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

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