MDA contacted Theatreworks and asked for us to remove one line of my Confucian timeline poem/monologue from our "Impetus" performance. (Ka Fai says he's never had any problems before with his performances... but this time the MDA specifically requested a copy of the script. Am I officially known as a troublemaker already? :/ Mixed feelings.)
The line cryptically referenced the 1982 death of Wong Ming Yang - Lee Hsien Loong's first wife, who had a fatal heart attack 3 weeks after giving birth to their albino son Lee Yi Peng.
Have to change the line to maintain its rhythmic value. Some loss of semiotic impact inevitable. Sigh.
-Yish.
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3 comments:
Guess it wasn't uhh... cryptic enough.
Hi Yish,
Would be great if you can provide more details on what was censored? I'm sure everyone in the community would be interested to know. ^_*
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The first performance went quite well!
Interestingly, I've found out from Ka Fai since then that the reason for the objection was that the line was seen as "cruel" rather than as politically sensitive. The person who made that comment was a woman, too, so maybe she felt she identified with the tragedy.
The entire verse ran as follows:
"1982.
I saw eight Confucian scholars
on a school trip to Sentosa.
They rose from the musical fountain,
breaking the water like Ang Peng Siong.
On the monorail, they praised the metric system, reading Cosmo
while a woman's heart attacked her body
three weeks after birthing an albino."
The last three lines were changed to reference the beginning of the Courtesy Campaign:
"while an infant lion spoke of courtesy
and bared its teeth."
I strongly believe that the line should have remained intact - the line doesn't mock the death, it uses it to punctuate the highfalutin gestures of before - and if all casual references to women's tragic deaths are cruel, does that mean that all Princess Di references are off-limits? But this revelation does cast another light on the supposed political paranoia of our censors. References to Devan Nair, JBJ and the corpse of Benjamin Sheares were left intact.
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