Well, this has certainly been the most dramatic SAF for me. I bought tickets for two shows.
On the day I went for the first show, my mother was admitted into the hospital, and I sat through the last hour or so of the performance in excruciating headache.
On the day I went for the second show, my mother was discharged from hospital, the same moment my grandaunt had a fall. We made it to the show in the end, after dashing yipuo to the sinseh for a quick tieda treatment.
Gatz (Sunday, 23 May 2010, 2pm)
A complete word-for-word reading/re-enactment of the novel The Great Gatsby. They had 3 shows - I picked the Sunday performance because they had a pre-performance talk at 12. But I had to miss it completely. I even arrived late for the performance actual, and had to wait ten minutes before the ushers found an "appropriate interval" to let the latecomers in. At first I tried to tell myself, what's ten minutes in a six-hour theatre piece? But then it was the
opening ten-minutes, and I felt like kicking myself for missing it after reading some of the reviews.
They should give out "I survived a 6-hour theatre show" t-shirts to the audience. Or badges. Or something commemorating our heroic endeavours for sitting through 360+ minutes of watching people talking and walking around onstage. It was funny, even hilarious (the Gatsby-Daisy-reunion scene comes to mind) in some parts, boring as hell in others, and barely tolerable in the last scene/chapter, where the narrator was wrapping up the fates of the main characters and my head was throbbing so badly I wished Fitzgerald had killed off all the characters in a random car/train crash so the story could just END and we could all go home. I was not so wrapped up in my headache though, that I did not realise the actor playing the narrator had closed the book by this time, and was reciting his lines completely from memory. I later read from the theatre group's website that the narrator guy has the entire book committed to memory.
In my more lucid times during one of the intermissions, I found myself sitting behind a certain local theater doyenne M (it was free seating), and I tried to eavesdrop on what she was saying to her friend about the performance. She was speaking in quite animated whispers, but I was sitting behind them and couldn't catch a proper sentence. I gathered she must have been pretty impressed with the show overall, as I caught what she said about her "one disappointment" - the actor playing the Gatsby character. Apparently, there was a film adaptation of the book, with Gatsby played by Robert Redford of "ethereal handsomeness" (according to M), and the actor playing Gatsby in this stage version was:
Well, not unattractive, but probably not what you'd call ethereally good-looking.
Cargo Kuala Lumpur - Singapore (Thursday, 27 May 2010, 6.30 pm)
This was a "theatre piece" that felt like a guided tour/road-trip/documentary. The official description says it's a "site-specific performance [... that takes the audience] on a simulated journey from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore". I don't know what to call it. There were cargo, cargo containers, trucks, cars, carparks, foreign workers, foreign worker dormitories and a singing girl in pink who'd appear in the unlikeliest places. Well I leave the arty people to string all this into a coherent whole.
We arrived at the Esplanade waterfront carpark obediently at 6pm ("30 minutes prior to showtime" our tickets advised) to swap our Sistic tickets for "cargo tags", and at 6.20pm we were herded into a converted truck that looked like this:
The audience inside the truck getting ready for drive-off:
Our first stop at the PSA port:
Viewing the containers at Pasir Panjang:
Our truck drivers Ganes and Ravi (in orange t-shirts) taking a short break and chatting with friends (on motorbike):
The first appearance of the singing girl in pink, on the rooftop of a giant multi-storey carpark for trucks. Here she is singing
Bengawan Solo a capella.
Our truck went round her several times before going back down the winding levels of the carpark.
It was beautiful. My camera is not doing this justice at all. Imagine this: the sun had set, the lights across the port and the buildings had come on, and there we were, taking this view in while going down the winding paths of the desolate carpark, listening to a haunting lone voice singing "
Bengawan Solo, riwayat mu ini ...". Hands down my favourite part of the entire evening.
The next time we heard her voice on the road, we immediately started chattering among ourselves "Where is she? where is she?" Well you can't tell from here, but here she is again singing (I forget what) and waving to us from the roadside in the middle of goodness-knows-where.
We would see her again on our way back to the Esplanade, in an interior-lit car, bobbing her head violently to the rock music playing in our truck. But it was too dark, and our vehicles were moving too fast for me to even attempt a shot.
One of our last stops (if not the last) was at this logistics company on Jalan Terusan, where the container coordinator guided us around the various types of containers stored on the vast grounds of the company while he rode alongside us on his bicycle.
... And we were back at the Esplanade, where Pink Singing Girl serenaded us for the last time with her rendition of 月亮代表我的心.
The "show" ended with peach tea served in plastic cups (small gripe: tea was lukewarm) distributed to the audience members. So sweet.
Oh, and did you know that 30-40% of our public bus drivers hail from Malaysia and China? One of the many foreign-workers-themed facts/stories they flashed on the truck screen during the show.
I'm not sure if I'm going for any other arts fest events - at least, paid ones - but I'm really pleased with my two choices this year. Headaches, hospitals, accidents, mad rushing aside, this has to be my personal best arts festival in recent memory.
