“Increasingly Pleasurable”

Reviewer: Lee Min Jie
Performance: 30 July 2016

Upon entering Esplanade Recital Studio for M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Festival 2016’s Programme B, I realise that a space filled with youths is always exuberant and energetic. Chatter and laughter bounce off the walls and there is never a quiet moment right up till the lights dim for the first performance.

This theatre festival is a necessary platform to harness all this energy.  It is here that youths can channel their energies and creativity into collaborating and cooperating, not only with their peers, but also with mentors, who have been in the industry for a long time.

Programme B opens with In The Cracks We Find. Performed by Raffles Girls’ School (Secondary), it begins by quoting the definition of “family” from the dictionary and Wikipedia. As the play progresses, we realise how wrong, or incomprehensive, these definitions are. Families in the modern society face unique challenges and no longer come in the prescribed forms. This gang of girls are a force to reckon with. They challenge definitions, offer their own and build human pyramids when you least expect it. Perhaps in the future they could consider a more stable and safer platform (not jagged blocks) to stand on when making their statement.

My personal favourite (from Programme A and B) is Pull Up by Clementi Town Secondary School. A play where life takes three fighter pilots in different directions after a freak accident. This is a well-conceived dramatic story that elucidates the theme of friendship and forgiveness. Lightbulbs on airplane models cleverly mimic their flight at night. Synchonised movements by the ensemble replicate the turbulence felt in a plane realistically. The emotional rollercoaster ride is made all the more memorable by the cast’s striking facial expressions. This thoughtful and theatrical presentation makes me overlook the illogical revival of one of the characters.

Dancing In The Dark by Buds Theatre concludes the evening. A girl’s fear of leaving the house and interacting with other people is so strong that it is paralysing. She stays at home, lives vicariously through movies and survives on delivery.

Everything is beautifully romanticised in this play and appropriately so I feel. For a girl who battles opening the front door, walking along the cobbled streets with a snack in hand is a dream. However, she doesn’t realise that her own existence is romanticised too. Using a typewriter and dancing like no one’s watching is a luxury one can rarely afford in a fast paced modern society like Singapore. What are the chances of a pet cat taking refuge in your own home and befriending the delivery man? The set, sound, and lighting design lends another dimension to the whole atmosphere too.

A home that provides a comfortable escape is something that all of us should be able to own.

“A taste of Forum Theatre”

Reviewer: Lee Min Jie
Performance: 28 July 2016

International Friendship Day (IFD) is an interactive drama targeted at primary and secondary school students by The Necessary Stage. The programme booklet even comes with an educational kit and study guide.

IFD takes the form of Forum Theatre. Forum Theatre was created by Augusto Boal with the intentions of bringing about social and political change. Usually audiences would watch actors passively and leave when the play ends. Boal prefers “spect-actors” where audiences are involved and think critically about what they are watching.

In Forum Theatre audiences can halt the performance, suggest another course of action for any character or even replace the actors themselves, in an attempt to change the outcome of that scene. This way instead of being passive spectators, audiences are active participants.

Fortunately, International Friendship Day managed to achieve this.

Actors split up and join audiences for a short but revealing pre-show discussion. A quick round of introductions followed by us putting a number to how many foreigner friends we have. It is surprising to note how some of us have none at all. Perhaps the outcome would have been different if we were asked how many foreigners we know.

The play traces a group of students in a local school as they prepare IFD. Each scene is richly packed for students to intervene. Beginning from childish bullying and name calling, to the segregation of local and foreign students, to the retrenchment of a student’s father, to the unfair treatment of a girl who does not want to attend a classmate’s party etc

In anticipation of short attention spans, IFD keeps each scene short and succinct, scene changes are smooth and swift. Yet it refrains from commenting on each scenario, leaving it to the students to unpack the misfeasance. Comfortingly, the students are perceptive and thoughtful. Kudos to those who mustered the courage to go on stage and act out a short scene.

Post-its are distributed for audiences to pen their reflection sum up the post-show activity. A walk around the display of post-its is encouraging as students suggest ways their schools can promote foreign-local student cohesion through camps and workshops etc.

Perhaps if plays like these toured workplaces, xenophobia and bigotry amongst adults can be mitigated.

“We do not fight hate with hate.”

Reviewer: Jocelyn Chng
Performance: 28 July 2016

International Friendship Day is an interactive theatre piece by The Necessary Stage, presented as part of the M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Festival by ArtsWok Collaborative. Peer Pleasure seeks to engage youths in the process of theatre-making, recognising their points of view as valuable within the larger arts scene. International Friendship Day is one of the standalone “Engagement Programmes”, but only one performance is open to the public (the rest being staged entirely for school bookings). Perhaps due to this context, the performance on the whole feels overly didactic for a general public audience.

The four actors introduce themselves as students and teachers of the fictional Marine Parade Secondary School (MPSS), following which the audience is immediately broken into groups, each led by one performer who remains in character throughout the discussion. The character tells us more about his background, and then asks questions such as whether we have friends who are not from Singapore, if we know of instances of racism directed at foreigners and so forth.

This section feels awkward, especially as the questions are too general to elicit forthcoming and meaningful responses from an audience used to sitting quietly in the dark. Although I can see its usefulness for a showing aimed at school students, such a pre-show discussion is perhaps unnecessary for the public showing as the relevant issues will become apparent through the play itself.

The scripted play, however, seems to me a little simplistic in its treatment of the scenarios portrayed – foreign students feeling left out of or not wanting to participate in activities with local students, being pressured to do things that they do not wish to, or facing bullying and name-calling. However, the time constraint perhaps accounts for the simplified presentation of issues (the scripted play lasts only about an hour or less). This is so that more time can be allocated for the interactive section that follows, in which audience members are encouraged to come on stage to try out different ways of managing or resolving a tricky situation presented in the play.

However, even this latter section begins to feel draggy after a while, reminding me of role-playing exercises at conflict resolution workshops, with participants who lack the experience or confidence to really carry their intentions through. This often results in contrived resolutions to the problems, which I doubt are an accurate enough approximation of real-life conflict situations to offer genuine learning points for a general public audience.

Regardless, the actors deserve commendation for their performance in a play that is demanding enough in its scripted part (each actor plays multiple roles), let alone the interactive section. The challenge of an interactive piece lies in its unpredictability, and the intense focus and responsiveness of the cast certainly helps them rise to it.

“Democratising Theatre for Youth”

Reviewer: Muhammed Faizad Bin Salim
Performance: 28 July 2015

ArtsWok Collaborative and the Esplanade have come together to plug what appears to be a gap in the Singaporean theatre scene: the lack of an avenue / platform for youth to showcase their works to the public. And if the maiden run of the festival is anything to go by, future iterations are looking promising … but not before ironing out some kinks first.

The 5 festival plays were conveniently chosen from the 2014 Singapore Youth Festival Arts Presentation for Drama (English) for Junior Colleges and Centralised Institutes. They share a commonality in that they all are loosely based on the festival theme of Causality. In addition, according to the festival’s Artistic Director Alvin Tan, the 5 plays features strong ensemble pieces and they provide an antidote to an otherwise individualistic and competitive world. What he fails to point out however, is how most of the works being presented are not actually written by the youth themselves and the direction is also usually provided by an adult – a teacher in charge of the school drama club or an arts practitioner, roped in to help mentor and train the students for the competition.

The standout pieces were Hwa Chong Institution’s The Female of the Species and Raffles Institution’s 10,000 Cigarettes. The former showcases the casts’ acting chops really well by getting them to play stereotypical female personas ranging from the gossip schoolgirl to the wife dealing with the partner’s infidelity at the cusp of ending the relationship. Alex Broun’s darkly humorous play 10,000 Cigarettes on the other hand is given a whimsical treatment by RI with lots of physical theatre thrown in to complement the brilliant banter. Catholic Junior College’s Poop handles Chong Tze Chien’s writing with great sensitivity and care. This showcase features committed performances by the three female leads playing the roles of Emily, Mother and Grandmother. The use of white masks for the cast, whilst simple, conveys the theme of hallucinations, spirits and the afterlife across clearly.

What ultimately soured the experience though, was ironically the very people this festival was supposed to cater to and celebrate. Admittedly, some of the issues presented on stage are not your everyday, run-of-the-mill topics the average school-going Singaporean student would identify with but neither are they so highfalutin that it would be beyond their grasp. It is irksome then, to have them react (oohs, ahhs and ooh la las) rather loudly and inappropriately to the littlest of things. One of the male actors from CJC gave the whole experience a rather positive spin during the Question and Answer segment by stating that the experience taught him that as an actor his job was not just to deliver the lines but to also react to the audience and pace the performance accordingly. For me (and the rest of the ticket-paying adult audience) though, part of a youth theatre festival must at the very least in its outreach efforts, be concerned with cultivating a sense of decorum that is unfortunately sorely lacking in young theatre audiences.

The short interval where the Q&A is conducted for the group that came before is neither purposeful nor insightful as the questions are over-determined and banal, and they do not mask the fact they are time-fillers while the next group is prepping to perform. Regardless of the audience demographic, the facilitator need not have dumbed down the questions.

Peer Pleasure certainly holds a lot of promise but for it to be a successful youth theatre festival, it must aspire to be a theatre of the youth, by the youth and for the youth.