Taking time out between rehearsals, award-winning director Kok Heng Leun meets UrbanWire at the Drama Centre to talk about Drift.

His latest masterpiece, a collaboration between Singapore’s Drama Box and the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, was commissioned for the Singapore Season 2007 in China and the ongoing Singapore Arts Festival 2008

The Idea Behind Drift

According to Kok, it’s the fast paced world that we live in, and not knowing what we are striving for, that drives the concept behind Drift.

“Drifting is like a state whereby you’re always moving,” he explains. “You’re never really sure where you are. Some are aware, and some are not aware, but it’s still a state.”

He also says that with how fast everything is travelling so fast today, our concept of time becomes warped, which in turn disrupts our sense of space and time.

“What used to take 10 months now only takes about 10 hours. Distance has shortened relatively, and your sense of space and time gets messed up.You constantly feel as if you are moving from place to place and you really don’t know where you are most of the time.”

The Multimedia Experience

There’s an element of interactive media in the play, enhancing the story. Using cameras and special programmes, “live” footage can be captured, treated and screened on stage immediately.

“You’ll find moments whereby you’ll actually see the actor interacting with the images on screen,” the director says, “and some moments are quite magical.”

And while the effects are stunning, it was also crucial that they apply it to the play appropriately to enhance the experience.

Kok asks, “These are technical wizardry. You will look and go ‘wow’, but how do you make it tell a story, so that the audience is attracted by the technical effects, and still be engrossed by technical capability that informs and enhances the storytelling?”

1 actor, multiple roles

Each actor in the play plays multiple characters, and that’s how he perceives the contemporary people to be, like some kind of split personalities.

“We’re schizo (short for schizophrenic) in some way, broken up with many personalities,” Kok explains.

Instead of complete characters, all the characters on stage are fragments, rather than a complete character. However, if you look and think carefully enough, they all seem to belong to a single character.

For instance, Lim Kay Siu plays 2 roles – of Victor, a father, and the other of Gerald, his son.

“Both of them are equally lonely,” Kok says, “Victor tries to deal with his loneliness through singing, through women, through power, through money, but yet he always feels lonely. No one understands him, not even himself.”

He continues, “Look at the character of Gerald, which is quite common among Singaporeans; he’s quite intellectual, and he philosophies a lot, but does he knows what he wants?”

The World Gone Schizophrenic

“In psychology, you realise that a person is constructed in a few ways: how you want others to perceive you, how you see yourself, how you don’t want to see yourself. All these perceptions causes a split of what you are like.”

That’s how Kok wants his characters in his latest few productions to be. He also said that he “tries to construct the world in that way”, referring to his perception of the highly schizophrenic world we now live in,

“What I’m trying to achieve is to show the contemporary state of a person stylistically,” he shares.

The characters in the play lose control slowly, reflecting life.

“Things fall apart because once you keep moving and moving and moving, you lose the centre. Then what happens? Things fall apart.”

And that’s precisely what happens to the characters; they spiral downwards, and slowly lose control. Then everything falls apart.

Future productions

“I’m working on another 3 different productions until the end of the year,” says the director.

The first is a play called Angel-ism. “It looks at what the angels are doing now,” Kok says, “since the world is so messed up.”

The next piece involving senior citizens titled 7 Deadly Sins: How I Kill Mother Earth. It is part of the bigger 3-year Project Mending Sky, which targets environmental issues.

According to him, the final piece is “something like a talkshow.” “So What If I’m Small? looks at the concept of small, its impact on our social, psychological and physical being,” he said.

Drift is showing from Jun 5 to 7, 8pm at the Drama Centre Theatre. Tickets cost $28, $40, $50, and $60 and can be purchased online. The play runs for 100 minutes with no intermission, and is performed in Mandarin with English subtitles.

Photo courtesy of Drama Box.

This article is part of UrbanWire’s 9-week Singapore Arts Festival 2008 special. Get all the latest Arts Fest updates and reviews on UrbanWire.