fear not history


Fiction on this island has never quite flourished. Perhaps because we've never quite made peace with our histories.

But two genres of fiction hold special place in Singapore as a result. Ghost stories - the art of unresolved pasts. And that even stranger fruit of fact-as-fiction/fiction-as-history. Part speculative history. Part documentary fiction. A romance of obscurity.

The Lan Fang Chronicles, Choy Ka Fai's work supported by the Arts Council's Arts Creation Fund and commissioned for this year's Arts Festival, is maybe of this latter genre.

Choy Ka Fai chances upon the Lan Fang Republic, supposedly the first democratic republic in SEAsia, set up by the Hakka Chinese in West Borneo. His research in West Borneo, China and Holland takes him through archival material, abandoned sites, photocopied photographs, a supposed descendent of Luo Fang Bo (founder of Lan Fang) and accounts of Dutch missionaries and colonists. These materials allow him to re-construct a skeletal history of the Hakka mining settlement and its relationship with the Malays, Dayaks and Dutch in Borneo. These materials also allow him to construct a fiction of imagined characters, objects and - history.

What results is described in the Festival programme as a "site-specific installation performance". (It may better to ignore this phrase. I think it has the unfortunate effect of discouraging further interest)

Using the Shuang Long Shan ancestral hall site at Commonwealth as a backdrop, you will be guided through 5 locations where several solo performances take place. These players each offer a perspective of the Lan Fang republic. Each performance is "aided" by different media - photographs, video, ritual, objects...

I don't want to say more and spoil it for you. Tickets for the Lan Fang Chronicles this Thursday to Sunday (7pm + weekend 3pm matinees) are available still. Get them via sistic.

For me, most aspects of this work works. It invites curiosity, and provides just enough for the audience's imagination to wander, sometimes drawing links with the issues of present-day Singapore. The material and production demonstrates admirable rigour and restraint. The performers, especially Jajib Soiman with his eerily evocative segment before the cemetery, handled their seemingly academic material well.



 And if nothing else, the location itself is reason enough. Go slightly earlier and walk around a Hakka Clan's 100 year-old ancestral hall hidden behind a 2nd-hand car showroom, and its domino style cemetery of mosaic-tiled tombstones surrounded by HDB flats.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

miracle man

Image
I can never quite tell if Ma J is asleep or just pretending The old lady in the bed next to Ma J's is in hospital because of a second stroke. When we were visiting Ma J this afternoon, the old lady's middle-aged son was also there. He was in his usual round-neck tee tucked into a pair of blue jeans with a belt made of buffalo hide. His limbs are slim, but his belly is round. His bald head, too, is round and abnormally large for his small frame. Let's call him Ah Biao , or if you prefer an English name, you can think of him as Bill (after his buffalo hide belt). When J and I walked out of the ward, Ah Biao or Bill followed us. Three of us stood around the counter by the nurses' work area. J and I were quiet, enjoying the break. Then Ah Biao wanted to show us something special. "Eh, I show you something." Ah Biao unzipped his black waist pouch and took out a small yellow cloth pouch. He untied the colourful string that secured the opening of the pouch. He weigh
Read the rest of this post

on a Hou Hsiao Hsien movie set

Image
By the tracks of the Jiji Station, the oldest train station in Taiwan OK, not quite. We did not even manage to go all the way south to Hou Hsiao Hsien's KaoShiung or even Tainan, but we did venture out from Taipei for 3 days to Taichung. But the real takeaway was actually this supposed feature of Hou Hsiao Hsien's films - trains! Trains are about the best thing about traveling. Unlike cars and taxis, trains are a social mode of transport. Train stations allow for reunions and departures, points to assess and affirm relationships. I admit that all this fades away when you are tired or in a great hurry (or both). But seriously, cars (oh, 4-wheelers!) have only brought about pollution and wasteful consumption, traffic jams, asphalt, mindless obsession with speed and countless quarrels in the stressful, enclosed interiors of cars. Friends, take it slow. Take the train. Read a book. Hold your partner's hand. Be there with the people around you. With Taiwan's highspeed rail
Read the rest of this post