The opening scene from Gossip GRLs which was presented as part of The Vault: Gossip, Symphony and Other Matters.

Centre 42 is a blue-hued greenhouse for plays. Some theatre-makers arrive with a sapling of a play, and we simply provide time and space for growth. And sometimes, we give a bit more of a nudge. For the first time at Late-Night Texting, our annual showcase of fresh new writing and emerging artists, we’re showcasing some of the plays that we’ve helped nurture from seeds of ideas, like the Boiler Room plays which require more care and guidance to germinate, and the Vault presentations which were given a structure to latch on to and climb.

Giving room to breathe

Boiler Room playwrights Zee Wong (left) and Tan Liting (right) will be showcasing their plays at Late-Night Texting.

At Late-Night Texting 2019, Room to Breathe will feature dramatised readings of two plays, The Women Before Me by Zee Wong, and Pretty Butch x 不男不女  by Tan Liting. Both plays were developed in Boiler Room, our research-based playwriting programme which guides budding playwrights to grow an idea into a full-length script for the stage.

The Women Before Me is one of the newest works to emerge from the Boiler Room nursery. Playwright Zee recently concluded her Boiler Room tenure with a private test-read of her play in March 2019. A searing drama that intertwines a fictional tale of sexual assault with European art history, the play took Zee over two years to write it.

“I first thought about writing about [sexual assault] four years ago. I actually wrote a monologue and a bunch of loose scenes. I submitted them [for the 2016 Boiler Room open call],” Zee recalls in an interview with Centre 42. “[The submitted version] drew a lot from my own personal experiences and was intensely personal. It was too exposing, too vulnerable.

“So when Robin and Casey very kindly agreed to take on my idea as a Boiler Room project, our work together very much centred on trying to find out some emotional distance between me and the piece that I was going to write, without diluting the message.” Robin Loon and Casey Lim are the stewards of the Boiler Room programme, who look after dramaturgy and script direction respectively.

“Robin and Casey were very instrumental in guiding me in the research phase, because I knew what I wanted to explore but it was very overwhelming because I didn’t know where to start,” Zee says. As part of her research, she looked at sexual assault legislation and real-life cases of sexual assault. Zee later stumbled upon the story of 17th-century Italian painter and rape survivor Artemisia Gentileschi, and, according to her, “a light bulb went off”.

Our second featured Boiler Room playwright, Liting, also drew from real life for her play Pretty Butch. As its title suggests, the play explores the friction in the lives of five characters when gender norms and identities clash. For her research, Liting interviewed people who identified with the label ‘butch’.

“I like the concept of telling real stories based on real people. So I sent out an open call to interview people who identify with the term [butch]. I managed to get about five or six people to talk to me,” Liting told Centre 42 towards the end of her Boiler Room journey.

Pretty Butch premiered at the 2017 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival with a five-day run in our Black Box.

But Pretty Butch isn’t just based on other people; Liting also looked to herself when she wrote the play: “I identify as butch, which is a term that took very long for me to come to terms with. Because there is a stigma, whether it’s in society in general, or specifically in the queer community… Boiler Room was the safe space to look at myself and how I identify and how I’m positioned to this work. I didn’t actually interview myself, but I started writing these short segments from what I remember from my childhood, what I remember from my interactions with people, and then matching them with the experiences of [the interviewees].”

Liting joined Boiler Room in 2015. To date, Pretty Butch is one of the most mature offerings from the programme having been staged at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival in 2017 to full houses and critical acclaim. However, what you will see at Late-Night Texting 2019 is really an off-shoot of the original play, a Mandarin translation which was read at the Taipei Arts Festival in 2018.

The Mandarin script is part of Liting’s plans to widen the reach of her play; she believes that a play about gender identity and sexuality is both timely and relevant across multiple cultural contexts. Taiwan, for instance, became the first Asian country to legalise same-sex marriage just a year after the Taipei Arts Festival reading.

Liting says, “I think we’re coming into a society or generation that’s starting to look at self-actualisation and autonomy. We’re starting to believe people can live their own lives […] I really think that eventually we’re going to get a point where equality for all sexes and sexualities can have a place in society. That’s my hope.”

Zee was drafting The Women Before Me when the #MeToo movement exploded in the US in 2017. “As #MeToo happened, it was really interesting and galvanising for me to keep going […] I know how common sexual assault and sexual harassment is. So many women in my life, even men, have experiences with it. So why aren’t we talking about it?”

But as much as the social conditions were ripe for plays of this nature, the writing was still an uphill battle for these two first-time playwrights, even with the support of Boiler Room. Liting, who previously only stage-manages and directs, reflects on the lonely process of writing: “I spend some days, consecutively, alone, and without talking to any human being. It’s tough being a writer… But I’m hanging in there.”

Zee is a freelance actor, so her first attempt at writing a full-length script was a “long-drawn, painful process” which brought up a lot of insecurities.

“I feel now I can say I am a playwright. It was just one play, but I’ll take it!”Zee Wong

“It’s just the self-doubt,” she shares. “You’re just not sure if it was any good, and struggling with your own insecurities about the work that you’ve created was probably the most challenging part… I lucked out in terms of having other artists who I could trust to share this draft with, to give me feedback.” Zee cites theatre-makers Tan Tarn How, Rei Poh and Chio Su Ping who advised her alongside Robin and Casey.

Ultimately, emerging from the other side of Boiler Room with a play in hand has to be immensely gratifying. Zee says, “There were many times I thought maybe I wouldn’t make it, but I did. So I’m very proud of that […] I feel now I can say I am a playwright. It was just one play, but I’ll take it!”

Liting concurs: “To be thrown into [the Boiler Room] process and to have to write my own play was very refreshing for me. You may not be the best playwright, but you can write a play. You can put words on a page, and you can create characters. And for me, that’s very empowering as an artist to know that I have the ability to do that.”

Zee’s The Women Before Me will be read on 30 August and Liting’s Pretty Butch, on 31 August in Room To Breathe at Late-Night Texting 2019.

Taking a Second Look

Also at Late-Night Texting this year, we’re bringing back three Vault presentations which respond to plays from different decades of Singapore theatre history. These three Vaults were developed by next-generation theatre-makers, all in their 20s, from the National University of Singapore’s Theatre Studies programme.

Our Vault series is rooted in the belief that there’s gold in the old, the old here referring to classic Singapore plays. It’s another way to grow new plays, by giving theatre-makers a brief to create, from these old plays, original works which speak to contemporary audiences.

Responding to Robert Yeo’s 1979 political drama One Year Back Home, The Vault: Gossip, Symphony and Other Matters featured three sketches from the 2019 Theatre Studies graduating cohort and was staged in April 2019. One sketch, titled Gossip GRLs, will be reprised in its entirety at Late-Night Texting.

@thisiemeraldgirl is performed by NUS Theatre Studies graduate and YouTube content creator Brenda Tan.

Gossip GRLs is a farce that delves into the world of Singapore politics via the middleman – the grassroots organisations, specifically the support staff who assist the grassroots leaders or GRLs. Michelle Simon Hariff, who plays a newcomer to the grassroots scene, says, “We settled on the concept of GRLs because oftentimes I think we forget about the in-between bureaucracies, which is the staff [and] the GRLs – the people who are trying to connect the public to the government.”

Cherie Ho plays a veteran staff member who is “emotionally empty” after working in the grassroots organisation for six years. On creating the laughs-a-second script, she says, “We’re just five friends, basically. We joke around with each other, and we tend to laugh a lot. We just have a lot of fun with it. We want to make it meaningful, but we also wanted something for the audience to enjoy as much as we do.”

In 2018, The Vault: @thisisemeraldgirl took on the landmark monodrama, Emily of Emerald Hill. The play was written in 1982 by Stella Kon, and its titular character has been brought to life by the likes of veteran Singaporean thespians Margaret Chan, Karen Tan and Ivan Heng. @thisisemeraldgirl imagines what life would be like for the Emerald Hill matriarch’s great granddaughter Elisabeth Gan, who is a popular social media influencer living in Emily’s mansion in the present day.

“You can never tell who Emily [in the original play] was addressing – the audience in the 1950s, or in the future, or in the past,” @thisisemeraldgirl writer Eugene Koh says. “I drew the parallel to YouTube videos, where everything seems like it’s happening in the present, even though you know it’s made in the past. So it started from that idea.”

“There’re tables in the middle of the room and then we sit around the table. And instead of an improv session – there’s no acting – [we] just write.”Matthew Fam

Eugene shares that the voice of Elisabeth mostly came from Brenda Tan, who performs the character. Brenda herself is a social media personality with a sizable following. She reflects on the process of creating Elisabeth: “I also make YouTube videos, so in many of these instances I am being me and I can relate, but at the same time I have to be very careful and remember that it’s also not me.” Brenda will be performing an excerpt of @thisisemeralgirl for Double Takes at Late-Night Texting.

And last, but not least, The Vault: Project Understudy from 2016 birthed a sequel to the political satire, Undercover, written by Tan Tarn How in 1993. In Undercover, a spy for a national intelligence agency infiltrates a charitable organisation suspected of communist leanings. Understudy is set 22 years after the events of Undercover, with three characters from the original play returning as high-powered individuals, each with a young protégé in tow. The lives of both old and new characters intersect when a decision has to be made about the year’s Cultural Medallion recipient.

Understudy was collaboratively written by seven writers, with each writer taking on a character. Matthew Fam, who wrote lines for Jane, previously a spy in Undercover, describes a typical script-writing session: “There’re tables in the middle of the room and then we sit around the table. And instead of an improv session – there’s no acting – [we] just write.” The team of young writers will return to read character monologues from the three newly-created characters of Understudy at Late-Night Texting.

@thisisemeraldgirl, Gossip GRLs and Understudy will be performed in Double Takes at Late-Night Texting 2019 on 30 & 31 August.

More than One Way

Creating theatre is risky business, because it’s difficult to tell what sort of fruit all that work, time and effort would produce. But as the unfortunate-sounding saying goes, there’s more than one way to skin a cat. For Centre 42, we try different ways to help playwrights and theatre-makers create new work. And at this upcoming Late-Night Texting, we’re proud to show you the fruits of our artists’ labour.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 7 July 2019 

You can catch all these exciting works (and more) at Late-Night Texting on 30 & 31 August 2019! Click here for the full programme line-up.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #10.

A scene from ETA: 9MIN by Main Tulis Group, performed at Late-Night Texting 2018.

Playwriting can be a lonely career. For the independent playwright, creating work and searching for opportunities by oneself is often a daunting, difficult task. But two heads (or more) are better than one, as I found out from two playwriting collectives who have made Centre 42 their home base.

“I feel like when you’re younger, the terrain seems very wild and impenetrable,” Nabilah Said tells me. Nabilah is a freelance playwright with four performed works under her belt in the past six months. She’s also just two months into her new role as the editor of online arts publication ArtsEquator.com.

“You’re one person in an industry that already has its structures, companies and festivals. You can apply to be part of things and you can contact people in the industry to work with them. But if you don’t get the opportunity, it’s easy to be shut out. For me, I thought we could start our own thing.”

Nabilah Said (left), founding member of Main Tulis Group, and Grace Kalaiselvi (right), founding member of Brown Voices.

That “thing” was Main Tulis Group (MTG), a playwriting collective of nine playwrights, including Nabilah, who write in Malay and English. Nabilah started MTG in 2016 after attending a playwriting course conducted by veteran playwright Huzir Sulaiman that year. The course group met every week to share new writing. They’d give feedback on each other’s work and spur each other on to develop a full-length draft.

Nabilah liked the course because it gave her a support system: “It helped me be accountable for my writing, kind of like exercise groups that work out together. You can’t skip if you feel lazy.”

Immediately after the course ended, Nabilah gathered eight other Malay writer-friends. The collective, christened Main Tulis, or “play write” in Malay, began meeting at Centre 42 once a month. Nabilah says, “It was like tuition for playwrights. The objective was very simple – let’s come together, eat and read our plays.”

Three years on, another playwriting collective began meeting regularly at Centre 42. This was Brown Voices, a collective of, at present, 14 Indian theatre-makers and writers. Its founder is freelance Indian actor-director-playwright Grace Kalaiselvi, who’s been involved in at least four creative projects in the past month. She shares with me her grand ambition for starting Brown Voices – to have more Indian representation in Singapore English-language theatre.

“The Indian voice is missing,” Grace tells me bluntly but brightly. “I’ve seen a lot of plays – even multilingual plays – where the Tamil voice is missing. In a lot of plays, you’ll see the Chinese culture and Malay culture in it, but never the Indian culture.”

“It feels like the power balance is shifting. It’s like we all have the power to start things, without having to wait for opportunities.”Nabilah Said

Grace is very much a self-starter. When she graduated from the Intercultural Theatre Institute in 2014, she experienced a long dry spell for stage work because there were few roles for Indian actors. Her solution? She created her own role – Grace co-created Mother I : Amma Naan : Ibu Aku with actor Suhaili Safari in 2016, which a reviewer called “a nuanced tribute to motherhood”. She invited all the major theatre companies to the English-Malay-Tamil production, which helped her break into Singapore theatre.

Despite experiencing these challenges as an Indian theatre practitioner, Grace is remarkably sympathetic towards the Singapore theatre industry. She’d interviewed several local playwrights for a 2017 Vault presentation on Indian representation in Singapore English-language plays. “The playwrights say they don’t know what or how to write about Indian culture, which is perfectly understandable. I can’t expect them to do it,” she explains. “So how else can [Indian culture] be represented if we don’t write it ourselves?”

Grace applied her do-it-yourself gumption to helping Indian playwrights write more and better Indian-centered narratives. In 2018, after sourcing for her own funding, she organised a workshop for 16 Indian theatre-makers and writers with noted playwright Alfian Sa’at. The workshop exposed them to the works of Indian playwrights from Singapore and the region. But that wasn’t enough for Grace.

“I didn’t want [the workshop] to finish and have nothing happen,” she shares. “So I proposed that we start a group where whoever’s interested can meet on a regular basis, write a script, come, and read. And then we help each other to develop a full-fledged script.” Brown Voices aims to create five full-length scripts by the end of the year.

The nine members of Main Tulis Group.
(Photo: Main Tulis Group)

But first, the collective will be getting their feet wet by presenting short plays at Centre 42’s annual showcase of new writing and emerging theatre-makers, Late-Night Texting, this coming August. With Indian-centred narratives set in the domestic realm, the collective is calling their programme Kitchen Masala.

Late-Night Texting was also when MTG went from “tuition group” to making public presentations. In 2017, in a show called ETA: 9MIN, MTG playwrights debuted nine nine-minute bilingual plays – one from each member – for the Late-Night Texting audience, filling our Black Box to the brim set after set.

“With ETA: 9MIN, we didn’t realise there’d be so many people who’d want to watch the show,” Nabilah recalled. “And it wasn’t our usual audience – when you think about Malay theatre, you think about Malay and Malay-speaking audiences. And it was very much an English-speaking audience.” MTG returned to Late-Night Texting the following year with a brand new set of short plays which, too, played to full houses over two nights.

Nabilah recognises that ETA: 9MIN was a breakthrough, not just for Main Tulis Group, but for Malay theatre in Singapore as well. She says, “It was an opportunity to showcase what work from a Malay playwright might be like, and they may or may not touch on issues relating to race, but they can talk about a lot of other things like sexuality, politics, social issues – which they did.

“It helped nuance the idea of the Malay playwright.”

Even though she set up MTG, Nabilah doesn’t like to call herself the collective’s leader: “I pretty much always do everything in consultation with everyone. And the administration can be a lot of work.” She shares responsibility of the group’s email and social media accounts with two other members, Nessa Anwar and Farhanah Diyanah. Meetings are organised, news relayed and collective decisions made via a WhatsApp group chat.

This diffused leadership and decision-making has enabled MTG to continue operating over the last three years, even when members started heading overseas for further studies. Currently, two of the nine members are not in Singapore for an extended period. Nabilah herself spent 2018 in the UK studying for a Master’s degree in writing for performance at Goldsmiths.

“[MTG] shouldn’t fall apart in the year I’m away,” Nabilah says. “I would’ve failed if that happened. It should still work even when I’m not in it.”

Grace, too, was a reluctant leader for Brown Voices. Recounting how she had hoped that one of the playwriting workshop participants would start the collective, she chuckles, “I dropped the idea [for Brown Voices], then nothing happened. I dropped the idea again – nothing happened!

“So I just said [to the workshop participants], I’m going to be at the kopitiam from this time to this time. If you’re interested in having this kickstarted, join me. And five of them came!”

A Brown Voices meeting at Centre 42. (Not all members present.)

The kopitiam meeting was where the collective first discussed how they would operate and what their expectations and goals were. Grace explains, “Brown Voices may be my idea, but I also wanted it to be what they wanted.” Each meeting is now arranged and chaired by a different member.

I ask Grace what is on the horizon for Brown Voices, and she says, “There is our first outing at Late-Night Texting, and then – play readings? Perhaps at Centre 42. And I did propose to the group that we write [a script] together via Google Docs.”

Since gaining recognition at their first Late-Night Texting outing in 2017, MTG has gone on to hold public readings, lead playwriting workshops, and even advise school drama groups. Most recently, the collective has ventured into collaborative writing, with three members, Hazwan Norly, Raimi Safari and Nabilah co-creating Pitch Witch, a performance at #BuySingLit 2019 which responds to Edwin Thumboo’s poem Ulysses by the Merlion. MTG will also be showcasing more new writing based on Southeast Asian poetry at Late-Night Texting this year in Verso/Recto.

Despite MTG’s achievements, Nabilah is cautiously optimistic about the future of the collective. She reveals that their meetings have been much less regular than before, and has even broached the subject of closing down the group: “If MTG is not useful anymore, then I said we can stop. If we’ve all moved on and we don’t want to work in this way anymore, then it doesn’t make sense to keep it for sentimentality’s sake. [A]pparently some members were sad when I said that… But [MTG] can evolve, so that it continues being relevant and useful to us.”

MTG’s record over the past three years is hope for newer collectives like Brown Voices, that a ground-up group can be productive, sustainable and impactful. There is, indeed, strength in numbers.

“If you asked me in 2016 if I could imagine MTG like this now, I would have said no,” Nabilah says, breaking into a big smile. “It feels like the power balance is shifting. It’s like we all have the power to start things, without having to wait for opportunities.”

By Daniel Teo
Published on 7 July 2019 

Main Tulis Group and Brown Voices will be presenting new writing at Late Night Texting on 30 & 31 August 2019! Click here for the full programme line-up.

Update (11 July 2019):
– Added “But [MTG] can evolve, so that it continues being relevant and useful to us” to Nabilah’s quote in the third last paragraph.
– Added image credit for Main Tulis Group members’ photo collage.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #10.

The concluding wrap-up session on 26 May at ADN Conference 2019. Only invited speakers participated in the discussion.

On 26 May, the invited speakers of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network (ADN) Conference 2019 gathered back in the Festival House Blue Room to share highlights, insights and critiques from two days of presentations and intense discussions. Titled “Dramaturgy and the Human Condition”, this year’s conference saw a diverse group of dramaturgs, artists and scholars from the region discussing about issues of change, choice and humanity in performance-making in keynotes, panels and roundtables. Drawing from their discussion during the wrap-up session, here are some of the key takeaways from ADN Conference 2019.

Performing sensuousness and gentleness

ADN Co-director Charlene Rajendran observed that “sensuousness” has been notably absent in the conference discussions of the human condition and human bodies in performance. According to Rajendran, sensuousness is a pertinent concept, especially in the context of 21st-century lives becoming increasingly digital and disembodied.

Australian video artist and dramaturg Martyn Coutts added on to Rajendran’s observation by highlighting State control of bodies, a point which Singaporean artist Loo Zihan had brought up. Coutts believes that performance can counter State violence through “radical acts of vulnerability”, citing several fellow speakers’ presentations which referred to works exhibiting care and sensitivity in approaching the human body. It is in the aesthetics of softness, slowness and gentleness which creates space and compassion. Coutts concluded, “As dramaturgs, we hold space for others… I wonder if as people, we can be gentle with each other, and somehow, that will carry forward?”

Dramaturging body politics

Indian theatre-maker and trans activist Gee Imaan Semmalar drew a link between the human condition and body politics. Analogising the State as a dramaturg and its citizens as actors following a script of citizenship, he pointed out that many of the conference presentations were about dramaturgs and performance-makers creating space for alternatives to the State-prescribed script. He cites, as an example, the keynote lecture by Japanese scholar Tadashi Uchino on the concept of theatre-as-assembly.

Dramaturgy then, as Semmalar extrapolated, is an assemblage and careful management of tenuous, fragile social relations. It is as much a sociological process as it is a theatrical one, which can help bring audiences together to imagine alternative communities and futures.

Malaysian director and actor Jo Kukathas suggested that the work of the dramaturg and artist right now is to heal, to rebalance the imbalances in the world, with the goal of arriving at a common humanity. And alongside the notion of healing are questions of care and ethics for audiences and artists alike, which had emerged repeatedly during the conference discussions.

Interrogating technology and humanity

Semmalar posited that it was crucial in an exploration of the human condition, to evaluate what choice, freedom and action mean to us, both historically and in the present. Referencing the panel on “Dramaturgy and Technology”, he argued that with how integral technology has become to our lives, technology can no longer be considered a mere tool, but rather, as constituting the human body. He cites the experience of trans men as an example of how technology creates and alters the human body and self.

“It is very strongly linked, how technology has changed the social structure,” Su Wen-chi, a new media artist based in Taiwan, told the ADN speakers. She acknowledged that there is indeed politics in employing technology, even in the realm of art and performance. Su warned that, much like any other tool, technology can become a weapon if misused. But it can also be used in art to help connect communities and peoples. That being said, she also cautioned dramaturgs and performance-makers against defaulting to binaries such as technology versus human, or to ascribe fixed moral values to either side.

On the other side of the coin, Singaporean theatre academic Robin Loon said he would be interested in further explorations on dramaturgy and the non-human. Citing Malaysian cultural researcher Janet Pillai’s keynote presentation, Loon recalled how Pillai’s research on Asian dramaturgies drew on case studies of performances created for non-humans, such as deities and ghosts. Loon said more discussion of performances for non-humans will, in fact, reveal more about the dramaturgies of the social and the human condition.

Embracing complexity

Referring to Malaysian cultural researcher Janet Pillai’s keynote presentation on multiple Asian dramaturgies, Kukathas said that the dramaturg must be open to exploring various possibilities, and not just fall back on tradition or convention.

Both Kukathas and Semmalar argued that the work of the dramaturg is to embrace complexity. It is also why the dramaturg and dramaturgy seems to escape definition, a discussion thread which emerges again and again from one ADN conference to another. But as Pillai stressed in her keynote, “It doesn’t matter what you call yourself, as long as you do the work”.

ADN Co-director Lim How Ngean also pointed out that over the years, the discussions at ADN gatherings have moved from questions of what the dramaturg does and what dramaturgy is, to include exploring what the dramaturg and dramaturgy itself can do for a performance, for art practitioners, and for society at large.

And over the past two days of ADN Conference 2019, no definite conclusions have been drawn. But as Rajendran said in her opening address, “the password to ADN is open dialogue” – the important thing is to keep the conversations on dramaturgy in Asia going, and for the dramaturg to embrace complexity and capacities for change.

By Adelyn Tan and Daniel Teo
Published on 7 July 2019

ADN Conference 2019, held on 25 & 26 May 2019, was co-presented by ADN and Singapore International Festival of Arts, and organised by Centre 42. For more information on ADN Conference 2019, head to the ADN website at asiandramaturgs.com. Documentation on this year’s conference proceedings will also be published on the website later this year.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #10.