The Festival of the Moon

For the past couple of weeks there have been celebrations for the festival of the moon. Isn't that a magical name? The celebrations have included frenzied buying of mooncakes, music and drumming and last weekend a red dragon danced down our street.

There is a shop on the way to the station which sells moon cakes. The week before last there were long queues outside it everyday. I planned to do a Monet like study of the queue throughout the day - the queue at 7am, 10am, noon and so on. Taking photos rather than painstaking oils observing the different qualities of light. But last week the queue had suddenly gone and I was too late. Here are a couple of snaps I took of it anyway. As you can see it's quite a long queue so the cake must be really good.

Although a great cake lover I am not overly fond of moon cakes, despite their delicious name. They have a thick crust a bit like a pork pie and inside translucent lotus seed paste. They can also, if they are particularly auspicious, have salted duck eggs inside. Very much like a sweet pork pie. Three salted duck eggs means that the eater is due for a long run of good luck.

There have been large open tents put up all over the place. In one we saw about 50 large tables set out ready for an enormous feast. Smaller tents hold stages where Chinese opera is performed. You can see the backstage area as you walk past sometimes. The performers getting ready painting their faces thickly into characters masks of bright white and red.

I came across a performance in full swing on Tuesday night opposite the Monkey Temple in Tiong Bahru. It was raining lightly and there were a group of four or five people in the audience outnumbering the performers. An old man held a blue umbrella over his little grandson as they watched the performance. People tell me it's a dying art form because the younger generation aren't interested. Here are some pictures and the video at the top (if it works) is of the performance.

I think you can get the idea from the photos that it's very brightly coloured, though a fairly bare stage. There's lots of singing and yowling and dancing using the long sleeves in a significant seeming way. It made me think of pantomine or music hall.

I loved it. It also reminded me of the workshop I did with the French 'Theatre du Soleil'. They are very influenced by Eastern theatre -Balinese masks and Chinese opera. It felt really exciting and enriching to wander past a street corner and find theatre going on as a part of people's lives. It's a shame that people don't seem as excited by it as the cake, but I am.