Directed/Performed by ELIZABETH DE ROZA | Written by CYRIL WONG
Lighting Design by LENNIE LEE / FOO KOK LIM | Sound Design by STEPHANIE KWOK
Performances
The Substation Guinness Theatre | 17-19 Nov 2004, 8pm
The Substation Dance Studio | 23-24 Jun 2005, 8pm
International Festival of Women in Contemporary Theatre
(Providence, Rhode Island, Magdalena USA) | 1 Aug 2005, 8pm
A woman looks out the window and sees only her face in the glass.
If we forget the events that made us who we are, does this mean that we have forgiven the past, or have we merely accepted what we could not change? Can we trust our memory to tell us who we are?
The woman in the glass is no longer a figure of grief but of peace, and yet the new morning breaks the news that she will always be changing. As her reflection crumbles in the light, she strains to recover what is left of that stillness.
A reflection on memory and loss, this performance shines a restless torch on the struggle of one woman to accommodate the things she cannot change - depression, the dead who have not yet forgiven her, the living she keeps trying to forgive - and her desire for quiet in the long flight of her being.
Review of Still Flight (23 Jun 2005, The Substation Dance Studio)
by Hong Xinyi in The Straits Times, Life! Thursday, Jun 30, 2005The ebb and flow of depression is a popular subject, it would appear, for female artists of a certain temperament.
British writer Virginia Woolf made the subject as light and sharp as a long-drawn breath of frosty winter's air in the 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway. American poet Sylvia Plath conjured up a thick plasma of debilitating self-loathing in 1963's The Bell Jar.
More recently, American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote an autobiographical account of her struggles with depression in 1994's Prozac Nation, which wallowed in self-indulgence even as she seemed revolted by her own illness.
But while prose can probe the intricacies of a state of mind that reduces one to a state of moribund lethargy even as emotional turmoil churns away inside, depression presents difficulties when it becomes the subject of theatre.
When the disease is fleshed out on stage, the risk is that its psychological burdens become a litany of perpetual whining about being sad and blaming others for it.
But Still Flight, a one-woman monologue written by poet Cyril Wong and performed by Elizabeth de Roza, grazed the pitfalls of its subject matter while managing to remain relatively unscathed.
De Roza played a women struggling with depression. She first emerged from a swathe of white cloth, a visually strong image that evoked a cocoon harbouring some latent butterfly splendour as well as the formaldehyde stasis of a mummified corpse.
Thus was a victim of depression pictured as the living dead.
This woman knew not why she was so sad. She had issues with her controlling mother, a few relationship problems, and seemed encumbered by troubled memories that ensnared her with vivid tenacity.
But then don't we all?
De Roza was an engaging performer, and her training in a movement-based performance style gave her, in this first stab at a more dialogue-based work, a visceral intensity and honest vulnerability that remarkably never lapsed into faux-lyrical posturing.
Her character repeatedly told herself each morning that today, she would put on brightly coloured clothes, dab on perfume and "turn up my collar like two wings".
This mantra was repeated, at times feverishly, like incoherent dream mumbles, and at times fervently, like a prayer by the faithful.
An hour later, her character emerged, somewhat, from her depression's darkest throes - and if not a splendid butterfly, at least as a battle-scarred warrior.
More Comments From The Audience...
Still Flight, written by Cyril Wong and performed by Elizabeth De Roza is a compelling mix of text and movement that asserts itself with conviction and force. De Roza’s performance, as a character struggling daily with depression, is a concentrated and informed one. She gets to the core of the character (through abstracted movement and speech) and does not deviate. In this she embodies the very nature of Wong’s text, unwavering in its poetic: the body of it allusive, its heart, its mind anchored in specifics.
- Terry Jaensch, Melbourne-based poet
I got to know Elizabeth as a performer in a new and refreshing perspective. Very touching and soulful.
- Yuen Wei, artistic director of In Source Theatre
Brilliant. Like a shard of truth piercing the layers of faces we wear to disguise what we really feel.
- Adelina Ong, actress
A vital piece of theatre...beautifully delivered moments.
- Matt Grey, theatre arts programme leader at LASALLE-SIA
Still Flight is a deceptively simple piece of work that is about the self but refuses to be self-indulgent. Open, honest and hopeful.
- Audrey Wong, Co-Artistic Director of The Substation
So often people attempt to integrate text, theatre and movement, and most of the time, it never comes out as a integrally-woven piece, eg, the movement may be tacked on for aesthetic impact, the text manipulated for cheap emotional punch, and the theatre is just 'full of sound and fury but signifying nothing'. But in the quiet, introspective and genuine performance I saw, Elizabeth managed to achieve it.
- Sonny Lim, actor & founding member of World-in-Theatre
