Quiet, hard-hitting chamber piece

HOW does one take an issue as horrific as corrective rape and/or homophobic murder and craft a performance piece out of it? While I Stand Corrected was loaded with heavy issues, South African dancer/performer Mamela Nyamza and British writer/performer Mojisola Adebayo's collaborative performance last week focused not on the acts of violence, but on the emotions related to it.

Told like a story, but mainly with movement, text, and drama, I Stand Corrected sent out the right vibes - to draw one into the tale of a bride seemingly stood up at the altar while in actual fact, her lesbian partner had been raped and murdered.

A missing lesbian bride is firstly a case that the local police don't want to investigate, coming up with reasons indicating that they don't see it as a crime.

While Adebayo dramatised the tale and also narrated it, besides delivering a poetic rap about it, Nyamza was in the background, performing her own narrative, but using only movement.

The effect was a two-layered story unfolding on stage. In the front, we had Adebayo's tale, told in monologue with simmering emotions, while in the background, Nyamza gets "reborn" - wriggling her way out of the trashcan she's dumped in.

The tale ends with her revisiting Adebayo when the latter returns to Britain. Whether it's as a ghostly form or a reincarnation, or if it's happening only in Adebayo's character's mind, it's not clear.

But that dark ambiguity running through the piece, the veiled violence against lesbians and women, gave gravitas to the piece, lightened with some sparks of humour.

If the first piece in the double bill was an upfront rant about perceptions and actions against gay marriage in South Africa, the second one was a more meditative piece of performance art by Nyamza and her teenaged son.

In it, the colour red - red cloth as the centrepiece, red clothes in the laundry - gave this piece its sense of immediacy. It began slowly, with just the music first, and then only Nyamza's humming of the same tune as she began to hang up clothes, one by one, on a laundry line.

She did this topless (with her back to the audience), and on her toes in ballet shoes, while the comedic sound effect and look was provided by the clothes pegs attached to her skirt. After the laundry line was all pinned with clothes, she put on a t-shirt and slowly wrapped herself with the red cloth covering a playpen in the middle of the stage.

The piece was also interjected with bouts of simply joyful South African dance and moves, and one awkward moment when Nyamza asked for matches, but not a lighter, from the audience. But this being high-tech Singapore, no one had any! For a performance piece alluding to Nyamza's role as a dancer and mother, the wrought tension and sacrifices, but also joy and rewards, were felt, rather than spoken.

The main quibble with the double bill was the one-hour intermission between the two pieces - where one is left wondering what to do to fill up that time. Kudos to the audience on Thursday night, as the majority returned for the second half, and also gave the performers a warm and hearty applause.

A quiet yet hard-hitting chamber piece, Double Bill: I Stand Corrected/Hatched, threw up the more thoughtful rather than spectacular moments in theatre.