Kindred spirits after all
Dear Reader,
The comfort of creativity belongs to all and no medium has a monopoly. There’s space for more literary events that are intertextual and multimedia. A poetry launch in a black box interspersed with meaningful song, creating a ‘sonic womb’. A night of spoken word and film, with live reading over a silent film, the audience fashioning a poem together.
That’s the idea behind Ethos Nights anyway. The first example above was its debut iteration when we launched Esther Vincent Xueming’s beautiful collection womb song. And the second example is in fact the upcoming "Faceri", in partnership with the Asian Film Archive, happening next Saturday, 8th February.
It all started when I returned to Singapore after a long spell of living and working in the UK. When running the poetry and prose society at Cambridge, it had certainly seemed that people wanted to mix up their avenues of inspiration. Poets wanted to string together stanzas alongside live drawing; spoken word sounded better after a jazz session. I caught up with the wise Kah Gay for a memorable coffee and we had a think about something fun and inclusive to do for the literary community. Maybe it was the caffeine, but we became spirited on trying to set up a rolling series of such nightly events.
Another coffee with my friend Natalie Khoo from the Asian Film Archive set our second Ethos Night in motion. We’re going to try a contemporary form of “Benshi”, the Japanese art of live narration, with Shawn Hoo adroitly reading his poetry in time to the silent film In Pursuit of Temples in the Sky. Acclaimed writers Jennifer Anne Champion and Prasanthi Ram will respond to Burmese docu-film A Million Threads. We’ll have Shivram Gopinath lead the audience in creating a piece of spoken word art live. If that’s not enough, we’ll also have wine for you, and gin (with choices for you to customise, of course) and lots of pens and papers for you to scrawl down what comes to you.
One might wag a finger at such things as symptomatic of a collectively diminishing attention span. I like to think that the flip side is an abiding curiosity to find new ways to encounter meaning. To be immersed in the experience and participate in it yourself. And perhaps to realise that strangers, though they may create, express and find solace in different ways, are kindred spirits after all.
So come join us on Saturday. Grab a drink and be with friends known and yet to be discovered.
Kindly with you,
Ho Ren Chun
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