Bun & Stone by ECNAD

I must confess that I'm usually baffled by contemporary dance, so I'll do my best to give my own interpretation of the performance.

The performance started off with an "excursion" where the audience stood round the Front Lawn of the Arts House to watch the special prelude of the performance, before proceeding to the Play Den for the main act. The former was actually performed on a stone installation (Stone Awakening) specially created for the performance by 1 of the artistic director, Lim Chin Huat. The latter saw the interplay of segments of different themes, with some video feeds in between. It was quite humorous at some parts.

As I thought about the show, the speech (there was some) and segments after the show, my interpretation is that the buns are like dreams and stones like reality (I tend to try to relate the title to what's going on). You know, buns are soft, white (pure?) and "fluffy" and at times warm, while reality is like pretty hard, solid and cold, like stones. And maybe that's why the prelude was Stone Awakening. That segment saw a "bun" (well, the dancer in white) being slowly woken up by a "stone" (dancer dressed in brown) that sounds a small gong (the Chinese type which used to be used to 敲三更 type). So there is an interplay and blending of dreams and reality, which was aptly described in the synopsis: "...reflections of our pragmatic society and the need to search for breathing spaces".