First Act(s) is a 4-part series featuring 8 plays-in-progress from a group of budding playwrights brought together by fate. These plays were born at the ‘Playwriting Workshop with Haresh Sharma’ (organised by the National Library Board, September – October 2018), and have now been taken to their next developmental step of rewrites and readings.

The plays will be publicly read to an invited audience for the first time, over 4 separate Guest Room sessions from March to July 2019:

Part 1, March 2019

• Twin Butterflies by Clara Mok
• We Cannot Bring Money When We Die by Christine Chia

Part 2, April 2019

• Touch Wood by Auderia Tan
• Untitled by XM Lim-Fang

Part 3, June 2019

• A Midsummer White Dream by Ivy Chen
• The House of Golden Chains by Larnce Alahendra

Part 4, July 2019

• If Tomorrow Comes Again by Ivan Choong
• Silence by Alicia Kan

Twin Butterflies by Clara Mok

Synopsis – The bosomy lao ban niang aka “Old Butterfly” and her pretty daughter aka “Young Butterfly” are in danger of being cheated by a charismatic guy due to a bet. Told from the eyes of bread shop employees, the play revolves around how Ah Tiong, the bread shop towkay, attempts to stop his loved ones from being snared before it’s too late.

Short story ‘Twin Butterflies’, which the play is based on, is one of ten selected works for the Writing the City showcase organised by Singlit Station (October 2018). This light-hearted play is unapologetic and unabashed in bringing out the worst in its cast of entertaining characters.

Playwright – Clara Mok loves reminiscing about her childhood and wishes to capture snippets of Singapore’s past before they disappear.

Actors –
Chio Su-Ping
Christine Chia
Gabriele Goh
Grace Kanai
Ivan Choong
Kelly Choo
Larnce Alehandra
Tanvi Kothary

We Cannot Bring Money When We Die by Christine Chia

Synopsis – We Cannot Bring Money When We Die is a play about a middle-aged woman’s funny and frantic search for security, love, and the meaning of life and death when her husband suffers a massive stroke, requiring her to repair relationships with her children and stepdaughters.

Playwright – Christine Chia is a writer, editor, and teacher who enjoys writing about serious issues in a humorous way.

Actors –
Alicia Kan
Chio Su-Ping
Clara Chow
Grace Kanai
Ivan Choong
Kelly Choo
Shaik Nazray
Yeo Wei Wei

In an ever expanding and growing underground passage network, three relationships and a story of a missing cat unfold. Does the man-made space bury or unearth hidden human desires? How wide apart are our lives from that depicted by advertisements on the underground walls?

Artist’s Motivation:
A playwright is (largely) confined to constructing protagonist journeys via spoken words. Yet, there are many limitations on what those spoken words reveal about the protagonists. Spoken words are like tips of icebergs, and every read of a script is a chance to imagine a different existence beneath what meet the eyes.

Under is an exploration in meanings of spoken words, through repetition, permutation and rhythmization. It is also an exploration of what lies beneath what can be seen and heard.

Centre 42 previously supported the play’s development under its Basement Workshop programme where Lee Shyh Jih and his collaborators underwent six months of workshopping to explore the many possibilities of delivering the texts of Under.

Read more about Under at our Basement Workshop programme here.

Playwright & Director – Lee Shyh Jih
Actors – Ric Liu, Jalyn Han, Tan Beng Tian, Neo Hai Bin, Myra Loke

We Cannot Bring Money When We Die by Christine Chia

Synopsis – We Cannot Bring Money When We Die is a play about a middle-aged woman’s funny and frantic search for security, love, and the meaning of life and death when her husband suffers a massive stroke, requiring her to repair relationships with her children and stepdaughters.

Playwright – Christine Chia is a writer, editor, and teacher who enjoys writing about serious issues in a humorous way.

Actors –
Alicia Kan
Chio Su-Ping
Clara Chow
Grace Kanai
Ivan Choong
Kelly Choo
Shaik Nazray
Yeo Wei Wei

Theresa Tan in 1987. Theodora, better known as Theo, has been living alone in her university hostel. One day, a girl named Sandra dressed all in yellow, moves in. Their personalities and family backgrounds are worlds apart, resulting in their differing perceptions about the world they share. With a healthy dose of varsity dramas, boys, and an “unflushable poop”, this play tells the journey of two ladies who managed to come to some degree of mutual understanding of each other.

Directorial Vision:
When A Yagnya first read Pistachios and Whipped Cream, the images that flashed through her mind were possibly not at all intended by the playwright when Tan first wrote the play in 1987. In her investigation and interpretation of this text, A Yagnya wishes to explore how the existing stereotype of foreigners in Singapore can be made better. Her adaptation seeks to portray the character of Sandra as a Chinese national and Theo as a Singaporean, thus giving rise to a set of different personal interactions between the characters. By working with the comedy present in Tan’s text, she hopes to achieve a work that questions its audience subtly on their views without being preachy.

Presenting this 1st phase of the exploration as a dramatized reading incorporating some basic multimedia and physical theatre work will allow her to crystalise her vision for the full work. The process will help her develop a conscious style for text based direction, through written reflections and documentation of the process.

A Yagnya aims to develop Pistachios and Whipped Cream into a full staging.

A Yagnya, Director
Yagnya is a director who has worked on various capacities with The Necessary Stage (Mobile II: Flat Cities), TheatreWorks (Of Babies [not really] and People), The Singapore Repertory Theatre (Chicken Little and The Nightingale) and the M1 Fringe Festival on theatre projects.

Yagnya aims to develop works for a non-theatre going audience to further discussions about societal issues in a way that she strongly believes theatre can achieve, through compelling stories. When she’s not doing theatre work, Yagnya studies Japanese and does translation and interpretation for the arts. She enjoys a good chat and good tea after shows.

Theresa Tan, Playwright
Theresa Tan’s foray into playwriting began after her first year at university when she decided to participate in the Shell-NUS National Short Play Competition 1987. She did not expect her play Pistachios And Whipped Cream to win First Prize—a win that opened up to her the world of theatre. Theresa went on to become one of the dramatists in TheatreWorks’ seminal Writers’ Lab, which culminated in the Theatre On The Hill event in 1992, a “carnival” of short plays penned by Singaporean playwrights.

Theresa’s Bra Sizes was staged at this event. Her first full-length play Dirty Laundry was staged by TheatreWorks in 1993. In 1994, Theresa collaborated with director Alvin Tan of The Necessary Stage to workshop and stage Excuse Me While I Kiss The Sky, a work that featured the true stories of young people who had attempted suicide.

Since then, Theresa has not written plays except for her church’s Easter and Christmas events. She got married in 1995, became the editor at a host of magazines, from Female Singapore to ELLE Singapore to Tiger Tales to Vanilla, and now runs her own commercial writing business, WORD Agency. She is also the author of A Clean Breast, a chronicle of her experience with breast cancer in 2010. She is married with three children, 19, 17 and 12.

Mentor
Alvin Tan

Multimedia
Brian Gothong Tan

Performers
Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai
Cheryl Tan Yun Xin
Ruzaini Mazani

We Cannot Bring Money When We Die by Christine Chia

Synopsis – We Cannot Bring Money When We Die is a play about a middle-aged woman’s funny and frantic search for security, love, and the meaning of life and death when her husband suffers a massive stroke, requiring her to repair relationships with her children and stepdaughters.

Playwright – Christine Chia is a writer, editor, and teacher who enjoys writing about serious issues in a humorous way.

Actors –
Alicia Kan
Chio Su-Ping
Clara Chow
Grace Kanai
Ivan Choong
Kelly Choo
Shaik Nazray
Yeo Wei Wei

“I feel nothing, nothing. I feel nothing.” – C

Two men, two women…. four voices that intertwine to create a deeply moving exposition about the extremes of love, hope, longing, desire, disappointment, despair and loneliness.

This experiment by 3^rd Culture Theatre is an attempt to create the kind of experiential and visceral theatre that Sarah Kane sought to make.

Audience members are intimately connected to performers. Sound becomes textural through shifts in spatial perspectives. Fleeting hints of light and moments of utter darkness encourage unrestrained emotional responses to performance and text.

About 3rd Culture Theatre
3rd Culture Theatre was launched in 2011. Its mission is to inspire a love for theatre through the staging of emotionally engaging, intellectually provocative and intensely creative performances. The company has created work in Shanghai, Singapore and London including Art (Reza), I Am My Own Wife (Wright), and The Merchant of Venice (a collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company).

Elena Yeo, Producing Artistic Director
Elena has worked for over last ten years as an actor, producer and stage manager in London, Shanghai and Singapore. As a producer, Elena launched the inaugural Short + Sweet Theatre Festival in Singapore 2007. It consisted of 40 ten-minute plays staged over three weeks, and featured some of Singapore’s top actors, directors and playwrights. Other production and stage credits include Agamemnon (Berkoff), Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare), King Lear (Shakespeare), The Master Builder (Ibsen), Drift (Yu) and Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht).

Nicole Stinton, Director
Nicole has worked in the performing arts industry for over two decades across Australia and Asia, specialising in Musical Theatre and other forms of stylised theatre. Her extensive experience is not only as a professional director, playwright and actor, but also as a teacher, manager and vocal coach. Nicole has taught in the West Australian arts education system, including spending several years managing the Performing Arts department of a college. She’s lectured in musical theatre, acting, voice and management at a tertiary level and has published several textbooks on Drama, which are widely used in Western Australia.

Nicole holds an MBA in Arts and Entertainment Management, a Graduate Diploma of Education, a Bachelor in Theatre, and a Bachelor in Musical Theatre from the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). She is currently working towards a PhD in Acting at WAAPA.

Cast
Gerald Chew
Sharda Harrison
Zach Ibrahim
Janice Koh

We Cannot Bring Money When We Die by Christine Chia

Synopsis – We Cannot Bring Money When We Die is a play about a middle-aged woman’s funny and frantic search for security, love, and the meaning of life and death when her husband suffers a massive stroke, requiring her to repair relationships with her children and stepdaughters.

Playwright – Christine Chia is a writer, editor, and teacher who enjoys writing about serious issues in a humorous way.

Actors –
Alicia Kan
Chio Su-Ping
Clara Chow
Grace Kanai
Ivan Choong
Kelly Choo
Shaik Nazray
Yeo Wei Wei

Leanne and Ming are a pair of physically active newlyweds who are trying for a baby, when Ming suffers an accident while biking around Pulau Ubin. They must navigate his recovery with Tammy, a no-nonsense physiotherapist, and Bee Poh, Leanne’s mother, who has never liked Ming.

Ubin is a work-in-progress. After the reading, audience members are invited to share their thoughts on how we can improve the play.

Previous versions of Ubin have been performed in New York’s Workshop Theatre, and the Tisch Asia Black Box.

Teh Su Ching’s (Playwright) work in theatre and film has been performed and screened in New York, Moscow, London, Glasgow, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Singapore. She graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Asia (Singapore) with an MFA in Dramatic Writing, and from Yale University with a BA in Literature and Theatre Studies. She is the only Singaporean student in history to have been featured in the Yale Playwrights Festival. Ubin was her MFA thesis play, which she also work-shopped with MacArthur Genius Grant recipient David Henry Hwang in a Singapore Repertory Theatre Masterclass. Since grad school, Su Ching has co-written three telemovies with Singapore filmmaker Wee Li Lin, performed with Shanghai’s oldest improv comedy troupe, Zmack, in English and Mandarin, and played wise-cracking forensics expert Jean Wu on Mediacorp Channel 5’s Code of Law. Su Ching now lives in Bangkok with her husband and son, where she writes for Mediacorp TV series Lion Moms. She is also a published fiction-writer, essayist, and poet. 

Sabina Ahmed (Director) is the founder of visual and performing arts appreciation group Artizens, and was most recently experiencing an internal feminist revolution when performing in the Vagina Monologues. Previous directing credits include Christopher Durang’s The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and María Irene Fornés’ Fefu and her Friends. She has been involved in various other creative pursuits including writing and acting. Sabina has a day job as a management consultant, which quite frequently seeps into the night. She met Su Ching on a production of Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth.

We Cannot Bring Money When We Die by Christine Chia

Synopsis – We Cannot Bring Money When We Die is a play about a middle-aged woman’s funny and frantic search for security, love, and the meaning of life and death when her husband suffers a massive stroke, requiring her to repair relationships with her children and stepdaughters.

Playwright – Christine Chia is a writer, editor, and teacher who enjoys writing about serious issues in a humorous way.

Actors –
Alicia Kan
Chio Su-Ping
Clara Chow
Grace Kanai
Ivan Choong
Kelly Choo
Shaik Nazray
Yeo Wei Wei

Without Reason explores the challenges of an interracial relationship in modern day Singapore. A Chinese girl and a Malay boy struggle to navigate cultural differences, reconcile different religious beliefs, and manage their family and friends’ expectations. Their story also highlights broader themes pertaining to social class, and the transition from teenage life into adulthood.

Through this play, Yan Ying hopes to contribute to the conversation between the different races in Singapore, and dissect the stereotypes that we have of each other. The intention is to bring to light the underlying racial tensions in our society, the issue of ‘Chinese privilege’, and the ethnic segregation that Special Assistance Plan (SAP) schools inevitably perpetuate. Hopefully, the play will open a discussion on how we can navigate the increasingly diverse cultural landscape of Singapore, and allow us to develop greater understanding and compassion for each other.

Without Reason was first written under the mentorship of Buds Youth Theatre (BYT) in 2014, and subsequently, a play reading of it was staged in March 2015 as part of BYT’s ‘From Scratch’ production. ArtsWok Collaborative will be presenting it as a commissioned play for the M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Festival, in collaboration with Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay in 2017.

Sim Yan Ying is currently pursuing a B.F.A. in Theatre at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She previously graduated from Hwa Chong Institution (college section), and Nanyang Girls’ High School, where she was the Club President for the school’s theatre club from 2010-2011. She took a gap year before university, during which she interned and worked with local theatre companies as such The Necessary Stage, Buds Youth Theatre, Nine Years Theatre, Wild Rice, Asylum Theatre, and Singapore Repertory Theatre. She intends to be a theatre director in future, but is open to exploring other aspects of theatre including playwriting, lighting design, and performing. She is also interested in interdisciplinary performance, and strongly believes in art as a catalyst for empathy and positive change.

Without Reason was presented at Esplanade Theatre Studio as part of M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Festival 2017.

• Tickets to the performance
• Other performances at M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Festival 2017
• Without Reason by Citizen Reviewer Casidhe Ng

What truly drives human conflict? Race, religion, politics or perhaps, even love? This is the central question behind MERCHANT, a powerful re-imagining of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice by 3rd Culture Theatre.

In this provocative re-imagining, 3^rd Culture Theatre is relocating the play to Shanghai 1890, using the opium trade between China and Britain as the historical backdrop. Antonio is a British opium merchant, representative of the many who made their fortunes from the illicit trade and Shylock is a Chinese pawnbroker.

The heart of the play is an examination of the similarities between the relationship of the Jews and Gentiles in the play, and the current situation with China and the west.

The Jews/Gentiles and Chinese/westerns have a very complex relationship, one that is distrustful, competitive, and occasionally outright hostile.  Yet they are bound together because of financial interdependence.

Ultimately, MERCHANT seeks to cast a fresh and provocative light on the conflict between the play’s central characters of Antonio and Shylock, using it as a prism to identify and examine the many issues that fuel our prejudices.

MERCHANT has been in development since 2013 when the Royal Shakespeare Company chose the project for its Studio programme.

Elena Yeo, Artistic Producer
Elena has worked for the last ten years as an actor, producer and stage manager in London, Shanghai and Singapore. As a producer, Elena launched the inaugural Short + Sweet Theatre Festival in Singapore 2007. It consisted of 40 ten-minute plays staged over three weeks, and featured some of Singapore’s top actors, directors and playwrights. Other production and stage credits include Agamemnon (Berkoff), Love’s Labours Lost (Shakespeare), King Lear (Shakespeare), The Master Builder (Ibsen), Art (Reza), I Am My Own Wife (Wright), Drift (Yu) and Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht).

Elena founded 3rd Culture Theatre in 2011 when she was based in Shanghai. Its mission is to stage emotionally engaging, intellectually provocative and intensely creative performances that inspire a love for theatre.

Elena holds two Masters degrees in Performance Making from Goldsmiths College, London and Curating & Cultural Leadership from UNSW Art & Design, Sydney.

Nicole Stinton, Director
Nicole has worked in the performing arts industry for over two decades across Australia and Asia, specialising in Musical Theatre and other forms of stylised theatre. Her extensive experience is not only as a professional director, playwright and actor, but also as a teacher, manager and vocal coach. Nicole has taught in the West Australian arts education system, including spending several years managing the Performing Arts department of a college.  She’s lectured in musical theatre, acting, voice and management at a tertiary level and has published several textbooks on Drama, which are widely used in Western Australia. She holds an MBA in Arts and Entertainment Management, a Graduate Diploma of Education, a Bachelor in Theatre, and a Bachelor in Musical Theatre from the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA).  She is currently working towards a PhD in Acting at WAAPA.

Without Reason was presented at Esplanade Theatre Studio as part of M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Festival 2017.

• Tickets to the performance
• Other performances at M1 Peer Pleasure Youth Theatre Festival 2017
• Without Reason by Citizen Reviewer Casidhe Ng

Once upon a time, there was a Ringmaster who wanted his Little Circus to be the best in the world. After observing the chaos caused by the bad habits in other circuses he told his vet to blind his animals to prevent them from copying these bad habits.

Despite their blindness, his animals performer better! But they were sad. To make them happy, Ringmaster allowed them to blind their own children. But this made them furious and caused a rebellion.

If the animals didn’t incite each other, there wouldn’t have been a rebellion! So Ringmaster decided to slice their tongues off. Look what happened to the circus where the animals could say whatever they liked? They were murdered! He was only thinking of the community. Everything he did was for his animals.

One day a Child came along. To cheer up the blind and dumb animals, she sang a song. However it reminded them of what they used to be. Tiger’s misery escalated during a rehearsal and she lost her temper and killed the Trainer!

Why did they listen to outsiders? Ringmaster really had no choice. He decided to slice their ears off as well. But their remaining senses compensated and the animals performed the best they ever did!

When the Child came again, she asked the blind, dumb and deaf animals if they were happy? They couldn’t hear her or see her tears but it didn’t matter. They nodded and smiled, doing what they had been trained to do. And the world saw how the animals in the little circus were oh so happy! Finally, just as the Ringmaster had dreamed of, his Little Circus became the best little circus in the world!

The Blind Circus is playwright Dora Tan’s latest endeavour that she begun writing for in 2014. Compared to her other plays, The Blind Circus went through a relatively short gestation period – just one year. Dora and her creative team spent 4 days in the Centre testing the script, and presented a dramatized reading to an invited audience on 5 October 2015 in the Centre’s Rehearsal Studio.

Dora Tan, Playwright
Versatile in various writing genres, Dora is most known for her stage plays including 41 hours (2006), Just Late (2007, 2008), I think I do (200), Why I don’t take ma on holiday (2011) and The Race, a public reading (New York 2014). Her most recent play A Wedding, A Funeral and Lucky the Fish was staged by The Singapore Repertory Theatre in 2014. She has also written short stories, screenplays and poetry. Her short stories include Selling your daughter for a pig and a carton of cigarettes (2nd prize, NAC Golden Point Award 2007), Seven views of Redhill(Balik Kampong 2012) and The only time I wished I could read(Junoesq Nov 2014).

Development process

Compared to my other plays, The Blind Circus went through a relatively short gestation period – just one year. In early 2014, I knew I wanted to write a play about censorship. Lots of stuff were going on – the NLB Library saga, the Charlie Hebdo massacre are the ones that come to mind. As I did my research, collecting articles that had anything to do with censorship, more incidents happened – Amos Yee happened.

Even now, in Oct 2015, Amos continues to stir debate about censorship. He is everything I detest about free speech – thoughtlessness, attention-seeking, offensive (intentional or otherwise).

Yet, why do people care so much about being able to say whatever they like? I realised it wasn’t so much the words. What they cared about was that a right was being taken away from them. A right that is as inherent to their being as perhaps one of their senses.

Style

And that is how The Blind Circus started. I used allegory because I wanted to distil the issues into its simple parts. I have often found Aesop’s fables ingenious in its simplicity and ability to get across a message clearly. So before I wrote the play, I wrote a story.

What are the issues?

I explored the role of censorship and its ramifications. How do we balance the rights of the individual with the interests of the community? Do we value social cohesion, safety and economic progress at the expense of personal freedom?

What are the rights of the individual? Does the indvidual have the right to jeopardise the safety of the community?

What about respect and trust between the state and community? The state’s version of trust is to come up with the ‘self-classification scheme’ for artists, which ends up making artists censor themselves. For the artist, this is not a show of trust. It is a show of who’s in charge.

The state’s reason, as it keeps repeating, is, it cannot risk insensitivities which may cause riots. Never mind the debate, the airing of views which can inform our populace.

The play also throws up issues of how the state measures happiness – in terms of GDP. Have we become such a materialistic society, that we see censorship as merely an inconvenience? It seems many of us are prepared to be censored if we have our HDB flat or more.

In the end, it comes down to a matter of balance – how much would the state need to censor before it becomes unacceptable? How far can we allow what we say, hear or do to be censored before we draw the line? Which is more tragic? Censorship? Or a world without censorship?

Research

I went through the usual newspapers and online blogs. Everyone had something to say about censorship.

Reflection during rehearsals and about the Read

I gained a lot from the process. As a writer, I tend to work solo. This process forced me to go ‘out there’ to look for collaborators. This was good because I reconnected with many actors I normally don’t speak to. In addition, when I sent out invitations, I also connected with producers and directors. I had to send my script in many instances. The process forced me out of a comfort zone and made me and my writing more visible.

During rehearsals, hearing the actors speak allowed me to write another draft. So all in all I wrote five drafts in 18 months. Working together as a team, I learnt about my collaborators’ capabilities. It was a good basic lesson in theatre production as I had to do non-writing tasks from budgeting to preparing the programme.

The Read itself went smoothly and professionally. Staff at C42 were very helpful. The actors performed their best. Certain pieces of music which were integral to my writing could be played and this gave the audience the tone of the work.

However, I’m not sure my goal to interest theatre companies to stage my play, was achieved. The people I wanted to see my play never got to see it. Perhaps I did not market the Read enough. Or perhaps it was the haze! Another learning lesson – remind guests two days before the event!

Bitten is an intimate conversation on personal accounts and morbid Kafkaesque imaginings of fear and death, erupting into hilarious spewings of superstitious beliefs based on traditional remedies and cures, leading to an adapted strange folklore of a man reincarnated as a blood-sucking mosquito feverishly in search of his lover. Both poignant and itch-inducing, Bitten aims to bring the audience into a world abuzz with rich Singaporean cultures, the supernatural, and multiple truths.

Inspired by the common experience of having fallen prey to the dreaded Aedes mosquito and dengue fever, Pei Qin and Shanthini share their vivid musings of the journey undertaken by the relentless virus inside their bodies, the heightened state of paranoia that came with the disease, and the love and care showered on them as the battle raged on beneath the skin, through devised text and physical movement with a spin on classical Bharata Natyam dance.

This piece borrows from the external physical effects on the body, and delves deeper beneath the skin into the inner human psyche and root of the performers, as they uncover experiences of communicating across generations, different languages, and medical terms, as well as the rich cultures, traditions and beliefs their families have to offer.

Thong Pei Qin trained in theatre directing and physical theatre at GITIS Russian University of Theatre Arts (Moscow), and holds two theatre degrees from the University of Essex (M.A. Distinctions in Theatre Directing) and the National University of Singapore (B.A. Honours in Theatre Studies). Recently, she joined the newly formed Saga Seed Theatre as Associate Director, and is one of the directors on board The Finger Players’ “Watch This Space” programme (Directors’ Cycle, 2014-16). She most recently directed TheatreWorks’ Between Consciousness (Feb-Mar 2016). Some other directing credits include Natalie Hennedige’s Nothing, Esplanade The Studios: fifty’s Family Relations in Singapore Theatre, David Schneider’s London premiere of Making Stalin Laugh, and a fully devised site-specific work Re: Almost Left Behind on the Singapore Arts Festival 2011.

Dr Nidya Shanthini Manokara obtained her PhD in 2014 from Theatre Studies Program on the NUS Research Scholarship. She is also a classically trained Bharata Natyam practitioner who has received a Diploma and “Natya Visharad” Award for excellence in the dance from Singapore Indian Fine Arts Society in 2003. She currently teaches with the Theatre Studies Programme at National University of Singapore and the Dance Department at Lasalle College of the Arts. Her primary research interests include evolving Asian performance practices and changing affective registers. Shanthini is currently an Apprentice Dramaturg with Centre 42 and has foresight in dance dramaturgy.

Bitten was presented at Esplanade Rehearsal Studio as part of the Fresh Fringe category under M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2017.

• Production Facebook Page
• Interview with The Fringe Team
• Tickets to the performance
• Other performances at M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2017

Bitten: Return to Our Roots will be re-imagined as a site-specific performance and presented at Kampong Bugis Event Site under Our Singapore Fund in 2018.

• Our Singapore Fund project page

Inspired by Antigone as well as stories from the Cultural Revolution, The Shape of a Bird evokes a magical world of warring birds and cicadas through the creative use of puppetry. Within an isolated cell, a Writer tries to retain her imagination and freedom by writing stories and letters to her daughter. She forges a tentative friendship with her jailor, even as she resists his attempts to force a confession out of her. In the meantime, she creates a magical world of birds and cicadas in her mind, which features a young heroine, Ann, who similarly defies the authorities to put her stories on the page and bring her brother back to life. However, as the pressures on the Writer intensify in the real world, she is forced to choose between her stories and her own daughter. Gradually, the boundaries between the two worlds dissolve, and events go spinning out of the Writer’s control, in both her real and imagined life.

The Shape of a Bird is playwright Jean Tay’s latest creation. With the support of the Centre’s Guest Room programme, Jean, together with director Mei Ann Teo and a team of actors, works towards presenting a work-in-progress play-read on 12 July 2015 in the Rehearsal Studio. Thereafter, input from invited audiences will feed into refining the play for a future staging in 2016.

Jean Tay, Playwright
Graduated in 1997 with a double-degree in creative writing and economics from Brown University, USA, Jean Tay has under her belt a number of award-winning plays. In 2006, Everything But the Brain was awarded Best Original Script for the Life! Theatre Awards. Boom was conceptualised at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2007, and developed and staged by the Singapore Repertory Theatre in September 2008. It was nominated for Best Original Script for The Straits Times’ Life! Theatre Awards in 2009 and is now an ‘O’ and ‘N’ Level Literature text in Singapore schools

Following the Guest Room work-in-progress showing, The Shape of A Bird will be premiering at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2016 in January 2016. The Centre continues to support the play’s development under its Basement Workshop programme. Jean Tay and her collaborators in the newly formed collective Saga Seed Theatre will be rehearsing at Centre 42 in the first half of January leading up to the production’s premiere.

Read more about The Shape of A Bird under our Basement Workshop programme here.