On Any Given Day: An Ode to Waterloo
Performance
Date: Sat, 30 Aug: 7 PM - 8 PM
Venue: Waterloo Centre, Level 1 (opposite St Joseph's Church along Queen Street)
Presented by The Listening Biennial, a highlight of The Singapore Night Festival
For The Listening Biennial, Third Edition, Chong Li-Chuan made a soundscape composition entitled On Any Given Day. It is an 8.5-minute stereo piece created from field recordings made at Hong Lim Complex in Singapore. The work is a meditation on the site’s layered history, specifically its role during the Japanese Occupation in 1942. The piece positions listening as an act of remembrance and woven into the soundscape is a personal thread: the story of Li-Chuan’s grandfather’s improbable escape from death during Sook Ching. On Any Given Day: An Ode to Waterloo shifts the locus of remembrance and reconciliation to a corner of Waterloo Centre, adjacent to the old campus of Catholic High School on Queen Street where Li-Chuan attended preprimary. An Ode to Waterloo is a 40-minute site-responsive performance that weaves improvised electronic music, field recordings, and live percussion on street furniture, to reanimate the textures of a city that hums with forgetting. The performance is an invitation to convalesce, to listen beyond the surface where memory lingers in metal, air, and gesture, to mutually witness, and to hold open the act of listening.
