Theatre Review: Checkpoint Theatre’s Two Songs and a Story Is A Soulful Search For Connection
PUBLISHED August 20th, 2020 05:00 am
For most of us in Singapore, the circuit breaker rewired connection. We lost physical connection, but new ways to touch one another sprung up – be it virtual, artistic, or musical. And in Checkpoint Theatre‘s latest production, all these forms coalesce into a timely, touching meditation on love and loneliness, solitude and solace.
Two Songs and a Story is Checkpoint Theatre’s first digital production – one of the new wave that emerged during the COVID-19 shutdown. Directed by Huzir Sulaiman and Joel Lim, this online series weaves together five mesmerizing monologues by local performers, including singer-songwriter Inch Chua and weish of famed electronic duo .gif. The production runs till 31 August, so set aside a couple of hours and draw strength from these raw slices of soul.
ants chua, at least I have words now
When it comes to talking about love and yearning, romance has a stranglehold – so how do we put words to other, equally intense forms of desire? Blending story and song, writer-composer ants chua searches for ways to express the complexities of friendship – its rivalries, its richness, its unnameable jealousies. Reopening old schoolyard wounds and plucking wistfully at her ukulele, her lyrical walk down memory lane is sure to spark your own nostalgia.
Inch Chua, Super Q
Ugly prejudice against migrant workers takes the spotlight in Super Q. Drawing on her experiences volunteering in dormitories during the COVID-19 outbreak, Inch Chua re-enacts each detail with disturbing vividness: a supervisor’s yelling, a guitar forgotten on a worker’s bed, and the crowning horror – the lock is on the outside of the door. If her uncanny gift for mimicry doesn’t stir you, her rage-fuelled lyrics certainly will.
Jo Tan, A Bit
For many of us millennials, Bit Wah’s life is the stuff of nightmares. An office lady without ambitions or passions, the only joy in her crushingly mundane life comes from watching anime. Award-winning actress Jo Tan plays this sketch to dead-eyed, deadpan perfection, delivering her character’s self-defeatist lines with sympathy and wry humour. It’s a tragicomic peek into a life only half-lived, a future that might so easily sneak up on us when we don’t have the courage to take action in reality.
Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, And Then I Am Light
The hardest people to love are, sometimes, ourselves – too many scars and childhood traumas cloud our ability to see ourselves clearly. In this moving confessional, Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai unpeels the layers of doubt that stifle her self-acceptance, from her experience in abusive relationships to her absent father. Her soaring vocals offer a powerful, much-needed reminder that we can let ourselves “just b[e] human, allowed to dream and cry”.
weish, Be Here, With Me
Trauma, too, echoes and haunts in the final piece of the series: Be Here, With Me. Through her trademark hypnotic loops and layered soundscapes, experimental artist weish brings to life the inner prison of a self trapped in her own head. Hollow clichés like ‘live, laugh, love’ ricochet about a mind that cannot stop circling back to her traumatic moment, making connection with others impossible – just when she needs it most. It’s an almost unbearably raw piece.
Two Songs and a Story runs from 6 to 31 August 2020 on SISTIC Live. Tickets are priced at S$15.
All photos courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre
