Redefining In Situ: Art + Live Reflecting New Realities

When we first spoke with art therapist and movement artist Vincent Yong about transforming the ongoing A Somatic Series programme into a 30-minute offsite session, an air of uncertainty lingered around our discussions. How do we convert a 90-minute participatory programme that relies on movement, interaction between participants, and engagement with the Gallery’s spaces, into a half-hour online event?

To start, we determined that A Somatic Series had to be livestreamed. This allowed the programme, centred so heavily on being in the moment and sitting with physical experiences, to engage with the audience in a manner authentic to the Vincent and the participants themselves. We chose Facebook as a platform so that we could reach a wider audience—individuals with and without accounts. Preparing for the actual livestream was a lesson in live online broadcasting. The Programmes team created a private Facebook group on which we conducted tests and rehearsals. Each rehearsal session left us giddy with new findings and feeling more prepared (and technologically adept) for the livestream.

Vincent was the first artist to participate in this new initiative. The launch of A Somatic Series online coincided with Mother’s Day weekend. It turned out to be the perfect context for the programme—motherhood is a topic dear to Vincent’s heart. The nurture and care he relayed through his interpretation of Ng Eng Teng’s Mother and Child, currently positioned along St Andrew’s Road outside National Gallery Singapore, captivated the audience. Joining the audience as a participant in his livestream, his instructions were just what I needed in that moment: Reach your hand up, move around at the comfort of your own home, shake your hands out, feel what’s happening in your body…

As with anything involving technology, we expected that not everything would run smoothly, and indeed we faced a technical glitch during the second session. While the livestream was quickly restored, Vincent shared how stressed he was trying to get a handle on the livestream in a chat after the session. Yet, neither I nor most of the audience sensed his dismay. In fact, he was able to draw on this experience during the session, acknowledging this glitch to the audience and relating his reaction to reflect on how we might choose to respond to the barrage of unfamiliar experiences and challenges during this global health crisis. He reconciled our current conditions with the means to seek some form of acceptance, or even closure, through this unexpected glitch, demonstrating what Art + Live aims to bring to our audiences.

Daryl Yam on An Ekphrastic Series

An Ekphrastic Series is a new, recurring series of literary programmes that invites a young and refreshing slate of local writers and poets to respond to artworks in the Gallery. The idea first came about when we saw how A Somatic Series with Vincent Yong cultivated a real sense of community amongst returning participants, inspiring them to create their own art-inspired somatic-based movements; we then witnessed the profound work of poet Pooja Nansi in her lecture/performance for the Lim Cheng Hoe exhibition, one of our most highly-rated programmes. She spoke to attendees about the commonalities between her life and practice and those of Lim Cheng Hoe, and how certain paintings of his even reflected photographs that she’d taken while abroad in London.

We appointed the literary charity Sing Lit Station to assist the Gallery in identifying and managing this new slate of writers, resulting in an exciting roster that includes the playwright Nabilah Said; the writer, photographer and Beyond the Hijab editor Diana Rahim; the husband-and-wife duo A.J. Low; the spoken word artist and environmentalist Cheyenne Alexandria Phillips; and the lawyer, poet and advocate Amanda Chong. These writers would be tasked to respond to five different exhibitions at the Gallery in the form of a personal tour that would combine their reflections on the art with reflections on their own literary practice as they took visitors through the show. These tours would then culminate in an in-gallery creative writing workshop that would allow our visitors to generate their own ekphrastic responses in the form of poems, flash-fiction pieces, and so on.

It was a great concept, and one that we would have loved to see carry out in its fullest form. But we had to adapt when news of the pandemic gradually affected the programmers’ ability to do our jobs. We first considered letting the programme run exactly as it had been conceptualised, but with social distancing measures in place such as limiting the number of participants. We then considered live-streaming our writers directly from the Gallery, although soon that idea had to be scrapped too, as the Gallery itself had to be closed. Eventually we settled on re-formatting An Ekphrastic Series as a series of pre-recorded clips under the Art + Live umbrella, allowing us to bring the Gallery to audiences anywhere. We even got colleagues involved as participants, writing poems for the first time for our first episode, featuring Diana Rahim in response to Chua Soo Bin: Truths & Legends.

While I loved all the poems, my favourite perhaps would have to be one by Vanessa Koh, a colleague from the Events Management team. I would even venture that Vanessa’s poem reflects how we at the Gallery also feel as we adapt to the new norm, devising new ways to bring art to our audiences. Here is her poem, titled Starting Afresh:

Nervous and anxious

Is what I feel as I begin painting

Beginning with sketches,

I felt like I was at an edge

After all, it has been 4 decades

My skills would have faded

I’m slowly picking up myself once again

While not being constrained

Slowly, head, shoulders, knees, and toes:

Finally, I am able to paint what I desire

Sin Hui Lim on Resonates With

Resonates With has developed over the past four years, from performances every weekend to a monthly theme-based music programme that sees invited musicians respond to the Gallery’s exhibitions. In late 2019, we shifted our focus to working with local music institutions, namely LASALLE College of the Arts, School of the Arts (SOTA), Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music and the Composers Society of Singapore. Our objective is to offer the space for young and talented musicians to perform their wide-ranging repertoire of classical to contemporary music, to develop and present their original music compositions.

These five institutional partners were each tasked to develop performances for a 3-month period between May 2020 to July 2021, engaging a new musician every month. Little did we know how tricky these arrangements would become. With the implementation of safe distancing measures, we were unable to continue performances in the Gallery, thus taking performances online instead. Where this was not possible, the programme was postponed.

With this in mind, we reworked the entire production schedule. For programmes that could move online, we developed a script to outline the flow of the video. Using this, the musicians filmed their own performances, then sent the clips to for editing. Different than the arrangements required for the Somatic and Ekphrastic Series, we had to coordinate artist, the filmmaker appointed to record these sessions and our team, as these performances were sometimes performed in two different homes.

Flautist Roberto Alvarez and classical guitarist Hunter Mah kicked off Resonates with with a lively performance of Celso Machado’s Musiques populares brésiliennes, a work inspired by food in the markets of Brazil, before moving into Laments under the sea (Lamentos bajo del mar) by Salvador Espasa and finishing with Dos aires candomberos by Máximo Diego Pujol. Every piece of music in the half-hour performance was selected in response to works from the DBS Singapore Galleries and UOB Southeast Asia Galleries. Appropriately selected for viewers stuck at home on a Saturday afternoon, Roberto and Hunter traversed bustling Brazilian markets, the sea and beyond. As the comments and viewership indicated, their performance was well-received, perhaps hinting at a desire to find escape through music.

Despite the hair-pulling moments the team endured to produce this programme, the knowledge that someone at home might find some joy and maybe relief, even if only momentary, in the art of Resonates with makes it worth the effort.