FCP 09/10

Aren’t you curious about this artist who’s part of FCP but we haven’t actually met yet? I mean, he’s got a frickin’ Wikipedia entry already!

He’ll be flying back down next week, and we’ll get to quiz him. Here’s the details:

18 November: Screening Journey to the Moon.
19 Nov: Artist Talk at 8pm.
Venue: 72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road.
Admission: Free. Please call 6737-7213 or email tworks@singnet.com.sg to register your attendance.

As part of the Flying Circus Project Platform 02, Theatreworks will be showing Journey to the Moon, the newest film by renown filmmaker and contemporary artist, Kutlug Ataman. The screening will be followed by a special artist talk on Kutlug Ataman’s previous works. His works which primarily document the lives of marginalised individuals; examining the ways in which people create and rewrite their identities through self-expression, blurring the line between reality and fiction; will be shared amongst audiences.

… and I deliver. Yesterday he sent me an e-mail from Phnom Penh, where he’s working on an extension of FCP with Singapore choreograph Joavien Ng, Filipina choreographer Donna Miranda and Turkish video artist Kutlug Ataman.

KS: hey yi sheng, thanks for all the work thus far. i think the blog captures well our discussions before expo zero itself.

just did a long session with the cambodian dancers this morning, second one. and donna/joavien doing their second session too. they are staying over to work with the dancers two more days. kutlug is doing his talk at bophana tonight.

i just went on the blog and wandered whether you would take us into the content of the two days in the expo zero more?

hug, keng sen

Happy now, KS? Bleah. Also updated the closin’ time article with a list of what we ate at Blue Ginger. I wanna remember small things like that.

À bientôt!

Woot! We’re done for this installment. Francois flies to Bali tomorrow, Martina, Boris, Mette and Yves-Noel fly back to Paris in three days, and Keng Sen, Donna, Joavien and Tay Tong fly to Phnom Penh tomorrow too. (It’s the second leg of FCP ’09/’10, located in Cambodia!)

To celebrate a successful run (and y’know, Sunday’s crowd turned out to be better than Saturday’s, with 150ish people turning up compared to 120ish the day before), we adjourned to the pantry…

for bread, cheese, pâté…

… and naturally wine.

Then off to Blue Ginger at 97 Tanjong Pagar Rd to introduce the travellers to the sharp tastes of Peranakan cuisine.

Their otak-otak is very spicy, but the texture of the fish is very fine.  Their ngoh hiang also wins high praise from me. Aside from that we also had kueh pie tee, tauhu nonya style, ayam buah keluak, juhu kangkong, sambal eggplant, mackerel with curry, durian chendol, plain chendol, pulut hitam, lime juice and beer.

KS kept saying that of all the cultural elements of Singapore, the food is the star, and the guests were inclined to agree (although they may have downgraded their quality appraisals on sampling the durian chendol.  If only I could’ve recorded the look on Boris’s face…)

The Cambodia-bound dancers had to sleep early, but Torrance and I took the Paris/Rennes team over to Tantric for some very overpriced drinks.

Even passed a Taoist birthday celebration for the gods on the way.  Opera and auctions!  Necessary injections of exotica.

But back at the theatre…

Kailash, Andy and co were busy bumping in for the next show.

We love you guys.  You give us so much liberty to be crazy.

G’nite, everybody.  Overviews of performances in the morning.

And the museum is closed! But the documentation ain’t half done.

And they’re being temporarily detained here because of the rain too.

We got the bulk of our audience at around 3pm and later today (in contrast to yesterday, when it was a steady flow all the way through). A fair number of repeat viewers too: critic and writer Usha Nathan, artist Ranger Mills and his daughter, emerging choreographer Kiran Kumar.

Ooh, and Donna just had a theoretical orgasm (i.e. not a hypothetical one, but a mental orgasm due to the excessive splendour of theory). She was doing a performance combined with a monologue about translation as deception, and an audience member was simultaneously translating for the audience from English into Mandarin.

And Aldo was there to capture it on video too!

GYYYOOOOOOO!!!

Came late. Should’ve been here at 12pm. Martina’s giving notes. In general, it feels like we can slow down our movements, placing a little less emphasis on memorised speech. But otherwise, she says, the participatory engagement, the interest, the staying was simply great.

There’s the on/off thing as well. How difficult, how exhausting it is to go from rest-state to performative state with each new batch of people. Not a good idea to go into the pantry and munch for one hour between sessions; better to stand around and watch other people’s show.

Also trying to consider how to close. Everyone should go downstairs at 6pm when the museum closes. Still, it was good how Boris was continuing his shirtless slo-mo dance in the darkness for ten minutes after closing, ‘cos that was nice and subtle, and of course Heman kept his poor victim locked up even while we were all having drinks.

Okay, we’re ready to go. Good luck, everyone.

Yves-Noel: Good luck? Not good luck! MERDE!!!

We’re having wine and cheese and bruschetta now.  But oh noes!  I broke my camera.

What makes it worse is that it was my bf’s camera. It happened while I was viewpointing around the space. Don’t tell him! I’m going to secretly buy him a new one.

And a lot of our friends have already come. Choreographers, students, administrators, directors, lovers. They came in pretty damn early too: things were already crowded by 1:20.

They took a while to spread downstairs, though.  Ooh look, this is the second victim that Heman’s trapped in his glass cell.

Will explain more later.  But one of the most intriguing things is how people are straying from their original proposals.

Boris started off, not with his usual museum tour, but with creative lounging and interventions.

Mette’s been influenced by Heman’s talk of science fiction, and at one point brought in sci-fi concepts into her group chats. And Keng Sen…

Well, he’s gone from vertical to supine. As has his audience. Quite dramatically so. He has led his audience to lie down and sprawl to listen to him in the 1 metre between the lowered stage lights and the floor.

More later.

We’ve done our warm-ups.

We’ve done our pep talk.

We’ve done our group hugs.

Now let’s do the show!

We’re setting up the wineglasses and flyers and little sheets of paper that say “No entry” and “Press button to exit”.

Of course it’s not precisely a run; everything’s still a process. But still nervous lah.