I recently responded to two productions at this year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts:
The first was a response to Tadashi Suzuki’s Dionysus (an adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy The Bacchae) – where I’ve attempted to bring together various threads around portrayals and constructions of feminine “madness” with Agave, Pentheus’ mother, as a sort of anchoring point. Arts Equator managing editor Kathy Rowland (our boss lady!) wrote a review of the work last year taking on its multilingualism and the intercultural collaboration, so this is a different approach. Read it here.
Then in a feverish fit of inspiration, I wrote about Checkpoint Theatre’s Displaced Persons’ Welcome Dinner after sitting with it for the past couple weeks. It’s a play that grapples with the enormity of humanitarian work but also the institutions that hold us hostage. (It was a polarising play; I was enthralled by it.) It’s up on The Intimate Critic, where my responses tend to be more personal and informal, where I’m savouring an encounter with performance, luxuriating in it. Read it here.