SIFA :: 'Pompeii'

From SIFA's fb post.

Had tickets to 'Pompeii' at the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA). It's a festival commission written and directed by Edith Podesta (AU/SG) together with filmmaker K. Rajagopal (SG). We have Remesh Panicker as a narrator and other actors, a vocalist Suhaili Safari and an ensemble to lend a full dimensional feel to the performance. 

Of course I didn't know what to expect. I was just hoping the show wouldn't be so out there that I wouldn't understand what it was trying to convey. I know what the blurb said, and it was sufficient to manage my expectations. The summary read,

Trapped in a bomb-shelter following a cataclysm, a narrator tells us the story of an apartment block in which the lives of its seemingly ordinary residents were anything but. A still-life painter ponders the permanence of objects; a husband and wife negotiate the vastness that had grown between them within the confines of their tiny apartment; an old Franciscan comes to terms with the death of his wife, and forms a relationship with a child whose life is just beginning. As they hurtle towards their inevitable end, the apartment is transfigured into a museum celebrating the beauty of quotidian human banality.

It's a live cinema performance which offered a diorama into the lives of residents in an apartment block, or as we call it here, a condo. We look at three units in this condo named 'Pompeii', of course. The title of the show references Pompeii (yes, that city in Campagnia) and its preserved ruins from the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. We study the lives of people back then in Pompeii through the things they've left behind when they didn't have a chance to escape the city before its total destruction. 

In this show, we were also offered a look at the lives of said residents in the three units through the objects they owned, viewing their stories through the their possessions. We got to see the actors going in and out of their characters on set, as well as the film crew doing their thing. It totally satisfied the voyeuristic bit in me. It's pretty meta. A super enjoyable show!