Mosaic

This decennial revival of Joel Tan’s time-capsule of a piece about nostalgia, memory, and loss was programmed as part of The Esplanade’s Studios season in 2023. Shou Chen (Director) and I wanted to capture that sense of loss and dislocation that comes with growing up within a constantly shifting urban landscape.

I began by examining how the dragon playground has been reappropriated and rebranded ad nauseum, and toyed with how I could do so within the context of the text. I wanted to portray it as this fragile, idealised objet that was beautiful but alien to the passing of time.

This impulse led to the eventual design - an eternal, glass-like version of the dragon playground set against a bed of decaying leaf-matter. Whether the tinting and immortalisation of this memory is for better or worse is left to the audience’s interpretation.