“The Last Bull”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 26 August 2016

Legend-making is tricky business. Issues of representation, exaggeration, and neutrality abound. Checkpoint Theatre approaches this endeavor with grace, inclusion, and joy, in their most recent production, The Last Bull, a sketch of the life story of Antonio Vargas – a legendary flamenco dancer and current resident of Geylang.

The Last Bull is both grand and anecdotal – a mélange of memory and the now – joining dance, theatre, film, and music into a celebration of a life, art, and passion. A cast of performers from Checkpoint Theatre work joins Antonio Vargas to narrate his life journey from his birthplace in Morocco, through his renowned career as a flamenco dancer and choreographer, to his current home in Singapore.

The level of Vargas’ artistic mastery, developed over a 60-year career in Flamenco, is mesmerizing. His poise, precision, and passion are extraordinary. His impeccable rhythm is complemented by a fervent and pure delight in movement. While Vargas could easily be the sole focal point of The Last Bull, Claire Wong and Huzir Sulaiman (artistic directors of Checkpoint) make sure this isn’t so.

My initial doubts about the universal relevance of a single man’s life story are quickly dissipated, as the archetypal tale of Vargas’ extraordinary artistic success is intermingled with raw and vulnerable testimonies delivered by a diverse cast of performers. They share openly about the challenges and joys of choosing an artistic professional path, the doubts and support of their families, and the parts of their bodies they most love and reject. At first these testimonies feel out of place, but as the piece progresses, their connections are clear and strong.

While The Last Bull is certainly an introduction into the world of flamenco – a world that much of the audience likely knows little about – it becomes clear very quickly that it is much more than that. The Last Bull humanizes professional artists, reflecting upon the honest hardships (and joys) of choosing an artistic path. It also considers the complexities of artistic specialization, and the era of prodigies and maestros.

Perhaps most unexpectedly, The Last Bull also feels like a celebration of Singapore.

“Split Up”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 19 August 2016

Directed by a playcircle, a collective comprising artists from DramaBox’s youth wing ARTivate, Split Up is an exploration of family, home, loyalty, and inter-generational love. The lights go up on a young woman packing for a flight to America. She hums happily to herself while folding her life into cardboard boxes strewn precariously across the stage. Her elderly father putters about, making breakfast. The scene is overwhelmingly ordinary somehow, an unremarkable image of ‘home’ pervaded by a uniform shade of blue-grey.

The scene of domesticity quickly deteriorates into a full-fledged drama involving risks of unemployment, revealed pregnancy, and a traumatic family history. Split Up has an almost “To the Lighthouse”-esque tone, as countless relationship complexities and conflicts are brought to the surface over a bowl of porridge in a messy flat. This mundane setting contrasts sharply with the poignancy of the moment portrayed – a father losing his daughter to another country, another man, another life – and thereby reveals the baffling banality of such pivotal moments.

Split Up captures a type of affection that feels distinctly Singaporean. The characters enact a sort of downplayed love, a language of affection that comes across as begrudging or ‘naggy’ but rests upon a foundation of actions that reveal a deeply loyal love. The daughter scolds her father for his carelessness, yet calls his boss to beg for his rehire. The father offers to move to America to take care of his daughter’s baby, yet hides the offer beneath a begrudgingly casual tone. The performers embody an impressively acute understanding of this distinctly Singaporean language of love.

Despite a few minor instances of what feels like clunky acting, I find myself swept up in the flow of Split Up. Beyond the relationship dynamics and overlapping personal stories, Split Up comments upon the status of Singapore caught between nostalgia and fast-paced modernity. The characters gracefully enact the complexities of Singapore’s processes of anglicization, the brain drain, and the widening inter-generational gap. Through carefully crafted yet refreshingly commonplace dialogue, I witness inter-generational communication breakdown, and deeply conflicted identities.

I leave the theatre feeling moved, saddened, grateful, and like I should give my grandmother a call.

“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….’

“Dreams, and what to do?”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 31 March 2016

I had a dream last night. I was in an aquarium in London with my husband who was actually my mother. We went to the library and a Spider Queen stole our pretzels. They might have been pretzels, or popiah – I couldn’t tell. My husband began ‘caw-cawing’ like a crow and put some items into a bag as if I were leaving him forever: a cucumber, a lamp, Oreos, an oboe, and a plucked chicken. That’s when I started to feel a tingling sensation. It was the Spider Queen crawling into my left ear.

… Are you with me?

Intrusions is a literal exploration of Jean and Jovian’s dreams. Two women, adjacent worlds, unaware of each other.

Are they two different people? Or one and the same?

Simultaneous dreams of a single person? The dreams of sisters sleeping side by side?

Wild objects populate the stage – dolls, puppets, a fish tank, a stack of concrete bricks, a drill – the space is a delicious-looking toy. The performers command the space, contort, sing, speak, and morph into all types of creatures and characters.

I find myself grasping for meaning, wondering whether there is a larger significance or purpose for performing these dreams in front of a live audience.

Is it simply a sharing? An opportunity to practice radical imagination?

Or simply a reminder to focus on singular moments and detail amidst the bizarre chaos or life?

Intrusions certainly has moments – fleeting and visually impactful tableaus that linger in my mind’s eye: Jovian parts her long black hair and wraps it through her toes, a chicken is beheaded, a red phone on a ladder rings.  I think about Dadaism, the Absurdist art movement, and Lewis Carroll.

There is an imposing rape scene – powerful, dominating, dark, inimitable – but it is dropped and we move on to parachutes and other dreams. I wonder without certainty if sex is central to Intrusions.

Do we have control in dreams? Are we performing in our dreams more or less than in real life? Do our dreams tell us about our souls? Or are we simply talking about REM?

I leave Intrusions with questions – sleepy, and hoping to wake with clarity.

“The Collectors”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 9 April 2016

The Collectors begins with Tan Beng Tian on the back of a Lorry asking us a simple question: ‘how many of you would devote all your attention to specializing in just one thing?’

I ponder the question for mere seconds, before becoming enthralled by tales of Tan’s grandparents – first generation immigrants to Singapore – who fled China in secrecy and never knew when they were born.

The Finger Players take us on a journey of memory – a guided tour through histories and experiences. Each stop is a tableau, a story, a thought, a sharing. The performers slide seamlessly between informal audience engagement and choreographed movements and words – and I am on the edge of my stool wondering what is ‘performed’ and what is ‘real,’ whether there is ever any difference and whether it matters.

A delightful mixture of string puppets, hand puppets, shadow art, film, audio recordings, and speaking and moving bodies – The Collectors problematises the divide between subject and object, animate and inanimate, puppet and puppeteer.

A string puppet version of the Moon Goddess (Chang’e) picks up a brush and writes four Chinese characters with all the grace of a real divine hand.

Tan’s Grandmother (in puppet form) laments the experience of feeling displaced from her home country and the loss of her mother tongue.

A quaint baby doll asks us, candidly, to consider the difference between a ‘traditional puppet’ and simply an ‘old doll.’

Chinese string puppeteer, Zhuang Lie manipulates a puppet with 36 strings with unbelievable fluidity. Just next door, sound artist/poet Bani Hakyal speaks of ‘the archives of our lives’ and information as a precious natural resource. The unlikely relationship between lived memory, personal experience, and big data becomes ever clearer.

As The Collectors comes to a close, and the ‘old doll’ bids us farewell, I am grateful to have been there. With thoughts of lost art forms, oral histories, and the modern age of information overload spinning in my mind, I am struck by the humility of puppet masters who are willing to try their hand at dancing, or who spend months designing creative ways to make their craft more accessible to today’s children.

In a world of non-stop stimuli, it’s good to be reminded of the art of choosing one thing, and staying with it.

“Information downpour – but is that enough?”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 22 January 2016

Human Bestiary is a piece about the state of our world – a crash course on the ‘inconvenient truths’ that we ignore for the sake of living our lives.

The artists of Principio expose the links between environmental destruction, endangered species, oceanic pollution, poaching, poverty, colonialism, gender inequality, religious conflict, and terrorism.

The performers – five women from Mexico City – display an unusual knack for transforming. They become rhinos, lionesses, beat-boxers, colonizers, poachers, and birds. They turn a ladder into a ship, into a tree, into the ocean floor. The actresses are bold in their femininity, accents, and physicality; an immense momentum originates from their ensemble dynamic and hurdles the piece forward.

Human Bestiary is ambitious in terms of the sheer amount of information it packs into 90 minutes. Principio uses a full spectrum of audiovisual multimedia to show us the islands of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean and the coltan mines gouging out the belly of Congo to make the latest iPhone.

Amidst the information overload, I feel myself wanting more emotions and less numbers. Principio seems to rely on the shock-value of the facts to engage the audience, but I find myself most drawn, instead, to the more personal stories of a couple falling out of love, or a woman setting off on a voyage to escape the sense of meaninglessness in her life.

As Human Bestiary comes to close, and the cryogenically-frozen futuristic woman careens through the universe on her way in search of potentially habitable planets, I feel a little disappointed. The information presented by Human Bestiary feels like the very first piece of a larger conversation we need to be having. It makes us gasp and cringe, but I am left wondering ‘what now?’ and hoping for answers.

Is it enough to provoke thought in an audience if you do not address their consequent actions? I worry that the audience leaves Human Bestiary feeling disturbed but not knowing what to do about it.

Despite what I see as a missed opportunity to inspire the audience to take action, Human Bestiary effectively exposes the inner animal beneath human skin.  I still find myself, days after, noticing how people shake their heads or blink their eyes, congregating like rhinos around watering holes, perched on benches or chairs, chatting and teasing, more beast-like than ever before.

“Pixel Chaos – Folklore in a digital world”

Reviewer: Kei Franklin
Performance: 16 January 2016

In a storm of sound and light, the artists of Zeugma blend flesh with digital, animal with human, and past with present.

For Kancil, the clever mouse deer, ‘intelligence is a curse’. Change is approaching fast for the animals of the forest, but only Kancil knows. Metal beasts just over the hill slay the soil and fell the forests. The other animals are oblivious as they merrily prepare for Kancil’s birthday feast.

The Chronicles of One and Zero: Kancil is a modern adaptation of the Malay fables of Sang Kancil, the puny mouse deer who uses her wit to win.

Featuring just one live performer, Gloria Tan, the performance relies heavily on multimedia such as body projection mapping and digital animation, as well as intricate sound design. Large screens surround Tan, and across them move giant chrome animals whose bodies slither and flex, and occasionally a stoic face with empty eyes and a cavernous mouth.

The prominence of the digital dimension provides a particularly poignant backdrop to Kancil’s environmental theme. Zeugma is targeting a new audience (us) in a digitalized world (ours). But the piece does raise a few questions: Does digitalizing a traditional folktale make it more relevant? Do we live so deeply in the digital realm that animation somehow feels more ‘real’ than live bodies on stage? Do we need eruptions of sound and flashing lights to feel the poignancy of a message or a piece of art?

Maybe not, but they certainly help. The complex audio-visual components of the performance make it real and dreamlike at the same time – part nightmare, part memory, and part 3D movie. I am never quite sure which aspects of the performance are literal and which are not.

Waves of Change skid across the screens in beads of light. Trees die and merciless lights look on. God – a passive voice, an observer – offers Kancil little solace as he excuses himself from intervening, explaining that Change is inevitable, ‘Nature’s Law.’

We look on and question our role in all of this – are we the metal beasts or the clueless crocodiles? – our agency up against the tromp of Change.

Kancil is flattened with the rest of the forest and I’m left wondering – game over?