Tara Tan, Straits Times 31 Jul 08;
IN A city where old trees are felled and blocks of flats demolished to make way for the new, where do your memories live?
Tree/House, a double-bill by Ho Tzu Nyen and Paul Rae, addresses this question of memory and remembering. It will be presented as part of the Singapore Theatre Festival next week.
Rae's Tree Duets, which was first performed at The Substation last year, was nominated for Best Script at last year's Life! Theatre Awards.
In the piece, he weaves several stories centred around trees. Some are autobiographical, while others are of past and present Singapore.
'Trees prompt us into remembering, they are repositories of personal, social and cultural memory,' says Rae, who is also an assistant professor of theatre studies at the National University of Singapore.
In the play, he speaks of a 100-year-old Bodhi tree growing at Jin Long Si Temple off Bartley Road.
'People pray to it, leave offerings. The tree is completely entwined with the temple's foundations and its devotees' lives,' says the playwright.
He also cites the brouhaha in 2002 over the felling of a 150-year-old Hopea Sangal tree, whose common name is the Chengal Pasir, in Halton Road. It was a tree so old that the area it was in - Changi - was probably named after it. But it was chopped down despite public protests.
'People have lost so much of what was pre-contemporary Singapore, that such trees are evidence of a continuity with the past,' says Rae. 'When they get chopped down, there is a sense of rupture.'
Destruction triggers the act of remembering, agrees Ho, who presents the performance lecture, House Of Memory, in the second half.
He was inspired by the block of flats in Holland Drive he lived in as a child, which was torn down in the 1980s.
'A house is often our centre of being. It protects us from the elements. We often attach a lot of ourselves to our homes. When this shell is destroyed, the emptiness becomes something else,' he says.
In the piece, Ho splices together footage of destruction he can recall having seen in films - from arthouse flicks to Hollywood blockbusters to old Chinese gongfu movies.
The connection between film and memory is a profound one, he adds.
'Film has the ability to be about memory, to enact memories and to become memory,' he observes.
'Even the experience of watching a film is recollection-in-action, due to the associative process that happens in the mind. You draw on the film's past to relate to its present.'
# Tree/House will be staged at the Drama Centre Black Box@National Library (Level 5) on Aug 7 and 8 at 8pm and on Aug 9 at 3pm. Tickets at $30 from Sistic (log on to www.sistic.com.sg or call 6348-5555).
