Diaspora

TheatreWorks of Singapore under global cultures specialist director/writer Ong Keng Sen collaborates with Singapore Chinese Orchestra, video installationist Choy Ka Fai and cutting-edge visual artists to create a memorable, very 21st century, multimedia evocation of South Asian people. Covering revolution and war, migration and displacement, memory and the search for identity, the multi-layered production makes cross-references to Scotland today.

Inter-weaving video, live story-telling, music and movement, the show is astonishingly hi-tech. Four large screens form an arc above the orchestra, with a walkway for actors and dancers above. Actors speak in stage-level side booths, appearing simultaneously on big-screen, or giant size on an invisible whole-stage gauze across which hover or flash abstract imagery and photo-montage.

Across the high screens rolls a backcloth kaleidoscope of people and places – rural and urban scenes of Singapore and Thailand, Vietnam and India, Indonesia, small-town America, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Sometimes the pace is so fast the audience members don’t know where they are, familiarising them with the feeling of being lost, which is among the production's core themes. Issues addressed include the homeland yearnings of an elderly Vietnamese migrant in America, the hopes and fears of the Chinese in Indonesia, tortured by memories of racist attacks, an Indian torn between Mumbai and home in Bali, the feelings about identity of a Scottish-born Muslim convert – the latter beautifully expressed by Rabiya Choudhry – interspersed with exquisitely-rendered Chinese music, both ancient and very contemporary.

Altogether, this is a landmark contribution by Singapore to global culture.