wisps of smoke in the dark

After a while, after getting acculturated to the whole theatre business again, it doesn't seem that bad to be spending loads of time hanging around backstage, waiting for the lights the mics the spaces to be sorted out. Victoria Theatre is quite a cozy place, the backstage is spacious and dark enough to promote unrestrained self disclosure, because when we can't see the other we picture them in our mind, our ideal of who the other person is.

Esplanade's backstage is too bright, too much white light, cold, sterile even, the floor squeaks. Here the stairs are narrow and spiralling, the floorboards are so scratched I derive no satisfaction from poking a hole in the floor. We walk two storeys up, on stairs that have spaces that your foot might slip in if you are not careful. But even if you tread slowly, the upper levels are colder, quieter, dark and airless. You avoid the non-lit areas, because they seem too foreign, like a heavy sigh of a country burdened with history.

You turn, at strange corners that lead to new places. One narrow door leads out to the walkway that can only accomodate one person, balanced five feet off the ground. The place where the production people sit and smoke and wait.

Smoke. It still has the strange magnetic effect on me. The throbbing headache that refused to go away vanished in a puff, when I went out and partook of the communal smoking sessions, those that happen once every hour, at least, much to my relief. I don't smoke, I just passive smoke, and the knot in my head unravels. The day I cut my hair I was wandering around at Holland Village and was suddenly taken by the compulsion to sit by the road and light up.

It is the most unholy thing to blog about, but it came so unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, that I had to remember it, (for future psychoanalysis purposes... or not.) I told most people I met on that day about the strange urge, in the hope that it would go away after people dismissed it as ludicrous. But it would not.

And it's still there. Now that daily I am enveloped in a cloud of second hand smoke that stains my clothes and hair, it feels like I'm home. If I were one to believe in past lives, I would attribute this to having been a chain smoker previously.

But I don't.

Today a line in the play popped up in my face, during the blank moments where there's just acting and no music. Neo Swee Lin says, "...why cranes fly, how children are born, why there are stars in the sky..." This, the play says, is what lends meaning to life, without which life would be "mere futile nonsense". That is true, especially if one believes in some Higher Being involved in nature and creation. But for Singapore, (this being Spotlight Singapore), whose gods are economic development and pragmatism, the lines though meaningful, rang false.

But nations are said to be imagined communities, so maybe it isn't so bad that the play is based on what some individuals imagine the country to be.