Er, why didn’t anybody inform me it was National Storytelling Month? The dust has barely settled after last week’s “epic” Epic Poem of Malaya by spell#7 when here comes TheatreWorks with its own “epic” storytelling session The Red Ballerina. Like Epic Poem, tonight’s performance – a work-in-progress – was also long. Nearly two hours, I think. Considering that I was running on low batt before the show even started, it was still the shortest two hours I’ve ever had watching something that didn’t involve two armies converging on a battlefield or someone screaming “Freedom!” or guns. Or multiple sex scenes. Again, I digress too much. To think it was basically Lim Kay Tong reading/performing excerpts from the late Kuo Pao Kun’s plays and letters and Karen Tan reading/performing snippets of archival interviews with Pao Kun’s wife Goh Lay Kuan to an audience seated in a circle. A show where director Ong Keng Sen generously let the stories weave their magic. (Consumer advisory: unapologetic positive comments below.) Yep, need another proof of the sheer power of storytelling? Go and watch The Red Ballerina either tomorrow or Saturday night. (Psst, it’s also free! You just have to register! And hopefully they’ll have seats for you!). I think many people tonight approached this piece in different ways. After all, you are talking about the royal couple of Singapore’s performance arts scene (and she was there, too). Some may have known them both as friends or peers or working partners. Mine was probably the least personal, approaching it with the detached curiosity of a slightly-informed outsider. And yet there I was listening and listening and listening to the commanding voices of Tan and Lim as they alternated in telling their respective “personas’” stories in a performance that was part-history lesson, part-theatre history lesson, part-character profile and part-theatre performance. With very little baggage or preconceived notions or opinions, I was surprised at how much I was completely drawn to this person named Goh Lay Kuan as her (condensed, open-ended) life story was told. We get a hint (when do we ever get anything more than that, anyway, even in real life?) of who she is as we hear of her experiences and philosophies as enlightened pedagogue, passionate dancer and choreographer, and object of state persecution. Kuo Pao Kun, too. But as Keng Sen shockingly mentioned before the show, there are no archived interviews with Pao Kun as was done with Lay Kuan. (Talk about major oversight, man!) We have instead, what we’ve always had – his writings. As, in this case, brought to life by the amazing Kay Tong. While I don’t think there’s a consistent one-to-one linear correspondence between the wife’s real, verbatim testimonies and the husband’s creative output (In a kind of “Aahhh, so that's why…” way), there is a sense of a kind of dialogue between the two (stage-wise they’re on opposite ends and don’t really interact). Work-in-progress or not, The Red Ballerina is worth catching. It is, after all, National Storytelling Month. Right? Right?