PELANGI PRIDE CENTRE PRESENTS
Not that I'm an invited writer, but Chris Mooney-Singh's roped me in to help out with the poetry slam activities. Will be slamming alongside him, Bani Haykal and Charlie Dark of the UK, plus hopefully Sharanya Maivannan of Malaysia and some Taipei poets. Now if only I really had a repertoire of slam, that'd be nice.
Dear friends,
31 Oct, 8 pm
Opening Exhibition of two video installations,
Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards the Complex - For the Courageous, the Curious, and the Cowards (2001) and Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas: Battle of Easel Point - Memorial Project Okinawa (2003) by Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
Performance by Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky
At 72-13.
02 Nov, 7 pm
Artist Presentations under the moonlight on Pulau Ubin
** For events on Pulau Ubin, the public is advised to be at the Pulau Ubin Jetty 30 minutes before the start of the event. Audiences will be ferried to the respective venue on the island.
03 Nov, 11am - 04 Nov, 1am
“Superintense”
Superintense is a marathon of personal strategies of creativity in the urban context, in our worlds. From one morning to the next, all the FCP artists will have an hour each to present their work, their practice to themselves and a public audience. A table, a projector, a microphone, an audience; which can all be recontructed into an open space – the same conditions are given to each artist. They are invited to share their practice with the audience; past work, present work, future work. It can take the form of a talk, a lecture demonstration, a performance, slides, a video, a dj session, a workshop, a discussion. Without a break, all the artists relentlessly articulate their practice, communicating an insight to the myriad ways of inhabiting, dissolving, thinking, making, living, destroying, rejuvenating. An actor, an audience, a shared space. Take a cigarette pause on the run.
At 72-13.
Several historical events escaped people’s memories, seemingly deemed insignificant in our invention of a vibrant, global city. With the aid of self-made and customised audio-visual devices, this multi-disciplinary presentation explores how these occurrences could be recorded, forgotten and fabricated, focusing on the moments and impulses before they transpired.
Oh dear... My appearance at the Arts and Life Forum for Asian Boys Volume 3 kena clash with my SDEA play. :( I'll be speaking with a few other guests, including poet Teng Qian Xi...
There's just something about a woman looking enigmatically out of a painting that seems to fire the imaginations of storytellers from print to screen.
Georgette, about the life of art pioneer Georgette Chen before she came to Singapore in her late 40s, is an exquisite work of theatrical art that mixes whimsy with wit and a sizeable dose of pathos.
Opening with the ensemble contemplating the "woman on the wall" – a slide projection of Chen's iconic self-portrait – we are soon brought to the gay Paris of the late 1920s, where a young Chen (Seong Hui Xuan) has arrived to become an artist, though her fat-cat parents are on hand to cramp her style.
There, the rebellious young woman falls in love with the Chinese foreign minister Eugene Chen, beginning a partnership that was ended by the ravages of World War II.
This no-frills staging had a cast of 11 accompanied by music director Chris Nolan on piano, in a manner charmingly reminiscent of café theatre.Local composer Clement Yang's melodies are lush, haunting and emotionally varied, from the Caribbean-flavoured Islands In The Sun to the sweet and simple love song Always Together and the gorgeous anthem to art, Bowl of Fruit.
Meanwhile, playwright Ng Yi-Sheng must be lauded for his economy. His scenes never go on for too long, and he supplies the sharpest lines that establish his characters' personalities quickly while entertaining the audience.
"I'm not beautiful," sings Eugene self-effacingly during their courtship. "But that's modern art," retorts Georgette.
The omniscient narrator (Lina Lim) is useful at the start as she helps with the introductions, but peters into insignificance as the show runs its course.
As for Chen, she is portrayed as both plucky and lucky, a sympathetic yet initially self-centred character whose motivations, both artistic and personal, warrant more examination than was given.
To the creative team's credit, they dared to poke fun at their heroine, such as in a hilarious moment when she flounces out of her parents' house denouncing them as outmoded aristocrats – even as she ignores the rows of servants who obligingly back out of her way.
Seong, with her almond-shaped eyes and delicate features, looks astounding like Chen's self-portrait. The actress also has a compelling, self-possessed presence and a lovely contralto voice, and it is a great pity that she gets anything close to a show-stopping solo only in the second half of the show.
Eu Jin Hwang as Eugene Chen impressed with a chocolately tenor and effortless gravitas, while as Chen's parents, C.C. Leong's woundrously large head and Joyce Liang's tai-tai look were perfect physical manifestations of their character's personalities, though one feels that the duo could have hammed it up even more. Indeed, it seemed at times as if the entire cast, directed by Lee Yew Moon, was only singing and acting at half-power.
Still, this elegant musical, saying much with little, is a breath of fresh air in Singapore's musical theatre scene.
Short, but sweet
Musical on Georgette Chen packs in the laughs, while it lasts
by Juliana June Rasul
And yet Musical Theatre Limited's Georgette, which ran on Saturday and Sunday at the Esplanade Theatre Studio, packs laughs aplenty, albeit for some strange and possibly unintentional reasons.
At one point, to illustrate the pioneering Singapore artist's fight for her work while surrounded by art-shunning communists in China, the ensemble splits into two camps. One rattles off the names of artists like Van Gogh and Picasso, and the other battles back with names of celebrated Marxists like Sun Yat-Sen.
This had the strange effect of reminding this reviewer of the song We Didn't Start the Fire, Billy Joel's names-only rundown of key events of the 20th century.
Meant to be a condensed, no-frills version of what playwright Ng Yi-Sheng hopes to turn into a proper musical, Georgette's brevity leaves little room to explore anything at great length.
Even the romance between Chen (played by Seong Hui Xuan) and her husband Eugene (Eu Jin Hwang), which was meant to be the focus of the musical, gets short shrift.
However, Ng earns some rather well-deserved giggles for art-themed in-jokes such as: "I'm not beautiful ... but that's modern art".
The play's general naughtiness also comes through at times, especially when Chen's father, Mr Zhang (CC Leong), a businessman, proclaims his sense of nouveau riche elitism by rhyming "business class" with "peasants, you can kiss my ****".
Yet even these funny moments add to, rather than diminish, the audience's incredulity at a work that has Chen donning a straw hat and salsa her way through a song celebrating her husband's intriguing early life on the Caribbean island of Trinidad.
The boys are putting on their makeup...
...and so are the ladies.
Yikes! It's only 7pm, and there's already a queue!
Standby...
...and the doors are open!
Front-of-house gets busy!
And after the show, people pose for photos. With the Yale Association Chairman, who knew Georgette Chen personally.
He liked it so much he asked to meet Seong Hui Xuan, who played Georgette, to congratulate her. From L to R: Hwang Eu Jin (Eugene Chen), Lina (Narratrix), Hui Xuan, the Chairman himself, me and Stella Kon (President of Musical Theatre Ltd).
Time to promote my upcoming musical, based on the life of pioneer Singapore artist Georgette Chen!
Despite what the paper suggests, the portrait on the left-hand side is not of Georgette Chen herself - it's her painting of some middle-class Chinese family in Singapore. I do like the fact that Today got that pic published tho - it's a terribly interesting case of family portraiture in which the wife takes centrestage as a powerful, intellectual figure and the husband's more of an adjunct to the scene (unless that guy's a really big son or her boy toy).
