Q

today, finally, after nightmares (serious) and consults and rumination, i decided to get a hair cut. this is the first time since a year ago. and hair cuts have a nasty way of not ending well for me unless i do it myself.

as you can tell, it is like when i get Magikarp to use splash.

nothing happened.

i’m not sure whether to feel relief, or annoyed that i spent dessert money to look absolutely no different. and no, this is not an excuse to post up boob shots. there’s nothing much to show.

Gloria is working at The Theatre Practice, and was a guide for TTP’s Kuo Pao Kun Festival. So the bunch of us went to watch last week.

we did KPK’s Silly Little Girl & the Funny Old Tree (fondly initialized to SLGFOT) for our O Level Drama piece, and hell that process makes up about half of our mugger’s mine of inside jokes. (i inexplicably typed indian jokes)

our group decided to do site-specific, at the outdoors playground/gym of the SN basketball courtyard, with a huge tree and all.

we spent most of our time sleeping on the grass/monkey bars like hobokids actually, because the group was basically the chillest (read: lazy) people of the class put together (Lorraine, Xin, Rei and Cat), and also because it being in the courtyard meant no Mr Wong supervision/pressure from other groups.

so it was month long drowsy afternoons under the sun feeding the mosquitoes and occasional bursts of energy which we invested in — puddling. i actually have photographic evidence:

YES. complete with bad haircuts and white sports shoes (besides those, we’re pretty much the same – t-shirts and shorts for rehearsals and being-hyper/not-doing-work). couldn’t find the one where we were actually on the site though. :-(

we finished about ten scenes in the last week, then retreated back to lethargy and dozed under the sun right before the filming, to the utter horror of the other groups as they spied on us from the MPR level. GOOD TIMES, M’FRIENDS. <3

so i was pretty excited when i got to watch a professional site-specific inspired by KPK.

it was at the Stamford Arts Center (or rather, TAMFORD Arts Center. it’s over a 100 years old and the S fell off). beautiful place, really. old, rustic, quaint structure, and it has a very occident-orient hybrid feel to it.

we were brought all over the area and i loved that (mostly because i hate sitting still) – the roof, corridors, rooms, backyards.

i liked the spatial-visual/audio usage: sometimes we got to watch a scene taking place in a balcony some floors down, with the cast’s voices echoing all over the building. sometimes we looked up and a someone’s just there teetering on the building’s beam. sometimes they mingled right among us.

it was inevitable that transitions (moving around) and the dispersed space took away some of the performance impact though. i could tell they were strong actors, but it’s impractical to expect that full-on energy and focus you get from the other contained-space theater spaces. given that constraint, it was otherwise great.

sublime moments used the element of surprise. a suitcase front-center, a scene going on behind. when the scene behind finishes, someone stretches out of the case. man dreaming of giving birth had his water bag burst. you get sent into a live demonstration of prostitution in a brothel with low-q music in the background. i liked the surreal.

but my favorites were the unplanned and spontaneous. one part had a character straddling a gate, yelling absurd questions out of the SAC compound a la KPK style: “YOU MEI YOU KAN JIAN DA NIAO?”. a random man on a bike actually yelled back an answer “DA NIAO MEI YOU, XIAO NIAO JIU YOU!”, it was just brilliant.

also the SAC cat roving around (it was very tame and had a strange majestic air about it, like it knew it was the actual boss of the area). it got caught right at the start of a scene: red lights on, incense, a door with steps leading down to the corridor where we were at, and there standing a woman about to begin her monologue – and the cat just there at the steps. it was so simple and meaningless and random, but it was the image that stuck with me after the play.

oh and YES, all in Chinese! the language may be slightly hard to follow, but my advice is to just stop trying to follow and go along with whatever you get – it’s enough. just listen to intonation, the pitch, the tone, they way they are said.

the site-specific work is over but there’s a whole series of other shows by TTP and they should be checked out, regardless of Chinese Language proficiency level.