A TINY COUNTRY| by ATTEMPTS

“It has been many days since we last ate. We barely manage to find some scrap of food here and there. These people, my people, my… tribe. I really hope we survive together.”

A TINY COUNTRY is a thought-provoking, experiential, playful, and exciting collective role-playing experience. The audience plays dual roles—one as a member of a community living in a tiny country who is invested in the country’s fate, and another as a social scientist who impartially experiments with the people’s future. The collective stories are woven through a person from the past, a present struggle, and a crisis in waiting.

The country has survived a long history of conflicts and threats. For the next decade, they come face to face with crossroads. Do they focus on harvesting natural resources or cultivating talents? Should they explore and expand or strengthen and defend? Do they unite or tear the country apart?

Artist Statement

A TINY COUNTRY is a special project especially for me. I’d recently come across a documentary about Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian island where a group of Malays reside. They practice Islam and similar Malay culture to us but yet speak with Australian accent. This makes me reflect upon my own relationship with the island I’m living on. What is my connection with this island? Why do I spend many years of my life, yearning for a place here when everything around me tells me to draw wisdom an foreign land elsewhere. How then, can I start telling my story, the story that starts with the place I call my home?

Development Process

This is an unique experience for us as it is the first time ATTEMPTS is working with an established playwright to write something participatory, forging a game while we are at it. C42 gives us the space to experiment and play with the ideas. Like all good games, one can only get better at repeated attempts at the game and tweaking the play. Right now, we are building, developing, writing, testing and rehearsing the performance as we speak. It has to run all at a go, which is the nature of spontaneous works.

ATTEMPTS
ATTEMPTS is a participatory theatre collective consisting of artists whose interests are participatory arts. They are Cheryl Tan, Farez Najid, Ng Sze Min and Rei Poh. It is founded by Rei Poh in 2019, after his research into video game mechanics and participatory narratives during his Master’s programme with the Victorian College of the Arts. Named after their first participatory project in 2018, ATTEMPTS is a collective that believes theatre can and should transform passive audiences into active players, by equipping them with agency (the power and capacity for action), while inviting them on a multi-sensorial adventure combining storytelling and game mechanics.

Director/Game Designer/Co-creator – Rei Poh
Rei Poh is a committed participatory theatre practitioner, director and game designer, who believes in the power of theatre to transform. He is a proud graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts’ Master of Directing for Performance program. Rei has created thought-provoking participatory and forum theatre works like ATTEMPTS:SG, ATTEMTPS:MEL and《莎莎》Girl In the White Sand Box. Rei’s recent projects include the showcase of DATING SIM (beta) —a participatory piece that experiments with video game-style narrative in LATE NIGHT TEXTING 2019 by CENTRE 42

Playwright/Co-creator – Jean Tay
Jean Tay is an award-winning Singaporean playwright, whose plays have been performed in Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. She has been nominated four times for Best Original Script for The Straits Times Life! Theatre Awards, and won for Everything But the Brain in 2006. Everything but the Brain and Boom have both been used as ‘O’ and ‘N’ Level literature texts.

Producer – Woo Hsia Ling
Woo Hsia Ling is an independent producer with 17 years of experience as a Stage and  Production Manager. Ling ventured into independent producing since 2014, and was the Managing Producer for Saltwater by Jamie Lewis, a participatory performance which saw four performance seasons in Melbourne, Brisbane and Gold Coast, between 2015 and 2016. She was also the Managing Producer for Chinatown Crossings by Drama Box, a roving site-specific performance in Singapore that ran two sold-out seasons in 2018 and 2019.

Spatial & Visual Designer – Goh Abigail
Goh Abigail (b. 1993) works with sound, drawings, objects and space as both subject and material. She graduated in 2017 with a BA(Hons) Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts and is a recipient of the 2017 Chan-Davies Art Prize and 2015 Winston Oh Travel Award. Her recent exhibitions include Bachelorette Machines at Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2019, and in-inhabitations at Telok Ayer Arts Club in 2018, and was onboard Toy Factory Production’s A Dream Under the Southern Bough: Reverie as the installation artist/set designer.

Sound Artist – Ng Sze Min
Ng Sze Min is a sound artist interested in expanding documentary and participatory forms. She expresses text, concepts and experiences into audio works. Her performances and one-on one live art shows have been featured at the Poetry Festival 2017 (Singapore), 15th Big Sky Documentary Film Festival (USA) and hillsceneLIVE 2019 (Melbourne, Australia). She recently completed a month-long residency in Kluang, Malaysia, engaging residents in detailing a sound map of their town.

Lighting Designer – Petrina Dawn Tan
Petrina Dawn Tan holds a Master of Art with Merit in Collaborative Theatre Production and Design from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. She practises Scenography (Space and Lighting) and has conceptualised a range of projects including circus, community music festivals and installations with the element of audience participation.

Performer – Farez Najid
Farez Najid started his professional career in 2006 and was trained in BA(Acting) at LASALLE College of the Arts. His works include Off Centre (The Necessary Stage, 2019), Main2 (Teater Ekamatra, 2017), Prism (Toy Factory Productions, 2017), Geylang (WILD RICE, 2016), and Tan Tarn How’s Lady Soul and the Ultimate “S” Machine (Esplanade Presents The Studios, 2015). He also participated in international works such as Year Zero (Drama Arts, 2017) at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Super Happy Land (Hatch Theatrics and Theatre Gumbo, 2016) with stagings in Singapore and Japan.