From an essay I wrote some time back on the Capitol Theatre:
The city, sociologist Rob Shields once argued, is always “a ‘crisis-object’ which destabilises our certainty of the real”. Indeed, cities are sites of constant change. Sanjay Krishnan, a literary scholar, remarked that in Singapore “scaffolding seems the only unchanging feature in a city that sees itself in permanent transition”.
There is a small temporary hut on stilts in front of the construction work at Zhong San Park, next to the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall; the stage for an old chinese opera. It is a magnificient sight, with its gaily painted canvases propped up on wooden poles, juxtaposed against the drab grey scaffolds from the construction work behind it – the beginnings of yet another business park. From this view, it is almost as if the opera tent is backed up into the corner, because the grass patch is empty and has no markings on it, and yet the opera tent squeezes right up to the edge of the plot, and the scaffolding for the commercial developments also grows taller and taller behind it.
RSS feed for comments on this post. / TrackBack URI