The Reviewers

Citizen Reviewers are a selected group of theatre enthusiasts participating and contributing to this programme. The 12-month programme will see them through an equipping process to help them generate informed observations about the productions they have watched, in the form of theatre reviews. The framework ensures that opinions and responses generated are underscored by some basic rigour in terms of foreknowledge and experience. It should not be a naïve barometer of likes and dislikes, but strive to be an insightful and discerning collection of views and reflections.

In 2014, we embarked on a pilot iteration of this programme with four contributing reviewers who had gone through a National University of Singapore (NUS) module on theatre criticism and thus have been sufficiently trained in the art and the voice of writing arts reviews.

Since then, we have cultivated a number of new voices to contribute to the Singapore arts writing scene through an annual Open Call. Now on the sixth cycle of the programme, we currently have 11 Citizen Reviewers for the 2019 edition (1 January to 31 December 2019). Six of them are returnees from previous cycles; five of them are newly selected from the Open Call held in October 2018.