Temple

Synopsis

< Flare

“This was one of many electrifying scenes in Cake Theatrical Productions' avant-garde epic Temple, which fashions a concourse of disturbed relationships and shattered fantasies out of richly symbolic stage pictures, enhanced by surrealistic soundscapes and multimedia narratives. At her best, playwright and director Natalie Hennedige strips man of logic, knowledge and other foundations of being to reveal his oldest, most intractable fears and darkest impulses...

Hennedige's aesthetic force is tethered not to logical storylines but to overarching ideas, and it is these that lend her work the credibility and coherence that a single narrative arc might achieve...

Rather than tugging earnestly at your heartstrings, Hennedige insists on getting under your skin. The result is a play whose images and implications are likely to stay in your head for a long time." The Flying Inkpot

Commissioned by Singapore Arts Festival

Temple sees the invention of a mythological universe where all the quarters of the world are at odds. A sports hall, once the diplomatic meeting arena of the now opposing sides, stands desolate.

7 people, assailed, stand at the entrance of the great hall. Quickly, they enter and bolt the doors. Some nights they hear pounding on the doors but they keep very still and do nothing. Within the inner sanctum, they create their own rules, find their own order. They wait.

One day, they awake to find the doors of the hall wide open. All swear innocence. In this singular act of betrayal, a metamorphic shift occurs. Bright lights illuminate, the blast of marching bands and the scream of cheerleaders invade stark silence. The grounds of the hall turn monstrously into a sporting battle field as the people devise elaborate war schemes against each other.

This multilayered experience infuses physical composition, visual style and sound architecture, in an exploration of the various notions of Temple.