i. womb song
ii. love is the song
Performance
Date: Sat, 30 Aug, 8.30PM - 9.30 PM
Venue: Arts Resource Hub (Black Box, Level 2), 42 Waterloo Street, S187951
Presented by The Listening Biennial, a highlight of The Singapore Night Festival
For this activation, artists Esther Vincent and Aine Nakamura respond to the Listening Biennial audio collection and Third Listening via poetry, voice and movement.
i. womb song
Esther Vincent (Singapore)
Poetry reading
Now you are gone and for a while my womb lost its voice and forgot how to sing.
//
What is a song but a daughter's love transcending time and space?
I am learning to listen.
When her beloved dog Ealga dies, Esther finds her home, which had been filled with the songs and sounds of Ealga's life, abruptly silent. womb song chronicles Esther's journey through grief as she wanders from landscape to landscape, from a temple in Bangkok to her subconscious, from the Kinabatangan River to the uncharted space of her dreams. All the while, the sea within her tosses. As Esther searches for healing, she finds herself asking, what does it mean to mother--a dog, a child, another non-human life--and be mothered?
ii. love is the song
by Aine Nakamura (US/Japan)
Voice & Movement Performance
Can love be a song? Through a nuanced interplay of voice and movement, artist Aine Nakamura engages listening as an embodied act of care. Her performance draws on attunement to depth and the site to cultivate a space for mutual recognition, gesturing toward the potential for collective healing and relational repair.
“I would like to pursue listening as an act of care and love. Last year, my friend Rachel Chen’s mother Deborah Chen changed my standpoint about intergenerational stories from 'responsibility' to 'love'. I listen to sounds in bodies, silence, hesitation, complexity, ambiguity, opacity...in a space beneath and between our physical boundaries. Folds. I would like to engage in my listening in response to participating artists' works, audience members, and the site as well. Esther Vincent's songs about loss and grief, and connecting with her mother through her mothering open me up to breathe with my mother's loss and her grief, the hidden that seems to leak. Li-Chuan Chong's sonic art work is a chance for me to listen to the environment that carries unheard and engraved. The Third Space reminds me of how each of our bodily parts are interconnected with natural elements. Together with audience members and the site, I would like to imagine a space of multiple feelings and beings.”
Accessibility Notes:
- Relaxed area available on Level 1 in the inner courtyard.
- The Black Box is located on the second floor of a heritage building that lacks elevators or escalators. Audiences can access the Black Box only by climbing a flight of stairs.
About the Artists
Esther Vincent Xueming (Singapore)
Author, Poet
Esther Vincent Xueming is the author of womb song (Ethos books, 2024) and Red Earth (Blue Cactus Press, 2021), and co-editor of two environmental anthologies: Here was Once the Sea: An Anthology of Southeast Asian Ecowriting (2024) and Making Kin: Ecofeminist Essays from Singapore (2021). She co-edited Poetry Moves (2020) and Little Things (2013). Esther has served as guest editor for Mānoa Journal (35.2), University of Hawai’i Press (2024) and as guest regional editor, Asia for a special eco-themed issue of The Global South (16.1), University of Mississippi (2022). Her essays have been published in The Trumpeter, EcoTheo Review, Sinking City Review and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. A literature educator by profession, she is passionate about the entanglements in art, science, literature, spirituality and ecology. Esther is featured regularly in the Singapore Writers Festival, and has been programmed at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival (2022) and Amazonia, The National Museum of Singapore (2024). Esther is a 2025 National Centre for Writing (Norwich, UK) Singapore Writer-in-Residence. Besides teaching and writing, Esther is an Usui Reiki Master and ANFT Forest Therapy Guide whose practice involves relating to the more-than-human world in an embodied, heart-centred way.
Aine Nakamura (US/Japan)
Artist
With her unique transnational background growing up between Japan and the United States, Aine Nakamura has developed her transborder and interdisciplinary art of voice and movement. She tells stories through her performances, exploring nuanced potentialities of voice and body, and of listening and sensing. Her recent works include her solo performance of sung and spoken voice and body Under an Unnamed Flower, presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which focused on war, weaving, silk, and mourning, gestures and objects connecting the multiple; solo performance project Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains (2022), presented at Theatertreffen at Berliner Festspiele after its premiere at the Gallatin Galleries, focused on time-transcending recovery in season changes; and a month-long site-specific exhibition and performance project hands on tape (2025), presented at The Lab in SF, unfolded over research, conversations and collaborations, exploring architectural changes and hidden stories, silk threads, erased labor, and metamorphosis of bodies and materials as she explored through experiences of surgeries and changes of inner shapes in a community. Nakamura is recently interested in the topics of love, hopeful kindness, and folds, a space between positive and negative. Nakamura has been awarded the Venice Biennale Site-Specific Performance Grant, the Fulbright Fellowship (Berlin), and The Leo Bronstein Homage Award (New York University).
https://evaaine.com/home
