Al-Matin Yatim

Al-Matin Yatim graduated from Intercultural Theatre Institute with a Professional Diploma in Intercultural Theatre (Acting). His theatre acting credits include Ten Thousand Tigers as part of Festival Theatreformen 2016 in Braunschweig, Germany (Ho Tzu Nyen), Between Consciousness (TheatreWorks), Ma’ma Yong (Najib Soiman / Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay), It won’t be too long: The Cemetery (Drama Box) as part of Singapore International Festival of Arts 2015, which he shares the nomination of Best Ensemble and Best Production of the Year at the 2016 Life! Theatre Awards, Q: Protagonists at the Edge (Ang Gey Pin / Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay), Hawa (Hatch Theatrics), Power Sex & Success (Aarne Neeme /Intercultural Theatre Institute), The Blind Age (T.Sasitharan / Chowk Production), Decimal Points 810 (Cake Theatrical Production), Balada Tun Fatimah (Teater Kami).

He wrote and directed his debut play in Race to the End II in 2011 as part of a multi-disciplinary young artist showcase organised by Panggung Arts. He last performed his own conceived monologue, Ring in the Desert at the
Singapore Writers Festival 2015’s 12 hours performance entitled “What I love about you is your attitude problem” curated by Huzir Sulaiman.

Ring In A Desert

Mamat, your friendly furniture guy had a decent day at work until an annoying incident decided to ruin it. A situation perhaps most of us have experienced before, get so irritated by but can do nothing but to curse secretly in our hearts. But Mamat doesn’t stop there. He searches into his pseudo-psychedelic spiritual reasons that brought him from floating in the outer space to swimming in the cell, just to find the wisdom behind it.

This play explores the reasons behind the significance of human existence, of its purpose and wonders through the concept of “middle nation” as stated in the holy Quran. How as an individual, we can affect other people through our actions no matter what social status you possess. Because everybody matters and plays a part, especially in the alleged self-centred, fast-paced and individualistic world we are living in, in creating a better integrated society.

Isaac Lim Jue Hao

Isaac is a freelance bilingual writer and actor. Isaac holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Theatre Studies from the National University of Singapore, as well as a Diploma in Chinese Media and Communications from Ngee Ann Polytechnic. His first play Satisfaction Guaranteed received the 2^nd prize at the Singapore Young Dramatist Award in 2003.  Isaac then won the 24 Hour Playwriting Competition 2015 (Open Category) for Between Consciousness, which was later produced by TheatreWorks in 2016. He is also part of the writing team of Project Understudy (2016, Thespis). As an actor-performer, Isaac was seen in Void Deck (2013, NUS), We, the Inhabitants (2014, NUS) and Incarnation of the Beast (2015, TheatreWorks). On screen, he appeared in Young & Fabulous (2016, Encore Films). Isaac is also a theatre reviewer under Centre 42’s Citizens’ Reviews. Isaac loves singing (to songs by Zhang Hui Mei), reading, café hopping, shopping and Instagram plus Snapchat.

I am A*MEI (working title)

A*Mei is a musician. A*Mei is an aboriginal. A*Mei is a provocateur.
A*Mei has an identity crisis.

Set in a music bar in an undetermined country with a Chinese majority, the play revolves around the lives of 4 characters, a non‐Chinese who wants to be a part of this city, a local who cannot wait to sanitize himself of the politics of this city, a born male cisgender/transgender who loves the city, and a woman who just hates everything around her. I am A*MEI questions one’s affiliation to his country and the policies they think are restricting them, it questions one’s gender, sexual and national identity. It is about the star in one’s heart, the voices waiting to be heard through the music, and against the music.

Zee Wong

Zee is an actor, singer, and theatre-maker. Her father’s early encouragement of a reading habit grew into a love for literature, then into an undying love for the stage.

Zee’s recent acting credits include Café (The Twenty-Something Theatre Festival); Upstream (The Theatre Practice Actors’ Lab); and Glass Anatomy (Toy Factory). She was part of the original cast of Normal (Checkpoint Theatre) in 2015, nominated for Best Ensemble at the recent Life! Theatre Awards.

Zee has had the opportunity to write, devise and direct under the Theatre Practice’s two-year Actors’ Lab programme. She also got her first taste of theatre producing this year, managing Marketing, Publicity, Sponsorships for the Twenty-Something Theatre Festival under the mentorship of Creative Producer Tan Kheng Hua.

Zee hopes to create art that affects, moves, and inspires. She is also an incurable cat lady.

Portmanteau (working title)

Portmanteau explores the complex issue of gender relations – love, sex, consent, ownership, respect – through the lens of sexual violence.

Tan Liting

Liting works full time as a theatre practitioner with an interest in devising performance from personal stories. Liting’s past directorial credits include The Truth About Lying (The Finger Players’ Watch This Space Director’s Cycle 2014), Taking The Subs (The Substation Director’s Lab), The Eulogy Project I: Muah Chee Mei and I (Potluck Productions), (When I’m) Sixty Four (Ageless Theatre), Re: Almost Left Behind (Singapore Arts Festival 2011), Almost Left Behind (NUS Thespis). Liting likes conversation, hearing and telling a good story. Liting also likes guitars, sneakers and referring to Liting in third person. Liting is a founding member of Theatre Cell.

B*TCH (working title)

B*TCH delves into the realms of feminine masculinity in an attempt to provide a glimpse into the private lives of women who relate to or identify as butch, those who transition through butchness, and the lives of individuals who surround them. Through the sharing of personal experiences and oral history, B*TCH aims to question the positions of those who are not bound by binaries, and seeks to locate them in Singapore’s society, a society that often regards them as odd and irrelevant. B*TCH is a performance on and of gender, exploring what it really means to be a butch woman by demystifying the label and problematising the binary. B*TCH is about real people, and their real stories.

Reflections by Tan Liting

B*TCH , retitled Pretty Butch, went on to further development for the stage, commissioned by the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2017.  The work is now supported under Centre 42’s Basement Workshop programme.

Read more about the development of Pretty Butch and its subsequent stagings here.

Nabilah Said

Nabilah Said was guided by pure instinct and methodical madness when she ventured into the world of theatre in 2010 as part of Teater Ekamatra’s youth wing, Mereka. She was part of Mentah, a platform to help nurture young playwrights, from 2012 to 2015. There, she was blessed with opportunities to show her work to unsuspecting audiences, such as Tart (2015), Next Station (2014) and Lost (2012).  She is now foolishly addicted to the fear and thrill of writing for the stage, and is hungry for more. On occasion, she has acted in productions by Teater Ekamatra and TheatreWorks, such as the 2012 ensemble piece, This Placement, held at the former Geylang Fire Station. She is a full-time writer at The Straits Times Life!, and writes poetry and short stories on the sly.

State Land (working title)

We are all islanders. Water surrounds us, coconut trees our natural vegetation, tropical weather our constant bugbear. In the city-state of Singapore, land is limited and we create spaces to call our own. But what happens when our spaces are no longer ours and we are forced to recreate new homes on foreign soil? Stateland looks at Singapore as mainland amongst more than 60 other islands, a city-state and a homeland for its people.

Reflections by Nabilah Said

Chan Yee Ann Daniel

Daniel has been hooked onto the theatre scene ever since he saw the musical, Wicked, 3 years ago. His second attempt at playwriting (we do not talk about the first attempt) was at TheatreWorks 24-Hour Play writing competition in 2013, in which he won a Merit in the Youth Category. He has been involved with the various arts forms for as long as he can remember, and he views himself to be a fiercely driven individual, his volition being his greatest asset. He left school to pursue his interest in writing, and fervently hopes to one day live off his passion as a published poet and playwright. Daniel is honoured to have been selected as a Boiler Room playwright at Centre 42. He currently also has the privilege to co-write for youth theatre collective, Bound Theatre. After his stint with national service, he might consider pursuing a Diploma in Technical & Production Management, whilst taking up writing ventures. He is the luckiest for the immense support, inspiration and encouragement he constantly receives from his family and friends. There is no line in Wicked, the musical that he does not know.

Inside The Box

The theory of Schrödinger’s Cat presents that the particles in matter exist differently before they’re observed, and after they are observed. Before observation, matter exists in all of its states. A cat inside a box with a ticking bomb, is both dead and alive, until one checks up on the cat. With that theory in mind, Inside The Box attempts to explore the themes of frayed possibility, predestination, and the question: Is there a point in anything, if fate has already been set?

Reflections by Daniel Chan

Suzanne Choo

Suzanne Choo teaches literature at the National Institute of Education. She completed her PhD in English education at Columbia University in New York. Her book “Reading the world, the globe, and the cosmos: Approaches to teaching literature for the twenty-first century” was published in 2013. Aside from writing academic articles, she has an interest in scriptwriting and has been writing plays and musicals for schools for over ten years. In 2008, she was commissioned to write a play titled “Implosion” which was performed over three nights at the Drama Centre. Another play, “smoke,” was a top-ten play performed at the Esplanade during the inaugural Short & Sweet Festival and won the People’s Choice Award. She hopes to continue writing plays that would de-familiarize the ordinary and provoke philosophical thought on issues related to aesthetics, ethics and social justice in Singapore society.

Open Spaces (working title)

The play is an exploration of the power of the literary imagination and its contribution to the development of civic space in Singapore. It shifts between the present in which metaphor, irony, and word play are no longer understood or valued as a result of society’s preference for the pragmatic, the logical, and the literal. This is juxtaposed with late nineteen century Singapore which saw the birth of the literary periodical as a platform through which locals could engage with social and political issues of their time. Set in the midst of a vibrant cosmopolitan world where contestations of power by colonialists, Chinese locals, Straits Chinese and other groups occurred, engagements with the literary played a vital role in developing dialogic and hospitable public discourse. This historical aspect of Singapore is layered with such philosophical questions as – does truth reside in the literal or does the empirical provide only half-truths that are surfaced as reality is disrupted by the fantastical? Does freedom lie in a world where concrete change occurs or in the realm of metaphor and allegory where dispositions of openness and ambivalence are cultivated? Audiences will embark on a journey to explore literature’s role in the past and its possibilities for Singapore’s future in a play of words, time, and imagination.

Reflections by Suzanne Choo

Bryan Tan

Bryan Tan is a playwright and theatre director. He graduated from the National University of Singapore with a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) in 1999, and is presently the regional legal counsel of a multinational company.

In 1996, he was awarded the First Prize in the Hewlett-Packard / Action Theatre 10-Minute Play Contest for Lizard In The Loo. In 1998, he received a Merit Prize in TheatreWorks’ 24-Hour Playwriting Competition for Snakeskin. In the same competition, he received the Second Prize in 2010 for There Will Now Be A 15-Minute Interval, and the First Prize in 2013 for Strike.

In 2004, Teater Ekamatra presented Blissed, and Broomstick as part of Istana 2000. In 2007, TheatreWorks presented The Last Theatre State as part of 120. Play Den Productions presented The Devil’s Encore in 2009, and Someday, Samsara in 2010. Most recently, Short One Player Theatre (Taiwan) presented WiFi Lovers in 2013.

He is a member of The Blue Statesmen, an independent collective of theatre artists. For their inaugural production, he conceived and directed BluePrince, which was presented by the collective and The Substation as part of SeptFest 2012 and the Kuo Pao Kun Festival 2012. His other plays include Heavy Heart, Travelling Light, Shopping For Baby, Nerve Endings, X-Country and Offering.

Paper Tigers

“All reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality, they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are powerful.”
– Mao Zedong

Paper Tigers examines the issue: can theatre change society? In that regard, can theatre be an instrument of cultural transformation, in view of its ability to articulate the concerns of a community, convey different positions and perspectives, as well as provoke reflection and debate? Or is theatre nothing more than a form of middle-class (and possibly middle-brow) entertainment, an opiate for the moneyed masses?

This work is set in Singapore during the years of 1990 to 2002, and premised on a fictional theatre company. The audience will be taken behind the scenes, to contemplate the inner workings of the company, and the local theatre scene in general. They will witness, in the rehearsal spaces and dressing rooms, both on- and off-stage, the artists’ dreams and anxieties, their ideals and struggles, in that era of often experimental and politically-charged theatre.

Paper Tigers presents a meditation on the complex and contentious relationship between art, society and politics, set during a significant period of theatre history in Singapore.

Reflections by Bryan Tan

Timothy Nga

Timothy is interested in the fine spaces that can be found in between the tight weave of Singaporean and global city society.

Since 2014, with the support of The Substation and the National Arts Council, he has worked on and presented theatrical projects that investigate the complex and ever-changing flux of the individual versus the collective.  Investigating ways of being in this world, so to speak.

He has two original works to his name.  In 2014, he created Taxi: Between You and Me, a verbatim play about taxi drivers under The Substation Directors’ Lab Programme.  In 2015, together with Bani Haykal and Yusri “Shaggy” Sapari, he created Between You and Me, a mobile, interactive 1-to-1 performance journey using small spaces within The Substation as corridors for connection, which was staged in the midst of the Night Festival at Armenian Street 2015.

Timothy continues a robust parallel practice as an actor/director and has trained in the Suzuki Method of Actor Training and Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints (SITI Company Summer Intensive 2008 and SITI Company/Soif Compagnie 2013), LeCoq Technique and Ensemble Creation Methods (Movement Theater Studio/Norman Taylor/Richard Crawford/Virginia Scott 2015), Pig Iron Theatre Company/Charlotte Ford/Emmanuelle Delpech 2016, Theatre de Complicite/Lilo Baur 2016) and Forum Theatre (Kok Heng Leun 2011). He is also a founding member of award-winning, now defunct, theater collective, A Group of People.

Where Has The Good Man Gone?

This play is an exploration into manhood and masculinity, beginning with two characters widely accepted as paragons of masculinity, the greatest of the Greek heroes, Heracles, and the Marlboro Man.

Heracles is a champion of the Olympian order against chthonic monsters. Extraordinary strength, courage, ingenuity, and sexual prowess with both males and females are among the characteristics commonly attributed to him.

The Marlboro Man is credited with making the most feminine of devices, the filtered cigarette, manly.

How do our gods of strength navigate an ever-shifting consciousness where the post-industrial economy and the rise of free information have transformed biological imperatives into shaky social constructs?

The world turns and society shifts uncomfortably in the sand. Where monsters no longer exist in the physical form, how do heroes of this ilk avoid going from the promise of the Alpha Male to the curse of the Omega Man? Does this prospect scare our dynamic duo? How do they feel about all of this?

“You have to be joking,” says Heracles, with a voice like polished stone. “We don’t talk about our feelings.”

“Correction,” says the Marlboro Man through pursed lips. “We don’t talk.”