migratory birds

So some people are playing for the Spotlight Singapore in Moscow thing, and my weekend nights were burnt for 4 hour rehearsals in which we played maybe for about one hour and spent the rest waiting around watching the play and eating Polar puffs (and getting fat).

But the play is interesting. It features malay kampung boys, ice kachang, a peranakan woman, russian doll lookalike, random people in business suits skating around on airport trolleys. Some musicians are wheeled in on airport trolleys. Snow is transacted, of the powder form, not the slush or hailstones. We have our own snow in the form of ice kachang - the ever wannabes.

Migratory birds continue to fly, no matter what philosophers are born amongst them - is the play's mantra.

A violinist said, "This play is about cultural essentialism", with considerable certainty, because of the depiction of cultural stereotypes - what we consider Uniquely Singapore. But I thought there was slightly more to it than that.

Singapore is a country of migrants, and we jetset; the wanderlust remains insatiated, or maybe it's because there is nothing to hold us to this place. Even if philosophers are born, they might not be appreciated by the Powers that Be, especially if they do not fancy sitting in Parliament in white. We hold on to particular cultural icons for purely symbolic purposes because we need representation, because those who represent us are washed out white, because we have no identity.

On stage, the majority of the actors are Malays, the Chinese plays a Russian, and another plays the Peranakan, also known as 'Others'. Putting minorities on stage gives them a voice, an importance, but this importance is staged, ultimately unreal, and we ship over a fiction to Moscow.

I haven't watched a play in ages. Ivan Heng's direction is great, he gives significance to what might otherwise be something even emptier, a shallow representation of the lame cultural symbols of what we think of as Uniquely Singapore. But watching it two times in a row, it left an unpleasant taste of hollowness. The ending was one of hope, no doubt, but what the entire thing reflected was a vapid reality straining at the edges to hold itself together.