JOURNEY TO A DREAM by Emergency Stairs

“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.