Intimate tales through songs and monologues

Intimate tales through songs and monologues

08/10/2020

REVIEW / THEATRE

TWO SONGS AND A STORY

Checkpoint Theatre

Sistic Live/Last Friday

Two Songs And A Story is exactly what it says on the tin. In Checkpoint Theatre’s online series, five artists perform an original monologue and two songs each.

What emerges is an incredibly intimate set of living-room confessionals, with music that ranges from wistful ukulele plucking to haunting electronic loops.

Acoustic sets swell into moving moments.

Inch Chua details her experiences as a sanitation volunteer in migrant worker dormitories during the Covid-19 outbreak, weaving intricate metaphors of isolation, insulation and alienation.

Tiny details – the guitar left on a worker’s bed, stashes of haw flakes and murukku – coalesce into the awful epiphany, when she is cleaning an isolation room, that the lock is outside the door.

The Straits Times Life Theatre Award-winning actress Jo Tan presents a light-hearted sketch of an office lady, Bit Wah, who scrapes by doing the bare minimum. Her mother exhorts her to do more with her life, but she truly derives joy only from watching anime.

Tan, a chameleon of a performer who has been assiduously working her way through the Covid-19 shutdown – most recently with her stellar one-woman show King – is a deadpan delight, even launching into a full-blown anime theme tune.

Two pieces tackle trauma with delicate vulnerability.

Actress Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai alludes to an abusive relationship in her past, while musician weish, who is one half of electronic duo .gif, uses the trademark loops of her music to convey the experience of trauma.

Chatty and wry on the surface, weish peels back layers to reveal something raw and visceral as she probes how trauma induces metamorphosis in a person.

The stripped-down aesthetic of the videos, directed by Checkpoint Theatre joint artistic director Huzir Sulaiman and photographer Joel Lim, belies the amount of behind-the-scenes work required for this level of polish, especially in the thoughtful camerawork.

BOOK IT /TWO SONGS AND A STORY

WHERE: Sistic Live

WHEN: Till Aug 31. Stream is available for 72 hours from the date on the e-ticket

ADMISSION: $15 (excluding booking fee) from sistic.com.sg/events/sltsas0820

INFO: checkpoint-theatre.org

Running like a bass line through the monologues is the notion of presence – being fully present in your life, being present for someone else. The circuit breaker often made physical presence impossible and much of the art created since has wrangled with other ways of being present.

The artists flinch from presence and yearn for it.

“Something about that act of naming my desire for company made me unbearable,” says ants chua, in a bittersweet recollection of the dissolution of a school bus friendship.

The monologue from weish is shot through with the anxiety that she is so raw as to be unbearable. It is heartbreaking.

“Do you actively, truly want to be here?” she asks. “With me?”

These are works created to exist without presence. But they insist, quietly and powerfully, that you be present with them.

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