Dragonflies Performance Takes Flight Online

Aisyah Ridzham looks at the differences between Pangdemonium’s Dragonflies as a live theatre performance and as an online streaming experience.

Adrian Pang (left) as Leslie Chen, and Matt Grey (right) as Clive, in a scene where Leslie is trying to find a way to claim ownership of his England home.

PHOTO CREDIT | PANGDEMONIUM

With the temporary closing of theatres, Pangdemonium’s Dragonflies has been uploaded for streaming but watching it in-person is quite different from watching behind a screen.

For a play that was produced in 2017, Dragonflies presents an eerily similar situation to our current reality. A reality that involves increasingly concerning global warming statistics, the prominence of racial stereotypes that people have created and immigration laws that drive families away from their homes.

Dragonflies is set in a dystopian future of an envisioned year 2021, where Singaporean stereotypes sabotage our racial harmony and we suffer the consequences of global warming.

With the effects of Brexit at its peak and immigration laws tightened, Leslie, a Singaporean migrant, is forced to return to Singapore with his daughter. While trying to return to their England home, they are met with insults related to racial stereotypes and a downpour that leads to a flood, resulting in the loss of their house. This leaves them at a loss for hope for both their house and humanity.

Live theatre is meant to bring a script to life directly in front of an audience, and it helps to immerse yourself in the situation. Through directing choices, an actor’s emotion or the constructed set with realistic sound effects, live theatre is a movie played out right before your eyes.

When describing what differentiates live theatre to other forms of entertainment, Ms Nabilah Said, 35, award-winning playwright and theatre critic, says in a Zoom interview: “We [the audience] are not being distracted by phones. We may be thinking about other things but at the moment we are all kind of fixated on what’s happening in front of us.”

The view from house left back of the Victoria Theatre at Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, where Dragonflies was staged at. PHOTO CREDIT | VICTORIA THEATRE & CONCERT HALL

Live theatre is different from watching a movie because the audience and the performers share a common space, literally. The space is separated into two sides. On one, there is the stage with the set and performers and the other is for the audience. This allows the audience to be able to see nearly everything on set, depending on how close you sit to the stage. It also creates an impression that the problems that the characters go through in the play are real, simply because you see it in real life.

In another Zoom interview, Ms Cordelia Lee, 24, a graduate in theatre, says: “Liveness [in theatre] is also co-created by both the performer and the spectator.”

This means that both the audience and those on stage help to bring the story alive through the actor-audience relationship. ‘How much [energy] the performer is giving’ affects the story’s impact on the audience as much as ‘how the audience responds’ affects the performance. The two factors help to create ‘liveness’, so when that is taken away and the actor and audience are separated by a screen, the story’s impact changes.

Online streaming takes away the impact of the actor-audience relationship. Whether you laugh or sit emotion-less in response to the jokes in the play, does not matter and will not affect the performance you watch at all. Not only that, the performance you see would not be nearly as good as you can get it. Since most videos of the performances are archived footage, what you see is probably of poor quality and positioned far away, which further takes the immersive-ness of theatre away.

Mr Ng Yi-Sheng, 39, performer and award-winning writer, says in a Zoom interview that the difference in watching theatre live and online is the fact that you will not be ‘watching the show in the medium it was designed for.’ Theatre is designed for a physical audience, not an online one. Naturally, watching theatre online will not be the same as watching it in-person.

Personally, I enjoyed being able to lie in my own bed while watching Dragonflies. However, sitting in my bedroom alone did have a major difference compared to sitting among audience-members with the performance directly in front of me. I felt a disconnect with the story and it felt far away from me, both literally and figuratively.

Theatre is meant for the audience to sympathise with the actors and the story. From where I sat, it did not feel any more different from watching a movie.