Hundreds + Thousands

Commissioned by National Gallery Singapore, Performing Spaces 2021Presented by PICA and Performance Space for Liveworks Experimental Festival of Arts 2022

Daniel Kok (Singapore): Lead artist, performer
Luke George (Melbourne): Lead artist, performer
Alice Hui-Sheng Chang (Tainan): Vocalist, performer
Leeroy New (Manila): Sculpture Design
Nigel Brown (Tainan): Composition, Sound Design
Matthew Adey (Adelaide): Lighting Design
Virtual Nursery design: Factory 1611
Participants: Plant-lovers from Sydney, Hong Kong, Perth and beyond

Photography: Emma Fishwick, Robert Catto

In Hundreds + Thousands, the theatre is turned into a lush, tropical landscape where people and plants gather for a multi-sensorial encounter.

In this collective experience of the visual, the sensual and the sensible, we consider what plants know, and catch a glimpse of a world where time is transformed, and humans displaced. Blending dance, experimental music, and installation, Hundreds + Thousands is an opera that attempts to reconcile the relationship between people and the natural world.

Over the pandemic, we came across numerous people who have developed deeply personal relationships with plants. Plants became our meditative companions even as we ourselves lived like potted plants during lockdown. As we were forced to slow down, some of us began to pay attention to minute shifts in light and air qualities in our apartments, changes in our bodily and thought patterns, new buds sprouting and old leaves withering.

In Hundreds + Thousands, we ask ourselves how we might be able to displace ourselves to catch a glimpse of the other. As this is a performance for people and plants, with people and plants, we wonder what kind of language is needed for us to listen, to see and to speak to/with plants.

For us, the title “Hundreds and Thousands” is a reminder of the overabundance of things that exist (in nature or man-made), the vastness of infinity, the great history of the earth and the universe in which humans are but a blip. What if we can ‘see’ together the times and spaces before the human epoch, or long after humans exist?

Watch performance excerpts
Explore the VIRTUAL NURSERY