We are familiar with loss in varying shades, from the irritation of losing a favourite pen to the devastation and anger that come with the loss of life or love. Loss, however, is hardly the final word. It exists in tension and symbiosis with “finding” – there seldom is one without the other – and in the middle of these two opposites, we often find hope.
The five productions of The Studios 2020 sift through the vast lost & found box that is life – collecting and collating its disparate parts, examining our losses and asking of ourselves what we might find in losing something.
The Studios’ commissions include music icon Margaret Leng Tan's sonic portrait Dragon Ladies Don't Weep, which traces her relationships with her mother, her mentor John Cage, as well as her obsessive-compulsive disorder – and how these have shaped her life and work in music. Another is multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan's Lost Cinema 20/20, which explores how dreams are the cinema of our subconscious; and that we're all inherently filmmakers who create films through the act of dreaming. The other co-productions, Punggah by Johnny Jon Jon and The Heart Comes to Mind by Lucas Ho delve into death and how reconciliation and redemption emerge from its messy aftermath.
As part of The Studios’ RAW series which is a developmental platform for artists to present their works-in-progress, Untitled Women in The Sea by The Disabled Artists Collective excavates and re-imagines two plays by playwright Haresh Sharma through the lens of disability and feminism.
Sift through the vast lost and found box that is life, and dive deep into the complex nature of losing and finding during these productions. Book your tickets at esplanade.com/thestudios.