'I've painted myself white & I am Death' and other lines from the 2011 Singapore Arts Festival

He just stands there, minutes trawling by. A white unmoving thing, er, figure as Bach’s Toccata & Fugue ruptures in the background. “Dracula!” the guy behind me whispers. Just because he isn’t moving it doesn’t mean he’s the lord of the undead.

You’ve joined me here inside Singapore’s Drama Dance Theatre and we’re watching the Asian premiere of Kuu (Emptiness), a Butoh performance by Yoshito Ohno, which is one of the highlights of this year’s Singapore Arts Festival. The Singapore National Arts Council has invited The STAR to the Lion City to watch several key shows in week two of the festival.

Kuu is Yoshito’s tribute to his late father, the legendary Kazuo Ohno, who popularized the dance form. Yoshito made his stage debut with his old man in, well, The Old Man and The Sea in 1959.

Yoshito, now a Japanese man in his 70s, stands with his back to the audience, wearing a cream-colored blazer and slack. We could almost see his back muscles rippling, a tensing spine, and a buckle of emotions. He hasn’t done anything yet and already our minds are getting blown. We begin to ask ourselves what is dance and what it is not. We begin to wonder if it is still dance or is it accurately more of theater.

(Information from the future: After the performance, Yoshito would explain why he just stands during the opening number: “I am a seed. A seed about to sprout.” And he would ask rhetorically, “What is standing [anyway]?” Minds would boggle. A girl would ask if Butoh is really an anti-dance dance. More boggling followed.) 

Onstage when Yoshito finally moves to the frightening sound of wind blowing, he takes the audience into a maelstrom of movements that are meditative, playful, pious, elegiac, even — I don’t know how this guy was able to do it — “lyrical” and “conversational.”

Sights, sites and sounds: The audience had a mind-blowing time with these eclectic shows, which featured everything from Buddhist chants set to electronic music (Li and Sa) and an eight-hour piece about the Great Famine in China (Memory II: Hunger), to a mammoth musical retrospective of 100 years in radio broadcast history (Airwaves) and other challenging yet entertaining theatrical pieces.

But that’s Butoh for you: it draws inspiration from nature and the imagination. In this particular performance, emptiness is the body, emptiness is sky. And in the vignettes, there are skies of emotions, facial expressions and more wonders. 

Yoshito dons bunny ears and weeps for the dead. He wears a flower hat. He plays around with tissue paper and lets them gracefully twirl like white birds. But the best prop of all is the old man’s body itself: sinewy, wiry, with sagging muscles, and everything painted in a deathly white pallor.

(Information from the future no. 2: The moderator in the artist talk would comment about Butoh as a “dance of darkness” and a “dance of death.” He would say, “But in your performance there is something life-affirming or celebratory.” Very good point.)

As the finale, Yoshito does a dance “duet” with a hand puppet (a gift by a Mexican artist) that resembles the elder Ohno — gaunt face, unkempt hair and all. (Check out the man on the cover of the Antony & the Johnsons album, “The Crying Light”). Before that number, pictures are shown of Kazuo on his deathbed — the great dancer rendered almost immobile by sickness and old age.

This is how Yoshito remembers his father: he dances with the puppet to Elvis Presley’s Can’t Help Falling In Love With You. For all the highbrow theories about art and its effects, sometimes it takes a pop song to drive home the point even better. I hear Elvis and I remember my own father and how he sang this song when he was still alive.

It feels as if a stone got stuck in my throat. Yoshito brought that very stone.

Earphone home: Renowned composer and musician Nitin Sawhney worked as conductor in one show (A Throw of Dice) to a block-rockin’ DJ in another (Last Days of Meaning).

Speak, Memory, Speak

We spend one morning with the Singapore Arts Festival general manager, Low Kee Hong, a very interesting guy.

Formerly the associate artistic director of TheatreWorks, and afterwards the GM of the Singapore Biennale, Low has traveled to far-flung places in Mindanao as part of a DVD series project on Southeast Asian performing arts and artists. Ah, the tales that Low could share about his spending time in General Santos and other areas of southern Philippines (witnessing tribes being wiped out by logging companies, juicy stuff). But for now, Low talks to us how the theme of this year’s Singapore Arts Festival, “I Want to Remember,” is part of a trilogy of sorts. He says that it is part of a larger investigation that the organizers started in last year’s festival with the theme “Between You and Me” and will culminate in the next one.

Low explains, “(This is to) examine and reflect a part of ourselves that we’ve forgotten. Or something that is completely lost to a younger generation. So, the festival this year squarely focuses on our relationship with memory. It has nothing to do with nostalgia because I don’t believe in going back to a romantic past that is so nice and wonderful. I am more interested in why some of these memories are erased, the little footnotes of history we don’t talk about. But we just put the puzzles on the table, it is up to the audience to piece them together.”

The shows for this year tackle everything from private to public histories.

The festival opened at the main stage of the Festival Village with When a Gray Taiwanese Cow Stretched by Japan’s Ishinha company. I imagine it created quite a stir since it tackled a subject matter that is usually under-rug-swept, the Japanese diaspora in Asia. Other productions could be the platform of discourse and a dragging-into-light issues that are kept in conceptual corners. Low laments the fact that we in our cozy V.2 cosmopolitan world simply don’t have space for them.

Singapore Arts Festival manager Low Kee Hong explains, “This year’¬ s programming, based on the theme of ‘I Want to Remember,’ has resonated strongly with many people. For the past three weeks, I have had artists, volunteers and strangers coming up to me to share their experiences of how the festival had connected with them personally.” From senior citizens to student volunteers.

“The Singapore Arts Festival is not just a collection of shows to watch,” he explains. “It’s a festival of ideas — how artists respond to the things around them through art.”

Total Recall

Three ladies in gray are dancing with red balloons, bobbing up and down in sync. Musicians accompany them, a man coaxing major, major chords from a stringed instrument (a ukulele or just a really small guitar, not quite sure) in recurring, repetitive musical motifs. We are watching episode one of Life and Times by an American experimental theater group called the Nature Theater of Oklahoma at the School of the Arts (SOTA) Drama Theatre. It is a three-and-a-half-long production based on the life story (from age 0 to 8) of company member Kristin Worral, and the script-slash-libretto is based on a verbatim transcript of a 16-hour telephone conversation that began with a question, “Can you tell me your life story?”

So here we are watching people “sing” the telephone transcript with all the attendant “uhms,” “ohs,” “likes,” warts and all. A child gets born, grows up, gets a Barbie doll, goes to school, and develops a crush, forms a band (The Homework Dessedee) those kinds of earth-shattering events. Yes, I am being sarcastic. Remember this is just episode one and the Nature Theater of Oklahoma is planning nine more episodes. So audiences would get more of Marcel Proust meets Nickelodeon or something similar, all 24 hours of it. Life and Times is long and trying, indeed. Gag me with a spoon.

I don’t know what the dude beside me finds so laughable (I am seated on row G-seat 10): he laughs at the most humdrum of song-lines, every word, even the pauses. Whatever he smokes, I want some.

Actually, the concept of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Pavol Liska and Kelly Cooper is interesting. They work with “found” material and their hero is Marcel Duchamp. Thus, they work with super-8 films from the flea market, photos found in the garage and, in the case of Life and Times, recorded telephone conversation. 

The way Liska and Cooper present Life and Times is a stroke of genius as well: as an anti-musical musical complete with the sweeping gestures, overly dramatic singing (even if the lyrics are incredibly tedious), and much, much dancing, etc. Plus, the energy of the three girls is astounding. How could they remember all their lines? Not a “like” or an “uhm” was forgotten.

Student volunteers Caselyn Ho Li Ying and Joanne Lee. Joanne says the festival opened her eyes to the arts. “(The theme) reminds us of forgotten past events, lost cultures and languages.” While Caselyn says, “(The festival) has definitely given me a great experience as I got to volunteer as a front-of-house ambassador.”

Speaking of long and trying, Memory II: Hunger by the Living Dance Studio from China is slated to run from 1 to 9 p.m. at the SOTA Studio Theatre.

“It’s a different world now — China,” explains Low. “The show excavates a part of Chinese history that young people have no memory of.” 

Form becomes content in this production as the young actors (aged 19 to 25) relive the Great Famine of China from 1959 to 1961 during Mao’s doomed Great Leap Forward hocus-pocus. Video shows the youngsters interviewing their elders about the famine, while onstage the youngsters themselves, who began their fast — I think — the night before, crawl on the floor, run deliriously, talk about going back to the villages to talk to their old folks, wiggle against each other, and pile on top of one another like worms or people dying of hunger. You see these kids suffering for their art. One girl has a worrying spell of coughing; another cries as she recounts her talk with her grandma; all of them with pained faces. Heavy stuff.

The audience members can enter, leave and reenter the theater as they please. I’m sure only the hardcore ones will stay throughout the entire eight-hour run: get a fast of their own going, suffer with the ones onstage, become a part of the enterprise.

After the show, the audience members are invited to the upstairs canteen to eat beef-and-potato stew (the poster dish of the commune canteens back in Mao’s China) with the young actors as they “break their fast.”

There is method acting. There are method actors. I think with Memory II: Hunger we are introduced to method watching. But I tell a student volunteer that even if some people fasted as part of the show, they would never truly understand what the survivors of the Great Famine endured during those years, or approximate their hunger.

Forgoing a Big Mac and a latte for several hours is not the same as chewing the barks of trees or opening pillows to eat whatever’s inside just to survive.

I also tell the student volunteer that sometimes the companies get mired down in making grand socio-political statements that they forget to be artful. They become these intolerably forgetful bore-fests that only academics could understand, like dramatic plagues on theater-houses. 

But we journalists are able to watch productions that we want to remember for a long time. (As well as a few items we wish we’d seen. For one, the reunion of a Cambodian rock ‘n’ roll band. Tempest: Without a Body is another.)

Composer Nitin Sawhney conducts the Singapore Festival Orchestra to accompany the film showing of the Indian silent film classic A Throw of Dice by German director Franz Osten at the Esplanade Concert Hall. With its storyline inspired by the gambling episode in The Mahabharata, A Throw of Dice has been described by the composer as “a cross between Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille and an early Bollywood movie.”

Sawhney’s score seamlessly bridges East and West: the strings are magnificent, the tabla is propulsive, the voices of Nicki Wells and Tina Grace are angelic, and the film boasts a simple, entrancing story. Nothing brainiac about it; just a lovely evening of sights and sounds at an audiophile’s dream venue, the Esplanade.

Same when Sawhney sheds off his conductor skin to wear the threads of a DJ in his “Sound System — Last Days of Meaning” gig at the Festival Theater. He spins, plays classical guitar, plays the keys, spins some more, and invites Nicki and Tina to warble and woo the moon out of the Singaporean sky. All the while, an Indonesian girl and I hold our cherished cups of Tiger Beer, consuming copious amounts of the brew by the end of concert.

(Information from the future no. 3: I would wake up with a hangover taller than King Ranjit and spend the rest of the day walking sluggishly like a hapless Butoh neophyte.)       

That doesn’t happen. I wake up just fine and look at what’s next on the itinerary. Something onstage, something onscreen, something for the ever-hungry memory.

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Special thanks to the Singapore National Arts Council, Singapore Tourism Board and Burson-Marsteller.