Papers by Ray Langenbach
“Riddle Coma”
Performance Research, Aug 18, 2017
It was the day after my tenth birthday in March 1958, the month when Massachusetts always had the... more It was the day after my tenth birthday in March 1958, the month when Massachusetts always had the final winter storms, and I couldn’t wait to get outside to play in the snow. I went down for breakfast. When she heard me enter the kitchen my mother turned. (Pause) The kitchen had a bitter cloud hanging in the air. Not a great cook, Mom was experimental and always developing new health concoctions. One frequently changing recipe fell under the general rubric of “Tiger’s Milk”. Holding a half-filled glass of the brownish liquid out to me, she said ‘Today we’ll eat breakfast a bit later, but first have your Tiger’s Milk. It’s special today.’ I recall she looked at me fixedly, emphasizing her words, ‘It will show you the world through your Granddad’s eyes.’ The phrase ‘through your Granddad’s eyes’ stuck to the walls. She seemed sad. To see through his eyes would be odd enough, but he had died just two weeks before. Seeing through the eyes of a dead man was horrible and a little thrilling. After the usual resistance, her impenetrable will overcame my ad hoc struggle to curtail her former rights over what went into my body. She joined me in a ‘toast’ and we both chugged it down. I felt slightly nauseous. She said it was normal and would pass. I wanted to get beyond the reach of my mother’s will and went up to the library where the 78rpm recordings of Edward R. Murrow, ‘I can hear it now’, were sitting next to the phonograph. I put on one of the records, and sat on the floor to listen to the voices of Adolph Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, with Murrow’s own deep, authoritative and reassuring voiceover. I didn’t know these people, but was drawn to the ambient sounds of vehicles, crowds, cameras and the variety of phonemes, languages and accents opening into a deep sonic domain. I began watching the stylus moving across the record towards the central spindle that poked through the centre of the disc. I picked up my father’s magnifying glass from his desk, and watched more closely how the needle vibrated and scraped the walls of the grooves, collecting an intricate ball of dust in its path. The groove seemed to expand to the scale of a valley, and then to a city street. The stylus seemed like a huge careening drill digging into the black asphalt, scraping walls of the buildings on each side. I began to feel that the drill was somehow reading the street and that the sound I heard was the street speaking to me, for me, in a language only I understood. The rotation of the record had a hypnotic effect. I felt that I had become that stylus and it was I who was scraping the grooves. I watched the action more closely and realized then that there was only one groove and even though I, the stylus, appeared to be moving according to my own will, in fact I was enslaved to the groove, the record and the turntable. I had no will of my own. It was the turntable that moved while I remained still. I resented my helplessness as I was inexorably drawn to the centre of the record. It felt like death was at the centre and it wasn’t fair. Death should be at the side, not at the centre! And, why did it have to be there at all? The record held me hypnotically in its thrall. I thought that this must be what my Granddad’s eyes saw. My father came into the library. I noticed him at the side of my visual field. I didn’t recognize him or what he was. I looked up. He looked so strange, towering “Riddle Coma” Enthralment at the Neuro-receptor Theatre
VINCENT LEOW: <i>COFFEE TALK</i> (1992)
WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks, Feb 1, 2023
Malaysia’s Video Quarantine
Afterimage, Apr 1, 1991
suedostasien.net, 2022
Lee Weng-Choy: As an art critic I've preferred to speak from but not for this corner of the world... more Lee Weng-Choy: As an art critic I've preferred to speak from but not for this corner of the world that I work within. Too often when we speak of Southeast Asia as a region, the nation remains the default discursive and curatorial framework. Artists are identified by nationality more than any other category, and cultural nationalisms frame the way histories are written-rarely about the region as such, but instead as a catalogue of separate nations. The grammar of the nation is containment, exclusion, closure as well as the definition and control of borders and identities. Patrick D Flores, a curator and art historian from the Philippines, has said the notion of a region remains productive, nonetheless, "if only because it persists in being a problem, one that is grasped in geo-poetic terms". [1]
Fluxee : Performance Decade
"Performance Decade consists of Aapo Korkeaoja's historical review of Fluxee and the fin... more "Performance Decade consists of Aapo Korkeaoja's historical review of Fluxee and the finish performance art scene." -- p. 9.
Not solitude and solidarity, not solitude or solidarity, but solitude-solidarity will be the new ... more Not solitude and solidarity, not solitude or solidarity, but solitude-solidarity will be the new adventure chanted by new poets. (Leo Bronstein, 1953) In the following pages I will present a reading of the intellectual lives of two cognitive scientists, a Singaporean-born, Chinese-American, Lan Gen-Bah (who in recent years has often presented herself simply by the initials LGB), and her mother, the late Chiang Mo-Jo. It is my hope that these personal topographies may reveal certain performative tendencies embedded in the ‘cultures of science’.
3. Representing state desire and the sins of transgression
The ephemeral and ungraspable moment of performance has ramifications that extend far beyond its ... more The ephemeral and ungraspable moment of performance has ramifications that extend far beyond its immediate time and place. This dissertation explores performances in Singapore as indicators of divergent visions of the nation-state. During 1993-94, 'performance art' and Forum Theatre provided an arena for a convergence and collision of imaginings and desires for civil society, held on the one hand by a small group of ruling Peoples Action Party (PAP) politicians, and on the other, by a small group of progressive artists and other intellectuals. To understand the ways in which the government and artists contested (or, in some cases, agreed to not contest) the cultural ground requires an examination of performance as a semiotic mode in public life, a genre in art, and an instrument of cultural politics. A study of performance alone cannot sufficiently reveal the subtleties of governmental and artistic agency. The government and artists have mobilized specific figures of speech from a repertoire developed over centuries. These tropes are analysed for their uses, their performative instrumentality, and their discursive power. Finally, tropes and performances coalesce and disseminate prevailing national, regional, and global ideologies. Through an understanding of their ideological import, we can situate specific tropes and performances in the full complexity of the socio-political moment, and reveal the sensitivities and desires that in 1994 drove the government to stigmatise Forum Theatre and performance art as capable of 'agitating' audiences, 'propagating' deviant social or religious information, and 'subverting' the state. This dissertation examines the power of aesthetic forms, and the aesthetics of power. Competing notions of performance in Singapore led to a cultural crisis in 1993-94. That historical punctum and its ramifications constitutes the primary object of this study, and is presented as a significant indicator of the state of the Singapore state at that time.
The ephemeral and ungraspable moment of performance has ramifications that extend far beyond its ... more The ephemeral and ungraspable moment of performance has ramifications that extend far beyond its immediate time and place. This dissertation explores performances in Singapore as indicators of divergent visions of the nation-state. During 1993-94, 'performance art' and Forum Theatre provided an arena for a convergence and collision of imaginings and desires for civil society, held on the one hand by a small group of ruling Peoples Action Party (PAP) politicians, and on the other, by a small group of progressive artists and other intellectuals. To understand the ways in which the government and artists contested (or, in some cases, agreed to not contest) the cultural ground requires an examination of performance as a semiotic mode in public life, a genre in art, and an instrument of cultural politics. A study of performance alone cannot sufficiently reveal the subtleties of governmental and artistic agency. The government and artists have mobilized specific figures of speech from a repertoire developed over centuries. These tropes are analysed for their uses, their performative instrumentality, and their discursive power. Finally, tropes and performances coalesce and disseminate prevailing national, regional, and global ideologies. Through an understanding of their ideological import, we can situate specific tropes and performances in the full complexity of the socio-political moment, and reveal the sensitivities and desires that in 1994 drove the government to stigmatise Forum Theatre and performance art as capable of 'agitating' audiences, 'propagating' deviant social or religious information, and 'subverting' the state. This dissertation examines the power of aesthetic forms, and the aesthetics of power. Competing notions of performance in Singapore led to a cultural crisis in 1993-94. That historical punctum and its ramifications constitutes the primary object of this study, and is presented as a significant indicator of the state of the Singapore state at that time.
“Riddle Coma”
Performance Research
’say as I Do’: Performance Research in Singapore
Contesting Performance, 2010
Dialogue
Education Innovation Series, 2013
Exegetical Commentary
Education Innovation Series, 2013
Performing the Singapore state 1988-1995
Unpublished Doctoral Thesis. Centre …, Jan 1, 2003
Publication View. 50654219. Performing the Singapore state 1988-1995 (2003).Langenbach, Ray. Abst... more Publication View. 50654219. Performing the Singapore state 1988-1995 (2003).Langenbach, Ray. Abstract. This dissertation explores performances in Singapore as indicators of divergent visions of the nation-state. To understand ...
Looking Back at Brother Cane: Performance Art and State Performance
Space, spaces and spacing: the Substation …, Jan 1, 1996
Representing state desire and the sins of transgression
House of glass: culture, modernity, and …, Jan 1, 2001
... demands from the electorate, in spite of being a single-party domi-nant government with scant... more ... demands from the electorate, in spite of being a single-party domi-nant government with scant political opposition in parliament&quot;(Chua 1995, p ... in returning to the deployment of social engi-neering in Singapore is that, in practice, instruments of social engineer-ing are generally ...
The Performative Indoctrination Model
Moving Pictures: The persistence of locomotion
Performance Research, Jan 1, 2007
... dream of locomotion, its technologies and its representations, and led me to look at two art ... more ... dream of locomotion, its technologies and its representations, and led me to look at two art works that demanded an intensive dialogue between location and motion: a street performance in Dresden in 2000 by Singaporean artist Amanda Heng, and Hsieh Tehching's durational ...
Conference Presentations by Ray Langenbach
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Papers by Ray Langenbach
Conference Presentations by Ray Langenbach