“The Journey Continues“

Reviewer: Jocelyn Chng
Performance: 8 November 2019

As I sit down to draft my review of Journey to a Dream, I am stumped. How do I even begin to review a work that sits within a festival that purports to defy conventional understandings of a festival? Journey to a Dream is the Festival Production of the third Southernmost, organised annually by theatre company Emergency Stairs. Every year, the Festival Production is created by the participating artists through a process premised on dialogue and exchange between the artists and their different art forms.

The artists, many of whom have participated in previous editions of Southernmost, are clearly highly proficient in their respective forms, and arresting to watch. Near the start of the performance, I am mesmerised by dancer Makoto Matsushima’s slow walk up the stairs, across the stage, and out the opposite door. Kunqu opera performer Shen Yili’s voice fills the black box and almost spills out of it – I appreciate being so close and witnessing her performance in such an enclosed space, because for the first time I feel like I can hear the personality through what to me is a distant, unfathomable technique of Chinese opera singing.

There is a moment when performer Amin Farid sings with Shen a well-known Malay song in Singapore, Dayung Sampan. Hearing it sung by Shen is a strangely beautiful experience. It is a straightforward exchange between the artists, but something about that simplicity touches me powerfully and I cannot quite explain why.

However, despite there being captivating moments such as the above, I nevertheless feel like an “outsider”. Not belonging to the world of any traditional Asian performance form, I feel like I can only appreciate the movements and physicality on a visceral level, but I lack some of the knowledge and language to fully appreciate the intricate layers of interaction between the numerous forms.

Apart from form and physical movement, Journey does respond to a theme – the idea of “centre/decentring” comes across strongly in the text that is both narrated in a voiceover and visually projected. A repeated image is that of a white 17^th century French dress with wide panniers, worn by several of the performers – what I read as the team’s response to the obsession that King Louis XIV’s court had with chinoiserie and Chinese costumes. It is no accident that classical Javanese dancer Didik Nini Thowok, who specialises in cross-gender performance, spends a good amount of time centre stage in that dress.

But in the midst of the many bodies and images on stage are several concepts that could do with clearer unravelling. Is this a “de-centring” or a “re-centring”? Or a “re-claiming”? And of what? Culture? Gender? Power? All of the above? We are also told by the voiceover and projected text, “thank you for your cooperation” several times throughout the performance. I wonder what I am meant to be “cooperating” with. I leave this performance with more questions than answers; but perhaps this is an intended effect.

Southernmost is Emergency Stairs’ response to the question “How do you create an arts festival for the future?” I keep coming back to this as I try to respond to Journey. Unfortunately, my thoughts on this are rather bleak. Journey, and Southernmost on the whole, do clearly reject the traditional funding and production structures associated with the international festival circuit, and encourage exchange and process-development amongst the artists involved. However, from the perspective of an audience member, Journey, with its end-stage configuration and clear performance framing, does little to challenge conventional ideas of spectatorship and the relationship between performer and audience. As an interested and involved member of the arts scene – part of an “in-group” that inherently supports Emergency Stairs and the kind of work it is doing – I am all too aware that the work likely appeals to precisely this in-group. But I question to what extent performances like Journey can really, in our product-oriented culture, change the way the arts are understood and experienced, not just produced and consumed.

“The chicken’s still dancing“

Reviewer: Edward Eng
Performance: 19 February 2019

You’re going to die. Every one of your friends will die. So will your crush. So will the strange man from the office across yours who give you a pat on the back sometimes.

I would be lying if I said Sarah Kane’s work doesn’t move me. Playwright Simon Stephens once said at a talk I attended that this is because Kane’s abjection emphasises her humanity, particularly in Cleansed and Crave where the tenderness between nuclear fallout and ultraviolence is quite distinct.

Her play 4.48 Psychosis, on the other hand, is a different emotional creature. It is Kane’s suicide note. Which makes adaptation odd: is it not exploitative? Why would anyone stage a suicide note?

Artist Liu Xiaoyi mostly overcomes these issues by personally reclaiming the narrative and structure. In FOUR FOUR EIGHT, he overlays the abstraction of Kane’s script on the grounded humanity of his own life. Since Liu is physically present in the production, FOUR FOUR EIGHT feels less suicidal and more existential.

It starts with Liu’s playful emails to his audience: one talks about his childhood while another snapshots a prosaic lift landing in a Workers’ Party-held constituency.

The performance itself is a sort of ‘choose your own (emotional) adventure’ through Esplanade that extends this existential-playfulness. We go to the rooftop, the waterfront, the Exciseman Bar (where Liu has set up camp), and a secret corridor that he enjoys. A little notebook is provided as a guide. It splices Kane’s original text and contains exercises inspired by it.

The places we go to feel like a jigsaw puzzle of one’s life. I am surprisingly touched by the secret corridor: I draw it as a softly-lit oasis. The sounds of the nearby escalator and plant room feel like an iron lung near the sea.

But the private room where Liu resides is strange: we get a drink from the bar and sit down to watch Liu and his belongings. The sudden jump here after pensively walking through public spaces makes this room seem almost pornographic. This is partly because the $58 ticket price, the exquisitely-bound notebook and the bar setting commodify the performance. The glass of nice whisky feels extraneous, as though it is an attempt to justify the performance, rather than the other way round. It is among the various ‘package-products’ of the performance that seem too disparate to honestly express Liu’s existentialism.

Watching Liu, I come to see how this honesty is important, because there are affecting moments in the room. Liu holds a stranger’s shoulder. Another audience member cries and he does too. One of the exercises is to mail a letter to a person of your choice, on the premise that today is the last day of your life.

4.48 Psychosis is most affecting when it is allowed to hold an audience in its spell. The author’s last moments yearning for human connection are heartbreaking. Liu captures these moments well, but if he can better limit the distractions, FOUR FOUR EIGHT has the potential for magic.

“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?