Image credit: Lau Xuan Kai

Reworked for the digital stage with spatial designer, Kow Xiao Jun; Dreamtalk 話夢, featuring Ranice Tay, and theatre pioneer, Ang Gey Pin, takes us on a journey to discover and embrace our inner worlds.

Tay, an NUS Performing Visual Arts Scholar and National University of Singapore Alumna, had originally partnered with Ang to produce this performance for the NUS Arts Festival in 2020. However, facing cancellation due to the incidence of COVID-19, the show has since been remastered as an online performance and will be screened on 4th and 5th September via Vimeo.

We connected with Ang Gey Pin and Ranice Tay to find out more about their motivations behind Dreamtalk 話夢, and their experience in transforming the performance for an online audience.

What is the “journey” in Dreamtalk?

Ang: To face something about the self. It’s an inward journey to meet your own dream – not just what did I dream last night, or did I wake up from a nightmare, it’s more like the whole life is a dream. We’re trying to see different layers of what dreams mean, not just for us, but for people who are interested in this theme.

What will audiences get from watching Dreamtalk?

Ang: Nowadays, perhaps it’s not so easy to ask someone to […] question what [one’s] life is about. But the dreamer has that curiosity perhaps to remember what you used to dream [about], or if you are still dreaming, and have a new way of looking at many many things, not just life, or the self, but everything. Perhaps to be daring to dream more. And that’s the dreamer, the spirit of dreaming, without fear, without any kind of hesitation, or worries.

How has Dreamtalk developed from its previous iterations?

Tay:  When we started Dreamtalk, I felt like that was the process for me, where everything was new, and everything was full of wonder and magic. And as the process developed, as a performer, slowly there were openings that began to form, where I could not just look at my own journey with this kind of amazement, but there was room for me to welcome another actor or another performer into that world. And we were able to create that world together, without us losing sight of what was going on inside us and inside our imaginations. And it has been a very delicate and very long, very thought out process – where we have now come to a very special place going: We have time in the world to slowly grow and discover and meet our own needs. Where time doesn’t become the limit anymore, what can arise?

Ang: At different phases our friends, people who have watched this work develop gave us feedback, and this was another way of continuous conversation with them. With this version,  we have a third performer, and not in the sense that she plays, she’s invisible, we will never see her in the same physical frame, you will not see a third person there, but she’s there all the time. How? She’s the videographer, our spatial designer, our lighting designer, and she herself has incredible knowledge about movement, space, architecture, dance. I’m curious to see that third person’s perspective, which is giving us that freedom to keep dreaming.

How have songs have influenced Dreamtalk?

Tay:  Songs, texts, images, poetry or ways of moving all affect us differently. And as far as the songs go, some of them will have languages or words that us in this modern day society will not understand because it comes from an ancient language from some of the tribes in Taiwan, some of them will be in our ancestral languages, our dialects. Some of them will be in languages that we know, like English, like Mandarin, but the tune that they carry might sound both familiar and forgotten at the same time, because they come from a source that pervades us when we were little or when we were younger or even now. It’s almost like taking a tune that we love and giving it new life through text.

Catch Dreamtalk 話夢

Dreamtalk 話夢 will premiere internationally on 4th September via Vimeo at 22:59 hr Singapore Time (GMT+8), and be re-performed on 5th September at 14:59 hr and 19:59 hr (SGT, GMT+8). The show will be in English with a few Mandarin dialogues.

Audiences can get tickets to the show at www.sistic.com.sg/events/zldt0920/.

Student and Friends of CFA can sign up at a special price with a promo code. To obtain the code, please drop us a message on Facebook, Instagram or Telegram (@NUSCFA for all).

To sign up for Friends of CFA, please visit: cfa.nus.edu.sg/get-involved/friends-of-cfa/