Au Sow-yee’s live performance feels like an experimental film screening at a cinematheque — geometrical shapes and blurry images overlap, split, hover and stutter on the stage to eerie sounds.
The Malaysian artist calls her show “live cinema,” for which she creates a unique audio-visual experience of light and shadow.
For Performative Cinema VI: Songlines, which takes place at the Guling Street Little Theatre this weekend, two LCD projectors and three 16mm film projectors are used to beam images, including still photographs taken from movies starring P. Ramlee, the legendary star of Malaysian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes separately, sometimes simultaneously, onto the stage where Au plays with various objects such as a prism in front of the machines. The effect is kaleidoscopic.
To Au, performative cinema addresses the fragility and ephemerality of celluloid imagery and echoes the death of film at the hands of digital production techniques.
“For different generations of Malaysians, he [P. Ramlee] is part of our collective memory, albeit hazy and faded,” Au told the Taipei Times.
JacAl Map, an experimental music duo from Malaysia, generate static ambient sounds for the performance.
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