The Spirits Play. Photo: Tuckys Photography.

Centred on five Japanese ghosts – of a mother, a general, a girl, a man, and a poet – from the World War II period, Kuo Pao Kun’s anti-war classic The Spirits Play was first staged by The Theatre Practice in 1998, and last staged by The Finger Players (TFP) in 2015. Two years later, the piece is returning as part of The Finger Players’ Contemporary Classics season together with Chong Tze Chien’s 2010 play, Poop!.

The Spirits Play is once again directed by the company’s resident director, Oliver Chong, and the cast and crew is the same as the 2015 staging, except this time it will be performed at Victoria Theatre instead of the Drama Centre Black Box. Oliver insists, however, that this production is more than just adapting the 2015 piece to a larger venue. We catch up with him to find out more about the work before the team begins rehearsals at Centre 42 for the first few weeks of October.

When did you first encounter The Spirits Play, and what drew you to the work?
The very first staging of The Spirits Play in 1998. The script was what drew me to the work because of the controversy it raised and Kuo Pao Kun was criticised for “speaking up for the aggressor”. We often hear the oppressed lamenting the cruelties of war and naturally rebuff all cries from the aggressors because their sufferings are just desserts for inflicting pain on others. Hearing the ghosts of the aggressors speak of the atrocities of war provided a bigger lens that look past hatred and discrimination to look at the human conditions of greed, anger and ignorance. The exploration of these human conditions in The Spirits Play is and will always be relevant. The play allows audiences to deeper examine and ruminate upon these conditions magnified under the cruel circumstances of war. That said, I am not sure if I will be able maintain this clarity of mind to direct it if I have lived through a war.

The Spirits Play was last staged by TFP in 2015 – why did the company decide to bring it back two years later?
Because our work was not yet finished in 2015. It was the completion of a phase of work but not fully completed. Yes I know, as of all previous works too. So I want to carry on working on it when it is still relatively fresh and move on to the next phase. And so, this restaging will not see the work repeated as of its last staging or just cosmetically adapted to a bigger stage. The Spirits Play also seems especially imperative now with recent news of imminent wars and nuclear threats all over the media. And also because the previous staging was well received that we have the chance to carry on working on it.

Oliver Chong. Photo: Tuckys Photography.

And why did TFP decide to stage The Spirits Play and Poop! as part of a Contemporary Classics season, rather as two standalone works? How does The Spirits Play‘s “classic” relate to Poop!‘s “contemporary”?
We decided to brand the Poop!/The Spirits Play season as “contemporary classic” as a preamble to a regular theme in our back to back plays by myself and Tze Chien from this point onwards. Our practice, and by extension the company’s, often draws its inspirations and methodologies from traditions and classics; we tend to modernise stage conventions and traditions/myths, making them our own while adhering to old-school principles and staging devices/styles/training methods.

On a literal level, in the branding “contemporary classic, the “classic” refers to The Spirits Play, and “contemporary” is a direct reference to Poop! as a modern counterpart. But of course contemporary classics could also be applied to both plays (one being a KPK classic and the other a TFP classic).

We hope to create a regular following of this back to back feature, which will return in June next year, and you’ll see how Tze Chien and myself respond to this theme “contemporary classics” with new works, with both original plays citing history and myths as inspiration.

What is the process of restaging a relatively recent piece like?
Re-familiarising with the work and re-visiting our previous staging is the first step. This is so that we can carry on working from where we left off as opposed to starting from scratch. The work that we have done up to the previous staging is invaluable and we are going to develop it further. The research and exploration work that we have done will be excavated further and deeper in characterisation. Actors’ training and exploration of Suzuki and Noh and finding a movement and voice vocabulary for this staging is underway.

Your team will be holding rehearsals at Centre 42 for the two weeks leading up to the performance. How do you plan to structure your time here?
Full runs, actors getting used to the actual size of the space and the texture of the floor that they will be walking on, notes, adjusts, repeat. Because TFP rehearsal studio does not have the actual depth and the entire floor on stage will be covered with garments and clothes.

By Gwen Pew
Published on 12 October 2017

The Spirits Play will be performed at Victoria Theatre from 27 to 29 October 2017. Tickets are available from Sistic.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #3.

As quite a few of them have worked with Centre 42 in different capacities over the years, we decided to catch up with them for one last interview before they begin the next chapter of their lives. They are aspiring playwright Nur Sabrina Binte Dzulkifli, arts journalist and playwright Nabilah Said, and dance artist Lee Mun Wai.

Sabrina was part of several projects at our blue house – she was the dramaturg for Alessandra Fel’s Under My Skin and CharChey’s For the Record, and the co-writer for Pink Gajah Theatre’s Bi(cara), which were all developed under our Basement Workshop programme. She is also a member of the Malay playwright collective Main Tulis Group, which was founded by Nabilah in 2016. Both Sabrina and Nabilah presented short plays at Late-Night Texting this year under the programme “ETA: 9 MIN”. Additionally, Nabilah is also one of our Boiler Room 2015 playwrights, and her play Angkat had its first test read in September. Mun Wai, on the other hand, created a work under our Vault programme titled Dancing the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where he examined the social themes in Elangovan’s plays from the 2000s.

We wish Sabrina, Nabilah, and Mun Wai all the best, and look forward to hearing all about their adventures abroad when they come back!

Nur Sabrina Binte Dzulkifli. Photo: Andre Chong.

What was the experience of working on the various projects at Centre 42 like for you?
Sabrina: Each of the projects I did at Centre 42 came with their unique bundle of challenges and working methods, but every single one of them was a valuable learning experience that I was happy to have. For me, Centre 42 has kind of always been home. A large chunk of the projects that I can put on my artist portfolio has been with you guys – whether as part of one of your Basement Workshop projects or just hosting us for rehearsal and meeting space. In that sense, I feel like the projects that have been hosted at Centre 42 have always had the full support of the team behind Centre 42.

Nabilah: Stressful but fun (laughs). I joined Boiler Room at a time when I was very unsure of myself as a playwright. I think I needed some form of validation that I was doing something right. This is random, but when I was being interviewed for the Boiler Room programme in 2015, I was in Inner Mongolia on a work trip and I had just returned from the desert. Casey Lim, Dr Robin Loon and Nelson Chia were the ones interviewing me [over Skype] and they were like, “where’s the desert?” because by then, I was already back in a hotel room. But maybe it was a metaphorical desert that I was in at that time – I was alone in my writing journey, shuffling in the sand.

That led me to forming Main Tulis Group (MTG). I approached Dr Loon and Casey about this idea back in 2016 – I pitched it to them over thosai and they were enthusiastic about it from the get-go. I think they saw the potential of MTG even before I did. MTG actually started out as a kind of self-serving thing of wanting to surround myself with other writers. Meeting regularly would mean that I would be forced to keep writing instead of only writing when I had a production deadline to meet. But over the course of one year, we’ve really grown into more of a collective and support network for each other. We are bigger than the sum of our parts. It’s been a beautiful thing to watch.

Mun Wai: It was like the beginning of a new chapter of sorts for me. I used the residency as a starting point to re-think or re-align my goals and what I wanted to do as an artist after leaving T.H.E Dance Company. I wanted to see how choreography and performance could come closer to the social sphere – implicate and relate to it. Elangovan’s three plays served as a solid starting point with themes that came close to this idea of social commentary. I could then use my practice as a choreographer and physical performer to find ways to weave choreography and performance closer to social commentary. The process was overwhelming in a very good way. Very quickly I discovered so many new possibilities and new ways to think about how I can perform or choreograph. Very soon, I had to even accept this residency was to be an initial trigger point to a much longer process in my development as a dancer/performer.

Nabilah Said. Photo: Erfendi Dhahlan.

What’s your favourite memory/story of your time at Centre 42?
Sabrina: I distinctly remember once having Bi(cara) going on upstairs in the Black Box, and then having to rush down to the Meeting Room right after to attend a rehearsal of my show Counting. That’s pretty up there – the fact that so much of my experience as an artist was with Centre 42 – along with the time you guys fed me on that one night I just came in to ask a semi-serious question about my fundraiser. Also, there was one time I literally wandered in to Centre 42 to take a nap between rehearsals on one of the benches outside, and Casey Lim was showing someone around, and they had to pass me while I was half-asleep and he said to the visitor: “And sometimes our artists sleep here as well.” Many a good times were had.

Nabilah: I think it was the sight of the long queues of people waiting to watch MTG’s reading showcase “ETA: 9 MIN” at Late-Night Texting in August 2017. That was quite overwhelming, because a year ago MTG was just an idea in my head that I wasn’t sure would quite work. I remembered thinking “wait, these people are in line to watch our show?” The setting of Late-Night Texting was already so magical – what with the fairy lights and general convivial vibe – and that visual of those queues just made my soul sing. I do apologise to everyone who had to wait in line though, I hope the experience was worth it!

Mun Wai: I think it was the performance night itself. The bump in was simple and I did everything with a team of just two people. It was the first time in a long time that I had such a simple set up. I was wondering if I actually had enough material to hold up the entire performance but in the end everything went rather well and the reception was rather warm. It was the first time I was subjecting my body to a much freer way of performing, using improvisational strategies instead of performing over rehearsed set choreography. Also, I was using my sensorial and thought impulses to trigger/stimulate action, movement, physical situations so that was quite scary too, because I had to be very in tune with my mind and body throughout the performance. At the end of the performance I felt like I finally found a way to work with improvisation. It was hard work but at the same time very liberating because it felt much more authentic and liberating.

Lee Mun Wai. Photo: Dinu Bodiciu.

Where will you be going and what will you be doing for your studies? And what are you looking forward to most about it?
Sabrina: I’ll be going to University of Essex, in Essex, U.K., pursuing BA Drama and Literature. I’m excited for some breathing space away from Singapore. To learn more about theatre and writing, and to have a bit more fun. I am also hoping to join the juggling, fire and magic club at my school – if the writing thing doesn’t work out, I’m running away to the circus (laughs)!

Nabilah: I’m taking a Master’s programme in Writing for Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London in the United Kingdom. There are a lot of writing programmes out there but I chose this one because it gives me opportunities to collaborate with artists from other fields, including music composers, visual artists and dramaturgs. This course is designed to train both playwrights and dramaturgs, so I’ll also have the opportunity to learn more about dramaturgy, which is a skill I hope to be better at in the future. In my one year away I also hope to be able to think of new ideas and plan future projects for when I am back in Singapore, on a personal level, as well as with MTG and other partners.

Mun Wai: I will be going to the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. I will be pursuing a Master’s in Choreography and Performance for two years. The programme will speak of choreography and performance in a much more expanded way. That is what I am most excited about. A lot of times in Singapore, choreography is dealt with in the narrow confines of formalistic dance – it is always about formal aesthetic concerns, how to design the body through virtuosic movement. In Singapore, we do not talk very much about how choreography can be a design of movement and time such that the design spurs/creates/affects/effects movement (whether bodily or not). Just like now Elangovan’s Talaq has shown, for example, how a tightly ‘choreographed’ patriarchal society, with all its rules and societal structures set by men, ends up in the marginalisation and disempowerment of women. I want to begin talking about choreography like that, not just how many turns I can do on stage or how high I can jump. That’s just athleticism and sport. It is also not about this naive idea of seeking social change through art, I have my reservations about that too. But at least, I am more interested in how my artistic tendencies and practices can weave into life much more.

When will we see you in Singapore again?
Sabrina: Gosh, that’s a toughie. I’ll be back every year (hopefully!) for summer breaks. But I’ll also be back to serve my NAC bond after four years, so there’s that. Hopefully I’ll have projects in between. That’ll be nice, wouldn’t it?

Nabilah: I’ll be back before the end of next year, raring to go out and get stuff done!

Mun Wai: I will still be visible don’t you worry (laughs). Two years will pass in a flash. Plus, coming to Germany is also about trying to stretch my network wider. It is not about forgoing Singapore.

By Gwen Pew
Published on 12 October 2017

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #3.

Citizens’ Reviews’ editor Robin Loon conducts a workshop for our Citizen Reviewers in June this year. Photo: Gwen Pew.

In the blink of an eye, we’re about to enter the fifth edition of Citizens’ Reviews. The programme invites aspiring theatre critics to embark on a one-year journey where they’re given tickets to watch shows, write about their experiences, and have their reviews edited and published on Centre 42’s website. It was conceived as a way to document Singapore’s ever-growing theatre landscape, as well as to provide a platform for dialogue and discourse.

“I have always believed that specialist feedback and commentary such as theatre reviews are critical for the development of a healthy theatre scene,” says Centre 42’s consultant Robin Loon, who helped conceptualise the programme in 2014 and has been serving as its English editor ever since.

But while the theatre scene has certainly come a long way in the past 50 years, the arts criticism scene has arguably grown at a slower pace. Unlike in places like the UK where there are critics like Michael Billington, who has written for The Guardian for more than 45 years, the theatre reviewers at our national papers tend to get swapped in and out every few years. It was also a great loss when one of Singapore’s longest-running independent reviewing platforms, The Flying Inkpot Theatre and Dance, closed shop in 2015, even though Centre 42 still maintains the website in its existing state as an archive for members of the public to access for research and education.

“Theatre reviewing has not quite caught up with the quality of the shows by some of the more established theatre companies in Singapore,” says Christian W. Huber, who used to be a theatre director and producer, and joined the Citizens’ Reviews programme in 2017. “Arts reviewing here primarily communicates what the show is about, and not much else.”

Jocelyn Chng – a freelance arts educator and performer who has been a Citizen Reviewer since 2016 – agrees. “The arts reviewing scene here is very disparate,” she notes. “Reviewing is not discussed often enough, and when it is, it tends to be viewed in a sceptical light.”

That is why Citizens’ Reviews aims to cultivate a pool of well-informed and articulate reviewers who can contribute to the arts criticism scene, and it does so by nurturing new voices. The pilot cycle of the programme in 2014 comprised only four reviewers, all of whom were students who took the Theatre Criticism module at the National University of Singapore (NUS), which Robin teaches. One of the reviewers who have been with us from that very first cycle – and continues to write for us now – is Isaac Tan. He used to review shows for The Kent Ridge Common, the online NUS student publication, prior to joining Citizens’ Reviews at Robin’s invitation.

“The programme has allowed me to find my voice as a critic without having to worry about very tight deadlines or readership. It has allowed me to focus solely on my writing,” he says.

Citizens’ Reviews started inviting members of the public to apply for the programme through an open call since 2015 – a process that is still in place today. For the first two years, we took on as many reviewers as we could.

“But after two cycles focusing on the ‘reviewer-on-the-street’ approach to selection, I wanted to focus more on the quality of the reviews and give Citizens’ Reviews more direction,” explains Robin. So starting with the 2017 cycle, we decided to up the requirements for the selection process, and introduced a new criteria where reviewers now have to watch at least one performance that belongs in each of the following categories during their tenure:

1) A community production that’s performed in community centres, libraries, or other communal spaces

2) A non-conventional or multidisciplinary performance

3) A production by an aspiring or semi-amateur company

4) A production by an established company

5) A play that’s performed in a different language to the one reviewers write in

While this certainly challenges our reviewers to venture outside their comfort zones, they have risen enthusiastically to the occasion, and reported that it’s been an eye-opening and rewarding experience.

“From applied theatre productions to intercultural pieces, reviewing as part of the programme has piqued my interest in forms of theatre I never knew I would enjoy, like Mandarin children’s musicals,” says Cordelia Lee, a second-year Theatre Studies and English Linguistics student at NUS who joined Citizens’ Reviews this year.

Some of these findings and thoughts will be shared with the public at a new event that we’re presenting this year, titled Living Room: Year in Reviews. Held at Centre 42 on 14 December, it will be a chance for our reviewers to gather and discuss the local plays they have watched this year, together with theatre reviewers from arts website ArtsEquator. The event will be divided into several parts, and reviewers will be invited to discuss and debate categories such as the best and most disappointing productions, performances, and design. It will not follow the format of award ceremonies and no particular productions, companies, or practitioners will be picked as the winners (or losers). Instead, these topics will serve as cues for conversation.

“I wanted to share this discussion with the public because I hope it will generate more awareness of the theatre scene in Singapore,” says Robin.

We hope that as Citizens’ Reviews keeps growing, the programme and the reviews written by our aspiring critics can also continue to serve as food for thought and discussion for audience members, readers, and the public in general. As for our reviewers, we will keep posing new challenges to them, too. “The marks of a great reviewer are wit, heart, sensitivity, being informed, and being thick-skinned,” says Robin. “For the next cycles, I am looking at perhaps assigning reviewers to focus on either a certain genre of theatre, or perhaps even track a theatre company’s work during his/her tenure.”

And for those who are up for the challenge and would like to put their skills to the test – the open call for our 2018 cycle is on-going until 22 October.

By Gwen Pew
Published on 12 October 2017

Find out more about the Citizens’ Reviews 2018 programme and apply here, and join us at Centre 42 for Living Room: Year in Reviews on 14 December 2017.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #3.

Students from the Singapore Management University’s Advanced Arts and Culture Management course visited Centre 42 in September to learn more about how we function as an arts centre. Photo: Daniel Teo.

How do you prepare students for the real world? That is the challenge faced by Hoe Su Fern, the assistant professor of Arts and Culture Management at the School of Social Sciences at the Singapore Management University (SMU).

Su Fern – who is armed with a PhD in cultural policy but has worked in a variety of sectors, from fashion to the government – is currently on a mission to groom the next generation of arts managers. She joined SMU in September 2016, and semester by semester, she’s been trying to instil in her students a sense of what it is like to work in arts management.

The field is vast and vaguely defined: arts managers can be responsible for everything from programming for an arts organisation, to facilitating with the day-to-day operations of the company, to managing budgets, marketing, and other administrative tasks for specific productions and projects.

While some things can be taught in school, some skills can really only be learnt on the job.

To ensure that her Arts Management students in the compulsory final year module “ACM004: Advanced Arts and Culture Management” can learn real-life skills, Su Fern designed a course that, as she puts it, “would allow them to learn both the critical thinking that is required of arts managers, and also the practical aspects of the role”. The students’ task is to work in teams to develop and present a proposal for a future arts centre in Singapore.

“I want this to be a project that’s meaningful and useful for them, and I’m hoping that they will really take ownership of it. And who knows? Maybe they really will develop it in the future,” says Su Fern. She adds that she deliberately left the definition of “arts centre” quite vague, as she hopes that her students can come up with their own ideas and meanings for it.

Su Fern has also strived to bring her teaching outside the classroom, by arranging for her students to visit existing arts centres in Singapore. She hopes that by speaking with staff from places like DECK, the Substation, and Centre 42, her students can learn about the various types of company structures out there, as well as sources of funding, and what the day-to-day operations of different companies are like.

After looking at case studies and doing their research, the final challenge for the students is to pitch their ideas – which comprise everything from the vision of their arts centres to how it will be implemented – to a live audience. This event, titled Partial Projections: Proposals for a Future Arts Centre in Singapore, will be held at Centre 42’s Black Box on 9 November, and it will be open to the public.

“For many of them, they’ve never done an assignment outside the classroom – I don’t think they know what’s in store for them yet!” she laughs.

The presentation will be accompanied by an outdoor exhibition, where students can provide more information about their arts centre and the thought process and research behind it.

Currently, the four groups all have their own unique ideas – and they’re all facing their own set of challenges.

“In the beginning, it was very hard to establish an idea that was not already out there,” says Bianca Westhuis, an exchange student on the course who joined SMU this semester. “But then we started thinking that while most of the ideas are in a way already out there, why are they not all successful? We hope to adjust some of these concepts in a way that will be successful.” Bianca’s group is hoping to create a platform where artists can network while giving them a space to create art.

Final year SMU student Lloyd Wong’s group, on the other hand, wants to create a centre for amateur theatre groups to test and rehearse new works. For them, the challenge is about finding a space. “Because our [proposed arts centre] is for theatre troupes, the location and size of the space is very crucial,” he says, adding that the group will be doing a series of site recces during their recess week in order to scope out existing spaces that they can gather ideas from.

The third group is proposing a centralised marketing platform for existing arts centres, while the fourth group would like to dedicate their arts centre to the alternative music scene.

Through the live presentation, Su Fern hopes that her students will also be able to take their first steps into the arts industry by connecting them with some of the players in it. “I want them to see that they can also be of relevance to the arts community,” she explains. “A lot of them do want to work in the arts, but they struggle and say they find that the arts ecology is too insular. So by holding the presentation at Centre 42, I’m trying to give them that stepping stone [into the real world].”

While Su Fern acknowledges that her students will not be able to examine everything in detail – the course is only 13 weeks long, after all – she hopes that it will at least give them a holistic overview of what being an arts manager is like.

“I want the course to really push them and prepare them for the possibility that they would become arts managers,” she says. “I think that we need more arts managers in Singapore, because they do add value to whatever project they are involved in – after all, it is the arts manager’s job to deliver the project.”

By Gwen Pew
Published on 12 October 2017

Join us for the students’ live pitching session, titled Partial Projections: Proposals for a Future Arts Centre in Singapore, at Centre 42 on 9 November 2017.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #3.

“The Vault: Absence Makes the Heart…” stars local Indian actors (pictured from left to right) Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai,Sivakumar Palakrishnan, and Grace Kalaiselvi. It’s happening at Centre 42 on 28 & 29 October 2017.

“Ramesh Panicker… R. Chandran… Who else?” Singaporean playwright Alfian Sa’at was sitting in the Centre 42 office on a cloudy Monday morning, trying to list established local Indian stage actors off the top of his head. “They’re very good, but we keep going back to the same actors over and over again. Or we import them from Malaysia – I mean, Jo Kukathas is everywhere when we’re looking for Indian actresses, right?” he grins.

Alfian is no stranger to talking or writing about topics that are considered taboo. Over the last two decades, he has discussed politics in his poetry collection A History of Amnesia (2001), sexuality in his plays The Asian Boys Trilogy (2000, 2004, 2007), and race and religion in Nadirah (2009), to name just a few examples.

And now, he’s setting his sights on something that he feels is absent from the Singapore stage – Indian representation. The idea came when Alfian initiated a casual gathering for practitioners to come together to talk about diversity on the Singapore stage. At one point, veteran director Alec Tok expressed his sadness that they were having that discussion that day, as there used to be many wonderful English language plays with complex, nuanced Indian characters in the pre-2000 years. It occurred to Alfian that there is a vast body of work in the Singapore theatre canon that many practitioners have either forgotten about, or have no knowledge of, which might shed some light on the way things were for ethnic minority actors back then.

To explore this, he proposed to create a work under Centre 42’s Vault programme, which will examine the trajectory of Indian roles throughout the history of Singapore English-Language Theatre. For him, the Vault is the perfect platform to revisit some of these older plays. “I’ve been to a few of the Vault presentations, and I must say I like the kind of work that is produced in terms of examining the archives, in terms of taking a look at the theatre history that we have. I somehow feel that we don’t do that enough,” he says.

Acknowledging that the story of Indian representation is not necessarily one for him to tell as a Malay playwright, he teamed up with local Indian actors Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, Grace Kalaiselvi, and Sivakumar Palakrishnan, and invited Aswani Aswath – the young resident playwright at Buds Theatre Company – to write the script for the Vault project. Alfian himself assumes the role of the dramaturg. The resulting piece, titled The Vault: Absence Makes the Heart…, will be presented at Centre 42 on 28 and 29 October 2017.

Chicken and egg problem

Alfian Sa’at. Photo: Daniel Teo.

To get the research process started for Absence, Alfian assigned each actor a period to focus on. “Each actor had the responsibility of going through particular decades [of Singaporean plays] in search of the elusive Indian actor,” Alfian explains with a wry smile.

Soon, they found that Alec was right – Indian characters weren’t so elusive in plays written between the 1960s and 1990s after all. They found Sheila Rani and Baram in Lim Chor Pee’s 1962 work Mimi Fan (which is often hailed as the first English-language Singaporean play), and they found Reginald Fernandez in Robert Yeo’s Are You There, Singapore? (1972). There were still notable and challenging roles written for Indian actors in the 1990s, such as Vinod in Haresh Sharma’s Off Centre (1993) and Nisha in Elangovan’s Talaq (staged in Tamil in 1999 and translated into English in 2000, although the English performance was eventually banned). But there is a noticeable decline in the number of plays with Indian actors after that.

So where did the Indian characters – and the talent pool of Indian actors – go?

To find out, the team spoke with prominent Indian personalities from the arts community, such as Haresh, veteran practitioner and educator T. Sasitharan, playwright and actor Rani Moorthy, actor and singer Jacintha Abisheganaden, and director and screenwriter K. Rajagopal.

“So what we discovered in our interviews is that in the early days, there were many Anglophone Indians. That is specific to the history of the British Raj in India,” Alfian reveals. “They were great debaters and orators, and just really good in English lah. So going into theatre came naturally for a lot of them. It’s a stereotype, but the gift of the gab, the particular eloquence in English, was associated with Indian actors. And they got cast in a lot of plays.”

What changed was Singapore’s language and education policies.

After the People’s Action Party came into power post-Independence, the new government declared that English should be used as the lingua franca of Singapore. The bilingual policy was officially introduced in 1966, and all students were taught English as their first language by 1987.

“So suddenly the learning of English became available to everyone, no matter what your race was. And the edge that these Anglophone Indians had when it came to the English language wasn’t there so much anymore,” says Alfian. “So part of the reason [that Indians became less prominent on the Singapore stage] was also due to changes in national policies, the education system, and shifts in the language environment.”

He also notes that since Singapore theatre is dominated by social realist works, it’s not surprising that many roles in these naturalistic plays are now written for the English-speaking Chinese majority. And herein lies what he refers to as the chicken-and-egg problem. “There are not enough roles out there written specifically for actors with Indian ethnicity. It seems as if playwrights and directors think it’s going to be hard to cast, because there are very few really experienced [Indian] actors these days,” he explains. “But if you don’t give these newcomers the opportunity, then they won’t have [anything to put in] their CVs. So you do need to initiate a process where you will cast the newcomers, because this is what’s going to beef up their CVs over time.”

Indian 101

At the time that we interviewed Alfian for this article, Absence’s playwright Aswani had just completed the first draft of the script. It is roughly divided into two parts – the first is a sort of “Indian 101”, which addresses certain misconceptions about “Indian-ness”, and the second is a reading of excerpts from Singaporean plays that feature Indian characters, including some of the ones mentioned above.

But rather than a conventional reading of these works, Alfian also wanted to include a commentary from Sangeetha, Grace, and Sivakumar about how they would assess these roles as actors. So he invented what he playfully named the Palakrishnan-Kalaiselvi-Dorai test (or the PKD test for short). It is based on the Bechdel test, which indicates the active presence of women in film. For the PKD test, it is passed when 1) the play has at least one Indian character in it, 2) who is not used as a token or to fill up a quota, 3) and does not perpetuate stereotypes, such as Bollywood dancing or excessive melodrama. The idea is that the actors would perform the play excerpts, and then give them a score based on the PKD test’s criteria.

“I want the audience to get some kind of insight about what roles are considered nuanced and complex, and what are considered stock. I think if we can hear from these actors about what kind of roles they love sinking their teeth into, and what are the kind that they feel are quite cardboard, then maybe some of us can learn something from it,” says Alfian.

Apart from the performance presentation, there will be a mini exhibition in our Front Courtyard. It will comprise a series of portraits featuring the three Indian actors in iconic roles that are often played by their colleagues from other races.

“We wanted a photography component because I think as a minority person I find the image very powerful. As something that’s aspirational, as something that can disrupt dominant standards of beauty,” says Alfian. “It’s not a coincidence that certain things, such as a magazine cover featuring a black or Asian model, make the news and make a lot of people excited. So our alternative history photo exhibition consisting of minority actors in iconic Singaporean plays will, I hope, provoke some discussion about how we cast for our plays.”

His wish is that the conversations generated by the performance and the exhibition can collectively serve as a first step towards breaking the chicken-and-egg cycle. “One thing that I learnt [during my research for Absence] is that if we want to write Indian characters into our plays, we wouldn’t be introducing a new thing. We would actually be reconnecting with our own historical tradition,” he says. “I hear a lot of people saying – especially playwrights – like I don’t dare to write about Indian characters, because I feel I don’t have the authority to write about it. But how did someone like Ovidia Yu, for example, have the confidence to write about an entire Indian family in Round and Round the Dining Table? I mean there are ways to do it, absolutely. One way is to just do research – you talk to people and let them read and fact check your script. Otherwise, you workshop and devise with others.”

And by presenting this edition of The Vault together with his all-Indian team, Alfian shows that that can, indeed, be done. Here’s hoping that more theatre-makers will follow in his footsteps, and get one step closer to bringing more diversity to our stages.

By Gwen Pew
Published on 12 October 2017

Find out more about The Vault: Absence Makes the Heart… here, and join us at Centre 42 on 28 & 29 October 2017.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #3.