This was an elegant
work that combined music, dance and installation to explore three artists'
ideas of war. It was suitably avant-garde, as befitting a fringe festival
performance, yet it remained honest. With a pianist (Shane Thio) playing
Schoenberg's early atonal music, a lone dancer (Kuo Jing Hong) and a simple
stage setting (designed by Lim Wei Ling ), the three artists resisted over-dramatising
the often clichéd theme of war. This in itself made for a surprisingly
watchable performance.
However, SCHOENBERG......Prismed failed to deliver on its key
conceptual promise, leaving the piece undefined and hanging. Admittedly,
the premise the artists had woven was rather elaborate. As I understood
it, their aim was to discover their ideas about war, and they would do this
through exploring their responses to Schoenberg's music. As they modestly
reminded us (in programme notes and festival publications), the artists
had not gone through war themselves. Hence, they first sought to develop
an understanding of the "war" that Schoenberg waged against the language
of classical music. Through this discovery process, they would explore more
conventional ideas about war, such as tragedy, entrapment, change, blindness,
the healing process, and so on.
A question enticingly posed was "Are we waging a war against Schoenberg
in deciding the outcome of the music?" Obediently taking the bait, I wondered
if a war was effected in the pianist's defying Schoenberg's performance
instructions, in his repeating and changing the order of the six pieces.
Was this an act of war on Schoenberg, who had rebelled against the fixed
idea of tonality as the only route to musical perfection? I suspected that
this was more an interpretative liberty than something destructive and warlike.
I mused if there was war in the physical rendering of Schoenberg's score
as black and white gridlines on which little wooden cubes were arranged
and later danced upon by Kuo. This was a "spatial music score" where the
time of each note in Schoenberg's score was translated into distance on
the performance space. Kuo's dance went from a careful non-interference
with the wooden cubes to a fever pitch, where the score was trodden on,
flung in the air and rearranged. The disordering of the wooden cubes as
the dancer "made up" her own score pointed to a destruction of the piece's
architecture... thence, war? As a conceptual device, it was disappointingly
literal.
I decided to look past concepts, as Kuo was enjoyable to watch and the
interplay amongst the different media was interesting. Moving with an organic
simplicity, Kuo subtly captured a range of emotions through negotiating
physical space, displaying childlike playfulness, then fearful hesitation,
then broad sweeping pain. Thio's rendering of Schoenberg's emotionally objective
music haunted Kuo's responses, distilling the piece's expression to the
bare essentials of a personal response. However, moments of artistic interaction
were rare. Thio played on his own and, lacking expressiveness, the pieces
sounded flat and structural rather than intense and idiosyncratic. With
diminished emotional impact, Schoenberg's aesthetic "war" against musical
conventions seemed to be an empty concept, riding the wave of novelty.
The piece was stronger in its concept than in its performance. This lent
SCHOENBERG......Prismed the air of an installation piece rather
than a production. But the concept was also convoluted, and raised more
questions than it could support. At the end of the day, the performance
was nothing grander than three artists' interpretations of Schoenberg's
Six Little Pieces, Op. 19. When considered apart from its conceptual
baggage, this was a modest work with interesting ideas, but ultimately it
lacked the conviction and illumination to take it one step above mediocrity.
By the way, although SCHOENBERG......Prismed was admittedly not
the main course of the fringe festival, it could have reached more of an
audience if some effort had gone into managing its publicity. In all of
its publicity materials, the premise of the work (to explore the interaction
of the three artists' interpretations of war) was undermined by the unnecessary
disclaimer that the artists had not gone through a war themselves. On the
Saturday night that I attended the performance, the ratio of empty seats
to the approximately 10 people in the audience made me think that the National
Day Parade was on that evening. As it turned out, it was Haresh Sharma's
new play that was playing at the Esplanade as part of the same M1 Singapore
Fringe Festival. This programming fratricide was exacerbated by lukewarm
support from the performance venue. A less-than-welcoming security representative
at The Arts House main door stopped and questioned every visitor, thus precluding
the possibility of curious passers-by coming in. A quick check revealed
that the title of the performance on The Arts House web page was "Untitled"
even on the day of performance. Lacking big names and a crowd-pulling programme,
SCHOENBERG......Prismed could have done with more help to obtain
the audience it deserved. |
"At the end of the day, the performance was nothing grander than three
artists' interpretations of Schoenberg's Six Little Pieces, Op. 19"
More M1 Singapore Fringe Festival Performances
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