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SIFA 2015: An incredible experience with Border Crossers

Back in 2012, theatre director Ong Keng Sen presented Lear Dreaming at what was then called the Singapore Arts Festival. A revisitation of his seminal 1997 work Lear, it showcased the intercultural Asian theatre aesthetics he had been championing, combining Japanese noh theatre, Korean court music, Indonesian gamelan and Chinese traditional music (and a laser show to boot) to create a unified take on Shakespeare (it was later followed by Desdemona and Hamlet).

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Back in 2012, theatre director Ong Keng Sen presented Lear Dreaming at what was then called the Singapore Arts Festival. A revisitation of his seminal 1997 work Lear, it showcased the intercultural Asian theatre aesthetics he had been championing, combining Japanese noh theatre, Korean court music, Indonesian gamelan and Chinese traditional music (and a laser show to boot) to create a unified take on Shakespeare (it was later followed by Desdemona and Hamlet).

Three years later and Ong — who has incidentally taken over the reins at the newly branded Singapore International Festival of Arts — takes this vision a step further with the expansive installation performance opus The Incredible Adventures Of Border Crossers.

Instead of forging from disparate elements a single coherent voice to take on a Western classic as in Lear, interculturalism is unshackled in the sold-out Border Crossers, resulting in a liberating explosion of voices speaking about themselves — and presented as a multilingual, multicultural karaoke session, fashion show, cultural presentation and a sounds-and-light extravaganza.

For roughly more than five hours at the National Museum of Singapore’s exhibition galleries, we witness 20 performers take to the stage to present the “other” side of Singapore — as residents who have come from South-east Asia, East Asia, Europe and the Americas to live here. The only exception is Eugene Tan, a Singaporean with another kind of “other” identity — as the drag queen known as Becca d’Bus.

At the beginning, someone cites the idea of the museum as a “theatre of memories” and a microcosm of human life, and Border Crossers plays out in a somewhat similar manner. Divided into 11 half-hour chapters with themes such as travel, feast, work and everyday life, the performers regale us with song-and-dance numbers, personal anecdotes, nuggets of insight, more song-and-dance numbers. We hear the story of Chilean Maria Eugenia Gajardo, who fell in love with a Singaporean and lived here (and later on, her experiences cleaning toilets in an Indian ashram). There’s Xiao Gang from China who, after experiencing heartbreak, decided to take up dance lessons to distract himself, and later became a dance instructor for Singapore’s senior citizens. American Aole T Miller talks about his gay wedding experience (bringing up differences with the Singapore situation). And Myanmar’s Khin Khin Lay shares her story about the death of friend and also of how she helps in facilitating the funerals of her countrymen who pass away in Singapore without families to help.

We meet some charming people, to boot: Vietnamese Richard Tang who belts out songs like a pro, Indonesian Elly Evyana wows with her Balinese dance, and long-time resident Gilles Massot, a French visual artist, belts out a karoke mash-up of La Vie En Rose and Teresa Teng’s The Moon Represents My Heart — when he’s not going around taking wefies with people.

Tan, meanwhile, is the lively provocateur, the unpredictable livewire with outrageous lipsync moments that see him twerking half-naked to a song titled My Vagina Is 8 Miles Wide or laughing hysterically as scenes from a National Day Parade are projected behind him.

As the night progresses, this simmering soup of stories, movement, languages and cultures thicken by the hour, a dizzying and disorienting sensorial experience as we, too, cross borders — the geographic, the personal and, for an instant, even planetary (as Japan’s Toshi Suzuki muses about a utopian future with extraterrestrials).

Ong saves the best episodes for last. In Anthem, the performers gather onstage and assume the role of mannequins as speakers hung around their necks blare out their personal “anthems”, from pop songs (including those from their respective countries) to chants to more personal testimonies to even silence. Theatre, meanwhile, plays out like a cultural presentation of sorts that in the show’s post-modern context twists the very idea of cultural presentations.

And while the 20 performers, evoking some kind of United Nations-in-Singapore collective, are the default eponymous stars of Border Crossers, everything else is, in a sense, performing, too.

Fashion label Reckless Ericka’s costumes become more colourful and lavish as the show progresses, with performers strutting down the catwalk-like set by Asylum’s Chris Lee. Multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan may have created his best work yet, conjuring hypnotic images one after the other on screens splashed all around, while sound artist Kaffe Matthews turns the entire cavernous space into a sound installation, his soundscapes whirling in surround sound.

The only thing missing here is artist Francis Ng’s geometric installations, which are to be found at the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station where the show was originally slated to be shown, a venue that has more in common with the gritty Palais de Tokyo venue in Paris where Border Crossers had premiered early this year (ticket holders can also visit that venue, which is concurrently open and which features a video installation of the Paris version).

Perhaps the change in venue is for the better, what with the unpredictable haze at the moment and the predictable Formula 1 traffic in that area. But the shift also changes things: While something is somewhat “lost” — the site-specific ambience and the show’s connections to the railway station’s history and import as a place of transience — something is also gained in the more controlled, slicker performance environment of the National Museum (where, incidentally, Ong had previously done a piece called 120, where the place’s histories came to life).

But there is also one subtle point Border Crossers seems to make: It is not really a museum-come-to-life. Museum objects are, in a sense, our way of trying to explain and understand everything — and while we do get glimpses of who these performers are, it is impossible to know them completely. What we get, instead, are what we get with anyone else, regardless of the identities imposed upon them — snatches of knowing.

Throughout the show, performers would sit among the audience, waiting for their turn to perform, not as if they were one of us because they are. During these quiet moments, the borders in this exceptional show well and truly dissolve.

For more information on SIFA 2015, visit https://sifa.sg/sifa.

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