R.I.P. Teh Cheang Wan

It's his 22nd death anniversary. To the day. Spare a minute of silence for the Honourable Oriental Gentleman, followed by 50 minutes of noise.

Because it's our first performance tonight. Wish us luck! Just had debriefing and some last-min updates regarding Fared's light tubes and Pat's Stephen Chow-esque laugh. Performance in a little more than an hour. Fared is calming us with sensuous massage.

More WTFotography

Come see what it's all about!

Meet Da Interns!

Here's Pav and Bin, the interns from Ka Fai's video art class. Both super-skilled at electronics (watch them soldering wires and twiddling little knobs - so butch), and able to manipulate central controls while Ka Fai stands back and tries to be vaguely directorial.


The other day during debriefing I called them Green Bin and Curry Pav. :P Yeah, I'm immature like that.

Today's workshop is brought to you by...

...the letters W, T and F. Which means that the production is coming along quite nicely.

The concept now seems to involve the characters as satellites orbiting the audience on a white catwalk. Heaven knows if we'll have enough money for the 2-metre styrofoam ball.

Omnis mutandis

The ground's shifted for me in this current edition of VISTA. Having written some conceptual text, I'm now placed as an observer, with the suggestion that I generate further text for print during the rehearsal process itself. No need for me to memorise the babble - I'm going to spend the entire show encased in a perspex coffin.


What's disturbing to me is how much the concept is changing behind my back - apparently, now Joavien is a Queen Android who evolves from being a robot to a human, Fared is an Animal Android who evolves from animal to human to robot, and Pat is going to be a Zen Android who examines our relationship with space by staring at walls.

They say they like my text better this time round - more him, says Ka5. Given me some homework on creating fictions to accompany each character. Me, I'm wary of having ANY text in this show.

Mo' Workshoppin'

We've got nearly the whole team in today. Eng Tat's strapping Joavien into the new electronic motion-detector sensors he's designed; they pick up on her blood pressure while she dances and translate the pulse into pitch. Ka Fai's been testing out his new sound design (Zul is abroad) while Fared and Pat improvise with their bodies - he thinks Pat's gained a new vocabulary of movement, but he's still hoping to translate Fared's inhuman jerks into smoother, more durational postures. Torrance is on his computer doing set design stuff, I guess - me, I'm rankled by the way I'm unable to upload any images, at all. Gmpht!

Pretty pictures and artist bios forthcoming. Woan Wen ain't here yet.

Winter Fashions from kwodrent

Thursday afternoon Eng Tat, the director and the performers went over to our costume designer Grace Tan's home studio. ET took these shots of Joavien in her December couture:

I like to think of this as her church organ/bell costume:


This one is her 80s polkadot costume:

And what the hell, one last view from the posterior:


Grace Tan gives good pleats. Mathematically designed, too!

Workshoppin'

Pat is investigating walking as a means of measuring time with the human body, inspired by Rebecca Solnit's "Wanderlust".


Joavien and Ka Fai are playing with the collision of the body with time-stimulated multimedia.


Fared's doing our programme.


Ooh! And we get to pick our photos for publicity!

VISTA Lab 2.0: Interference

Didja hear? We have a title!

Second installment of workshopping: we've been joined by a new artist: Lim Woan Wen, who'll be taking over from Andy as lighting designer. So far she's been working with Torrance to recycle the gazillion fluorescent light tubes from 120.

Unfortunately I didn't bring my obtrusive ol' camera at this session, so I can't capture everyone's faces while Ka5 shows 'em the mess of conceptual writing I did while they were away. I feel guilty for not being lucid.

Pat's hair has mostly grown back, but Fared will still have to trim his top to become her clone. (Ka5 has a soft spot for clones, I think.)

VISTA Lab 2.0

First workshop in preparation for the next installment of VISTA! Joining us to collaborate (i.e. not involved directly in the previous production) are engineer Khoo Eng Tat, fashion designer Grace Ng and traditional Chinese musician Lim Hock Siang.

We had a discussion...


A show and tell...


An improv...


...and a post-mortem. :D