“Three’s a crowd when there’s only two chairs“

Featuring:
Nothing (Ma Junfeng) &
Descendants of Eunuch Admiral – Was (Liu Xiaoyi)
Descendants of Eunuch Admiral – Is (Liu Xiaoyi)

Reviewer: Isaac Lim
Performance: 30 July 2015

Nothing, a physical theatre piece performed by Ng Mun Poh and Melissa Leung, feels like a work-in-progress, or perhaps a showcase of theatre workshopping. The director, Ma, brings little to the table. This is especially disappointing when Ma is known for his eclectic work in Shanghai, constantly exploring a fusion between the traditional and the contemporary. The “key props” of table and chairs are barely utilized, except for a few seconds towards the end.

This feels like a weak primer to what is to served next.

Lab Director Liu Xiaoyi presents two thought provoking works, both based on Kuo Pao Kun’s landmark text, Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral. Subtitled “Was” and “Is”, the two pieces question the notion of “cultural orphans”, of what is past and what is present.

Chinese actors Zhu Hong and Zhao Yutao (both from Jiangsu Performing Arts Group Kun Opera Theatre), together with Singapore-based Hung Chit-Wah, Felix, tore apart the original text, and two molecular (& muscular) performances of Descendants are born.

The seemingly disparate performance elements work well with one another yet maintain their independent qualities. These include a contemporary voyager’s seeking self-worth, to a ghost-like figure hunting for something lost. They run parallel with the chosen Descendants text narrated by Liu. While the table and chairs are not put to good use, there is good attempt shown in engaging them for the pieces.

It is in Descendants – Is that the collaboration of artists produce the brightest sparks. An audience member is invited to take a seat on stage, reading aloud the part of the text describing the castration process. This is followed by a movement piece by Zhao, combining “Kunqu” operatic moves with modern gestures that question the loss of traditional culture.

The 1 Table 2 Chairs Experimental Series, in its fourth iteration, is designed as a platform to present “cutting-edge works” that will “breathe life into traditions and the contemporary”. This installment has the most exciting mix of artists to date. However, the “dialogue” which creator Liu has hoped to generate is fairly muted.

“1 Table 2 Chairs”

Featuring:
Nothing (Ma Junfeng) &
Descendants of Eunuch Admiral – Was (Liu Xiaoyi)
Descendants of Eunuch Admiral – Is (Liu Xiaoyi)

Reviewer: Sam Kee
Performance: 31 July 2015

The concept of one-table-two-chairs is inspired by the traditional setting of a Beijing opera, in which various settings, ranging from a temple to a palace, can be depicted simply with these three pieces of furniture. This limitation appears restrictive but it also gives directors a free rein to express themselves and experiment with unfamiliar forms and structures.

Ma Junfeng does not seem too comfortable with a free rein though. He responds to this with a play titled Nothing and a rather cliché response, in my opinion. He borders a rectangular performance space with a thin red tape, where two performers take turns to enter and perform. Girl number 1 (Ng Mun Poh), bubbly and cheerful, explores her terrain, realising that she can burp pockets of air that floats and cut through the imaginary walls with her fingers to peer into the ‘outside world’. In contrast, Girl number 2 (Melissa Leung) seems to be always shouldering a huge boulder of ‘air’ with a solemn face. Not long after the girls accidentally stumble into each other’s alternate universe, they leave the demarcated space, and finally sit down opposite each other at the table. In the last few seconds before the lights go out, we see a symmetry – two seemingly opposites, staring into each other’s reflection. I reckon the piece cannot have found a better title, it literally was NOTHING much.

While Ma fumbles with ‘nothingness’ and ‘being’, Liu Xiaoyi deals with the dichotomy of past and present in an adaptation of Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants of Eunuch Admiral, Zheng He. Zhao Yutao (who is due to perform only in the last play) enters to remove the red tapes, literally.

The play begins with a pre-recorded text from the original playscript, voiced by Liu himself, to set the story. In Was, we move through a flurry of abstract symbols characteristic of Liu, with Liu narrating the background information and voyages of Zheng He. Descendants is a play-text that engages many critical and pertinent issues: power, authority, duty, rootlessness and cultural limbo, to state a few. But I feel that Liu personalizes these issues with a decidedly humanist approach – centering his pieces on a reluctance to depart and a helplessness to affect change.

Another scene that leaves an impression is the juxtaposition of a Chinese performance tradition with an Indonesian soundtrack. Zhao performs a routine of stylized Kunqu Opera segment, clad in modern-day suit. It looks like he is dancing to the tune of an Indonesian folk song, Bengawan Solo. Despite the apparent disparity between the two, the juxtaposition works. Projected in the background, is text taken from a well-known Kunqu segment, 单刀会 (The Single-Knife Meeting of Guan Hanqing). Both text and soundtrack speak of a river that has flown eastward, never to return, exacerbating the melancholy & the helplessness.

As the light fades out, Zhao slowly turns his body around. He raises his finger at the audience, begging the question: Have you ever wondered if you might be a descendant of the Eunuch Admiral, Zheng He?

“Artistic experiment“

Reviewer: Walter Chan
Performance: 18 July 2014

Like its title suggests, 1 Table 2 Chairs Experimental Series presents three starkly different plays that emphasise the process of creating theatre rather than the product.

One table. Two chairs. Two performers. A short play of twenty minutes. Everything else is fair game.

Returning for the second year in a row, 1 Table 2 Chairs Experimental Series presents three different plays (performed in Mandarin) from three directors (Cai Bixia, Eva Tang and Liu Xiaoyi), each from very different backgrounds. The result is a very interesting combination of performances that runs the gamut from the refreshingly quirky to the downright bizarre.

The first piece, Emperor Qin and Lady Meng Jiang, directed by Cai Bixia, tells a small tale about love and the corrupting influence of power. Cai’s Chinese opera training was evident in the way both actors sang their lines and expressed themselves in their body gestures. Yet, she cleverly circumvented the issue of the long staging times of Chinese opera performances by having her actors snap out of their characters and engaging in casual small talk about their characters’ motivations. This puts a new spin on a traditional performance style, making for a strong opening piece.

The second piece, X2, directed by Eva Tang, seemed to be a meditation about loss, with a woman at a divorce lawyer’s office grieving over the death of her pet dog. (At the post-show dialogue, Tang elaborated that it was about how we express love in a contemporary setting.) While Tang’s background in film did give rise to an extended use of the space, such as playing different levels of action and using shadows to evoke spaces, ironically they ended up being constraints to the premise of “1 Table 2 Chairs”. The actors’ engagements with the props were only restricted to that of a physical level and the transformation of space was only made possible by pre-existing technical modifications. If this were a proper game with rules, I would term this as “cheating”.

The closing piece, UnSound 2, directed by Liu Xiaoyi, took the idea of “experimental” and ran with it. Nothing was too avant garde to be left out, and everything collided in an atrocious mashup of theatrical elements. To illustrate, at one point the male actor positioned a chair millimetres away from the ground and froze for what seemed like an eternity, while the female actor played games on her iPad whilst performing what seemed to be the couch potato version of the whirling dervish. All this while the multimedia screen overhead superimposed contrasting words on top of each other (“crass”/”refined”) and a grating soundtrack hummed over the speakers.

Yes, this show does not make for easy viewing at times. But keeping in mind that these pieces are essentially raw and unpolished creations, it may interest audiences hankering for some off-beat Chinese Theatre.