S’pore Fringe Fest 2015: The late Paddy Chew comes to life in With/Out

SINGAPORE — In May 1999, The Necessary Stage (TNS) presented Completely With/Out Character, a one-man show by Paddy Chew, who was the first Singaporean to publicly come out as being HIV-positive.

Fast forward to January 2015 and artist Loo Zihan revisits the piece, with a couple of roadblocks along the way. For one, he couldn’t refer to a single complete video documentation of the show. Most importantly, Chew had sadly passed away a couple of months after the run.

Nevertheless, from so many disparate elements such as video snippets and still-existing props, he succeeds in cobbling up a version or interpretation of that momentous production. We get a glimpse of Chew bravely telling his story at a time when AIDS was a social taboo. We see him crack people up with his morbid sense of humour, his anecdotes about buying a coffin and taking his obituary photo. We also witness scenes of pure heartbreak, such as his anecdote about visiting a dying friend. We hear his bitterness, his acceptance, his words of wisdom. The images grab you: Of an AIDS candlelight memorial vigil, of Chew stripping down to his undies to confront audiences with his emaciated body. It’s painful to watch the performance of a then-dying man but it was also inspiring to see him do so defiantly and full of life.

But as much as With/Out was a deeply moving production, it was equally highly conceptual. If, in 2012, Loo re-enacted Josef Ng’s controversial performance art piece Brother Cane in the piece Cane, With/Out was a meticulous reconstruction of Chew’s show that acknowledges and embraces the very absence of its protagonist — a “no-man show” as Loo previously described it.

On the second floor of Centre 42 were three video screens showing bits and pieces of existing snippets of Chew’s performances, props (a hospital bed, a wheelchair, the original candle used), and Loo in one corner facilitating an online streaming session on YouTube, a nod to the original work’s groundbreaking use of the then-popular Internet Relay Chat, through which the piece was transcribed in real-time (a detail that also reminded us that TNS’ Facebook-supported Poor Thing last year had its historical precedent).

To compensate for the bad audio recording of the original videos, the voice of a designated reader for the night — in our case, it was, poignantly enough, playwright Haresh Sharma himself, one of Chew’s collaborators — was piped in through speakers from the clinical “control room” downstairs, where the tech people were stationed. Newspaper clippings and other print documentation lined the walls to provide further information about Chew’s story.

Free to decide on how to deal with With/Out (find a spot and stay put, wander around or shuffle upstairs and downstairs), you negotiated and wrestled with this fragmented — albeit tenuously linear — experience that simultaneously hit you on two levels: The deeply moving emotion one feels towards Chew’s monologue you see and hear, and the intellectually compelling detachedness of the presentation strategy Loo used. It was a show full of warmth, it was a clinically cold show, a combination that worked brilliantly.

The one thing that somehow seemed a somewhat awkward was the mid-show Q&A session, which took place three quarters of the way through. You could either stay upstairs to watch original footage of Chew’s own Q&A or head down to the control room where Sharma and a representative from Action For AIDS Singapore fielded questions. Does one watch Chew-come-alive or does one listen to people talk *about* the late Chew or how Completely With/Out Character came about or the current issues surrounding AIDS and HIV in Singapore? Do we commune with the past or engage in the present? Perhaps it really depended on a specific night’s audience, but last night, majority of us found ourselves downstairs learning about the 1999 production and about Chew as his ghostly presence continued to flicker upstairs.

“Let me just be a memory,” Chew recalled telling his sisters in Completely With/Out Character. But he was ultimately more than that. With/Out was self-conscious about its limitations in bringing back to life Chew’s performance but it also recognised and played up the most power element in its arsenal: Chew’s words (shaped as a monologue with Sharma). The many pieces of this puzzle of a show may fit awkwardly (if one should insist on an ideal whole) but the one constant were his words. Whether it was him speaking in the videos, the designated reader speaking in real time, or in versions of the script found at the control room, Paddy Chew’s words exuded power.

For in the end, you could say that was the very reason why he decided to come out publicly as HIV-positive and, later, to perform his life in public. The numerous print articles on the walls, the discussions audiences (then and now) had during and after the show(s) or online, the collective discourse was, in many ways, fuelled by one man who decided it was time to speak up.

With/Out, which runs until Jan 18 at Centre 42, is sold out. For more details, visit http://www.singaporefringe.com/