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Bukit Ho Swee: Roam if you want to

SINGAPORE — So when are we having our first Singapore Site-Specific Festival?

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SINGAPORE — So when are we having our first Singapore Site-Specific Festival?

Judging from how popular heritage tours and site-specific performances are, I’m sure the SSSF or SS-SF (pronounced “sssfffff” or “sss..sssfff”) will be a sure-fire hit.

Consider how many tours there are right now or have recently taken place: All the island hopping, kampong strolling, lighthouse sightseeing trips at the ongoing Singapore Heritage Festival, The OPEN’s Ways Of Wandering jaunts to MacRitchie Reservoir and Tiong Bahru, the Bukit Brown tours…

Not so long ago, the Singapore Arts Festival brought you to hotels and a workers dorm in Jurong. The wonderful Open House art tour went to neighbourhoods in Marine Parade and Tiong Bahru. Even last year’s Singapore Writers Festival felt bookworms needed to stretch their legs a bit. And then, of course, spell#7’s audio tours and tours (we already miss you, guys!).

Coinciding with the Heritage Fest’s tours is Drama Box’s latest performance walkabout. They’ve been known to do such things as make you walk along abandoned railway tracks or go to Geylang. This time, their latest IgnorLAND show — IgnorLAND Of Its Time — takes its own, erm, swee time, at Bukit Ho Swee, an old estate known for its fiery past: The inferno that levelled an entire kampung in 1961.

It’s pretty typical as site-specific performance tours go. For two (sweaty) hours, you basically snake around the area, walking past flat corridors and bemused residents in what performer-guide Fanny Kee describes as a “tour of invisible things… things no longer there.”

To be honest, I didn’t get maybe half or more of what was going on during Tuesday night’s preview (there’s a lot in Mandarin or Hokkien — although I’m sure the Drama Box folks would be more than happy to help non-speakers). But I was lucky that during the preview, I bumped into heritage blogger and former resident James Seah, who fed me additional snippets of information (he also has his own separate heritage tour as part of the Ignorland project). Yes, there was the fire, but Bukit Ho Swee also had its own old cemetery and was also a kind of a favela of its time, notorious for its gangs. Interesting.

I’m a sucker for these kinds of experiences. It’s always fun exploring places, listening to stories and immersing in an environment. But even with the language barrier and the fact that it’s not much different from other tours format-wise, there was something a bit special about it, I felt.

Its creators (directors Koh Hui Ling and Han Xuemei, and playwright Jean Tay) mixed staged moments with real testimonies from residents, who also gamely took part in the production. It wasn’t simply a case of the audience-as-outsider looking in but of feeling like we were guests of some pretty hospitable folk.

It’d probably have felt a bit different had IgnorLAND Of Its Time been all “theatre” or, conversely, all “real”. In combined, Tay’s basic narrative structure of an old-timer’s tragic experience during the infamous blaze resonates not just as a re-enactment of a historical event. In coming face to face with residents — whether or not they have any direct memory of the fire — we are gently reminded of the human aspect. The human cost of development and the human face of history. Yes, this is the Bukit Ho Swee of History but it is also the Bukit Ho Swee of its people. A place that continues to morph thanks to both those who once inhabited it and those who currently claim it as their own.

IgnorLAND Of Its Time’s performance-tour is from July 24 to Aug 1, 7.30pm to 9.30pm. Free admission. The Heritage Trail is on Aug 2, 9.30am and 11am. Registration required for both at http://www.eventbrite.sg. The town hall meetings will be held on July 26 and Aug 2, 2.30pm, Blk 42A Havelock Road. No registration needed. There might still be tickets for the shows tonight (24th) and on the 28th.

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