This was the longest solo performance I ever did, a monologue of one hour and fifteen minutes. In my opinion, I developed a lot through performing this piece, which I had my friend, Kelvin Tan to thank for. The circumstances surrounding the creation of the play was after I had performed two of his plays, we were looking for something to do and he wrote this for me to perform. It requires a maniacal energy and commitiment to acting that I'm not sure I can muster today. I spent months preparing for it and through the process learnt much about the craft of acting. The only other person with me was Tan Jia Liang, who operated the lights for me.

 

The monologue centers around the life of Ishamel who is an artist, conman, and filmmaker.  Kelvin had never dealt with the issues of art making in such on such a wide breath as before this play.  I would attempt to deal with some of these issues in Kundabuffer. 

 

I staged this play twice, the first time at the Chinese Opera Institute in 1999 and the second time at the Substation in 2002. I still remember at the first performance I blanked out in the middle of the performance and had to literally walk out to look at the script.  Someone in the audience later told me later that they thought I went out for a shit! 

 

The rehearsal process was long and lonely the first time round, and the studio at the Institute was hardly the best of places to project one's voice, the acoustics not being designed for such purposes.  It tended to get creepy at night too, being a pre-war building.  It didn't help that one of the actresses who worked with me before claimed she could see spirits and saw them aplenty at the Institute.  

 

It helped that I was part-timing at the Institute at that time so I just had to stay back on some days and rehearse.  I was also allowed to use the studio on days that I wasn't working.

 

The work itself drew inspiration from the people around Kelvin, and at the same time, the deep questions he wanted to pose with regards to existence, and the meaning of doing art in the modern world, especially in such a culturally schziphrenic society such as Singapore.  The act of looking into the void had always fasicinated Kelvin, and I think in one of our conversations he likened himself to the Norweigian playwright Henrik Ibsen who he said, looked into the void but never stepped into it. 

 

The void here refers to the darker facets of everyday existence that one might be pushed to push oneself into one day.  The prefix 'a' refered to the act of avoiding that most of us are familiar with.  Avoidance of the truth, avoidance of what might discomfort us.  The protagonist made the act of avoidance an art and the central fact of his life, and in fact used it in the artworks he made.  This was in fact as much of a commentary on the state of contemporary art as anything else.

 

Hence the void could be seen as a result of the act of avoiding. 

 

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