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The MadHatter Project Throws A Spectacular Sarong Party

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The MadHatter Project Throws A Spectacular Sarong Party

By Carolyn Oei, 24 February 2019


Cover image: Marc Nair

“Lie back and think of England, darling.

You’ll never bring up the rear…”

From the get-go, it was clear that Sarong Party would be everything that the Singapore Bicentennial Office wished it wouldn’t be.

It’s 2019 and Singapore is celebrating 200 years of colonialism – 200 years of the white man landing on our shores and claiming us for their own. In there is a veiled message about how fabulous the fight for independence was and how we must be eternally grateful to our saviours, those who lifted us from bondage.

But why the need for sheer covers and coded messages?

Make like The MadHatter Project and tell it like it is. The band, each member as mad as a Hatter, even if only quietly so, pulled no punches in their questioning and displeasure of this celebration of colonisation.

The Mad Hatter Project don’t seem very pleased about this colonisation lark. Photo: Marc Nair

Perhaps it was fortunate, then, that Sarong Party – an apt name for the performance, much like Pocahontas – was actually part of The Future of Our Pasts Festival, organised by Yale-NUS College in support of the SG Bicentennial.

Sarong Party was a dizzying display of poetry, rock music, cabaret, Thai disco and, fittingly, choral singing. Yes, the Sarong Party Chorus did sing in Latin and they did treat us to a modified version of the Mr Bean theme song.

[Watch our highlights video below.]

Photos: Marc Nair

As the MadHatters took us through sermons extolling the values of the English language and shocked us by making us stand to sing the Raffles Institution school song, it became apparent how much of a full-bodied performance this was. We scratched our heads wondering where we might have seen something as oversized as this.

Many in the audience were laughing quite hard during this bit. It did feel a little weird to be singing someone else’s school song. Photo: Marc Nair

Many fans of good music would admit to listening to, ironically, British band Queen, whether regularly or when in need of some, well, good music for a change. We listen to Queen often and have done so more frequently of late after we watched the movie, “Bohemian Rhapsody”. We can’t seem to get enough of the largeness, the wizardry or the pinpoint accuracy of emotion of Freddie Mercury.

And then it hit us.

Mark Nicodemus Tan, the lead MadHatter, was large and a wizard with the complex melodies and he sang with in-your-face emotion.

Mark Nicodemus Tan delighting the crowd with his tinkering on a training piano. Photo: Marc Nair

Mark Nicodemus Tan sang “The Long Arm Of The Law” with painful intimacy. The performance brought to mind Queen’s “Too Much Love Will Kill You”.

Make no mistake, though; the other band members and performers were also large - Xie Zhizhong on crazy keyboards and conducting the chorus; John Yeo with his smooth bass lines; Yan Yi Yang, the trumpeter Pied Piper; Jamie Lee with her stirring drum solo that gave pounding gravitas to Edwin Thumboo’s poem, “May 1954”.

Jamie Lee pounded on her drums as Edwin Thumboo’s fiery words flashed across the screen. Photo: Marc Nair

The Sarong Party narrative wasn’t chronological; it didn’t have to be. This wasn’t a history lesson. Rather, it was an awakening, a seeing again, a reclaiming, although perhaps not in the propagandist nation-building fashion that the Prime Minister’s Office might have envisioned.

No.

Sarong Party challenges us to interrogate the “what ifs”.

What if we hadn’t been a sleepy fishing village?

What if there were no S377A of the Penal Code?

What if we’d never tasted Marmite?