Singapore Arts Festival 2006

The Singapore Arts Festival is here again! Yippee! But damn the organisers, why didn't they publish the calendar for the "Arts on the Move" like they had always done in the past? Now I dunno where to go to catch those free performances! And this time round, I'm gonna be so broke... cos for the first time in my life (and it won't be the last, I'm sure), I'm gonna catch quite a number of ticketed performances in the Arts Fest. ~$$~

Tonight, I'm gonna catch "160 Characters" by Vanilla Productions (Australia) at the Esplanade Recital Studio.

Leave your phone on during this performance! The 160-character-limit of phone text messaging is explored in this highly interactive, often hilarious work of improvised theatre. Performed to a sold-out season at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2005, 160 Characters asks its audience to forward their most intriguing text messages to an onstage phone. Each text message inspires an improvised comedic sketch, highlighting the performers’ extraordinary versatility.

I think that this interactive, improvising, versatile + comedic? performance is a very interesting concept.

Next week, I'm gonna catch 《独在家乡为异客》 "A Stranger at Home" by 戏剧盒 Drama Box (Singapore).

“你要死在那里？
某人的怀抱里。”

教授和他的学生通过电邮探问一个人的心属何处；家是心的栖息之处吗？

生命里不同的角色——老师、老人、情人、乩童、恐怖分子，在寻觅安心之处的过程，敞开着心扉。漂浮的心应寻找依附，还是迷失于怀旧的情怀？

一出结合剧场、音乐、电影与文字等因素的舞台剧，让您倾听心的絮语，感叹生命的无常，探讨城市现代人的乡愁、记忆、身份等……

由青年艺术家奖得主郭庆亮改编、执导。电影由著名导演陈子谦执导、制作。

Then, Xiaoming and I are planning to go for the Pop Village at Fort Canning Park cos Chet Lam and At 17 will be there.

And, thanks to Baozhu with whom I made a real crazy decision, we're gonna catch "Play On Earth" on 24th June @ 2am!! This is by Station House Opera (UK) in collaboration with TheatreWorks (Singapore) and Philarmonia Brasileira (Brazil) and NewcastleGateshead Initiative (UK).

Dusk in Singapore, tea time in Britain, breakfast in Brazil.

Nine people from three continents perform in one single production.

A quayside building in NewcastleGateshead, a skyscraper in São Paulo and a riverside theatre in Singapore merge to become a fourth imaginary space.

Three audiences, one in each city, watch the performance simultaneously.

In São Paulo, Newcastle and Singapore, audiences arrive at a building to watch a show, all visible to each other as they take their seats. This global audience then discovers a much larger, fourth performance, visible on three screens above the actors. Projected simultaneously from three corners of the world, a narrative unfolds, immediate, unpredictable and alive.

A Brazilian couple is eating breakfast, but the woman is very interested in the man sleeping in Singapore; and why is the English woman watching so closely? When he leaves his flat, she follows him through the streets of Newcastle to his rendezvous in São Paulo. The revelation of their relationships is played out across the globe - by performers in three continents together telling a story which is both universal and true to its own locality, its own culture and concerns.

What are our relations to the rest of the world?
Are we strangers or are we family?

I think this is gonna be a really cool performance, and we're so cool, right, to go for it at such an unearthly hour! 2am! Crazy!! Heehee!

Hey, so if you're planning to go pubbing/clubbing that Friday night, you can ask me along, so I will have something to do before I go for "Play On Earth". Haha!

And on top of all the above, I'm also gonna watch Chen Sheng concert next Sat. (This event's not under Arts Fest though.)

Broke broke broke... and pay day's nowhere in sight...