Asian Books
Blog is based in Singapore. During the Singapore Writers Festival, (SWF) which
is on now, and runs through until November 8, daily posts will offer a flavour
of events in the Lion City.
So: Day 8...
In an exciting
development both for SWF, and for night owls, last night saw Checkpoint Theatre present an all-night party of words and ideas. What I Love About You Is Your Attitude Problem featured 24 new
and specially commissioned pieces from Singapore - drama, poetry, songs, and
prose - over 12 hours, from dusk, until dawn this morning, with supper and breakfast
thrown in. There were also musical performances and visual arts exhibitions – even a cookery demonstration from Brendon Fernandez, who performed a monologue about different attitudes towards Christmas food.
What I Love About You Is Your Attitude Problem
was curated by playwright, and co-founder and Joint Artistic Director of
Checkpoint Theatre, Huzir Sulaiman. Before the event, he granted me a quick Q
& A.
What I Love About You Is Your attitude Problem is a great idea, where did it
come from?
Checkpoint Theatre was asked to propose an
overnight event to complement the traditional Singapore Writers Festival
programming. Building on Checkpoint Theatre's focus on developing and producing
original Singapore writing, I was very interested in the idea of commissioning
24 new texts in performance: the words lifted off the page, interacting with
live audiences. This allowed me to explore artists who work across different
art forms and to curate a wide variety of events: play readings, monologues,
poetry, songs, performance art, visual art, film, electronica, hip-hop,
lectures, drag performance...it's an excitingly diverse line-up.
How did you
co-ordinate so many different performers?
I wanted artists who were interested in
doing something different, or in pushing their existing artistic practice to a
new direction. So I had a wonderful series of conversations with a mixture of some
artists I'd worked with before; some artists I'd always wanted to work with;
and some artists who were strongly recommended by other artists. The Checkpoint
Theatre team all pitched in with ideas and I wound up with a great list of
people to talk to. I was really happy to see how this quite diverse group of
practitioners were all uniformly excited by the idea of doing something
different for What I Love About You Is
Your Attitude Problem. There is a real sense of contributing to an intense,
exciting, marathon event that will bring out the best in new material.
What are you
personally most looking forward to about the evening, and why?
Because each of the events arose after an
individual conversation with the artist, I can honestly say that I am equally
excited about all of them. With the play readings and monologues, there's a
solid bedrock of the development and performance of new Singapore writing,
which is the cornerstone of Checkpoint Theatre's work. But there's also some
really cool and innovative new stuff, including:
·
The
electronica duo .gif are doing a
lyric writing workshop early in the night, and they'll be incorporating that
material into their set later in the night, which will allow audience members
to jam along with them by placing instruments among the crowd;
·
Dr.
Farish Noor is giving a 2am lecture on the fluidity of gender identity in
classical Malay texts;
·
There'll
be a 12-hour live reading of the entirety of Meira Chand's novel A Different Sky, while acclaimed artist
Jimmy Ong makes work at the same time.
Actually that's just the tip of the
iceberg; I really am super excited about everything!
