Helmi Yusof in the Living Room with Tay Tong

 

Tay Tong has close to 30 years of professional experience, working in the arts both locally and internationally. He was the Managing Director of TheatreWorks (Singapore) and its home and creation space, 72-13, created in 2005. From 1989 to 2018,  he has produced over 200 productions and international arts festivals here in Singapore and internationally. This includes the Singapore International Festival of Arts, 2014 – 2017, as the Aide to the Festival Director. Tay is an advocate for engagement with diverse cultures and firmly supports the philosophy of ‘celebrating differences’ and cultural negotiation.  He produced the long-running inter-cultural, multi-disciplinary Flying Circus Project between 1996 and 2013 as well as the capacity building programme, The Continuum Asia Project in Luang Prabang, between 2002 and 2012, and recently the Curators Academy 2018, for TheatreWorks. Tay was also the Director of Arts Network Asia (ANA) from 1999 to 2017 and he   brokered greater intra-Asia dialogues and exchanges.  ANA provides project grants and mobility grants to artists and cultural workers to develop connectivity and a network of dialogues within Asia.

 

Helmi Yusof is the Arts Correspondent for The Business Times covering a broad range of topics including visual arts, theatre, film and books. He graduated from Victoria School, Victoria Junior College and National University of Singapore. He joined Singapore Press Holdings’ (SPH) flagship newspaper The Straits Times in 2000 as a film and theatre critic. During his time there, he profiled hundreds of international creatives. In 2005, he received a Media Development Authority scholarship to pursue an Advanced Diploma in Film Production at Ngee Ann Polytechnic. His graduation film Flyer received the Highly Commended prize in the Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester in 2007. The following year, he rejoined SPH to help launch its first online video channel RazorTV. As RazorTV’s Lifestyle Editor and later its News Director, he led a team of eight reporters to produce at least 20 original video stories a week. In 2012, he moved to SPH’s The Business Times to be its Arts Correspondent. Within a year, the arts coverage of the newspaper expanded to include major international events such as Art Basel, Asia Pacific Triennial and Venice Biennale, profiling top names such as Ai Wei Wei, Takashi Murakami and Yayoi Kusama. In 2016, his first play My Mother Buys Condoms was produced by theatre company W!ld Rice and directed by Ivan Heng. It received good reviews in major publications including TODAY which called it a “remarkably assured debut”.

Tay Tong – affectionately known as “TT” – stepped down from his role as managing director of TheatreWorks Singapore a few months ago, after overseeing some 200 productions over 30 years with the company. In this edition of the Living Room, which took place in our Black Box on 15 September 2018, we invited him to share his colourful career and life experiences with Helmi Yusof, an arts journalist with The Business Times. Over the course of the evening, TT and Helmi discussed a wide range of topics, from the early years of Singapore theatre, to the challenges of being a producer, to the importance of self-care for arts workers. Here’s a snapshot of the event. Photos: Daniel Teo

Source: Centre 42 Facebook