More than words

BANGKOK ART and Culture Centre’s fourth Performative Arts Festival concluded last Sunday with interdisciplinary physical theatre performance “Si Ti Kay” by Singaporean director Noor Effendy Ibrahim, known better as just Effendy, with the support from the National Arts Council and Singapore International Foundation.
The BACC’s fourth-floor studio was configured as a thrust stage with audience members sitting on different levels of platforms on three sides. At the centre was a house structure where three actors and one actress all in white costumes sat and ate rice at a table. Everything seemed normal except for an eerie soundscape, which suggested otherwise and the fact that the house was attached to the stage manager upstage. Later, when the house was pulled up, the four moved to other parts where, in one corner, raw meat was hanging and, in another, a bathtub half full of water was placed. Pulled apart, the men were wearing red bras and underpants underneath their white costumes. Their stage actions and movements, which varied in pace throughout the 45-minute performance, and finished with all four performers back in their house, showed that there’s much more in this society than is seemingly normal at first.
Coming from a seemingly pleasant first-world country like Singapore where everything, and perhaps everyone, seems to be under control, “Si Ti Kay” was a sharp, subtle and specific social, cultural and political commentary that can be understood and applied to many countries around the world. This is a country, remember, with one of the highest GDPs in the world, yet its people’s satisfaction with living conditions is quite the opposite.
With the performance running Friday to Sunday over two weekends, discussions with the cast and crew were also held on both Saturday afternoons at the same venue. Chumpon Apisuk moderated the one on “Challenges in Creating Art for an International Audience” and, on the following Saturday, I served as moderator for “Understanding Collaborative Approaches to Interdisciplinary Art Practice”, to which only one participant turned out – and she was planning to watch the performance later that evening. That, unfortunately, was one more than the number of audience members attending the first discussion. This, however, should not discourage BACC or any local producer from bringing in foreign performances with which local audiences are not familiar. If we continue giving the audience what they already know and like, then our stages will be no better than TV.
The four performers, who came from various backgrounds including dance, spoken theatre and music, and the sound designer revealed during the discussion that Effendy allowed them to pitch in their ideas and collaborate in certain parts of this work, which premiered three years in front of an invited audience at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. Effendy also said that he didn’t recreate this Bangkok version from the video-recording of the premiere, instead relying on his and the three original cast members’ memory.
Effendy, himself the former artistic director of multi-disciplinary art space The Substation, is also planning to bring a few Singaporean stage works that are not performed in English to next year’s Bangkok Theatre Festival.
Last Friday after watching this work, I also discovered an authentic Singaporean restaurant, 10 minutes away by car. The owner says that many of her Thai customers asking about Hainanese chicken rice, which is not part of her Malay-Nyonya menu. Like “Si Ti Kay” itself – and this is from a theatre critic who travels to Singapore six times a year and enjoys food as much as theatre anywhere – there’s more to discover in this multi-cultural country.