.
collaborative response to faust/us by nine years theatre,
with corrie tan,
by TheatreWorks
is an interactive piece of performance criticism. click on the image to play with it.
![]()
excerpt from
“Dear yesterday it rained salt,
You crept up on me. After I met you that Saturday afternoon, after
those initial moments of inexplicable resonance with what you presented —
about the intricacies of a father-son relationship, about a sea goddess
that is at once patient and unyielding — I found myself sitting with a
quiet weight for days to come. It got me thinking about the unsurmountable yet hopeful distance between here-and-there,
now-and-then — words by José Esteban Munõs from Cruising Utopia.
So much of the future is already waiting inside us as intimate
imaginations. I am often impatient when it comes to the future. I want
it — whatever it is — to come now. Yet I want the past to be with me, giving me the familiarity I often crave, now. We can’t always have both at the same time, can we?
So I watch, as KayKay Nizam and Soultari Amin Farid navigate each
other, to try and understand each other, playing father and son.”
“Dear Saloma and Vinod,
I first met the two of you seven years ago, when I was 16. I dissected your words, and tried to live alongside you in Off Centre. I fear I have outlived you. Yet after meeting the both of you again, I know I have not. I may never. So do many others since 2007, when your world became a cornerstone text read and studied by thousands of other 16-year-olds every year, as they prepare for a major national examination. The fictional world has a way of outliving what we know as reality. It restates that horrid, beautiful luxury each time Off Centre is restaged, reviving ghosts of those who have, who are, coping with their mental health. Reality has no such luxury. People slip through the cracks all the time.”