International, intercultural and interdisciplinary

AMONG MANY joys of attending an arts festival these days is the fact that an increasing number of them have become more interdisciplinary, reflecting the nature of contemporary arts in which boundaries between genres continue to blur.
For example, during the final weekend of Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa)– on the main theme of “Enchantment”– when I wasn’t watching a performance in a theatre, I was at arthouse cinema The Projector listening to internationally acclaimed Filipino film director Lav Diaz discuss the production of his latest film, which has been commissioned by Sifa. On the ground floor of Sifa’s hub 72-13, I experienced an interactive video installation “Guilty Landscapes III”, in which Dutch artist Dries Verhoeven invited his audience, one person at a time, to interact with a man in a war-torn city on video screen. One floor above, I browsed through artefacts that reflected Singapore’s natural history, and learned more about the green side of the country I visit most often from the exhibition “The Nature Museum” by the Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ).

 

Of course performances remain at the heart of Sifa and festival director Ong Keng Sen signed off his four-year tenure with “Trojan Women”, his collaboration with the National Theatre of Korea and the National Changgeuk Company of Korea, at the Victoria Theatre. While Ong is known as an innovative director who fuses various performing arts traditions and aesthetics into many of his productions, the focus here was the traditional Korean music theatre genre of changguek and the traditional narrative music pansori. Accordingly, he had the six-string zither geomungo accompany Hecuba, a strongly passionate woman. Cheekily, he cast a male actor as Helen, the “face who launched a thousand ships”, while the pianist and composer also portrayed Paris.
The off-white grand set reminded the audience of the neutral stage of ancient Greek theatre. Even though the performance was entirely in Korean and most of us needed to read the English surtitles, Euripedes’s two-and-a-half-millennia old play was reborn to remind us that war not only affects only those who go to war. I’m sure this production would also reignite the younger generation’s interest in Korean traditional theatre.

 

Meanwhile at the studio theatre of School of the Arts, South African director and choreographer Robyn Orlin’s poetic and poignant work “And so you see…our honourable blue sky…and ever enduring sun…can only be consumed slice by slice…” made its Asia-Pacific premiere, after touring to many European cities.
Orlin worked with queer performance artist Albert Silindokuhle Ibokwe Khoza, whose back the audience saw more than his front, which was captured and projected live onto the back screen by videographer/stage manager Thabo Pule. With monologues, songs and physical movements as well as some traditional costumes and keenly selected and designed props, including plastic tapes which wrapped around his whole body, “And so you see…” showed the current state of South African society that’s more complicated than the audience in this region would think. Most of us can plead guilty to losing interest in it after Apartheid.

 

One strong commonality between these two works was the collaboration between the director and the performer(s). This differs from the more common practice in which the former puts his grand idea forth for the latter to execute, and that’s in addition to the fact that both are works that the audience couldn’t watch elsewhere in the region.

The writer’s trip was supported by Arts House Limited. Special thanks to Tay Tong and Mervyn Quek.

THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

- “Trojan Women” is back at National Theatre of Korea from November 22 to December 3. Next May and June, it will be part of Brighton Festival and London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT). For details, www.NTOK.go.kr
- Keep track of the South African choreographer at www.RobynOrlin.com
- More info on next year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts, under the helm of new director Gaurav Kripalani, is at www.SIFA.sg.