A very happy Chinese New Year to all the Chinese people out there. Yes, it’s the first day of the New Year and I pray that everyone will enjoy the mingling and collection of red packets for those who are unmarried.
Looking at Andrew’s blog, I felt really bad paying a sum of money and not keeping this blog alive. Sigh! But I shall blog about my performance “Angels and Flies” in Express Vol. 01. It was performed twice for this project and interestingly, both performances (though intended to work in identical fashion) took a different turn. I guess it was because the first show was (grossly) filled with people that I know and similarly, they know me. I felt awkward performing myself to them and I could feel the same awkwardness from them. Nevertheless, they tried to “play” along, something which I didn’t really appreciate. I know it sounds rather crude but seriously, I didn’t enjoy every single second of it.
Andrew commented that I must have invested a lot of emotional energy into the performance that night. Honestly, I did. At one point, I questioned myself on why was I doing this, what went wrong, how can I salvage the whole performance etc. I think I gave up because I was really too tired trying to reach an audience who, generally, didn’t appreciate what I was doing. A week before the show, Wayne asked me what would I do if the audience was a wet blanket. I still remembered my answer…I told him that I would work with what I have and everything would just feed and create the “experience for the day”.
I must emphasise once again that I really hated that particular performance. It really drained me out and I was wondering whether it out turn out the same for the second show. Thank God it didn’t. The audience was so much more engaging and willing to participate. I didn’t adhere to my script because I felt that it was “dangerously safe” (or “safely dangerous”) enough to venture in another realm with such an interesting audience. Sticking to my original script wouldn’t do justice to that particular group of people.
The outcome was much better that what I had anticipated and it sort of made up for the inadequacies of the first show. I didn’t feel drained out but instead, I felt much more pumped up.
Feedback. The first night was more patronising than genuine. The second? Generous praise but also a fair share of criticisms. Once again, thank you for being part of the experience…