Akram Khan, Sylvie Guillem, Sacred Monsters photo Tristram Kenton |
Just some of the artists featured in this year’s Festival include ballerina Sylvie Guillem performing with choreographer and dancer Akram Khan in Sacred Monsters, a dazzling duet which initially builds on childhood reflections in which the dancers dialogue with their respective danceforms. Elsewhere on the dance program, Michele Anne De Mey (Charleroi/Danses, Belgium) presents Sinfonia Eroica and Japan’s Saburo Teshigawara and his company, KARAS, perform Bones in Pages and New York’s Bill T Jones and Arnie Zane Company does Blind Date.
Among theatre productions from Singapore and China, Lee Breuer and his company Mabou Mines from New York will bring their DollHouse, a hit at the 2006 Brisbane Festival. Local company, The Finger Players, presents Wong Kar Wai Dreams in which a woman dreams of the famous filmmaker dreaming of her. Checkpoint Theatre will explore “how technology changes everything, except the strength and fragility of the human spirit”, in Cogito.
The music program includes Singapore’s own T’ang Quartet collaborating with Theatre Cryptic from Scotland on a new work, Optical Identity. Composer Tan Dun continues his exploration of organic music that incorporates elements of the natural world in Paper Concerto for Paper Percussion and Orchestra in which papers of different sizes and strengths are variously manipulated as percussion instruments, including paper cymbals, wax paper bags, and a ‘paper thunder tube’ invented by Tan.
There’s also a workshop program where you can wrestle with Meyerhold, Stanislavski and Brecht combined in a master class with Lee Breuer or get really physical with Breuer and Mabou Mines performer Maude Mitchell, or with Janet Wong in a workshop exploring the Bill T Jones’ repertory. Singapore beckons.
Singapore Festival May 25-June 24 www.singaporeartsfestival.com
RealTime issue #78 April-May 2007 pg. 30
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