Night falls from the City

"God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day." So declared Genesis 1:4-5. Fridays in big cities (Saturdays too, for that matter) seem exempt. There are two ways to look at it: Friday night being a seamless extension of the day, or that Friday itself begins when it gets dark. When the 7th annual Singapore Night Festival comes around, the march of time is suspended until Sunday morning.

I have never really been a festival kind of person, nor Mary - we've always preferred more permanent, crowd-free installations. Like waterfalls. Hang on, I take that back. In this time of climate change you can never be sure even of the shapes of continents. But I do admit sometimes we're missing out. The beauty of life is the beauty of moments - fleeting and forgotten if we aren't careful.

It took me 40 minutes to travel the short distance between office and Plaza Singapura where we arranged to meet. Bus 65 came, disgorged some commuters, refused to take on any and moved on. I barely made it on Bus 175, and amidst glacial traffic managed half a chapter en route to Dhoby Ghaut. Such was the throng at Plaza Singapura that queues outside many eateries endured well past eight. It was either the draw of the Night Festival, or the dross of my unschooled bumpkin ways.

The festival grounds were quite extensive. The action started at the School of the Arts (SOTA), and extended towards both Queen Street in the east and Armenian Street towards the west. We skirted the heart of the festivities on the Singapore Management University (SMU) and National Museum grounds, where the throngs were thickest, and only scratched the surface with three pieces - at SOTA, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and the Armenian Church.

Below: Sticking umbrellas together to form sheltered, albeit rather makeshift, resting places was a brilliant idea. The whole idea was to draw attention to the SOTA steps as a place where people could gather, linger, catch their breaths and watch the world go by. But we could do none of the above, and were soon edged on by an endless stream of camera-touting visitors (very much like us, I must add).

Below: the elegant facade of the Singapore Art Museum was the canvas for the "Spirit of Nature" lightshow. Thus with light do we not only banish night, but also adorn that which by day is concealed under a veil of varnished white, sometimes blinding, sometimes withering.

Below: the Armenian Church hosted two installations. The first was Taegon Kim's "Dresses of Memory", spun from a total of some 40 kilometres of fibre-optic cable. These were islands of brilliance amidst the darkness in the church yard, switching from red to blue to green. It would surely be electrifying to try these on.

Below: the second piece in the Armenian Church was ALSOS*, by the French duo Grégory Lasserre and Anaïs met den Ancxt. Mary had a lot of fun shining her torch at the flowers amongst the branches. These emitted sounds the type of which were dependent on the intensity of the light shone on it. It would have been more poetic, and fitting for the haunting setting beneath the church portico, had the sounds elicited by curious and intrigued visitors even vaguely resemble a coherent tune. But I guess that is what one would call art.

We were also able to accord these venues more than the perfunctory glances on any other days. European Town, as the Bras Basah precinct came to be known in the 1822 Jackson Plan (Raffles Town Plan), was set centrally between Kampong Glam (for the Malays and Arabs) to the east and Chinese Kampong (today's Chinatown) and Kampong Chulia (all that remains today is Chulia Street north of Raffles Place) to the west. As a result this was also where the first churches (the oldest being Armenian Church, completed 1835) and Christian schools (the Catholic institutions of what later came to be known as SJI and the Convent of Holy Infant Jesus) were established in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today these echoes from a different world live on in what has been called the Museum Planning Area, an area set aside to go our our cultural heritage. Embalmed? Or restored? That will depend on whether one is on the side of heritage, or modernity.

Above, from top to bottom: the SOTA steps with its leafy portico of fern-covered colonnades; the classical elegance of the SAM, formerly St Joseph's Institution, first completed in 1867; and the austerity of the Armenian Church, completed in 1835.