an invitation to look beyond these floorboards and alleyways we assume to be mere rehearsal spaces or rubbish dumps; to acknowledge the lives lived, loved, and lost.

“A Roundabout Hypothesis”

Reviewer: Jevon Chandra
Performance: 1 March 2018

Einstein in the Carpark is proudly experimental. Part performance, sculpture, and mash of instructional exercises, the show takes place in Esplanade’s B2-level carpark. Curious objects, timed events, and interactive elements are scattered throughout the expanse of the work – they serve as both invitations and challenges to the audience.

Unfortunately, these provocations are neither engaging nor focused. Copulating with too many ideas, the show feels conceptually promiscuous.

It wants to have fun, but is unwilling to follow through.

Every work (even the free-form ones) is informed by a basic set of assumptions. However, the core assertions here seem superficial. For example, a central premise: that the carpark is a “liminal space”, a place of “transition.”

How so?

To me, the carpark, as suggested by the very word “park” in its name, is a space of rest. It is its own kind of destination, where moving bodies become still.

Under the theory of classical relativity, “absolute rest” does not exist. Objects are never so much as rest as merely perceived to be at rest. A car may “stop”, but once we move away, it too moves away from us.

But the endless gesturing towards relativity – of identity, culture, perception – becomes a crutch. There is a sense that I am being intellectually hoodwinked.  The show’s arguments also feel glib. A work can present multiple perspectives, as in a Cubist painting. However, an internal logic, abiding to a conceptual through-line is still required to tie the work together.

Relativity does not substitute the need for internal coherence.

Despite the show’s claims to present multiplicities, the actors’ personas – one embodies western musical theatre and the other eastern Kun opera – are flattened. Post-dramatic theatre, from which the production draws influences, seeks to free actors from being “text-bearers”, so as to depict action and places. Antithetically, the actors in the show are saddled with a different burden: that of being culture-bearers. Meanwhile, audience members are barraged with safety instructions and actively shepherded by on-site staff. All these parameters may be necessary, but I wish they too can be enfolded into the show more critically and thoughtfully.

Thankfully, when the show is truly bold, it is also eloquent. One sequence has a character driving around the carpark, prompting the safety crew to keep everyone off the road. For a while, I became more attuned to my body’s physical properties, my mass and velocity relative to the moving car. In another moment, sound designer Darren Ng tapped onto the acoustic properties of the space. A cacophonous rumble resonated throughout the carpark, as if space-time has been made audible.

Nevertheless, such points of coherence are few, and too far in between. They captivate, but do not manage to clarify.

By the end of the performance, I remain unsure: if this show is an experiment, what is it testing for?

“A Prayer Needs No Explanation”

Reviewer: Jevon Chandra
Performance: 17 January 2018

In one sequence, performers Ajuntha Anwari and Sharda Harrison embrace in a bathtub and hum “Que Sera Sera” in unison. Ajuntha’s voice flickers, her pitch fluctuating and breath petering out in the song’s longer phrases. The voices kiss then fall apart – but they remain together.

When they have journeyed through their leg of the song, the melody is entrusted onto the voice of media designer and musician Sean Harrison, who completes the tune with utmost gentleness.

In such moments, Hayat is sublime.

As such, Hayat can afford to revel in its pathos and less on exposition. Anwari paints the metaphor of bow and arrow for the relationship between mother and daughter, and I recall a line from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.” This association also reminds me of the sheer economy of Gibran’s text, and the enduring force it achieves with so few words. Not unlike the bow which launches only as forcefully as its string is taut, Hayat may have benefitted from a tightening of texts. The laborious excavation of Anwari’s memory and mortality leading to the play makes every uttered speech precious. Every word has the potential to be a gem, and I yearn for a script that is more direct than dense in its recounts.

Hayat also suffers from an eagerness to dramatise. On several unearned occasions, tensions are heightened and voices are raised, as if anxious of losing the audience’s attention. For example, right after the singing of “Que Sera Sera” has tapered off, and with barely a beat to dignify the tenderness, Anwari’s sobbing crescendoes into a wail. Such gestures are palpably felt, but the punches, though powerful, lacked aim. The result is that moments puncture instead of punctuate, leaving behind holes in place of texture.

At its best, Hayat does no performing – the business of living, as embodied in Anwari’s journey, simply unfolds on stage. At its bravest, knots and non-sequiturs are allowed to simply be, without the pressure of sense or resolution. One video montage weaves snippets of religious rituals and reverence, natural disasters, and childbirth – these are visions of forces acting upon agents, and agents living out (un)due courses. In another moment, the performers invite audience members to dance with them, and then with yet other members of the audience. It is awkward, but we all move in tune; and the wooden floors creak, heaving a sigh of relief.