In the Living Room: Year in Review 2019

SynopsisThe PanelTheatre and Depictions of Sexual Violence (1pm - 3pm)Theatre and Decolonisation (5pm - 7pm)

As 2019 draws to a close, we’re inviting the Singapore theatre community to come together to review our year in theatre. In this special edition of the Living Room, we will explore two topics which trended in this year’s slate of productions: sexual violence and decolonisation. A panel will kick off each session, followed by break-out groups so everyone can participate in the discussion.

Theatre and depictions of sexual violence, 8 Dec, 1pm – 3pm

Nabilah Said, editor of arts website ArtsEquator.com, convenes the first panel on depictions of sexual violence in 2019’s theatrical works. What are the responsibilities of theatre-makers in staging sexual violence, and how do these square with their artistic impulses? Is theatre still a safe space? The panelists are Rosemary McGowan, Grace Kalaiselvi, and Rei Poh.

Theatre and decolonisation, 8 Dec, 5pm – 7pm

Theatre-maker and educator Felipe Cervera assembles a second panel which will explore the theme of decolonisation across productions which have directly or indirectly responded to Singapore’s Bicentennial celebrations this year. What are the aesthetic similarities and differences between all these productions? How has the aesthetics of decolonialising performance been explored this year? Did we push the envelope enough? This panel comprises Chong Gua Khee, Charlene Rajendran, and Noorlinah Mohamed.

An exhibition of the timeline Singapore Theatre in 2019, which documents the theatre productions in the calendar year, will be displayed in the Front Courtyard from 8 Dec.

EVENT DETAILS

Sunday, 8 December 2019
From 1pm @ Centre 42 Black Box

Admission price: Give-What-You-Can
(Cash only, at the door)

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

From the “Theatre and Depictions of Sexual Assault” Panel:

Nabilah Said
Nabilah Said is a playwright, arts writer and theatre critic. Formerly an arts correspondent with The Straits Times, Nabilah is currently the editor of ArtsEquator. Nabilah’s plays include Tart (Teater Ekamatra), yesterday it rained salt (Bhumi Collective), ANGKAT (M1 Singapore Fringe Festival; Noor Effendy Ibrahim), Drip (The Necessary Stage) and Inside Voices (VAULT Festival; Lazy Native). She is the founder of Malay playwright collective Main Tulis Group, and co-founder of theatre collectives Rupa co.lab and Lazy Native.

Rosemary McGowan
Rosie comes from an extensive history of working with young people using drama and theatre to explore potentially difficult and sensitive youth-related themes and issues. She has a masters in applied theatre and a masters in counselling and often combines her knowledge of these two fields throughout her practice.

As a freelance applied theatre practitioner, facilitator and educator, Rosie has taught drama in numerous schools in Singapore, both in-curriculum and CCA. She runs workshops and projects exploring themes of self-care, sexual assault trauma, self-harm, communication, leadership and understanding mental health. She has also designed and run projects in two Singapore halfway houses – the Community Rehabilitation Centre, and The Turning Point.

As a counsellor, Rosie specialises in addiction and trauma- working with various addictions, as well as family members of addicts and trauma survivors. She uses a mixture of cognitive and experiential methods throughout her practice.

As a theatre practitioner, Rosie has acted in The Crucible (Toy Factory Productions); Mind Map of Love, sold-out runs of The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband and Ragnarok (Skinned Knee Productions); and dramaturg on Edith Podesta’s commissioned production, Leda and The Rage (The Esplanade).

Rosie runs a performers emotional support group on Mondays, 12-130pm.

She is currently the President of the Singapore Drama Educators Association.

More information is available at www.rosiemcg.com

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.

Grace Kalaiselvi
Kalaiselvi Grace graduated from Intercultural Theatre Institute in 2014 and now works as a freelance actor, creator, director, educator, puppeteer and writer. Some of her own works include Crocodiles in Kurtas (Esplanade-OctoBurst’19), Touch Me Not (1^st part of Goddesses of Words – Sarojini Naidu), The Old Fogies (Esplanade-OctoBurst’18) and Mother I (1 & 2). Grace also acted in Ms British (Esplanade Studio Series’19) and directed 3FVU for TheatreWorks’ Now Festival’19. She started Brown Voices, a collective, to write professional scripts with Indian Narratives and they did their first showcase at C42’s Late Night Texting.

From the “Theatre and Decolonisation” Panel:

Felipe Cervera
Felipe Cervera is a writer, theatre-maker, and academic. He is a Lecturer of Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore and an Assistant Professor with the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. He has acted and directed internationally since 2008, and co-leads, with Fezhah Maznan, the theatre and performance collective The Art of Strangers. His research interests are collaborative theatre-making, teaching, and research, and the interplays between performance theory, science, and technology. He is an associate editor of the international peer-reviewed journals, Global Performance Studies and Performance Research.

Charlene Rajendran
Charlene Rajendran is a theatre educator, practitioner and researcher who is currently based at the National Institute of Education – Nanyang Technological University. She is also Co-Director of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network.

Noorlinah Mohamed
Noorlinah is an award-winning theatre actress who is also a teaching artist and creator of public engagement arts projects in Singapore. Since 1988, she has performed with various Singapore theatre companies. Internationally, she has performed in Asia, Europe and the US. In arts education, she has undertaken artist residencies in schools, develops curriculum as well as professional development for teaching artists and teachers in arts pedagogy. As a producer, she has worked on both intimate and large-scale arts events, including the Singapore International Festival of Arts (2014-2017), co-creating platforms and works for and with Singapore as well as international artists. Noorlinah is a recipient of the JCCI Cultural Award (2008) and the Women’s Weekly Women of our Time Award (2005) for her work in the arts. She obtained her PhD in Arts Education from the University of Warwick in 2013. Presently, she is the Artistic Director of N.O.W., Not Ordinary Work. It is an interdisciplinary public project focusing on women creatives and change-makers.

Chong Gua Khee
Chong Gua Khee / 张月崎 works primarily as an independent theatre director and performance-maker in Singapore. She also takes on facilitation and dramaturgical work that spans disciplines such as dance and visual arts.

Gua Khee’s practice centres a collective (re)imagination of relationships and the current landscape of conversations. In her work, she often seeks to cultivate and nurture relationships and conversations by asking: What conditions of space and time are set up in a project or piece? How do these allow for the seeding of various conversations – both the spoken and textual, as well as the unspoken conversations between and amongst bodies and architecture – and how might these bloom and flourish over time?

Recent projects include music theatre piece Songs for Tomorrow (director), art experience PASSPORT: Anthony Chin x Christophe & Sharon with OH! Open House (dramaturg), the musical Island Song (director), participatory performance LAST DANCE by Drama Box and ArtsWok Collaborative (creative team), theatre piece Tortoise Tales under Silver Arts Festival 2018 (director and co-playwright), and performance HOT POT TALK: Theatre & the Arts (producer and director). She has been an Associate Member of Dance Nucleus since 2018, and was Artist-In-Residence under its ELEMENT #3 (Solo) Dramaturgies. More details available at: www.guakhee.com

Session Overview

For Theatre and Depictions of Sexual Violence, Nabilah convened a team consisting of applied theatre practitioner, counsellor, facilitator and educator Rosemary McGowan, theatre actress, director and educator Grace Kalaiselvi and participatory theatre creator Rei Poh. They were interested in the following questions:

What are the responsibilities of theatre-makers in staging sexual violence, and how do these responsibilities square with their artistic impulses?
Is theatre still a safe space?

Structure of Session

Reflections from Facilitators

Session Overview

For Theatre and Decolonisation, Felipe Cervera assembled a team comprising of Chong Gua Khee, Charlene Rajendran, and Noorlinah Mohamed to facilitate the session. The team was keen to interrogate decolonisation across productions which directly or indirectly responded to Singapore’s Bicentennial celebrations this year. They asked the following overarching questions:

What are the aesthetic similarities and differences between all these productions?
How have the aesthetics of decolonialising performance been explored this year? Did theatre-makers and audiences push the envelope enough?
How are we educating ourselves as theatre-makers and audiences and what is the role of theatre in education?

Structure of Session

Reflections from Facilitators

Migration and Labour
Facilitated and written by Felipe Cervera

The general framework of the session was to focus on the audience’s perspective. We felt that if we focused on the voices of the makers, we would be emphasizing things that were already on the table, as expressed in performance throughout the year. The question for us was more about the after performance — what next? Sure, we have this bunch of shows that dealt with postcolonial and decolonial topics and ideas, but beyond the context of the bicentennial, how can we think through these performances and reflect about theatre more directly? What can we learn about how theatre is made, and to what end, in Singapore?

The four break-out sessions were part of this audience-centered focus. We wanted to unpack the umbrella theme — theatre and decolonization — by addressing narrower foci of conversation.

In my case, the topic of migration and labour sprung from what I perceived to be a huge topic in my experience of doing Miss British, and by what I also think is an important issue in local theatre. That is, the ways in which certain kinds of migrants are represented in contrast to other kinds, and the ways in which the distribution of labour in local theatre is also implicated in the stratification of migration in and out of Singapore.

Titles and Lenses
Facilitated and written by Charlene Rajendran

The Titles and Lenses discussion considered how titles of productions can become a first point of contact with performance, and shape the way a performance is approached. But there is always the possibility of ‘mis-remembering’ the title and that creates another frame via which the work is apprehended. One example was someone who remembered Civilised by TNS as Un-Civilised because of a particular marketing approach. Group members talked about how a title might make sense much later in the process, in retrospect or after the fact, because the performance prods a reviewing of what it might mean.

The discussion also broached the question of the lenses we use to view productions and how these impact choices made about what to watch and expectations that ensue. An example of a Singaporean watching a performance in London called White Pearl, set in the Singapore context, in which Singlish was spoken with a British accent, suggested how it was disorienting and troubling to deal with a frame that felt ‘false’. Yet, within more familiar contexts, where the frames are less at odds with the performances, how do we ‘decolonise’ our habits and propensities to like or dislike, appreciate or denigrate?

Languages and Histories
Facilitated and written by Noorlinah Mohamed

The questions I proposed for my breakout group were: Is looking back at history a limitation in itself? Are we mythologising the colonial wound? What language(s) are we working with when unpacking colonialism and decolonialism and are they further cementing a colonial and/or imperial mindset and attitude?

The discussion was open-ended. It was not intended to resolve or offer definitive answers to the questions. Instead, the intention was to generate a conversation on the process of art-making, viewing and responding. Decolonial work in theatre has been going on for a while (Third Stage, ITI, staging of Singapore narratives). But what is significant in 2019 is the inclusion of less privileged tropes and narratives (for example Ayer Hitam; Tanah Ayer; Merdeka). The notion of ‘wound’ led to some useful discussion on ‘womb’ (how turning to history is less of an account of it rather an interrogative and generative source for other imaginings) as well as an invitation to move away from the metaphor of colonial history as a wound that require healing to seeing symptoms that require therapy. How do we erase colonial history when the very structure of modernity & knowledge is a product of Eurocentric colonisation? Personally, that Sunday was fruitful because the conversations gave us an opportunity to unpack our own way of thinking as artists, critics and audiences.

Audience Responsibility and Engagement
Facilitated and written by Chong Gua Khee

In thinking about colonial narratives, information is very often framed as ‘neutral knowledge’, with its origins and lenses obscured from public interrogation. Hence, for this session on theatre and decolonisation, I was interested in starting from subjectivities and feelings, and then unpacking the complexities within, rather than attempting a pretense of ‘objectivity’.

As a provocation to discuss audience engagement and responsibility in the decolonisation of theatre, I highlighted how I had heard many comments from audiences that they had to ‘work very hard’ in various productions this year. From this entry point, the breakout group shared about their own experiences as audiences this year, which led them to collectively agree that a lot of research had gone into the various productions this year, which was very much appreciated.

Nevertheless, many felt the way in which the extensive research was woven into the productions came across as very intellectual and academic, not unlike ‘history lessons’. This perceived positioning of theatre as expert in relation to the audience also caused them to feel distanced and powerless, overwhelmed with information rather than evoking any desire to make their own meanings from their experience or to engage further with the issues raised. A key question that subsequently emerged was whether productions and theatre-makers were/are inadvertently replicating colonial power relations between them and audiences. In thinking about decolonising efforts in theatre, perhaps a helpful question to continually reflect on is, “what power relationship is being set up between and amongst audiences and theatre-makers/theatre in this production?”