“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?
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ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
THE CHRONICLES OF ONE AND ZERO: KANCIL by Zeugma
13 – 16 January 2016
Esplanade Theatre Studio
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Kei Franklin is currently a third-year student at Yale-NUS College, where she studies Anthropology and Environmental Studies. She believes that the best way to spend time is creating.
