Performed in Bahasa Indonesia, Japanese, Mandarin and Korean with English subtitles. Fifteen years after 1997, Ong Keng Sen revisits his Lear to create a new performance, distilled and visionary, entering one man’s mind, a past king and his memories: Lear Dreaming. Read More
3.14 Company’s Wayang Tempest was a 2001 adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest directed by Roger Jenkins which incorporated Wayang Kulit (shadow puppets), Javanese dance, and Gamelan music. Read More
Chicken Rice War (Jiyuan qiaohe, dir. Chee Kong Cheah [CheeK], Mediacorp Raintree Pictures, 2000).
Supported by the Singapore Film Commission (SFC) and shot as a mockumentary with MTV-style rapid cuts and whooshing camerawork, the comedy film is Mediacorp Raintree Picture’s first movie primarily in English and the first feature-length work by CheeK, editorial director of MTV Asia (headquartered in Singapore). It frames and trivializes the feud in Romeo and Juliet by reducing the generations-old dispute between the aristocratic Montague and Capulet families, leading to bloodshed, to the rivalry between the Wong and Chan families, who own competing chicken rice stalls next to each other in a hawker center (semi-open-air food court) in the prosperous city-state.
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In March 2000, Ong Keng Sen directed Desdemona in which – actors, musicians, designers, video/installation artists – from India, Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia, and Singapore worked together on-stage. Desdemona premiered at the Adelaide Festival and then went on to the Munich Dance Festival and the Singapore and Hamburg Festivals. This production toured Japan in 2001.
