A scene from Journey to Nowhere, the festival performance from Southernmost 2018. Photo: Tuckys Photography

Southernmost – it’s the title of Emergency Stairs’ annual festival for artistic experimentation and dialogue, and also a geographic direction. At first encounter with the word, and thinking of geography as cultural politics, I think of relationships, positionality and cultures. It’s also a reference to the festival’s geographical location in Singapore, but more on that later. Into its third year in 2019, Southernmost is Emergency Stairs’ response to the question: “How do you create an arts festival for the future?” To tackle this question, I first dug briefly into arts festivals of the past and present.

As most commonly understood today, an arts festival takes place over a fixed time period, usually within a city but commonly across several venues. It usually encompasses events and performances, which can be of the same genre or of multiple art forms. The latter is sometimes referred to as the ‘combined arts festival’ in a UK context.

In this form, as researchers such as Finkel (2009) and Quinn (2010) have documented, arts festivals were mostly a post-World War II phenomenon, and the international proliferation of arts festivals occurred from the 1980s onwards. Since then, arts festivals have been examined in line with the politics of culture and place. For example, Waterman (1998) observes that arts festivals are common sites of cultural exchange and contestation, and that “promoting arts festivals is related to place promotion” (p. 54). Quinn (2010) specifically notes that “arts festivals are now a mainstay of urban tourism and urban policy-making” (p. 266).

Indeed, many cities around the world have become synonymous with their associated festivals – in film (e.g., Cannes Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival), visual arts (e.g., Venice Biennale), as well as the performing arts (e.g., Salzburg Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe). Waterman (1998) argues that “place-marketing strategies encourage a ‘safe’ art that attracts commercial sponsors and large audiences” (p. 64), although he also acknowledges that this is contestable.

A Masterclass at Southernmost 2017. Photo: Emergency Stairs

It is noteworthy that all the above research is typically located in the European and North American context. So what of our “arts festival for the future”? Southernmost indeed places itself in opposition to many of the ideas above. Southernmost is just three years old and organised independently by a small company, in stark contrast to major arts festivals backed by extensive organisational structures. Rejecting commercialism and ‘safe’ art, the curation of each Southernmost festival has been informed by a “process-driven, artist-centric and Asia-based” philosophy (About, 2019), contributing to our ongoing decolonialisation of art and culture in the region.

The “process-driven” orientation of the festival manifests in its programming. Rather than a series of pre-packaged and immaculately-staged works, the festival encompasses workshops and showcases, open rehearsals, an Open Forum, and one performance piece devised over the duration of the festival by the participating artists. At the 2018 Open Forum, “process-driven-ness” was enthusiastically unpacked by the invited speakers, who reflected on how the artistic process can be made more visible to the public.

Along the same lines, the term “spectator-collaborator” also emerged at the 2018 Open Forum, as a proposal for an alternative to the conventional idea of the “audience.” The question of how to encourage more people to become spectator-collaborators was discussed, but compelling long-term strategies will take time to crystallise.

On the side of the artists, however, an interesting part of the 2018 edition of Southernmost was the introduction of a critic-in-residence, arts writer Corrie Tan, who documented through performative writing the full eight days of the festival process. Her blog, publicly accessible online, serves as a window into the rehearsal room for anyone who cares to peek in, and begins to build a path towards democratising and demystifying the process of art-making for the general public.

Another aspect that characterises Southernmost is its engagement with issues of the traditional and the contemporary. The participating artists of each year’s festival are mostly practitioners in various Asian art forms. Inevitably, in such a context, the idea of the “intercultural” shows up, regardless of whether it has been specifically invited to the party. The 2017 edition of Southernmost was explicitly described as an “intercultural theatre festival” by Emergency Stairs itself. Responding to the 2018 festival production, Journey to Nowhere, Cervera (2018) reflects on the festival’s interrogation of “new interculturalisms in Singapore and potentially in Southeast Asia”.

While Southernmost’s aspirations are regional, the festival’s programming is still firmly grounded in its Singaporean context. For example, Journey to Nowhere was a response to the then-newly unveiled Our SG Arts Plan 2018-2022. This year’s festival production, Journey to a Dream, hints at addressing issues related to colonialism and progress – pertinent in the year of Singapore’s Bicentennial.

Further emphasising the festival’s groundedness in the local, the name “Southernmost” makes reference to Singapore’s location as the southernmost stop in the One Table Two Chairs circuit. The One Table Two Chairs Project was pioneered in the 1990s by Danny Yung, Co-Artistic Director of Hong Kong-based company Zuni Icosahedron. The name of the project is a reference to the one-table-two-chairs set typical of traditional Chinese opera performance, and before 2000, the project invited artists to collaborate in the creation of works of 20-minute duration and only involving two artists, one table and two chairs (Yung, 2017).

The One Table Two Chairs concept has since evolved, and Southernmost adopts the movement in a wider (but somewhat less clear) framing of the festival. In the spirit of cultural collaboration and exchange, participating artists of the Southernmost festival in all three years have taken part in a series of platforms across Asia and internationally, in the months leading up to the Southernmost festival in Singapore. While this is an interesting aspect of Southernmost, unfortunately documentation of the participating artists’ processes and involvement at the other platforms has been less prominent within the overall Southernmost documentation thus far. In line with the festival’s focus on being process-driven and expanding the concept and role of the audience, it would seem valuable for the public to also gain an insight into the wider One Table Two Chairs process and its relationship to Southernmost.

The 2019 edition of Southernmost is right around the corner. For this year’s festival, unlike in previous years, a dedicated website has been launched, making it much easier to navigate the festival’s programmes and schedule. An active social media campaign is underway on Facebook, including an “Ask Xiaoyi Anything” series, where Artistic Director of Emergency Stairs and festival curator Liu Xiaoyi responds to questions from the public about Southernmost and/or his work. This post has sparked intense and meaningful conversations with festival audiences – an apt way to involve the audience more in understanding Liu’s thoughts and influences surrounding the creation and curation of Southernmost. The critic-in-residence will be back again – this time LASALLE graduate Ke Weiliang is taking the reins as the festival’s process scribe.

Has Emergency Stairs succeeded in creating an arts festival for the future? Just three years in, it’s hard to tell. But as I wrap up my thoughts on Southernmost, it is not lost on me that I’m writing about the decolonialising aspirations of a festival in the conventions of Western academic writing. This quandary convinces me that we in Singapore and Asia need more of the kinds of work that Emergency Stairs and Southernmost are pursuing.

By Jocelyn Chng
Published on 22 October 2019

Southernmost 2019 is jointly presented by Emergency Stairs and Zuni Icosahedron, and will be held at Centre 42 from 5 to 12 November 2019. Programme and ticketing details can be found here.

References

• About Southernmost. (2019). Retrieved from https://www.southernmost.sg/festival
• Cervera, F. (2018). “Southernmost”: The Politics of Nowhereness. Retrieved from https://artsequator.com/southernmost-2018/
• Finkel, R. (2009). A picture of the contemporary combined arts festival landscape. Cultural Trends, 18(1), 3-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548960802651195
• Quinn, B. (2010). Arts festivals, urban tourism and cultural policy. Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure & Events, 2(3), 264-279. https://doi.org/10.1080/19407963.2010.512207
• Waterman, S. (1998). Carnivals for élites? The cultural politics of arts festivals. Progress in Human Geography, 22(1), 54-74. doi: 10.1191/030913298672233886
• Yung, D. (2017). One Table Two Chairs – Interview with Danny Yung (Part 1). Retrieved from https://artsrepublic.sg/backstage/one-table-two-chairs-interview-with-danny-yung-part-1/

The cast of Rumah Dayak. From left: Rusydina Afiqah, Uddyn J, Yamin Yusof, Al-Matin Yatim, Farah Lola, Tysha Khan, Yamin Yusof Ali Mazrin. Photo: Rupa co.lab

In 2015, Nessa Anwar volunteered for an organisation that provided educational opportunities for underprivileged children. When she visited a rental flat on a mission trip, she was greeted by a sobering sight.

“I saw five or six curtains hanging from the ceiling inside a one-room flat. Faces kept popping out from nowhere and I realised there were more than eighteen people living in that tiny room,” she recalls vividly. “It broke my heart.”

That image stuck with Nessa, becoming both inspiration and motivation to create her latest work, Rumah Dayak, a play about a safehouse run by a pair of ex-offenders for troubled youth. The play is being developed at Centre 42’s Basement Workshop ahead of its premiere at the Malay Heritage Centre next month.

Rumah Dayak is Nessa’s second full-length work, presented by brand-new collective Rupa co.lab, which was founded by Nessa and fellow playwrights Nabilah Said and Hazwan Norly. All three are also founding members of Main Tulis Group, a Malay playwriting circle that has made Centre 42 their home base since 2016. The trio plans to take turns producing each other’s plays annually over the next three years.

Each annual production, Nessa explains, will focus on a sub-set of the Malay community. This year, Rumah Dayak shines a spotlight on the mat rep and minah rep. Often shortened to mats and minahs, the terms refer to male and female Malay youths who are trouble-makers and delinquents.

Playwright of Rumah Dayak, Nessa Anwar responding to feedback at the Guest Room reading of the work.

It’s a group she knows well having grown up alongside many mats and minahs: “They had problems with money, family and working for a living. A couple of them got into trouble with the law.”

Her volunteering stint also gave her insight into the difficulties that the troubled youths and their families faced. She says, “This play is my thought experiment on what [at-risk] kids really need – do they need tangible resources or just a space to make mistakes?”

In order to learn more, Nessa embarked on an extensive research process which involved speaking with friends, reading up on police cases, and interviewing officers from the Central Narcotics Bureau and police. As her curiosity grew, so did the material for Rumah Dayak.

Nessa finished a first draft in October 2018 and then, in June 2019, presented a test-read of the script under Centre 42’s Guest Room. There, she received a wealth of feedback on her script from theatre-artists such as Rafaat Hamzah and Najib Soiman.

“I am not an expert. I am just one voice,” she says. “But I want to make sure that Rumah Dayak is as realistic as possible.”

Her desire for veracity also extends into her direction for the work, particularly with the cast’s performance of the mat lingo.

“[When] mat reps fight, their language is coarse, but the delivery is beautiful. They use a lot of rhythm that is found in pantun [a Malay poetic form],” she explains. “This rhythm needs to be practiced. If it is not delivered properly, it will fall flat and it won’t make sense.”

Since not all of her eight cast members were familiar with the world of mats and minahs, she facilitated a two-day workshop for them to delve into the history, culture and lingo of the community.

Referencing popular reggaeton music, Nessa calls mats and minahs of the early noughties the Gasolina (2004) generation, and their present-day counterparts, the Despacito (2018) generation. The Despacito generation, in particular, has to deal with the pervasiveness of social media and higher cost of living.

“The climate of being a mat was very different. Back then, if you said you were going to run away, you would do it. Now, it’s just too expensive to run away from home,” she explains. “But there’s still that swagger [of being a mat]. It’s just translated differently and depicted differently.”

All these details are important to Nessa.

“I just want to see my friends represented on stage,” she says simply. “It is a way to pay homage to the people I grew up with.”

By Lee Shu Yu
Published on 22 October 2019

Rumah Dayak is in residence under the Basement Workshop and will be staged at the Malay Heritage Centre from 21 to 24 November 2019. Tickets available here.

Zelda Tatiana Ng (left) and Aidli ‘Alin’ Mosbit (right) performing the Phase 2 version of Just AZ at a Basement Workshop showing in August 2019.

Imagine this – you’ve written a script. You’ve even tested it out on an audience. And then, your director says you’re scrapping it all and starting again. (Did you wince?) Well, it’s not that your script is terrible. It’s just part of the process.

That’s exactly what happened in a GroundZ-0 project that’s been in development in our Basement Workshop residency since 2018. The project involves seasoned theatre practitioners Zelda Tatiana Ng, Aidli ‘Alin’ Mosbit, and Alvin Tan. In October 2018, after spending a month workshopping, Zelda and Alin performed their original script Just AZ, titled so because it was just about Alin and Zelda. It was an intensely personal work reaching deep into the love lives of the two women. There were exes. There were tears. There were love ballads. This was Phase 1 of the project.

The team reassembled at Centre 42 almost a year later for Phase 2, an intensive week of workshopping and development. But what they presented at the second closed-door showcase was vastly different. It’s still primarily a story about one Malay woman and one Chinese woman; but now, the former is Lela, a single woman and Head of Department at a school, and the latter is Lydia, a single parent and popular news anchor. Lydia’s son, who is a student at Lela’s school, becomes embroiled in a statutory rape scandal. Just AZ was no longer autobiographical, but instead, entirely fictional. So what of the original script?

Alvin Tan, director of Just AZ, introducing the audience to the Phase 2 script in August 2019.

“Zelda did ask me if we weren’t going on with the Phase 1 script, then won’t it go to waste?” director and collaborator Alvin Tan recalls. “But when you do process work, you’re aware there is a lot of waste.”

For Alvin, it was necessary for the two actors to dig deep in Phase 1. He always begins a project by asking the question: “What is disturbing you?” It’s a technique he’d learnt at a directing workshop run by late theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun in the 1980s.

“Through the project, through the production, through the process, Pao Kun would try to explore what has been disturbing him and all the different perspectives on it,” Alvin says. “I asked Alin and Zelda what at this point in their lives was disturbing them. And they very quickly talked about being single and the instability.”

Because of the deeply personal nature of Phase 1, this technique requires a lot of trust between all involved. Alin, Zelda and Alvin have plenty of history together – Alvin is the founding artistic director of theatre company The Necessary Stage (TNS), Zelda was formerly an ensemble actor with TNS, and Alin has inhabited many iconic roles in TNS productions, including her breakout role as Saloma’s mother in Off Centre.

Surprisingly, the original brief for “Just AZ” wasn’t about women and love, but rather, an exploration into the relationship between the Chinese and Malay ethnic groups in Singapore. But Alvin is quick to reassure that the project hadn’t gone off-course: “I can’t go straight into ethnic differences. I have to have a story, and then through the material, sensibilities will show. How they behave, how they react. I need a story to be the vehicle. And as the actors discuss it, I’m observing their discussion.”

It is these observations and more that have ensured that Phase 2 wasn’t throwing the baby out with the bath water. Alvin shares, “A lot of things, subconsciously get taken up. Broader themes like single women are taken up. We just have to follow the themes into a new environment.”

Time was another factor that allowed the team to take such a bold step. The Just AZ project in the Basement Workshop is spread out over three years, with Phase 1 in 2018, Phase 2 in 2019, and a concluding Phase 3 in 2020.

“After finishing Phase 1, all of us had many projects so we couldn’t continue it until much, much later. But it gave us distance,” Alvin says, “When writers write, you need some months away before you can come back and edit. You don’t feel like you’re killing your children. There is enough distance not to feel the waste.”

Entering Phase 2 this year afresh, Alvin was inspired by a 1994 film called Ladybird, Ladybird by British filmmaker Ken Loach. The film, about a woman losing her children to Social Services, would provide the starting point for a new, totally fictional Just AZ involving single women, motherhood and the State.

A Basement Workshop showing of Just AZ (Phase 1) in October 2018.

“I wrote all these briefs and I WhatsApp-ed them to Zelda and Alin,” Alvin shares. “Zelda had a lot of questions. Alin’s not the kind. Alin’s the kind that may be absent on WhatsApp, but goes off and creates on her own. They have different working styles.”

But again, what of the discussion on inter-ethnic relations? Alvin says, “Phase 2 gave us all more things to discuss about, because it’s not just actors, it’s the characters also. Characters which are a certain kind of Malay and a certain kind of Chinese. And then, the notion of the intersectional comes in.”

The team had also made a decision not to involve playwrights in the first two phases. This way of making theatre breaks away from a convention which places the playwright at the apex of a work and all other disciplines following suit. It’s not a new method, Alvin admits, who cites the devised works of Drama Box as example. But for Alvin, who has been directing work for three decades, is finding himself treading on new ground.

“I do feel insecure. I don’t know which part to cut, to let it breathe,” he confesses.

That’s where Phase 3 in 2020 comes in. The team will be joined by not one, but two playwrights, to help flesh out the 40-minute Phase 2 script. Alvin shares that there may even be a dramaturg. With additional script-writing brawn, GroundZ-0 hopes to stage the work in the near future.

But with the work deviating so far from where it first began, will it still be called Just AZ?

“We’ll change the title,” Alvin concedes with a chuckle.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 22 October 2019

]]> https://centre42.sg/a-to-z-of-making-theatre/feed/ 0 https://centre42.sg/growing-theatre/ https://centre42.sg/growing-theatre/#comments Sun, 07 Jul 2019 08:16:44 +0000 http://centre42.sg/?p=12187

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.

Support the work that we’ve been doing at Centre 42 by helping us “Grow the Cloud”!

The past five years have been exciting for us here at Centre 42. Since we opened our doors in April 2014, we have been home to more than 150 artists and theatre collectives, and supported the development of over 170 new theatrical projects. But as we strive to do even more for the scene in the coming years, we need your help!

While the National Arts Council does provide us with some funding, we are still required to raise at least 45% of our annual operations costs in order to sustain the company. As one part of our efforts to do that, we are launching a fundraiser called “Grow the Cloud”, where we hope to garner support in the form of donations from those who believe in our mission. Our goal for this initiative is to raise $20,000 by the end of 2019.

We chose the symbol of the cloud for this campaign not only because it is such an integral part of our identity – it is the shape of our logo, after all – but also because clouds play an important role by providing shelter from the sun. And when the clouds get big enough, it rains, which helps things to grow. The idea is that by donating and adding to our “cloud bank”, you will enable us to continue supporting and growing Singapore’s theatre scene through our myriad of programmes and initiatives.

Breaking new ground

Late-Night Texting has become a crucial platform for us to showcase new local writings in the last few years.

When Centre 42 was first conceptualised, its main purpose was to address “the lack of consistent new writings for Singapore,” as our co-founder and executive director Casey Lim once put it. Our suite of programmes were thus designed to provide different ways to support the creation and development of text-based works for the local stage.

One of our biggest and most public platforms that champions this cause is Late-Night Texting. Over the last three editions, we have brought bite-sized theatrical experiences to over 14,000 audience members as part of the Singapore Night Festival. The event is an opportunity for us to programme works by groups that we’ve built a relationship with. They include Dark Matter Theatrics, GroundZ-0, Main Tulis Group, and The Second Breakfast Company – all of whom have created or curated a series of 10- to 30-minute short plays for our annual shindig, some of which will be published in anthologies by BooksActually in the coming months.

“Centre 42 has been a crucial source of emotional, spiritual and physical support for Main Tulis Group. It’s been there for us from the start, from the time when [our group] was just a seedling of an idea in 2016, to becoming home of our meetings. It also gave us our first public presentation platform at Late-Night Texting, with ‘ETA: 9 MIN’ in 2017 and again in 2018,” says Nabilah Said, the founder of the Malay playwrights collective.

“Late-Night Texting afforded us the space and resources to continue our work on bringing to the fore old Singapore works and exploring new ways of looking at them,” add The Second Breakfast Company, who juxtaposed excerpts from pre-2005 and post-2005 local plays about love in “Lovebites”. “With the platform given to us, we were able to juxtapose old works with new ones, which allowed for meaningful reflection about the repertoire of Singapore works, how we have evolved (and how much) and what Singapore society is about.”

Indeed, another central part of our mission is to encourage artists to revisit plays that have come before. As such, we regularly commission contemporary responses to existing works in our local theatre canon under a programme called The Vault. For instance, in 2017, we worked with Alfian Sa’at and his team on a piece titled Absence Makes the Heart…, which was an attempt to trace the presence and absence of Indian roles in Singapore English-language theatre over the years.

“The Vault: Absence Makes the Heart…” was an examination of the presence and absence of Indian roles in Singapore English-language theatre.

“I was very inspired by the possibilities of creating work that was based on the archive, after watching works by Lee Mun Wai and Nelson Chia,” says Alfian. “We had a lot of fun with [Absence Makes the Heart…], while at the same time platforming issues such as ethnic representation in theatre and cultural diversity. Centre 42 gave us all the help we needed, from the budget to the rehearsal room and performance space.”

The piece was brought back for another dramatised reading during Wild Rice’s Singapore Theatre Festival in 2018. On top of that, the experience itself also led to other opportunities, as the collaborators came together again this year to organise and conduct a playwriting course for Indian/Tamil writers.

Another work that was created under The Vault was Sau(dara) by Bhumi Collective, which was a response to Leow Puay Tin’s boundary-pushing 1988 play, Three Children. Its first work-in-progress iteration was presented in 2018, and it was recently re-performed as a double-bill titled Are You Game, Sau(dara)?, which was co-presented by Centre 42 and Malaysia’s Five Arts Centre.

“As a young company, the opportunity to be commissioned to do The Vault has helped increase our visibility within the industry,” shares Mohamad Shaifulbahri (aka Shai), the joint artistic director of Bhumi Collective. “If the arts industry had not yet accessed Bhumi’s works or know of us, this was a chance for them to do so, through their connection with Centre 42.”

In an attempt to encourage responses from even newer voices, we are currently working with students from the National University of Singapore’s Theatre Studies programme on another edition of The Vault. Their triple-bill, titled Gossip, Symphony, and Other Matters, is a response to Robert Yeo’s One Year Back Home, which will be performed at our Black Box on 20 April.

A place to play

But beyond programming showcases that are open to the public, we understand that it is also important to give artists the space and time to play and experiment, without the pressure of production. And that is why our Basement Workshop residency provides independent theatre practitioners and collectives a place to work out of, with heavily subsidised rental.

“The Singapore ‘d’ Monologues: And Suddenly I Disappeared” was recently nominated for Best Ensemble at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards 2019. Photo: Memphis West Pictures

So far, we’ve supported around 30 projects under Basement Workshop. Recent examples include The Singapore ‘d’ Monologues: And Suddenly I Disappear – which was recently nominated for Best Ensemble at The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards – and Making A Stand. Both works were co-created between 2017 and 2018 by Peter Sau together with a group of local disabled artists.

“Centre 42’s Basement Workshop provided an affordable and conducive space for me to work with Deaf and disabled emerging artists, which enabled a mentorship and performance training to happen,” says Peter. “It is an intimate and safe home that favours the birth of new works and encourages risk-taking.”

While we never stipulate that Basement Workshop projects need to be staged, many works did end up at festivals we’ve partnered with, including the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, Esplanade presents: The Studios, and the Singapore Theatre Festival.

“Centre 42 is a literal space that creates opportunities through programmes that can house works that are still in development,” shares Sharda Harrison, who has been in residence for several projects, including Bi(cara), which was developed and later performed at our space as part of 2016 Fringe Festival. “Often we watch finished products. However, it isn’t only the finished products that add to an industry, the process of theatre is equally important, and Centre 42 supports this.”

On top of offering subsidised rental, we also provide our artists in residence with documentation support through regular interviews, to help them chart their creative journeys at key milestones. These interviews – some of which are made public – can be viewed on our YouTube page and our blog.

“I really appreciated how our process of writing was archived and recorded by Centre 42 in different phases. It helped us clarify our intention of writing, allowed us to articulate what we wanted to talk about with the script, and also opened up a space for us to question and reflect on our writing process,” shares Neo Hai Bin, who wrote When the Cold Wind Blows in 2016 before the script was picked up by the Singapore Theatre Festival in 2018 at our recommendation. “For freelance artists like us, to be able to rent a space at an affordable price to work in, to devise, and to experiment different methodologies of creation is really, really precious.”

“Guest Room: First Act(s)” is a four-part series featuring eight plays-in-progress from a group of budding playwrights.

For works that need a testing ground for the artists to gather audience feedback, they could do so under our recently relaunched Guest Room presentation platform. This programmes provides artists with five days of free usage of the Centre’s facilities for rehearsals. On the fifth day, we would organise a closed-door dramatised reading and invite our industry partners and mailing list subscribers to attend.

“I see Centre 42 very much as an incubator of new works. Getting new work through the development stage is a long process, and particularly challenging without funding,” says Ivan Choong, a member of the team behind Guest Room: First Act(s), a four-part series featuring eight new works by a group of budding playwrights. “And it’s not just writers who benefit [from a programme like Guest Room] – the community as a whole benefits, as actors get a chance to practise, and audiences get a chance to see new works-in-progress. It involves the whole community.”

Building bridges

At its heart, Centre 42 is an intermediary that supports the creation, documentation, and promotion of text-based works for the stage. And over the last five years, we have increasingly expanded our role as a connector for different players within the performing arts scene.

We have hosted several events that feature performing arts writers from both our Citizens’ Reviews programme and other arts publications. “In the Living Room: Year in Reviews 2018″, for instance, was co-hosted with ArtsEquator.

We have, for example, been fostering a community of performing arts writers through our Citizens’ Reviews programme, which is currently in its sixth edition. We believe that critics are an essential part of any theatre ecosystem, which is why we’ve hosted several events in partnership with arts publication including ArtsEquator (with whom we presented In the Living Room: Year in Reviews last year) and Arts Republic (who we’ll be co-hosting a Plunge talk on 21 April). Recently, we also organised the inaugural Performing Arts Writers Social, which is a chance for journalists from different publications to meet in a more casual setting.

“Reviewers can often seem like faceless entities behind screens, but events like [Year in Reviews and the Performing Arts Writers Social] put faces to names and give physical, tangible form to this very nascent practice, and legitimise it in a way,” says Akanksha Raja, the assistant editor of ArtsEquator.

“Communities of practice are so important. Particularly because writing can be such a solitary activity, these socials and other programmes allow spaces for connection and support,” agrees performance writer and researcher Corrie Tan. “I’ve also observed how the team tries to finesse the format and structure of these events to make every meeting as inviting and generative as possible!”

Additionally, we have also been bringing together dramaturgs from both Singapore and the wider Asia-Pacific region as the principal organising partner of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network (ADN) since its inception in 2016. By presenting symposiums and labs in Japan, Australia, and Indonesia, we gave dramaturgs and artists a platform to share their knowledge and experience with one another. This in turn has led to an increased understanding of dramaturgical practices from around region, and we’re looking forward to bringing ADN home this May as part of the Singapore International Festival of Arts.

“Centre 42 has supported the work of ADN in a range of ways, including skilled organisation, detailed documentation and most of all intelligent, generous and thoughtful management of the projects that we have done. This has enabled ADN to grow and become more adventurous in its scope, as well as gain critical and reflective capacity in relation to what has already been done,” says Charlene Rajendran, the co-director of ADN.

Other initiatives we have supported include co-hosting talks and panel discussions with organisations such as the Singapore Management University’s Arts and Culture Management Program, National Institute of Education (NIE), and Asia-Europe Foundation. Additionally, we have also been the venue host for networks like Producers SG and supported arts community activities like the Arts NMP consultations.

As a venue, we have supported various arts community events, including several editions of the Producers SG socials. Photo: Benjamin Chee

“Anyone could provide space, although not enough do; Centre 42 goes many, many steps beyond by making the blue house as fertile and nourishing a space as possible for these works,” says independent producer Mok Cui Yin. “Besides nourishing the work and processes of writers and theatre-makers, Centre 42 has also been incredibly supportive of the broader arts ecology, be it creating a safe space for arts advocates and community town hall meetings; facilitating and hosting meetings for arts management and producer networks such as Producers SG’s events, and visiting regional networks such as the Open Network for Performing Arts Management (ON-PAM).”

As a result of Centre 42’s involvement in such a wide range of initiatives and programmes, our beloved blue house has, over time, evolved into a safe space – a community centre of sorts – for everyone who work in or love the arts to come together. In fact, there are few things we enjoy more than an impromptu gathering of different artists who all just happen to be working on their own projects here at the same time.

“Coming to Centre 42 feels like coming home,” says Nabilah. “It’s like that tagline of the sitcom Cheers, ‘where everybody knows your name’, but much, much more. It’s biscuits when you’re having a long meeting, professional or personal advice, and vouching and fighting for you when it matters.”

“Support for C42 is support for an open space where multiplicities can meet, interact and bump into each other, leading to new synergies and possibilities,” agrees Charlene. “This is not about big productions and spectacular events with huge crowds and large audiences. It is about a variety of petri dishes being allowed to exist in conducive labs and then be observed and examined. It is space that encourages options to change, transform, invent, and innovate.”

As the oft-repeated saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child – and to support Singapore’s growing theatre community. As a non-profit organisation, Centre 42 is committed to developing the scene in every way we can. If you believe in the work that we do, please consider making a donation to help us “Grow the Cloud”. Your gift will go an especially long way right now, as every dollar will be doubled by both the Cultural Matching Fund and the Bicentennial Community Fund. Furthermore, our Institutions of Public Character (IPC) status has just been renewed, which means that all donors will receive a 250% tax deduction. We hope you will join us as we continue to do our part for the theatre community, for the next five years and beyond!

By Gwen Pew
Published on 5 April 2019

Help us Grow the Cloud and receive a 250% tax deduction by donating here.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #9.

“Is ‘dramaturgy’ the new word that we’re all using, all the time? And in 25 years will I wear a perfume called Dramaturgy?” joked ArtsEquator’s Kathy Rowland at the Asian Dramaturg’s Network (ADN) Satellite Symposium in Adelaide in 2017. Her comment emerged in an open discussion about the way ADN had been handling the term. Having documented all of ADN’s activities in the past three years, I’ve noticed it’s been a recurring concern. And it’s important to ask ourselves what we mean by “dramaturgy”, especially since the term seems to have come into vogue since ADN’s inception in 2016, at least in Singapore.

Looking at the number of Google Search entries in Singapore for the word “dramaturgy” (inclusive of all its variants like “dramaturg”, “dramaturgical”, etc.), there is a noticeable spike in the last few years. This surge seems to suggest that dramaturgy has become quite a buzzword in the local Interwebs.

I’ve also noticed more theatre productions in Singapore crediting dramaturgs, especially those by younger groups like Bhumi Collective and The Second Breakfast Company. A more established company, Checkpoint Theatre, has recently promoted its latest production using the phrase “directed and dramaturged with verve and sensitivity” in its publicity material. And in a student production by the Intercultural Theatre Institute in March this year, the dramaturg emerges at the start of the performance to preface what the audience is about to witness. At the State level, in its five-year plan for the arts in Singapore, the National Arts Council identified dramaturgy as a potential area for regional networking and sharing in the performing arts.

So what is dramaturgy? The origin of the word is credited to 18^th century German dramatist Gotthold Lessing, who defined the term as “the concern with composition, structure, staging and audience from literary analysis and historiography”. This definition resonates with the idea of dramaturgs as literary managers and researchers, firmly ensconced in the areas of text and theatre.

But in the 20^th century, some academicians – most notably rhetorician Kenneth Burke and sociologist Irving Goffman, began using the language of theatre to describe the individual and society. Viewing life as a performance, with a private self that exists “backstage” and a public self that performs “onstage”, dramaturgy then became a study of how humans interact with each other, individually and collectively.

ADN straddles these two understandings of dramaturgy, with one foot firmly in the performing arts and another in a perspective on society, seemingly comfortable in its fluidity. Kathy observes of the ADN proceedings in Adelaide: “It did, at times, feel as if the term was in danger of becoming so open and inclusive as to be emptied out of its meaning…”

A review of past ADN conference themes gives us clues to this amorphousness – “Mapping In, Out and About” and “Tracing Asian Dramaturgy”, not only engage with the geopolitics of the network’s eponymous “Asian”, but also situate dramaturgical practice within the performance-making process; while “Dramaturgies of the Social and Cultural” and “Dramaturgy of the Political” site dramaturgy in the larger context of society. But despite the themes, all ADN gatherings have engaged in explorations of both dramaturgy in performance and society. The multifarious discussions demonstrate a reluctance to view artmaking in isolation of its wider context, and consequently dramaturgy has to be considered with eyes on the micro and the macro as well.

Another clue to the fluidity of dramaturgy in ADN can be found at the very first discussion in 2016 at the inaugural symposium in Singapore, when Indonesian dance dramaturg and researcher Helly Minarti proposed the Indonesian words pendamping and penganggu as Bahasa Indonesian equivalents for the English “dramaturg”. Pendamping means “companion” and penganggu means “bully or disturber”. The dramaturg as penganggu has come up in almost every ADN gathering since, coming to represent the dramaturg as a critical proponent of an artwork, over the implied compliancy of the pendamping. The penganggu dramaturg is adversarial to the art-maker for the purposes of improving the work.

Dramaturgical thinking is then synonymous with possessing a critical lens. And if art draws its inspiration from humanity and society, then as a proxy of these, a dramaturgical perspective necessitates a betterment of the world through a deep examination of its structures and relations via an aesthetic frame.

But can there be rigour if a word seemingly lacks conceptual boundaries? With such an open understanding of dramaturgy, rigour perhaps shouldn’t come from or be enforced from the top, as that would curtail the range of discussions the network is able to have and the kinds of people who are able to speak.

Rather, rigour can emerge from how the individual dramaturg or performing arts practitioner makes sense of and practices dramaturgy. “You have to be rigorous with yourself in terms of the way you think of it. And the more rigorous you are, you can communicate a certainty that people can respond to. So in that space you’re actually creating a dialogue,” said Australian dramaturg David Pledger. “Dramaturgy as a word is a prism, through which you can enter from multiple directions. And that is a very rare thing for a word to provide.”

I recall once joking to a colleague, “So, everything can be dramaturgy!” And it seems, with ADN, that it might just be possible, and also opportune, to view art and the world through a dramaturgical lens.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 5 April 2019

ADN’s next meeting, part of the Singapore International Festival of Arts, is ADN Conference 2019: Dramaturgy and the Human Condition, from 25 to 26 May 2019 at the Festival House. Details and registration at asiandramaturgs.com/conference2019.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #9.

It took playwright Nabilah Said more than three years to get her play from conception to staging.

Sitting across from me at the café outside the National Library, Nabilah Said is relaxed, confident, and slightly giddy from the excitement and exhaustion of back-to-back rehearsals.

“Rehearsals are great! They have been sooooo fun!” she gushes. “It’s funny because I’m sure this kind of ‘I love rehearsals!’ feeling is something that everyone else in theatre had already gone through when they were quite young. But I think as a playwright, if you’re not doing it full time, there are so many things that allow you to build walls. But now those walls are no longer there.”

Three years ago, however, she was in a very different place. “My heart squeezes and I feel terrible,” she wrote in a reflection piece dated 15 June 2016.

Back then, she had spent a year trying to write a play called State Land under Boiler Room, Centre 42’s script development programme, about people who used to live on Singapore’s offshore islands before being forced to move to the mainland. At the same time, as an associate artist in residence at Teater Ekamatra, she was also working on another piece called Angkat, about the common and informal practice of adoption in Malay families. (Anak angkat means “adopted children” in Malay.)

For various reasons, however, she just couldn’t bend or twist either of those projects into the shape and form that she wanted. That was when Robin Loon and Casey Lim – Boiler Room’s resident dramaturg and director respectively – suggested that she should take a six-month break before returning to it with more focus. She understood where they were coming from and gratefully accepted their offer, but nonetheless felt frustrated that it had come to that.

“It is a strange sort of heartbreak,” she wrote in another reflection piece on 1 July 2016 as she began her hiatus.

It turns out that the break was exactly what she needed. By January 2017, she was ready to pick up her Boiler Room journey where she left off, having decided to incorporate her ideas for State Land into Angkat.

A test read of “Angkat” was held at Centre 42 in September 2017 to conclude Nabilah’s Boiler Room journey.

“I want to look at both adoption, and the relationship between the former islanders and mainland Singapore. Because to me there is a parallel journey of how you started from one place and moved to another,” she says. “Even if you feel like you’re okay with the new place, there must be some feelings still tied to the former place. So I felt that the two journeys could be looked at in the same play.”

She finished her new draft of Angkat in September 2017, and held a test read at Centre 42 to conclude her Boiler Room journey.

Meanwhile, Teater Ekamatra had informed Nabilah that they would like to stage the piece in December 2017, but felt that the script still wasn’t quite ready. They came to a mutual agreement to allow the director of the production, Irfan Kasban, to devise new scenes together with the cast, taking the production in a different direction.

“With the benefit of hindsight, I totally understand some of the concerns they had, and some of the weaknesses of the script at that point in time, and why they wanted to simplify it. It’s fine that they [devised the play that way],” she says. “But I also felt that this story that I had initially wanted to tell – I still wanted to tell it.”

And so in January 2018, Nabilah reached out to director Noor Effendy Ibrahim, whose work she really admires, and asked if he would like work with her to further develop her original idea for Angkat. He said yes, and together, they submitted the piece to the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival open call shortly after. To their delight, Angkat was accepted for the 2019 festival.

Since November 2018, Nabilah has been back at Centre 42 together with Effendy, her dramaturg Zulfadli Rashid (aka “Big”), and the rest of her production team to further develop and fine-tune her play under our Basement Workshop residency programme. She has also extended the title of the piece to better reflect her story. It’s now called ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native.

“I always felt that the title Angkat by itself didn’t fully capture the ambition of the play. It would have made people think that the play was only about the adoption story. Plus, I want to find a way to give people a sense that this play is going to be a bit siao siao one (Singlish for “crazy”)!” she smirks. “I did not want a boring title.”

Which brings us to the “I love rehearsals!” phase that Nabilah is enjoying these days.

The cast and creative team of “ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native” are currently in residence at Centre 42.

“The thing about the play is that there are a lot of funny moments. Like, a lot. So sometimes in rehearsals we can’t actually finish reading it, because we’re too busy laughing!” she shares. At the same time, she’s also feeling more assured, knowing that she is well-supported.

“It feels really nice that even now, when it’s no longer about the script anymore – rather it’s about the production – that we can still work with Centre 42 to develop it. And it’s cool that Ekamatra is still a part of my journey as well; they’ve been very supportive. To me it signals that there’s confidence about the piece, which I really need as a playwright,” she says. She pauses, and bursts out laughing. “It sounds so terrible! I sound so needy! But for me, it’s really important that the people I’m working with believe in it.”

On top of working out the story that she wanted to tell with ANGKAT, Nabilah also spent the last three years trying to find her voice and place as a playwright. And now, she has not just one, but three plays that will all be debuting in January 2019: ANGKAT and yesterday it rained salt will  both be staged at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, while Inside Voices will be performed at London’s Vault  Festival. It may have taken her a while to get to where she is today, but the journey from idea to production was never meant to be straightforward.

“I started out being unsure, but now it’s a complete 180-degree change, you know. I’m like very, very, very sure,” she says. “And I feel like it did require those three years of work for me to figure out what it is that I’m trying to say.”

By Gwen Pew
Published on 11 January 2019

ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native will be performed at NAFA Studio Theatre from 24 to 26 January. Tickets are available here.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #8.

Loo Zihan hopes to explore the relationship between objects, memories, and identity in “Catamite”. Photo: Tom Giebel

Multidisciplinary artist Loo Zihan is no stranger to our blue house. He was one of our first ever Basement Workshop artists in residence, and developed and staged With/Out here for the 2015 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. Four years later, he has returned to create a one-man show called Catamite for the 2019 edition of the same festival, to be performed at Centre 42 from 25 to 27 January.

The idea for this new work came about when he was writing the thesis for his Performance Studies Master’s degree in New York recently, and used the opportunity to reflect on his own artistic practice.

“I was looking at works that I’ve done in the past through a critical lens, and I kept coming back to this installation that I did at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at Lasalle in 2016, called Queer Objects: an archive for the future,” he shares. “It was still very fresh, and it was something I haven’t really worked through, unlike With/Out [which I revisited at Esplanade in 2017]. So I wanted to come back to it.”

He explains that in a way, he had unfinished business with Queer Objects. The piece imagines that in the year 2065, Section 377A of the Penal Code in Singapore – which criminalises sex between men – has been repealed, and objects from a time capsule are unearthed and displayed. The exhibition actually comprised items loaned to him by members from the local queer community that they associated with their identity. It got a lot of attention, but not really of the sort that Zihan was hoping for: a few items from the collection were deemed too offensive, and removed just before the show opened.

Zihan has been working on “Catamite” under Basement Workshop, and has been conducting trial runs here recently.

There was one such seemingly mundane object from that exhibition that he’s especially keen to re-examine: a watch whose face and strap look like they came from different eras. Zihan is fascinated by the lovely story behind it, which led him to consider the kind of narratives that objects can contain.

“I am drawn to objects that hold a symbolic weight in archives, especially narratives that have been historically suppressed or proscribed. I am also trying to understand why some objects have been tethered to memories, while others have been disconnected and neglected,” he muses. “Through the tracking of what memories and objects have been given significance, we can measure what society’s, or an individual’s, values are, and how they evolve over time.”

Incidentally, a watch also cropped up in a separate story when he was researching the history behind how Section 377A came about. Through newspaper archives and his conversations with legal scholar George Baylon Radics, Zihan discovered the case of Captain Douglas Marr and a male prostitute – also known as a catamite – called Sudin bin Daud. They were two of the first people in Singapore to be charged with Section 377A back in the early 1940s, and the main piece of evidence that was used to prove their alleged relationship was a timepiece that Sudin had stolen from the captain.

Both Zihan’s Queer Objects exhibition and his research on Section 377A will form the basis of Catamite, with the humble watch linking the two threads, and serving as a metaphor for the passing and verification of time.

The performance will be divided into five parts, comprising a series of participatory exercises as well as lecture-performances. But even though the work traces Section 377A all the way from the 1940s well into the future, Zihan is clear that it is not a history lesson.

One object that inspired Zihan in the creation of “Catamite” is a watch loaned to him for an earlier installation work.

“If you’re coming in expecting a lecture, that’s not really going to be the case,” he emphasises. “That said, my practice has been about providing people with knowledge and information, to understand that there are multiple historical narratives. So for me, the biggest responsibility of Catamite is to help people understand where 377A came from. Whether they are for repeal or not is up to them, and I don’t think that’s something I can possibly change through one performance. It’s just to give them information so that they can make an informed decision on the eventual position that they would like to adopt.”

The work will be performed in our Black Box, which happens to be where part of his 2015 production of With/Out took place as well.

“It’s nice that in Catamite, when I talk about the candle from Paddy [Chew]’s performance [of Completely With/Out Character, on which With/Out was based] – which was also one of the objects in the Queer Objects archive – then I can talk about the moment when I lit it in that very same space in the Black Box,” he says. “When I first did With/Out here, it was a new space and it was exciting. But now, coming back, there’s a certain complexity and richness that accumulates over time, by coming to the same space and working in the same space over and over again. It’s a different relationship, and adds layers of complexity to the work itself.”

Catamite is also an open invitation for audiences to explore the relationship between objects, memories, and identity. And in that sense, it’s also been a rather nice way to resurface Zihan’s own memories and relationship with the space, as well as the objects associated with it.

By Gwen Pew
Published on 11 January 2019

Catamite will be performed at Centre 42 from 25 to 27 January. Tickets are available here.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #8.

A nightview of the Causeway from Johor Bahru.
Photo: Fauziah Shariff, Flickr (Used with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License. Some modifications made to the original image.)

From the birthright of cendol to maritime disputes, the relationship between Singapore and Malaysia can go from testy to downright tense. But our expulsion from the Federation in 1965 not only created two separate nations, it also gave rise to two English-language theatre scenes. Looking back on the history of Singapore theatre, the relationship between us and our northern neighbour plays a significant role, with works emerging from cross-Causeway competition and collaboration, as well as from the historical significance of the 1965 Separation.

Sibling rivalry

Inevitably, with two neighbouring entities with such close ties and shared cultures and history, there is bound to be an element of competition. One play whose production history perhaps best embodies the competitiveness between the two scenes is Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill. Kon wrote the monodrama in 1982, and with it, won the Singapore National Playwriting Competition the following year. Despite her win, and others in previous years, she had difficulty getting her work staged in Singapore.

Programme cover featuring Leow Puay Tin as Emily in Emily of Emerald Hill (1984).
(Image: MY Art Memory Project)

Emily was first produced by Malaysian theatre company Five Arts Centre in 1984 in Seremban and Kuala Lumpur (KL). Malaysian playwright Leow Puay Tin was the first to play the titular Nonya matriarch. Straits Times theatre critic Kate James later penned a response scathingly titled Come on Singapore, stand up for your own plays in which she berated Singapore theatre practitioners’ lack of interest in local work, and particularly for overlooking Kon’s plays. (She calls these theatre practitioners “pussycats”.) Emily was only staged on its homeground in 1985, performed by Margaret Chan.

Yet, Malaysia’s love affair with Emily knows no bounds, with actress Pearlly Chua playing the matriarch a whopping 200 times between the years 1990 and 2017. (To be fair, her debut as Emily was in Singapore.)

This competitiveness extended beyond the two nations’ theatre scenes. In 2002, Malaysian writer Karim Raslan attended the opening festival of Singapore’s Esplanade. Reflecting on the new facility, he wrote, “Interestingly, at least for a KL-ite, the Esplanade also marks an important attempt by the Singapore government to play catch-up with Malaysia. Maybe it’s a reflection of the changing times and the altered nature of bilateral relations, because in the past, Malaysians used to spend most of our energy ‘catching up’ with them.”

In theatre, Business Times arts writer Helmi Yusof observed in 2016 that more and more Malaysian practitioners have built successful stage careers south of the Causeway. Some, like Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong, even helm theatre companies based in Singapore. Malaysian actor-director Jo Kukathas credits the National Arts Council and the Esplanade for the growth of Singapore English-Language Theatre in the last three decades, creating many more opportunities for both local and Malaysian practitioners. But she also recalls that the flow of talent between the two countries was more comparable back in the 1980s: “…there was more parity between the Malaysian and Singapore theatre scene. Malaysians would come here to perform, and Singaporeans would go to Malaysia.”

Creative collaborations

The cross-pollination of stage talent and ideas between the two countries in the 1980s was the backdrop for more formal creative exchanges, such as the one between Singapore’s TheatreWorks and KL-based Five Arts Centre. In 1988, TheatreWorks presented Three Children in Singapore, co-directed by its artistic director Ong Keng Sen and Five Arts Centre’s Krishen Jit. The play was penned by the very same Leow Puay Tin who first played Emily. In 1989, Ong directed Peter’s Passionate Pursuit, written by Singaporean playwright Eleanor Wong, for Five Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpur. The emphasis on this exchange was on formal training of performers – Krishen worked with the Singapore cast, and Ong with the Malaysian cast, for several months before their respective productions, focusing on performance skills and devising.

Programme cover for Second Link (2005).
(Image: Wild Rice, The Repository. Used with permission.)

A more recent cross-Causeway exchange project would be Wild Rice’s Second Link, staged during the 2005 Singapore Writer’s Festival, as well as its follow-up Another Country at the 2015 Singapore Theatre Festival. The two works commemorated the 40^th and 50^th anniversary of the Separation respectively. In both productions, a team of actors and a director from one country would perform a curated selection of works from the other.

According to Wild Rice’s artistic director Ivan Heng, these Singapore-Malaysian collaborations served a greater purpose beyond creative development: “If we can take the time to understand, to interpret and then express each other’s concerns and aspirations, you begin to have this idea of empathy and go into this idea of what it means to have peace between neighbours.” Krishen echoed these sentiments in the programme of the 1992 restaging of Three Children: “The theatre world is getting to be truly international and it is no longer a one-way theatre traffic… [Three Children] has not been immune of friction, little and sometimes, large ripple of cultural conflict. But the love of theatre by one and all has proved to be the great leveler of cultural bumps and grinds.”

Separation stories

While theatremaking can help mend the rifts caused when one country became two, theatremakers are also inspired by the Separation and the relationship between Singapore and Malaysia theatreafter. In 1998, Singaporean playwright Alfian Sa’at penned his first full-length play in Malay titled Causeway, a series of eight vignettes inspired by the bridge that joins the two countries. The work was staged by Singapore company Teater Ekamatra. In anticipation of the work, Straits Times theatre critic Elizabeth Kaiden wrote, “Causeway has been crying out for its story to be told all these years since Separation, but especially so since last year, when the jams on it became a visual metaphor for the clogged relations between Singapore and Malaysia.”

Programme cover for the second staging on Causeway in 2002.
(Image: Teater Ekamatra, The Repository. Used with permission.)

Alfian revised Causeway in 2002 for the Singapore Arts Festival, following the events of 9/11. This restaging involved a cast comprising performers from Teater Ekamatra and The Actors Studio in Malaysia.

Separation 40 in 2005 shared a similar episodic structure, with five humour-laden scenes exploring the relationship between Singapore and Malaysia. It was a joint project by Singapore’s The Necessary Stage and Malaysia’s Dramalab, written by the companies’ resident playwrights Haresh Sharma and Jit Murad, and directed by Alvin Tan and Zahim Albakri. Reflecting on the collaboration, Zahim said, “The relationship between Malaysia and Singapore is more like sibling rivalry, one-upmanship between families. It’s not acrimonious and we enjoy having a dig at them as they do us. That’s probably why the writers chose very human stories to depict this relationship.”

Siblings, collaborators and competitors – our relationship with Malaysia is complex to say the least. The above productions are just a few examples of work emerging from and/or spurred on by ties with our closest neighbour. The line dividing us isn’t as clear as the straits that separate island from peninsula, and our intertwined past, present and future make for fertile ground for theatre and art.

By Daniel Teo
Published on 11 January 2019

In March 2019, in our own cross-Causeway collaboration, Centre 42 and KL’s Five Arts Centre will present two original works created in response to Leow Puay Tin’s play Three Children. Stay tuned for more details!

References

James, K. (1984, December 30). Come on Singapore, stand up for your own plays. In Straits Times. Retrieved from NewspaperSG.
Kaiden, E. (1998, April 16). Malay theatre travels along the Causeway. In Straits Times. Retrieved from LexisNexist database.
Loke, P. L. (2005, September 24). Separation issues. In New Straits Times. Retrieved from LexisNexis database.
Star2.com (2017, October 4). Role of a lifetime: Actress Pearlly Chua talks ‘Emily Of Emerald Hill’. Retrieved from www.star2.com.
Raslan, K. (2002, October 29). Why the Esplanade deserves to succeed. In Business Times. Retrieved from LexisNexis database.
Tan, C. (2015, February 3). Theatre company Wild Rice presenting five politically-themed plays for SG50. In Straits Times. Retrieved from straitstimes.com.
Three Children. (1992). House programme.
Yusof, H. (2016, April 8). Enter stage right: The Malaysian actor. In Business Times. Retrieved from businesstimes.com.sg.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #8.