As social-distancing measures prevail, all 21 CFA Arts Excellence Groups continue to face many challenges on-and-offstage. Online video-call services like Zoom have proven essential to effective organisation and audience engagement.
Yet, the difficulty of previously straightforward tasks like rehearsals have been amplified. For some performers, maintaining morale and fizzle without the expectation of a live audience might be a mental struggle as well.
In her recent Straits Times opinion article, “The killing of the play in the digital domain” (29 September 2020), Senior Cultural Correspondent Ong Sor Fen commented that unless online theatre “fundamentally reshaped” its content to suit the new medium and audience, the energy and charm of their physical counterparts might be lost.
An NUS student does not need to look very far to see such artistic innovations are taking place.
Blindspot (观心), a play by NUS Chinese Drama (国大爪吗) was inspired by interviews with visually impaired Singaporeans, who were introduced through support from the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped (SAVH) and Dialogue in the Dark Singapore.
The title is a pun on carefully observing (观心) and caring for something (关心) and hints at the overarching thematic concerns of the play.
These two ideas are reflected in the stories of the two central characters: Hao Yu, a foreign student from China who is “overlooked” by local students and Xiao Yun, a young women who struggles to accept the gradual deterioration of her mother’s sight.
In times of isolation, the stories of these two students are even more relatable as they provide a sobering reminder to demonstrate our care and love to our family and friends by interacting with them more regularly.
Though Blindspot was originally intended for the NUS Arts Festival 2020: Ways of Seeing, the group was not deterred by the event’s cancellation. Instead, they took this opportunity to collaborate with Access Path Productions, an expert in disability arts, to make the newly worked virtual show more accessible to new audiences, such as the visually impaired and non-Chinese speakers.
The reworked online play subsequently premiered to an audience of over 100 viewers on 10th October, in celebration of World Sight Day. The YouTube premiere featured two versions of Blindspot, one of which was an accessible version with Audio Description and Creative Captioning.
The production team of Blindspot also displayed ingenuity in clever usage of online technological resources and film editing techniques to reach their virtual audiences. By overlaying Zoom recordings of the actors onto background photos, the scene’s setting was effectively conveyed.
Furthermore, even though the actors were unable to interact with and see each other in the same space, their wonderful performance never sells the audience short on the emotion of the scene.
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