“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.