We are in a new era of performance making. An era of dissolution. Dissolution of genres. Dissolution of generational divides. Dissolution of “I” in creation. With that, we are emerging into an era of commencement. Commencing brave unknowns. Commencing democracy in creative dialogue. Commencing the “We” in creation.

In this August edition of&nbsp;Running with Strippers, we return to our home base. CAKE's home base in a northern suburb, a space where two years ago, at any given time, machines wurrrred putt

Running with Strippers: Ethereal Machines (2021)

Spatial Designer

By Design is a performance-centred art experience where graphic design, media art and performance meet in playful collaboration. Conceived and directed by CAKE, graphic design artists Vanessa Ban and Amber Vittoria, and media artist Zach Lieberman are invited to create new pieces in collaboration with live performers.


By Design (2021)

Urban legend has it that Sophocles, the Granddaddy of Tragedy, died from holding his breath while reciting a particularly long line from Antigone, the story of a young woman from Thebes, who had the cheek to defy her uncle-ruler Creon to bury her brother Polyneices. Receiving a proper burial was a big deal then. The deceased without an appropriate send-off would be denied entry into the Underworld and forced to roam the shores of River Styx as a restless ghost forever. Antigone wasn’t about to let that happ

Rubber Girl on the loose (2019)

Production Designer

Temple sees the invention of a mythological universe where all the quarters of the world are at odds. A sports hall, once the diplomatic meeting arena of the now opposing sides, stands desolate.

7 people, assailed, stand at the entrance of the great hall. Quickly, they enter and bolt the doors. Some nights they hear pounding on the doors but they keep very still and do nothing. Within the inner sanctum, they create their own rules, find their own order. They wait.

One day, they awake to find the doors

Temple (2018)

In 2015, we stripped our former studio bare to host the first iteration of Running with Strippers. Since then, Strippers has grown to embody the germination of ideas in arid spaces. Our meditations came into focus within the gaps. Dead spaces we saw as potential for fluid and divergent ways to meet minds and create. A space where art begets art. We saw a necessity to wrestle out of the ennui that threatens to cloud the creative space, that pushes risk, experimentation, defiance and stubbornness out of the p

Running with Strippers: On the Rocks (2018)

A foreigner from an ancient civilization, Medea becomes the perpetual outsider in a city defined by self-proclaimed civility and rule of law. When her husband deserts her to marry the daughter of the city’s Premiere, she is left utterly displaced. Facing imminent exile with nothing save the skin on her back, she redirects her anguish into vengeance, punishes her enemies and horrifies the populace by spilling the blood of her own children on their very ground.

One of the most fascinating mythological figu

Medea (2017)

An unlikely location transforms into a stomping ground for artistic expression. Cake’s Running with Strippers is back! Featuring artists and their creations, spilling across genres from performance to performance art, performance installation to music. Each segment adding up to two nights over one weekend of alternative artistic encounters brought to you by artists across disciplines bent on designing original work with a spirit of experimentation.

Borne from Cake’s Decimal Points series and originally t

Running with Strippers: Thou Shall Not (2017)

Over three decades, The Necessary Stage and actors-collaborators who have been partners in the making of the company's devised plays have revealed to us over and over again - in profound, heartbreaking and funny ways - what it means to 'be' in Singapore.&nbsp;

Vinod | Radha Krishnan | Eric Sim Guan Yeow&nbsp;| Noorhayati Yusof&nbsp;| Sergeant Mok&nbsp;| Jali bin Mohd Fariz&nbsp;| Mrs Chua&nbsp;| Mrs Phua Su Lin&nbsp;| Alisha&nbsp;| Melly&nbsp;| Saloma and many more

Away from the buzz of the rehearsal 

Being Haresh Sharma (2017)

After Ophelia, Electra becomes the second creation in Cake’s series of classical re-imaginings where tragic figures are given a striking awakening on Cake’s contemporary stage.

Electra is an immense character borne of tradition and myth, the lady of perpetual lamentation, the embodiment of personal and public grief. This mother of a tragedy centers on Electra, a daughter who ceaselessly and undividedly grieves for her slaughtered father. The perpetrators of the murder are Electra’s own mother and her mot

Electra (2016)

She captures the imagination with her madness, her drowning. A tragic character set eternally in a pool of water, eyes dead, and full of secrets. So little is known about Ophelia. What does she tell us beyond the limits she faced in her short life?

Inspired by Shakespeare’s character, this work delves into the workings of a mind, intricate and complex, encompassing too the landscape of a soul inextricably linked to that of a prominent other, Hamlet.

Beyond the politics of sex and gender and the cycles

Ophelia (2016)

Cake’s studio undergoes a complete strip down, making way for a 124ft X 21ft cavern for art. Running with Strippers features artists and their creations, spilling across genres from performance to performance art, installation to performance installation and music; each segment adding up to three nights of alternative artistic encounters brought to you by artists across disciplines bent on designing original work with a spirit of experimentation and exposing varying degrees of nakedness, metaphorical or oth

Running With Strippers (2015)

Conceptualizer

Director

Born from the desire to chart humanity’s passage from&nbsp;the beginning to its present state, Versus is a ferocious&nbsp;performance about our existence amidst all the wars&nbsp;we wage.

This allegorical journey takes place in the most contentious zones of conflict&nbsp;we know - the world’s innumerable battlefields, the volatile intersections&nbsp;of faith, the deep trenches of the heart - spinning it all like some renegade&nbsp;turntable, ricocheting from flesh domain to spirit state, meshing personal

Versus (2015)

No words heard written spoken can fix what is broken but
damn if we don’t try try try harder faster to be stronger better
than our yesterday selves so all eyes ears fists fingers we delve
into territory unknown how time has flown now we are standing
scared in the sacred soul-searching whilst naked wondering
wandering about this machine is there a place any space to pin
some
spare
hope

If a body seeks a home, it must either find or build one. Decimal Points [infinity] is a journey into an amusemen

Decimal Points [Infinity] (2015)

In Kesamet, orgone is food, water, energy. Orgone is life. Dan works in the factory, producing orgone from his body day after day. At night, he dreams of a woman whose face he cannot see. Someone he believes is from a past he does not remember. His only friend, Talulah tells him it's for his own good. Kesamet survives when everyone plays their role. But is surviving enough?


Paradise (2014)

Stage Designer

Before going under, a man is told that patients hallucinate during surgery. He wakes up thirteen and a half hours later and cannot remember a single thing.

Decimal Points 810&nbsp;is one man's hallucination of a hallucination that never took place. What was going on during the eight hundred and ten minutes of his existence that was lost in oblivion? Where does the mind go when the body lies there in inertia? Where does the mind go during eight hundred and ten minutes of unconsciousness?

Decimal Points

Decimal Points 810 (2014)

Set Designer

Presented by Cake Theatrical Productions in partnership with The Substation and curated by Natalie Hennedige,&nbsp;Decimal Points&nbsp;is a series of art experiments that fuel artistic creation through process and exploration. Over the course of two years (2011 — 2012), four artistic experiments are made, each helmed by an individual artist — Brian Gothong Tan, David Lee, Philip Tan and Rizman Putra. Each artist is encouraged to create from a personal place, finding entry points via the varying disciplines 

Decimal Points First Station (2013)

Artist

Someone said the universe must not be narrowed down to the limit of our understanding.&nbsp;

Two actors move across a desert-like terrain.&nbsp;

Encounters between them gradually bring forth a dramatic landscape capturing at once, a dream-like state and the reality of their humanity.&nbsp;

A theatre performance in two acts.&nbsp;Illogic&nbsp;asks questions it can't answer and sets a path it won't follow.&nbsp;

Two actors. One moving terrain. Giving way to illogic.&nbsp;


Illogic (2013)

People.

Sticking it out in a hyper-real place. Doing things and saying things and thinking things out loud. They keep this up all day.

One Day in this Place&nbsp;is set against a backdrop of an imagined place at once familiar, at once kooky. This new Cake work features the emerging arts practitioners of&nbsp;In A Decade.


One Day in this Place (2013)

Production Construction

A woman is on a flight from

Tanzania to Singapore

In limbo she cannot sleep

memories recent and past play out

in her mind and

a spectre of a loved one appears out

of nowhere


one point six one eight (2013)

5.1 refers to the six channel surround sound multichannel audio system - the most commonly used layout in both commercial cinemas and home theatres. It is also about the search for self in a densely populated space, a space with a population that is reaching a 5.1 million mark.

Decimal Points 5.1&nbsp;is a wordless movement based performance, incorporating radio frequency motion sensors, neo futuristic costumes and unconventional live vocal experimentation, colliding techno toys with raw human physicalit

Decimal Points 5.1 (2012)

Surround sound artist and music director Philip Tan takes it to the floor, tearing up notions of conventionality and turning it up several notches in an installation experiment with performance at specified timings. It's just what happens when the beats from his head let loose and possess a silver screen, kick a** speakers and whatever else is in the room. Okay, you get it, here's something in a performance space that really shouldn't be measured or defined except to say it's what happens when a brilliant m

Decimal Points 7.7 (2012)

Conceived and directed by David Lee, the second experiment in the&nbsp;Decimal Points&nbsp;series is&nbsp;0.01,&nbsp;a quest for perfection that eludes. A tiny piece in a puzzle that seems forever missing. A small voice that echoes all is lost, all is lost. Colliding dance, performance and drawing deep inspiration from the conceptual world of visual design,&nbsp;0.01&nbsp;seeks to create an illusionary world, at once tragic and fantastic, where the inhabitants reach for pure, unadulterated liberation in the

Decimal Points 0.01 (2011)

Desire works at the checkout counter of a supermarket. Day in and out she scans and beeps, trapped in total, utter dead-end boredom. In her imagination she is free, living many glorious lives as lover, heroine, rebel, rogue. In reality, she scans and beeps, scan and beeps in retail hell.

Desire at the Melancholic String Concert&nbsp;is an exploration of freedom beyond the unbending lines of power and oppression. Breaking free from tepid, gutless existence into wild unpredictability and heroic adventure. 

Desire at the Melancholic String Concert (2011)

The art of living in the in-between&nbsp;is a collaborative art project featuring installation, film, performance, workshops and gigs that uncover the inspirations and fantasies that have catalyzed 5 years of works by Cake.

Over 5 days, a shophouse is transformed into a hotbed of images, words, sound, strange movement, magnetic encounters and unexpected happenings sometimes way into the night! Wander through the rooms, each flowing and ebbing with exquisite strangeness or come especially for the performa

The Art of Living in the In-Between (2010)

Cat, Lost &amp; Found finds its charm in the little things that most of us wouldn’t give a second look. The story about a salesman who falls in love with an usher in a movie theatre is a modern day fairy tale that has weird and wonderful characters permeating the stage. A salesman falls in love with the usher who is besotted with a stray cat in the cinema. Meanwhile, the hero of the movie showing in the theatre loses the plot and enters real life to find his brother’s murderer, leaving his hapless wife wait

Neon Tights

WORKS DOCUMENTED IN THE ARCHIVE

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