THE INCREDIBLE ADVENTURES OF BORDER CROSSERS by Ong Keng Sen, Kaffe Matthews, Chris Lee of Asylum, Brian Gothong Tan, Reckless Ericka, and Francis Ng

“The runway show of border crossers”

Reviewer: Isaac Lim
Performance: 19 September 2015

A part of the opening segment has Italian design director Laura Miotto sharing about her love of museums, being a living gallery, and a microcosm of the world. And here, she shares this stage, set in an exhibition gallery in the National Museum of Singapore, with 19 other border crossers, in a bid to show what a “Singaporer” means.

Director Ong Keng Sen mentions in his notes that the “Singaporer”, he believes, is an individual who lives in Singapore, but is not a citizen, and the show emanates from this position of cosmopolitanism. Except for Eugene Tan (a.k.a Becca D’Bus, the drag queen) who is born in Singapore, the other 19 performers hail from all over the world, crossing borders and but for now, they call Singapore home.

The Incredible Adventures of Border Crossers is part-installation, part-fashion runway, part-karaoke sing-along, part-physical theatre and part-storytelling. The slightly over five-and-a-half hours long durational performance embodies perfectly the theme of this year’s SIFA perfectly, POST-Empires. It presents the ‘others’ of contemporary Singapore in such a fragmented way that this audience feels strangely familiar with the characters, yet very distant at the same time.

Eleven different themed segments make up this mega-production, with “Panorama” opening the show (a prologue), and an uncomfortable ten minutes long mixed-media presentation titled “Spirituality” (kind of epilogue) closing it. The other nine themes questioned the border crossers on their respective take on the themes of “Feast”, “Travel”, “Education”, “Work”, “Everyday Life”, “Wedding”, “Anthem”, “Theatre” and “Funeral”.

The first half of the presentation is fairly slow-moving, despite being peppered with interesting moments of lip-synching, karaoke singing, dancing, and a visual treat from the video art courtesy of multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan.

There are also poignant stories about crossing the causeway to Singapore from Johor Bahru in crowded buses everyday (as told by Malaysian Ho Shyn Yee), falling in love with a Singaporean, then moving here and falling in love with Singapore (as told by Chilean Maria Eugenia Gajardo), and how a difficult breakup with an ex-lover lead to a new passion for dance (as shared by China-born Xiong Gang).

It is in from the “Wedding” chapter that the mood and rhythm starts to pick up, and all the performers change out of their predominantly monochromatic national-costume inspired get-ups into fancier, colorful costumes fit for a United Nations-themed party. The costumes created by the two creative minds behind Singaporean fashion label Reckless Ericka are a treat for the eyes.

All borders are erased during the “Anthem” chapter, as all the border crossers took to the stage as “live” exhibition specimens, each with an individual sound emitter playing voice-recordings of their personal anecdotes, recitals or choice of songs. The audiences are invited to step into the playing area, to get up-close and listen to these “anthems”, and many took the opportunity to take selfies with the performers.

The most raucous of the chapters is “Theatre”, as the border crossers challenge the notion of what is performance on this sprawling stage/space. D’Bus stripped to reveal black tapes as nipple tapes, and a pink blossoming flower look-alike covering his genitals while performing the track “My Vagina 8 miles wide”. The entire cast goes crazy as Xiong lead a mass dance to the viral hit “Little Apple”.

Theatre and border crossers all merged in this one mega-production by the end of it all. Set designer Chris Lee (of Asylum) creates this long catwalk-like stage with pockets of spaces the audience and performers can interact, is very much suited for this performance venue (the show was initially slated to be performed at Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, where there is a concurrent exhibition-installation by Francis Ng taking place on the three nights the show runs), a cozy and intimate play-space. Sound artist Kaffe Matthews adds on with a most immersive and impactful aural sound-scape that completes the experience.

At the end of it all, Border Crossers is a collection of many fragments, pieces of different people who have moved to find happiness, or parts of people who have come to seek memories. This gallery manages to encase a greater Singaporer, a most interesting intercultural mix of contemporary Singapore.