by Lydia Tan
Back for its second year, Textures 2019 — held over the weekend of March 8–10 — celebrates Singapore literature with the theme, Love and Loss (and some things in between). Co-commissioned by The Arts House and #BuySinglit, and supported by the National Arts Council, Textures 2019 highlights how words express and interpret a spectrum of emotions.
Exhibits
The four-day event featured a series of exhibits that combined both poetry and art/design elements. One of the exhibitions, My Grandfather’s Road – Rabbit Heart, Dragon Soul, was based off Neo Kim Seng’s multi-disciplinary project of stories called My Grandfather’s Road about the artist growing up at Neo Pee Teck Lane, a road named after the artist’s grandfather. It is a project that is constantly being updated as new stories and information surface and can be adapted to suit different performance styles.
This multi-media exhibition showcased old pictures, documents, artefacts and video documentation of past stage iterations of the stories that visitors could watch on old-school TV box sets with headphones. Held at The Chamber of The Art House, it definitely wasn’t your typical stark, white-walled exhibition room – the old, weathered feel of the old Chamber itself made it feel like you were transported to the past and added a whole other experiential dimension to the exhibit.
Over the weekend, there were also readings of the English and Cantonese monologues developed from Kim Seng’s book and a music listening session of music from the artist’s childhood to when he moved out of his grandfather’s road in 1973.
There will also be two theatre performances related to this exhibition, in both English and Cantonese versions, happening at The Esplanade from 18-21 April. More details on the performances and ticketing can be found here.
Performances
Other than visual art and design, Singapore literature was also reinterpreted through performance art. One such performance, Performing Malay Sketches is a play-within-a-play by local theatre company The Second Breakfast Company (2BCo), featuring local poet and writer Alfian Sa’at’s anthology of short stories, Malay Sketches. The play explores the question of “what really makes a Malay?”, and how the Malay identity is represented and perceived in Singapore.
The play’s story centres around a struggling small theatre company working on a production featuring enactments of Sa’at’s sketches from the book, with the intent of being the representative portrayal of the Malay community. When one of the actors suddenly walks out on the production, the team is faced with the dilemma of whether to make do with the two remaining actors or to accept the new Chinese actor the producer has brought in and forsake their vision of having an all-Malay cast and crew for the play.
In a mix of comedy and social commentary, the play takes you from laughing over the jokes made by different Malay archetypes portrayed in the characters, to being reflective over what really defines “Malay-ness” and how to achieve that middle line between being too stereotypical and too universal. The play has a nice balance of lighthearted funny moments and serious, tense scenes that really bring out the emotional side of the actors so every second kept you interested and involved in the story.
Overall, Textures 2019 was a great opportunity to experience the art of Singapore literature interpreted in different art forms. The true beauty of local literature is that it really embodies elements of the Singapore culture, history and lifestyle so there is that familiarity and relatability that you don’t get from other forms of literature. Textures 2019 definitely captured that, featuring literary works in different languages that fully encapsulates the multiracialism and diversity of Singapore’s poets and writers.
