“An Ode to the Sea”

Reviewer: Amanda Leong
Performance: 19 January 2019

Yesterday it rained salt by Bhumi Collective is about two men who keep connecting with and disconnecting from one another. It is also an ode to the alluring but terrifying sea. This is a moving and visceral piece, but it struggles to deliver a compelling narrative.

In the black box space, a man (Kaykay Nizam) sits on one of the seats. The sound of crashing waves plays over the speakers. Not much is happening onstage, so I just sit and watch. But imperceptibly, boredom slips into absorption and embodiment. Slowly, I feel my body mirroring the slowness and stillness of the man’s movement, and I can almost feel the waves lapping at my waist.

Azman (Soultari Amin Farid) appears on stage. In English, he describes the strangeness and distance he feels in a place that should be home to him. The first man, aware that he is being watched, replies in Malay. This exchange continues to occur across the stubborn distance in language. It is jarring to watch. The way the two of them move, too, is different – the first man’s movement is slow but strong, while Azman’s body language is tense and clipped, just like his words. At this point, I am unsure of their relationship. I wonder if they are equals, or different psychological manifestations of the same person.

Later, the bamboo poles are arranged in the shape of a boat, and the two men set out to sea. The tension and unease Azman embodied earlier seem to dissipate as the duo start playing childhood games with each other. Now, I think they might be brothers.

“If I could, I would want to die here. Everything I want is here,” Azman announces. Suddenly, the sea becomes choppy. Azman transforms into something else, though I am not sure what. Is Azman so affected by the sea that he is experiencing a psychotic episode? Or is the actor playing Azman now playing someone else? Powerful and mystical, he dances, smiling as the other man drowns. (I only find out during the post-show dialogue that Azman had actually become a sea goddess, but that reference was completely lost on me.)

The piece ends with an awkward transition into naturalism as the pair return to shore. It is only at this point that the two men are explicitly revealed to be father and son, and I learn that they’re trying to come to terms with losing a relative to the sea.

Throughout the performance, I felt myself being carried by and absorbed in the ebb and flow of each moment. Yet, the piece with its constantly shifting focus, never feels anchored in its characters and their stories. I was, in the end, mostly confused by the relationship between the two men, which was the centre of the piece.

“Breaking Into Less Familiar Territory“

Reviewer: Cordelia Lee
Performance: 11 July 2018

The room is dark, save for a weakly illuminated performance space. This bare, ovoidal area that the audience surrounds spatially resembles a dance cypher – a liminoid, where music and movement converge to unleash pure, personal expression.

B-boy and actor Dominic Nah sits at one end of the space, composed yet never completely still. With eyes closed but a body fully awake, he spontaneously responds to the lo-fi hip-hop pulsing through the speakers, constantly in perfect tandem with its rhythm.

Magic ensues whenever Nah breakdances in the space.  His body appears weightless, limbs slicing through the air with graceful precision. Dance is clearly Nah’s first language, and he speaks it fluently. The emotion driving every movement is conspicuous – ecstasy as he executes successive flares, rage as he steps into a dizzying frenzy, and anguish as he softly cradles himself.

Through a mixture of flashback scenes and breaking sequences, Nah divulges intimate details of his personal life to the audience. From his tumultuous relationship with his now-deceased father to his pilgrimage to the birthplace of breaking, we hear it all. Nah’s story is precious; his vulnerability and willingness to share it through theatre, commendable. It is therefore disappointing when amateurish habits sabotage his delivery, crippling an otherwise powerful performance.

Nah periodically fails to project his vocals, making himself barely audible. This is particularly problematic whenever he delivers a line with his back facing the audience. In such instances, we can neither hear him nor attempt to read his lips. This unfortunately renders some lines in the script lost. Additionally, forced sighs appear in every other line, long enough to either consume the first few syllables in a sentence or to distort the flow of speech midway. Perhaps these pauses are used to buy time, or they are meant to be instrumental in conveying a mood. Regardless of intent, the sighing quickly becomes a distracting element throughout the performance.

Sentences are frequently left hanging, especially when Nah switches between recounting his b-boy experiences and memories of his family. While I respect the artistic decision of using unfinished sentences as a transitional device, it does not discount the fact that it ruptures Nah’s flow of thought for his audience. A non-linear play containing flashbacks and parallel plots requires, at minimum, scenes that end coherently with a completed thought. Withholding information from the audience destabilizes their understanding of the entire narrative. It inevitably catapults them into a perpetual – not to mention incredibly frustrating – guessing game. This ultimately distances the very group of people who want to engage with Nah’s story.

I leave the performance space remembering how Nah’s body flowed as he breakdanced, like it was the only way his body truly knew how speak. If only he had applied the same charismatic confidence and clarity he wielded as a dancer to the rest of his performance.

“Every Brilliant Thing”

Reviewer: Jocelyn Chng
Performance: 21 April 2017

Every Brilliant Thing, written by Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe, deals with the grim subjects of depression and suicide. It is presented not from the sufferer’s point of view, but that of a family member growing up and living with the realities of the matter.

The play’s portrayal of depression is incredibly nuanced. Instead of depicting it categorically as a tragedy, Brilliant presents depression as an everyday part of life, making the subject matter accessible without being heavy-handed or didactic. Underneath the narrator’s anecdotes and stories from childhood (including honest thoughts like being angry with his mother for wishing she were dead), to dating and marriage, to his eventual separation, emerges the acceptance that life is less than perfect. This point is reiterated towards the end of the play. There, the narrator observes that if one has lived a long life without ever being depressed, one “probably [hasn’t] been paying attention”.

Like the list that the narrator compiles over decades of his life, as a means to remind his mother (and himself) of all the brilliant things to be happy about, there are several brilliant things about this play. As the narrator describes his mother’s wildly swaying moods, one comes to realise that the play is taking the audience through a similar trajectory – lighthearted, often hilarious moments morph into dark, serious moments in a matter of seconds.

The theatre-in-the-round configuration also suddenly makes complete sense when the narrator joins a support group for survivors of suicide, taking up position within the circle and addressing everyone as members of the group.

Fresh from winning Best Actor at the M1-The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards 2017, Andrew Marko bravely takes on this very challenging, one-man performance of a role that was originally played by one of its co-writers, Jonny Donahoe. Marko’s rapport with the audience is laudable – with a script that calls for some supporting roles to be played by audience members, many things can go wrong. However, the audience gamely participates, and this is probably due to Marko’s ability to put the audience at ease right from the start.

As the one hour and twenty minutes of the play progresses, Marko’s focus does not waver. Near the end, in desperation, the narrator calls his ex-school counsellor (played to humorous effect by an audience member) on the phone many years after graduation, and breaks down. I struggle to process what just happened, my laughter is caught abruptly in its tracks. I observe the same thing happening around the circle of stunned faces caught one by one in mid-laugh, as silence descends upon the room.