A Yellow Chair Productions team huddle during Lanterns Never Go Out (2012). This photo is just one of the memories unearthed during the Our Space in Time archival residency. Photo credit: Yellow Chair Productions.
At Centre 42, documenting and archiving Singapore theatre is an essential part of our ethos, and this includes making space for stories that may have been lost to time. To paint a more colourful picture of the local theatre landscape, one of our new programmes, The Archival Residency, invites artists to venture down memory lane and tell the less documented histories of our scene through the archival process.
Kicking off the residency is Our Space in Time, a digital exhibition capturing memories of Yellow Chair Productions (YCP), a now-defunct community and amateur theatre group.
Leading the project is none other than YCP co-founder and artistic director Mohamad Shaifulbahri (Shai), who is better known these days as an independent producer and co-artistic lead of outfits like Bhumi Collective and AdeebandShai.
A production photo from Tainted Flower (2006). Photo credit: Yellow Chair Productions.
YCP was based in Tampines Central Community Complex and was home to almost 300 youth from 2005 to 2016, many of whom are still practicing in the arts today. Together, they staged and produced numerous works in community spaces and organizations.
Many of these milestones and memories have been retrieved and archived in Our Space in Time, including scripts, old programmes and photographs. In fact, for this residency, two plays, Tainted Flower (2006) and You Think, I Thought, Who Confirm (2013) were recently revived as play-readings and recorded for the exhibition.
But for Shai, the Archival Residency is just the beginning. Our Space in Time will be further developed into an YCP Legacy Project over the next few years. We speak to Shai to find out more about the YCP journey and his experience in the residency.
Why did you decide to embark on this archival project?
Over the years, I’ve talked about wanting to do a ‘YCP book’ to the people around me, but never actually committed to it. This all changed when the pandemic hit and the circuit breaker happened. During this period, I created this metaphoric cave that I went into and shut down for a bit, and this forced rest gave me clarity and a new perspective about history and theatre-making.
It was then I knew this is exactly the time to be archiving and recording legacy. Instead of presenting archival footage like what the other theatre companies were doing [during the pandemic], I thought, “what does it mean to archive something that hasn’t been archived?”
How has your time in Yellow Chair Productions shaped you?
I was 19 when I started YCP. At that point in time, it was something that I did out of interest and wasn’t thinking of making into a career. None of us (in YCP) had any affiliations with big theatre companies, nor did we go through any training programmes, so a lot of what I learnt from the scene came through my time at YCP.
I jokingly refer to those years as my “on-the-job training”. It was a space where I could make mistakes (and I did), because as the leader of the group, you just had to do it. And the spirit of “just doing” became part of the YCP identity as well.
A Yellow Chair Productions recruitment poster. Image credit: Yellow Chair Productions.
What are some of your favourite artefacts that you’ve dug up thus far?
Photos of me with hair! [laughs]
The one artefact that I keep getting lured back to is a recruitment poster back from the early days that I discovered in my old emails. It says “Take Centre Stage” and “Come Join the Club” — I can’t recall when we even used it! But it was for an audition that we held back in 2005, and the image and the poster were quite definitive of what we were doing back in the day. Of all the artefacts, this was the one that got us started and it was a marker that we existed.
What’s your favourite thing about the process of archiving?
For me the process of discovering things that I thought we’ve lost to time is my favourite. Contacting people and seeing what they have is a joyful thing, people who respond might not think that their photos or artefacts could be useful, but to me, it can be unique.
Do you wish you could go back and archive everything that you’ve lost to time?
No, because then I wouldn’t have the richness of what I’m experiencing now. I believe that everything has its space and time, and there are reasons why this journey didn’t happen earlier. Part of the fun is knowing that some things are going to be lost to time and maybe it’s meant to be.
I think if we had been continuously talking about YCP for the past 15 years, this conversation wouldn’t be happening. My co-founders and I never looked at Yellow Chair in a critical way from when we first started and looking at it now has allowed me to create new archival material in the climate and the time that we’re currently in — and that keeps it exciting!
by Nadia Carr
Published 30 August 2021
Our Space in Time, a digital exhibition following the history of Yellow Chair Productions is now live! Visit bit.ly/ourspaceintime to view it now! Our Space in Time was developed under Centre 42’s Archival Residency. Click here to find out more.
