This review is my trying to be remembered and relevant, attempting my own 'pivot'.
I let the Zoom app linger on a black screen after the closing words, thank yous and apologies for technical issues during my experience of Pivot last night (4th Feb 2020) as I moved my attention to my mobile screen and I'm pretty sure I heard Jo utter "shit" before the meeting was disconnected.
It could have been part of the show and it would have made perfect sense. Even the 'technical issues' of having a few minutes into a scene done one mute and others with barely audible audio made me wonder 'is this part of the show?' as I texted a friend of mine out of panic for the production. This 50 minute snapshot encapsulated the experience, delimma and woes of Singaporean artists in different boats storming this pandemic by paradoxically lifting the veneer of the screen through voyeuristic modes of being and seeing alongside the 'presented' (sometimes satirized) selves that we perform to show that 'we are ok'. The 'mistakes' (intentional or othwerise) illuminate what we are all really thinking and feeling which made the experience memorable and relevant for me.
The play capitalized on knowing its audience and us 'knowing' them as a couple, theatre couple, individuals and artists which added a level of intimacy and discomfort when the subjects possibly revealed too much of our own selves in the work. I'm a sucker for exploring identity (self-perceived or from an other) in 'the real' and 'the virtual-real' and this lack of surety I had on 'whether this was part of the show' continuously engaged me on the level of 'real-ness' each scene revealed about Jo, Ed and ourselves as a community of Singaporean artists. During the post show Ed even had to say in Mandarin to his mother (mother in law?) that they weren't really divorced!
While I don't think the work provides us an answer on how to perform our own pivots, it possibly creates a collective sense of unity among our community of Singaporean artists making sense of where and how to place our practices in 2021. I would recommend watching this and having a 'real' post-show discussion with fellow artists on trying to continue on in 'the scene'; who knows, you might end up writing blog reviews of theatre work.
Pivot runs until the 7th of Feb 2021: https://www.facebook.com/Pivotdigitalplay/about