“Dancing with Another Country”

Reviewer: Gan Soon Rui
Performance: 3 July 2015

Another Country is like a buffet spread packed full of Singaporean and Malaysian dishes.

For the first half, you sample a comprehensive selection of Singaporean dishes cooked by Malaysian chefs. After a 15 minutes interval, you continue on to the Malaysian dishes, this time prepared by Singaporeans, in the order predetermined by a game of Tikam-Tikam [local version of drawing the lot].

And like all buffets, it can be overwhelming trying to savour ALL the dishes in three hours, especially if you are the kind of person that wants to get their bang for the buck.

The spread of texts selected carefully by the curators Alfian Sa’at and Leow Puay Tin, from the Singaporean and Malaysian texts respectively, can be used comparatively to trace the lineage of local theatre in both countries. Simply put, this production allows us to see Singapore and Malaysia as two entwining vines binding both countries. Another Country is a performance operating primarily on juxtaposition.

And I guess it is no coincidence that the Malaysian and Singaporean casts are dressed in black and white respectively, and how the plain white floor of the stage is purposefully marked with black tape into a tic-tac-toe-esque shape during the latter half of the performance. Subsequently, combined with the systematic movements of the Singaporean cast from text to text, the latter half of the performance feels clinical and less robust compared to the first half, even though the order of the texts are performed in a random shuffle.

While the collections of texts are indeed comprehensive and varied, it seems a shame that there is little attention paid to the pacing of the performance. Continuing with the analogy of a buffet, the performance feels like us gorging on richly flavoured food without being given time to appreciate the details of the dishes, savour the taste and pause for reflection. After a while, the audience is drained, which is more often than not the opportune time for them to check their phones. And mind you, this behaviour is infectious amongst a distracted audience… but I digress.

Towards the end of the performance, Another Country does leave much food for thought for the audience. Titled Dance, this piece had both the Singaporean and Malaysian casts dancing a short bout with their counterpart, and leaves a strong and poignant reminder of this brief and coordinated duet together between 1963 – 1965.

An unforgettable dance duet with another country.

“It’s a small world after all”

Reviewer: Andre Theng
Performance: 25 June 2015

In light of this year’s SG50 celebrations, I should first commend W!ld Rice for reviving an interesting premise for a theatrical production, one which answers the question of whether Singapore and Malaysia are in fact, different or the same countries. This is especially so for the audience members who had missed the previous iteration – the 2005 production, Second Link. Even for those who were there in 2005, Another Country presents updated texts and a refreshed production, resulting in an up-to-date anthology of sorts of Singapore and Malaysian literature.

Here’s how the second production in Wild Rice’s ImagiNATION series works: the first half of the show consists of a Malaysian cast playing a series of 35 texts about Singapore, selected by Alfian Sa’at and played in chronological order. These are a combination of both fiction and non-fiction texts, including newspaper forum letters, poetry, a song commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and excerpts from Singapore theatre such as Lim Chor Pee’s Mimi Fan and Michael Chiang’s Private Parts.

The second half comprises texts about Malaysia curated by Leow Puay Tin. However, there is an additional twist: the pieces are not played in chronological order, and instead, before the intermission, the audience is invited to play a game of “tikam-tikam”, and the order of the pieces are decided there and then. A timer was set up at the corner of the stage, and at the end of an hour, the Singapore actors playing the Malaysian scripts would stop and perform just one more piece. That means that not all the pieces would be performed, and that the pieces each night would be different. The same devise was done in the 2005 iteration.

Throughout the performance, which flits through each (unrelated) piece of text and there seems to be little effort to make links between the pieces, I ask myself how the entire experience helped to answer the question presented in the premise.

Strangely, by the end of the nearly 3-hour performance, it works. The sum of all the parts clarifies that culturally, Singapore and Malaysia are quite the same after all. Many times, it is indeed difficult to identify whether a certain piece is Singaporean or Malaysian – many of the Singapore pieces are about Malaysia, such as Claire Tham’s Highway and Alfian Sa’at’s A Visit to a Relative’s House in Malaysia. This shows that geopolitical boundaries are not as clearly demarcated culturally, and perhaps, we have something in common after all.

Presented shortly after a run in Kuala Lumpur, I concur with the Malaysian reviewers that the Malaysian texts, presented by the Singapore cast, are more entertaining and well-paced than the longer and slower first half. I am not sure if it is the cast that lack energy and synergy on stage, or if it is the nature of the pieces chosen by Alfian that had resulted in this. The performance doesn’t start strong and only picks up in segments featuring song-and-dance. The Malaysian pieces, on the other hand, given their random order are high energy and on point, and you can look forward to Lim Yu Beng playing a chicken and Siti Khalijah, the crowd favourite, playing Emily. There are no sets and the production is accompanied by some video clips and props.

All in all, I must say that I enjoy the romp through Singapore and Malaysia, and if anything, I discover many new literary works which I will be sure to look up.