uick, when was the last time you saw a classical quartet walk around barefoot on stage in sleeveless tops, while topless images of them flashed on screen behind them? Never? What if you added odd shaped pieces of furniture and dimmed the stage lights so one could hardly see anything?

Before you congratulate me on an odd sense of imagination, let me assure you that I'm completely incapable of fabricating anything like that. I just described the scene of Theatre Cryptic's Optical Identity, which showed at the National Library's Drama Centre and ended its three-day run recently.

I first came to know about this when I interviewed the director Cathie Boyd about this marriage between music and visuals, as it were. The concept sounded simple: the T'ang Quartet, wearing clothes designed by Baylene, would sit on furniture built by Jason Ong and play four modern pieces. It would attract young people and grow new audiences for classical music.

As this was a completely new production and relatively hush-hush, no pictures had been hitherto available of the sets, much less the costumes the musicians would be wearing. It would be an interesting night, wouldn't it?

What followed was an hour an a half of pure tedium. We started off with Kevin Volan's White Man Sleeps. The house lights dimmed and the curtains opened. Then a light from the far end of the stage lit, showing the quartet seated on polygonal chairs with cutouts in their backs, and with their backs facing the audience. So far, so good. But as the piece progressed, with its preponderance of slow, repetitive music, I wondered if it was meant to excite me or to lull me to sleep.

I remembered Boyd saying that it would be completely fine to close my eyes during the performance if I wanted to concentrate on the music. But how could I, knowing that I paid to both see and hear the performance. Like a typical Singaporean, I wanted to get my money's worth. So I kept my eyes peeled for every moment of the show. Besides, it was easier to keep awake that way.

I waited in vain. Apart from some shifting of lights, creating mildly interesting shadow and slit-hole effects, there were hardly any effects worth speaking of, certainly not a "spectacle wedding sight and sound" as promised by the Arts Festival blurb.

As the performers started walking around their chairs like fiddle-playing sleepwalkers, I found myself so distracted wondering just what there were going to do next that could entertain me that I found myself distracted - the very thing Boyd had said wouldn't happen.

The pieces followed one after the other without a break. The one that came close to promise was Franghiz Ali-Zadeh's Mugam Sayagi - where digital artist had pre-filmed the quartet playing the piece topless, zooming in on and slowing down the film so that the musculature was emphasized. The work itself, starting with a cello solo and developing into a dance, was interesting too as a piece of theatre as well as music - the quartet had to double up on percussion in parts. But ultimately, the indulgent (one would say narcissistic, but we'll give the T'ang the benefit of a doubt that they didn't come up with the topless poses themselves) filming, though effective in a way as it interacted with the music that was being played 'live', proved distracting and irrelevant to the music as I heard it.

Rolf Wallin's Phonotope 1 and a new work written by Joby Talbot for the quartet playing "against" themselves in a recording might have been engaging in different circumstances, but not when the visual effects conspired against them.

I'll be the first to admit that contemporary music isn't the sector of music I enjoy the most, or that i'm most familiar with. But I remember "straight" concert performances of the modern music by the Kronos Quartet, as well as other modern repertoire in recitals and concerts, where I didn't know the music beforehand but was nevertheless engaged and moved by it. In a festival that supposedly tries so hard to bring the arts to the people, I was surprised to find myself not reacting to the music and actively disliking the performance as a whole. It was Pretentious with a capital P and, like a fellow member of the audience that night, I felt, very simply, ripped off. LIke so many "modern", "artistic" shows, this emperor wore no clothes.

 

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