with my powers of precognition and scheduling, it was foreseen that august and september would be a wild ride, and they were. I’ve already had my first foray into what I saw as an Official Queer Event in Singapore – the colourful and aggressively-publicised Pink Dot – in june, but nobody! bothered! to warn me about IndigNation SG —

can’t believe IndigNation’s been going on for 10 years and I’ve only just heard of it. these past months have been full of first-time-goings to events specifically for queer audiences. (let us have a moment of silence for putting your sexuality on hold.) and even then only because I insist on following cute poetgirls to meetings that I’m not supposed to be a part of. this year, being part of Mass Hysteria Relapsed! was very important:

‘AmOk Collective, Sayoni and IndignationSG present a production like no other. Following the success of Mass Hysteria (SingaPunk Biennale, January 2014) and to the delight of a sold-out audience, the Queerdos are back with more stories of love, of anger, of sadness and pure queer insanity.‘

‘eat your own nasi kang kang.’

it was very, very good. being in Mass Hysteria has been described as ‘life-changing’, and I fully concur. perhaps it’s because I’ve never felt that I was allowed to be blatant about queerness in art; it was a thing to be slyly alluded to, a wink and nod to those who got it. I suppose the implicit understanding was that queer was sensitive and censoring it was the polite thing to do. so when you do a show about kissing girls involving a seven-part poem about vaginas, the floodgates open. devastation is liberation. what do you do when anonymity doesn’t protect you from ignominy. we talked about how you shouldn’t aspire to be both edward scissorhands and a lesbian. how we were less Butch/Femme than What. how bisexuality feels like the 30-day trial version of gay. about queer mentors’ mentors’ mentors.

(bless you, Ad Maulod, Germaine Yeo, Raksha M, Sage Lee, Stephanie Dogfoot, Vanessa Victoria &&& Illi Syaznie.)

these people were very important. people who teach you a new way to be often are.

nice things people said about the show were that they liked that it was harder-hitting and more serious than in its first installment. it was very different. I can’t speak for myself, because I’m a newcomer to the Mass Hysteria crew, but the sense was that they did, indeed, grow up.

Mass Hysteria was reviewed by @notabilia here (‘all the performances were, in nearly equal measure, droll and tragic’). photo credits to Kirsten Han, who interviewed us as well; here is the flickr album where we are immortalised. I’ve never been so glad to shrug off my uniform (but still strut around in fuckyes military boots).

Mass Hysteria wasn’t the only thing at IndigNation, however. the closing event, A Minor Contradiction, helmed by Vanessa Victoria and Stephanie Dogfoot (who were incidentally also in Mass Hysteria) was incredibly memorable. I don’t want to contrast it with the traditional IndigNation SG opening event, ContraDiction, but I feel I should add that it was an utterly warm, welcoming event where the top floor of an advertising firm was turned into a space in which humour and honesty were in equal parts celebrated. A Minor ContraDiction was for ’emerging voices’ in the singaporean lgbtq literary scene but it wasn’t the potential of genius we were looking at but actual, already-crystallised, art. one of the spoken word poets, Yining (read her blog about A Minor ContraDiction here!) stood out for me, especially because of her age and talent – she’s sixteen and already gut-punching you with the feels. I can’t say enough about my beautiful friends and friends-to-be in fear of not doing them justice, but suffice to say that there’s no way in hell I’d have predicted that a speculative poem about Lawrence Khong’s gay past would’ve been described as ‘heartwrenching’ before this (we have Muslim Sahib to thank for this). Jolene, please don’t take my man is still stuck in my head, a full month later (Chris Khor is extremely talented, doing amazing work for trans visibility and super cute to boot). Khai did this amazing drag performance (complete with a full split!!) to lady gaga and it was gorgeous. the lady has so much style and heart it gives me tingles to look at her. Ng Yi-Sheng made bandung ice-cream and turned up resplendent in SIA kebaya and penguin mask. there were so many baby queers (I use the term in the most un-condescending manner possible) that I feel old at a doddering 21 years.

if I had had more wine I would have teared up with happiness. but that’s a story for the afterparty.

the event (revolution) has been televised (youtubed) – this is me with ‘Chopsticks’ and ‘First Day of Sexual Orientation. the entirety of A Minor ContraDiction can be found on the same channel, courtesy of Roy Tan.

other amazing events during IndigNation SG included FACE, featuring JujuBee of RuPaul’s Drag Race (have you ever entered a roomful of drag queens and asked if they needed anything, only to be told ‘men. lots of men.’?). the thing I am most Indignant about is no one’s told me about this thing for the past twenty years. I can’t wait to be home with the queermos again.

I was fortunate enough to be asked by Raksha (@internetraksha, also of Mass Hysteria fame) and Olivia Kwok to perform at the SPORE Art Salon’s 46th Edition!  it was a little bit surreal because I’ve never done a solo set before; it’s always been slams or group performances. it was quite lovely and Artistry is a choice place to do artist features of any kind, because great staging and cosy seating arrangements. there was a multi-instrumental musician – Pablo Aldunate – whom I need to work with some time, mostly because he uses singing bowls to put audiences into trances. and is really into vibes. like me. but with longer hair. there were also live drawing sessions throughout the night and mr. Doodu Karani who was touted as an “authentic Bagobo-Tagabawa tribe(-sman?)” which quite puzzled me/I didn’t agree with but I really liked that SPORE features artists whom we wouldn’t get to meet otherwise.

DOODU KARANI, traditional musician, from the Bagobo-Tagabawa tribe of the Philippines. Photo credit: Paul Pereira

august was also the first time I’d participated in the Story Slam, which is also traditionally held at Artistry (it’s becoming the go-to hangout for us unwashed artist types. due only in part to its name.) the Story Slam was started by the lovely and almost scarily-driven Elina Lim and is now hosted by Stephanie Dogfoot and Tang Chee Seng. it was important because the audience is one of the most receptive I’ve ever seen. also because I told a roomful of strangers about that time my parents discovered my entire drawerful of kinky sex toys and lived to tell the tale, quite literally. the theme of that night’s slam, obviously, was Family. you should go. it’s kind of like doing stand-up, except with less jokes and more earnestness. but you can tell jokes if you like.

also, there was this adorable, strange thing happening at Bandwagon The Music Market (#BTMM) at the Hard Rock Cafe in early august and it was called DaBao Poetry (because consumerism and the fact that poetry is extremely portable).

little stalls with quirky people. Paul brought his tarot cards too, so in the midst of writing lines for others he read between our own. photo credit: Pamela Ng

we were there for an afternoon selling custom-written poetry to strangers and it was great. writing poems about increasingly arbitrary prompts for $5 a pop has never seemed so fun. we got our own custom-made stamp from the stall next to ours. I wrote a poem for dawn yang. spent the day with some of the loveliest people to grace the planet. it was a productive day.

september was devoted to putting together a show for Lit Up 2014 by Word Forward, which promised to be – if not a blast – then at least four-sevenths full of madness. the theme was WALK THE EQUATOR so I suppose it was inescapable that our dear cuntry was placed under poetic scrutiny. these were the people I was working with – Marc Nair, Gideon Goh, Charlene Shepherdson, Allee Koh, Jennifer Champion &&& Shivram Gopinath who are all strange people in their own right with distinctive manners of performing:

Everybody Hertz, Lit Up 2014. photo credit: Theresa Goh

I hypothesise that we were all such different personalities and unfamiliar to each other and so we came up with Everybody Hertz, a strange fucking show with so many types of funny and so many thematic concerns. like the insane baker neil gaiman was once likened to. our once innocuous theme of ‘television’, through the warping growth (deformation?) of two months, led to us saying things such as, ‘can you imagine Penis-Man getting spam, for Viagra??’ & ‘where we rip your home a new one’ & the most perfect artificial-intelligence poem delivered by Jennifer in a flawless Siri voice. many hip gyrations were made. much bad singing was tolerated. I once straight-up shoved Allee off a chair. where else can you go to hear people rhythmically fake-vomit into microphones to the beat of ‘what does the fox say’? star reviews include: ‘not as easy to make fun of as we expected’ & ‘white looks good on u guys’. it was called political without being preachy, which is a good look if you weren’t aiming for political in the first place, I suppose. Everybody Hertz might be having another run in january, so come. wear white and orchid garlands if you want to. these people taught me you could be funny without unzipping the front of your pants, which is a good skill to have, because I don’t usually wear any.

Everybody Hertz has been featured in The Smart Local’s review of Lit Up (‘the troupe of seven took turns to mock our digitally-saturated world’)!

other highlights of WALK THE EQUATOR included Sekaliwags’ XPOWERMENT!, which was a beautiful, smoke-ridden play about time travel and children’s shows, and made one wonder why all children’s cartoons haven’t cornered the market on political satire already. also Paul Pereira’s tarot poetry (where he says himself to let him ‘penetrate your mysteries’) at the Market of Experiences and Movable Strangers by With Every Bloom, who let you take their books if you are willing to take their flowers and give them to strangers. which is great for me because I love words and giving people pretty things. (see: my virginity)

they just make me want to give plant genitals to every good-looking stranger I meet. and then some. photo credits: With Every Bloom

and that concludes my documentation! for posterity!

xxx
marylyn