A season of musts in ‘Renaissance City’
June 20, 2005 | 12:00am
Imagine going to the Lion City and then meeting buskers, voodoo witches, post-apocalypse ballerinas, ancient acrobats, odd goddesses, giant puppets (who look like William S. Burroughs, "the hit-man for the apocalypse," according to J.G. Ballard), tiny dancers, jugglers, and street musicians, among other interesting creatures. You’d think for a second that you’ve been recruited to the quirky cosmos of Haruki Murakami with his posse of sheep-men, sputnik lovers and insomniacs. However, reexamining your surroundings reveals this: You are merely attending the month-long Singapore Arts Festival and enjoying one of the shows – whether it be a musical about a busker, a ballet featuring charming cavemen, and a jazzy Chinese opera about restless spirits – and getting your recommended dosage of culture and the arts.
The aforementioned characters are among the 4,400 performers as well as visual artists from 27 countries who are featured in 67 ticketed performances and over 400 free shows, exhibits and special events in the annual festival. (Mentioning the statistics alone can leave a person out of breath.) The Singapore Tourism Board recently invited journalists, including this writer, to watch cultural shows (some of them making their world premiere) and to tour buildings in Singapore put up specifically for the arts – such as The Arts House, Tyler Print Institute, the Asian Civilization Museum, and art houses on Waterloo Street.
According to Singapore Arts Festival director Goh Ching Lee, the thrust of the event is to promote and nurture Singaporean artists, and at the same time open Singapore’s doors to art practitioners from other countries. This is done by offering scholarships, developing major art events, providing corporate sponsorships, putting up art infrastructure and housing projects, and of course by ensuring that the arts festival raises "not more money, but the profile of the arts," said Goh.
(Mull over the activities of organizations such as Singapore’s National Arts Council to spearhead the development of the arts in their country, and then cultural junkies like us better start banging our heads against the wall festooned with MMDA art because of the dearth of government support for the arts in the Philippines. Not at all surprising since, traditionally, our leaders are primarily concerned with keeping themselves in power. Art, phew!)
Going international is a major consideration for the NAC. "Looking inward is a death for us," Goh shared. "So we’ve been working with Australian and even European artists and festival organizers." The festival features exhibits and shows which range from the traditional to the avant-garde and even to contemporary multi-media and inter-disciplinary forms – genres that flirt lasciviously with each other, art that spits like punk rocker Sid Vicious at boundaries and limitations.
The festival, which was conceived in 1977, has indeed gone a long way. Now, its yearly lineup of programs continually presents audiences not with "fixed definitions of theater, music and dance, but an interplay of different elements."
Art, after all, is a living and constantly evolving thing, always up for revaluation and reappraisal. Not a stone-cold museum piece.
The musical acumen of the guys from the Canada-based Ex Machina troupe was no less than jaw-dropping – especially drummer Frédéric Lebrasseur who played the role of the busker who gets recruited into a ska band. Believe me, the man could play anything, from a conventional drum kit to pots, cans, glasses, spoons and sticks. Think drummer Matt Cameron (Soundgarden) or Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater) playing in The Rocky Horror Show and you’d get an inkling of how Fréd fared in this production. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but the man has uncanny rhythm.
The story deals with Macheath, singer and bassist of The Highwaymen, who gets caught having sex with his agent’s daughter, the luscious Polly Peachum. Macheath escapes and the story takes on a twisting trip from London to New York to Las Vegas to New Orleans, and to Huntsville, Texas, and into a mad, mad universe of celebrities, groupies, agents, lawyers, lounge singers, and voodoo witches.
The musical pieces also traverses different genres such as ska, reggae, jazz, Broadway/West End show tunes, rock, blues, country, doo-wop, tango, rap and what-not.
In one number, Polly deftly navigates the turntable, sampling and scratching a piece of vinyl. She’d be able to supply hot grooves for a Beastie Boys record. A strange duet features two women – one Jewish, the other Arabic – trading verses framed by the appropriate musical style. Like a friendly jamming session on the Gaza Strip.
There is also a doff of the musical hat to Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and even Led Zeppelin, as one female character screams a few lines from The Immigrant Song. One of the highlights is the New York pimp rap bit. Think Snoop Doggy Dog rapping verses penned in the 18th century. Another crowd favorite is the song by the Doo-Wop Killer Burger Employees, which recalls Why Do Fools Fall In Love? or Earth Angel. Cool harmonies.
Props should go to, uh, the props: such as the TV screen that conveniently shows a dog on a leash and the ugly mug of Colonel Finias Flanders, a card-carrying fascist pig. There is also the foldable screen, which is used to create London phone booths, jail cells and the bayou club.
This is as liquid as theater gets. Every element – the music, the props – becomes fluid, flexible. If Bertolt Brecht were an MTV VJ…
Les Noces deals with a collective peasant wedding rite with brides and grooms communicating the whole gamut of emotions – from reservation to anxiety to all the elegant gestures of hopes and fears. I especially like the opening segment where the dancers performed sans music (like mimes in synch), their movements characterized by silence and precision. The performance called for four pianos and percussions, plus a vocal quartet. Stravinsky once said he wanted a mechanical and impersonal reenactment of a peasant band. No strings since the composer didn’t want "anything so human as violins" for the particular piece.
The Rite of Spring is one of the 20th century’s most moving pieces of music, which elicited protests and riots when it was first premiered in 1913. Maybe it was the primitive and barbaric rhythms of the piece which was designed to be the musical equivalent of "the whole earth cracking." Trivia: Jazz bassist Jaco Pastorius quotes passages from the piece when he played in Joni Mitchell’s Refuge of the Roads. Another thing, Disney appropriated the piece for the innovative Fantasia cartoon. My favorite next to Mickey Mouse’s bit in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and those dancing hippos.
Pietragalla and the Singapore Dance Theater rose up to the challenge of interpreting the post-apocalypse, pagan sacrifice drama of The Rite of Spring. Great costumes. Great choreography. The recorded music for the most famous Stravinsky piece could have been better, though. It was a bit of a letdown. I prefer the rumbling sound of thunderous drums crisper, clearer and upfront – like an orchestra playing inside a taxicab.
Five femme fatales (all played by men as part of the conventions of Chinese opera) act out lives of treachery, heartache and murder. The characters are Bao Si of the Zhou Dynasty, who was rumored to be the incarnation of a lizard; Lu Hou of the Han Dynasty, China’s first female ruler likened to a fierce hen; Yu Xuan Ji of the Tang Dynasty, poetess who wished to be reincarnated as a fish; Ke Shi of the Ming Dynasty, demonized as the eggplant flower’s spirit; and Sai Jing Hua of the Qing Dynasty, condemned as a traitor and believed to be a diabolical cloud hanging over Peking.
Chinese opera, eh? Sounds dusty and conventional. Aye, here’s the rub: Toy Factory Theater Ensemble chief artistic director Goh Boon Teck tells the story of the five female figures by fusing Chinese opera with circus acrobatics and with jazz. Jazz, you ask. Yes, the kind purveyed by John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, where the saxophones murmur sweetly in one moment, and then bawl and bray like constipated beasts in the next.
According to Goh, "Why can’t we communicate ideas without prejudice and preconceptions in a universal spiritual ground? Why not Chinese opera (combined with) Cats? Why not Norah Jones performing as Cho Cho San in Madame Butterfly?"
Why not indeed? Because maybe the answer is this: Chinese spirits singing Chinese laments in falsetto in glitzy costumes clash big time with sax honking the dissonant lines from Free Jazz or Song X. Some segments work elegantly. Some come across as uneven as Charlie Parker doing a duet with Charlie Chan.
But Spirits was an engrossing thing to watch if only for envelop-pushing idea behind the whole enterprise.
At the Malayan Heritage Center, visitors can learn more about the cultural heritage of indigenous Malays, Javanese, Bawanese, Bugis, Minangkabau and Banjar. Artifacts include canons, ships, artworks, even a life-size replica of a Malayan shanty.
We also took a trip to The Esplanade, and learned about the technology involved in creating its noise-free theaters – from vacuums to Indonesian timber to rubber mats to other items for sound absorption and insulation. You could even hear a pin drop onstage in one of the venues, or an audience-member unwrapping sweets. You could watch a performance of John Cage’s 4’33" – all four minutes and 33 seconds of silence – and hear it differently at The Esplanade. (Cage once philosophized about the piece: "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it, and that is poetry...")
Waterloo Street is the home of the Sculpture Square, Action Theater and the Chinese Calligraphy Center. The Asian Civilization Museum houses treasures from ancient Burma, India, Iran, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia. The places is filled with masks, vases, costumes, statues, weapons, musical instruments, and books – including an ancient Iranian dictionary of medicine and other interesting tomes. The Little India Arts Belt is the area where Wild Rice, Bhaskar’s Art Academy and Plastique Kintetic Worms gallery are located.
Plastique Kintetic Worms, along Kerbau Road, styles itself as a "contemporary art space organized and managed by artists." And it is quite funky, I should say. The key phrase is "alternative and experimental art practices." You won’t see paintings of fruit bowls, landscapes, or mother-and-child visual clichés here. Instead, you will see installations that challenge the old chestnut that is Art (with a capital A).
When we visited the gallery, Milenko Prvacki’s artworks were on view. The thrust of the European sculptor was to "frame and position" the elements – air, water, fire and earth. In one work, the artist (born in Yugoslavia and currently based in Singapore) took a piece of wood and burned it to show how fire can create artsy textures, or how water can give cryptic designs to a piece of lumber. In another, Prvacki ingeniously framed air. Shades of Jose Garcia Villa’s "The Emperor’s New Sonnet."
Proof that when it comes to art, everything is still up in the air, or germinating inside the heads of restless artists. And that’s what makes arts and culture events like the Singapore Arts Festival a long, heady, rewarding trip.
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