Striking scenes and staging in A Brooding Beast In The Corner

In a time of increasing awareness about humans' impact on the world and where climate change has led to greater urgency to address some of that impact, Arts Fission starts the year off with a frank, gritty look at the topic.

- Jocelyn Chng

While this issue has been frequently discussed in art forms such as plays, visual arts and film, seeing a treatment of it via movement is relatively less common. It was thus an interesting choice for the company to present this work, with some effective outcomes.

One of the performance's strongest aspects was the use of space. The size and thrust shape of the Ngee Ann Kongsi Theatre allowed for a proximity between the dancers and audience members quite unique among theatres in Singapore.

On the stage, pieces of furniture were strewn about, with a wall fragment upstage, evoking a natural or man-made disaster, or perhaps both. The set overflowed into part of the audience, with tarpaulin material covering the front rows of seats. The arrangement of the materials and objects around the space helped to centre the focus visually towards the dancers performing mostly in the middle of the stage.