Roar Expression

Running from May 25 to June 26, the Singapore Arts Festival, now celebrating its 30th birthday, promises a lineup of quality productions that continue to push the limits of artistic imagination.

It brings together 1,900 artists from more than 27 countries, with 22 main productions and a whopping 400 free performances, among which are six world premieres, and five Asian premieres, at 30 venues across the island country. Also being staged is a spectrum of outreach activities such as the Asian Showcase, Arts on the Move, Family Funfest, and the Visual Arts component.

Singapore's National Arts Council chief executive Lee Suan Hiang describes this year's festival as bold.

Through commissioning new work, "we attract the best from around the world to come to Singapore, to use Singapore as a platform to create new artworks not only by themselves but in collaboration with Singapore artists," he says.

The festival's international profile increases significantly this year via an alliance with the 60-year-old, prestigious Edinburgh International Festival, the first such collaboration Edinburgh has undertaken.

Under a recently signed memorandum of understanding, the duo has pledged to support mutual touring and co-commissioning.

This year, the Singapore-UK musical collaboration, Optical Identity, becomes the first production in Edinburgh's main festival program featuring Singapore artists.

This year, festival director Goh Ching Lee has split the Singapore program evenly between dance, theater and music, with the dance category itself divided between Asian, American and European companies.

The festival's theatrical and musical programs continue the East-West fusion theme, with Optical Identity, Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun's The Map & Paper Concerto, Malaysian writer-director Huzir Sulaiman's psychological thriller Cogito, Chinese literary icon Cao Yu's Beijing Ren (Peking Man) prepared by People's Art Theater in Beijing, and modernized version of Romeo and Juliet brought about by Lithuania's Vilnius City Theater, among others.

The attention-grabbing, sumptuous concert Tan Dun brought to the audiences on June 2-3 at the Esplanade Concert Hall proved to be a truly innovative work going beyond the world-music crossover empty gimmickry that plagues vanguard classical music to create sweet, if at times discordant, music to the ears.

In The Map, a Concerto for Cello, Video and Orchestra, traditional music typical of Southwest China presented on docu-film interplays with live orchestral music bridging generations and cultures across years and over continents.

And in Paper Concerto for Paper Percussion and Orchestra, paper of various sizes and strengths are manipulated in different ways to serve as percussion instruments, such as paper cymbals, wax paper bags, and a "paper thunder tube" invented by the composer.

As challenging as a music piece, Cogito, kept many viewers on the edge of their seats at its world premiere on June 7 at the Checkpoint Theater.

Against a stark, minimalist setting, actresses Neo Swee Lin and Claire Wong, clad in black-and-white cheongsams, gave finely calibrated performances as they fleshed out their characters.

The two women protagonists are puzzled by the fact that they share the same name (Katherine Lee), the same husband (Lex) and many of the identical memories. As the two get to know each other, they start to flounder in understanding what their lives mean in the light of the other's existence.

Cogito, the title of the mind-boggling play, refers to philosopher Descartes' well-circulated formulation "cotito ergo sum (I think therefore I am). Playwright/director Huzir Sulaiman here deconstructs this conception of self-consciousness as the basis of identity by toying with the idea that consciousness can be easily fabricated and manipulated.

Neo and Wong tossed off Huzir's intricate lines with controlled ease, giving viewers the sensation of watching a pair of disciplined verbal judoists at work.

However, not all the shows are so philosophical, conceptual, or even painfully hard to digest.

For example, director Oskaras Korsunovas from Lithuania has taken to Singapore Arts Festival a version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that many have never seen before - set in a pizzeria in 1940s Italy.

Instead of the usual sword spars, there is dramatic food fights. And the weapons: pots, pans, dough and flour. If all this is not harrowing enough, the 200-minute play was performed in Lithuanian, with English supertitles.

On the dance calendar, a definite climax is Sacred Monsters, which won a ten-minute standing ovation when first staged on June 8 at the Esplanade Theater.

A collaboration between French dance superstar Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan, one of the most prominent dancers in the UK, Sacred Monsters explores the boundaries between two great classical dance forms - ballet and kathak - through two of the modern dance world's most esteemed practitioners.

"The performance is amazingly beautiful and soul-stirring as well," said Li Fang, a Chinese spectator, who was especially moved by the third duet, which may symbolize the reconciliation of the Western and Asian dancing discipline.

In this warm and emotionally resonant part, she is particularly struck by the poetic images of Guillem wrapping her legs round Khan's waist, and of both continuously echoing each other in wide steps.

The piece unfolds with a fascinating solo specially choreographed for Guillem by choreographer Lin Hwai-Min, director of the Cloud Gate Dance Theater of Taiwan.

Blending Chinese kung fu moves, the meditative solo, which gradually intensified in force and speed, just showed off Guillem's best features, noticeably her perfect arched foot and her trademark six o'clock extensions.

As a contrast, Akram Khan's virtuosic Kathak solo, choreographed by Gauri Sharma Tripathi, was a brilliant rhythmic tour de force with many sharp changes in direction, but graced by a lot of arm flourishes.

Besides Chinese-born musician Tan Dun's The Map & Paper Concerto, this year's Singapore Arts Festival bears a Chinese touch also by staging Beijing Ren (Peking Man), Chinese master playwright Cao Yu's own favorite play, on June 22-23 at the Esplanade Theater, along with a series of Cantonese opera shows under the Outreach scheme.

Beijing Ren comes to Singapore replete with a vast paper-house set that bespeaks the fragility and fractured emotions of the people who inhabit it.

Set in 1937, the breakdown of a family entrapped by selfishness, divided loyalties, and unfulfilling love exposes the decline of traditional feudal families at a time of turbulent change in China. It will be performed in Mandarin with English subtitles.

And film buffs aren't forgotten either. One of this year's most interesting works was the world premiere of the award-winning Singapore Finger Players' Dreams, a play based on the films of Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai.

(China Daily 06/14/2007 page20)