Theatrex Asia

Artist Sharing Session with Chen Tong. Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, on Chinese performance art group the Long Tail Elephant Group, Guangzhou, China.
Talk to be conducted in Mandarin, with simultaneous translation in English Language.
Speaker: Chen Tong

Interpreter: Richard Chua
Date: 15 January 2010

Time: 8pm

Venue: The Back Room, Post-Museum

The talk will be made available free of charge, [...]

The closeted intellectual bigot in me told me that it would be meaningless to write a review for Chestnuts (a mainstream play, for it would have nothing for me to write about, except for frivolous acts STAGES made at the expense of others. It is with this hypocrisy I held to my heart, I was finding ways of justifying my paid trip to STAGES’ Chestnuts 2009 on 29 November: from the inane reason I wanted to know what STAGES had up in their sleeves, needing a good night’s out like the middle-class, to supporting my friends Jonathan, Terence and Keng Kiat. But I never wanted to admit that I loved the production. The truth is I am secretly in love with STAGES’ Chestnut series. I have watched many of them in the past, but never wrote down my reflections on them.

A Singapore writer travelling up to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to catch a theatre production that dealt with Delusion harbouring the idea that theatre in Malaysia was more real than the ones in Singapore was in itself a deluded affair. As if there was a difference between delusion and reality on both ends of the causeway. After watching the production, what the writer said of Malaysia theatre collective, managed by Loh Kok Man, Pentas Project’s The Year In A Word: DELUSIONS was that when artists got all involved in making theatre, the world seemed to stop revolving around them. On the face of it, the writer seems to have given a bad comment, but on closer look, it might prove otherwise, especially through the eyes of a deluded theatre writer.