BWW Reviews: OzAsia Festival 2013: SUPEREVERYTHING Left the Audience Breathless

Reviewed Thursday 26th September 2013

Each year the OzAsia Festival brings together a wide range of Asian and Asian/Australian works, but focuses especially on one country, and this year it was Malaysia. The Light Surgeons, from London, join with Ng Chor Guan, Hands Percussion, and Rhythm in Bronze to create an audio-visual work, SuperEverything, that looks at, well, just about everything Malaysian.

They employ a combination of electronic and live music, with images projected onto a scrim curtain between the audience and the performers and also onto a screen behind the performers, often with multiple images at the same time on each screen.

Founding member of the Light Surgeons, Christopher Thomas Allen, and one of his collaborators, Tim Cowie, both handle audio and visual content, much of which is triggered live, not programmed. Composer, Ng Chor Guan, plays keyboards and percussion, as well as that instrument favoured by science fiction and horror film makers for its eerie sounds, the Theramin. Teuku Umar, of Rhythm in Bronze, plays gamelan, Miu Ng of Hands Percussion plays gamelan and percussion and Jimmy Ch'ng of that same group plays percussion. There is, thus, a combination of the modern sounds of electronic music and the traditional sounds of drums and both keyboard percussion and tuned gongs used in gamelan.

The visuals are diverse, from photos and videos of both rural and urban scenery and pursuits, to video recorded interviews. It is part travel guide, part history lesson, part cultural analysis; it is, in fact, a documentary of enormous ambition. It attempts to cover so very many things by means of fragments, some flashing for only moments onto the screen. If it resembles anything at all, it is a modern music video, which is similar in that it employs diverse images flashing across the screen throughout the song.

While much of the visual content was shot on location by the Light Surgeons, they also use stock photos and videos in this performance.

With people identifying as Malay, Chinese, and Indian, there is an internal diversity, a conflict of identity, previously affecTed Further by British Colonialism, the effects of which linger on. There is also religious and cultural diversity springing from this mix. This, too, becomes a part of the narrative.

The eyes and the ears are kept constantly on the alert, trying to garner as much as possible as the complexity of the music, the spoken word, and the rapidly passing images demand the full attention. The smell of sandalwood incense was a relief in that it was the only thing that the sense of smell was required to respond to.

There was a theme of diversity, of nationality, of rapid change, of consumerism and, more than anything, of tradition juxtaposed against modernity, which can be seen as rural against urban and industrial. The city images at ground level, shops and shopping malls, could be cities anywhere in the world, but rural life still clings to many traditional lifestyles, methods, and practices.

All of this places demands on the audience, who must maintain focus and concentration, remaining alert for over an hour and, as fascinating and informative as this production was, that did prove difficult for some people who, after the performance, were left questioning what it was all about. I put that down to the fact that there were many senior people in the audience where this is probably something that would appeal more to younger people who are attuned to this type of complex and fast paced form of presentation. For those older members of the audience who stuck with it, there was a wealth of information and the pleasure of watching the musicians playing the diverse assortment of instruments.

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