The Esplanade’s three-day love-in began tonight and there’s definitely still space in their cozy, prickly venue should you care to drop by over the weekend, which this RAT is encouraging you to do. Lots of free stuff happening all around. Tonight the Waterfront had the, ahem, Durian Awards—an Oscars-type variety show hosted by Najip Ali complete with, ahem again, durian trophies given away past Esplanade performers. Over at the Jendela, they unveiled the Tribute.sg exhibition (with accompanying website) paying homage to some movers and shakers of the local art scene—artists, arts managers, bureaucrats. Worth spending some time spotting familiar faces, (re)discovering others, and digesting some quotable quotes. The National Broadway Company also opened at the Theatre while the indie music scene held court at the Recital Studio with the concert Sound>tracks. Yours truly, however, was at the Theatre Studio, catching the totally delightful SideBySide showcase of works by independent choreographers—that ended with the unforgettable moment where a certain dude, whom followers of the Singapore Biennale and the Singapore Arts Festival may recognise as Low Kee Hong, egged audiences to cuss their hearts out.

Low Kee Hong in Daniel Kok's The Cheerleader. Photo courtesy of The Esplanade.

The one-night-only show proved to be a promising start to my mini-marathon of the art centre’s ticketed shows. Four bite-sized pieces paying tribute to a variety of things—and revealing just how inventive our local dance scene can get.

Tammy L Wong's Andante. Photo courtesy of The Esplanade.

Opener Andante by Tammy L Wong saw her reinterpreting war heroine Elizabeth Choy’s incarceration during WWII, based apparently on a chapter of the choreographer-turned-author’s next book. It’s a simple vignette that nonetheless conveyed a tender, delicate sense of foreboding by way of textual accounts, song lyrics (the Christian hymn The Old Rugged Cross, the Beatles’ Blackbird), and choreography based on these (Wong crafts some based on Choy’s account of communicating via hand movements). A ticking metronome signifying time echoes the sinister footsteps of her captors as much as it does the simple rhythm underlying the Beatles’ poignant song about freedom. The solitary bed, meanwhile, underscores the piece’s yearning for innocence lost even as it does a sense of intimacy as well as a hint of sensuality—which actually plays second fiddle to Wong herself with her fragile-looking frame and eternally youthful looks. The melancholic Andante, with its getting-under-the-skin-via-art, was definitely the most straightforward work of the lot—from then on, SideBySide just got more and more interesting.

Ming Poon and Scarlet Yu's The Infinitesimal Distance Between Two Bodies. Photo courtesy of The Esplanade. Ming Poon and Scarlet Yu’s The Infinitesimal Distance Between Two Bodies wittily flips the programme—a duet that goes behind the scenes of a hypothetical performance. Here is a tribute to their other selves—the pre-show self—as it’s premise is essentially of the two “warming up” in a completely realistic manner, either separately or occasionally synchronised (in the most deadpan, nonchalant manner—a sign of things to come for the night, we later find out), interrupted by a phone call here, a water break there. When they dance in tandem, it is not always smooth or perfect, but the palpable connection between the two goes beyond the creation of patterns of lines or shapes and highlights the undefinable link between two bodies (er, the “X” factor?”) The duet dynamics all happen within the larger contrast between the supposed stage performance and the backstage one. The grandiose Bethoven’s Symphony No. 3 provides the background music to both the quirky proceedings and the supposed actual show—which is always at the back of our minds (in great part due to the subtle lighting of Lim Woan Wen seeping through the backdoors). It’s this double take that keeps you on your toes. You know what’s unfolding in front of you is theoretically a prelude and yet you are drawn to what you really aren’t supposed to see. At this point, it’s all still pretty “normal”. And then Joavien Ng comes along in zentai.

Joavien Ng's My Superhero. Photo courtesy of The Esplanade. My Superhero is tribute-but-not, as Ng cosplays as two of her childhood inspirations—Wonder Woman and Superman. Awkward, makeshift dressing and awkward posing on a makeshift plinth in her skintight white bodysuit, Ng self-reflexively pokes fun at the absurdity (and literal impossibility) of the heroic pose as much as she does her own trust of these fictitious heroes that she attempts (and once attempted) to become. If there’s one realisation I had watching this, it’s that one of Ng’s strengths is really her ability to tell the simplest anecdotes and give it depth: from her quirky tale of spinning ala Wonder Woman (complete with kitschy background visual effects) to a poignant one regarding the painful act of abandoning her beloved pet dog. My Superhero looks messy and even borderline slapstick, but here’s the thing—it’s not simply WTF hilarious or absurd. When, doing her Superman pose, she proceeds to, erm, toot out the movie theme, the comedy is mixed with your recollection of Ng’s earlier tale about the dog waiting for its master’s call. Superman’s Theme is that call the dog never heard. It’s quite sad actually—and here, Ng has created an emotionally complex piece that is really both funny and pessimistic at the same time.

Daniel Kok's The Cheerleader (feat. Low Kee Hong). Photo courtesy of The Esplanade. Which brings us to the night’s positively hysterical closer: Daniel Kok’s The Cheerleader. Kok’s piece is a tailormade tribute to/profile of Low Kee Hong who’s performing himself—while simultaneously encouraging everyone to pay tribute to, erm, him. Despite the out of this world image of Low we have here—ridiculously dressed in a fatsuit tracksuit (with intestines sticking out) and waving pompoms—this is perhaps the truest and most honest of all four “tributes”. It’s not about anyone else (imaginary/fictional/historical in Wong’s and Ng’s) and neither does it fall back on any sort of mirror-layering (Poon/Yu’s). This is Low exaggerated as a cartoon jester, but Low nonetheless. Of course, one can settle, as with Ng’s piece, on the pure slapstick entertainment of it—but the thing is, the slapstick works because of the knowledge of Low as public figure (the Biennale, the Arts Fest, the National Arts Council) which, these days, has overshadowed his roots as a performer/director (he says it's his first performance in 10 years and the first at the Esplanade). So in this autobiographical piece shoved into a distorting House of Mirrors as conceptualised by Kok, our performer isn’t just enacting the idiocy of cheerleading but also his very performance as bureaucrat cheerleader and the inherent tensions of this role. This RAT, for one, can’t help but read into offhand comments like “Very cheem, I don’t understand” a sarcasm that hints at the anti-intellectualism that continuously hounded the Arts Festival, for example. And in one segment talking about “community”, what does one make of his deadpan cheers of “Wake up, bitches! Woohoo!”? (Admittedly, one thing that stumped me was that moment where he orders the audience to “Look at my hand” repeatedly. Still, an awesome moment, methinks.) I initially thought of The Cheerleader as a deliciously sarcastic work—but then again, who was it really poking fun at? The joke is on who? And here’s where Kok’s deceptively simple conceit comes out. If you think about it, a cheerleader is equal parts an influential shaper of opinion and a clown—and the willingness of a public/audience’s participation in the “game” has an integral role to play in a cheerleader’s efficacy. So whether one actually follows Low as he urges everyone to chant “KNNBCCB Hong Gan!” or laughs at his “antics” makes all the difference in shaping the entire performance. What do we make of it when, as was the case during the show, when one does both? Wink. Too bad SideBySide is only a one-off thing. I hope the Esplanade will consider doing more of these combined short pieces programmes in other festivals. And I must say, this is probably the first time I've seen this many Singapore dance pieces with a refreshing sense of humour at one go. Woot. (For more of the Esplanade's 10th anniversary celebration events, go here.)