Shien presenting his findings and re-imaginings of Those Who Can’t, Teach at our The Vault Lite: A Whole New World? Arist-in-Residence Sharing

I’ve always been quite interested to explore what sets theatre apart from other media, especially film to which it is usually compared and put against – if you have 2 hours to entertain yourself on a weekend, would you rather watch a play or watch a film? And when cost comes into the picture, plays usually cost more (sometimes much more) than a movie does. Why, then, do we still want to sit in the theatre and watch a play?

I didn’t come up with an answer to that question, but rather, went in the opposite direction of answering that question – I thought of another competing demand for our time, in the form of a game. Or, more specifically, a piece of interactive fiction. In the context of The Vault and C42’s work to champion local theatre, I took up the opportunity to explore transmitting the story of Haresh Sharma’s Those Who Can’t, Teach through interactive fiction (which I thought was fitting given the rash of digital theatre performances that have sprouted up in these Covid times).

The idea to create a piece of interactive fiction came first, and I had a lofty idea to create something like the game Disco Elysium. I even asked friends if they could help with the coding. But as I created my first mockup (on PowerPoint, a rudimentary but good enough replacement for coding), I realized that the crux of this shouldn’t be about the medium, but rather the message. The format of interactive fiction, although not super widespread, is not completely unheard of either – most Netflix fans would have at least heard of Bandersnatch, if not played it. But, what was special about this project was translating a well-loved local play into a format that no play had ever taken before. And given the peculiarities of this format, how would the same sentiments be able to be conveyed?

Shien sharing a little about the game Disco Elysium‘s format of interactive fiction.

It was then I took a step back from focusing on polishing the end product, and really got down to thinking about how the scenes would need to be rewritten to bring out Su Lin’s dilemmas as a teacher and the struggle with online teaching during Covid. I was particularly inspired by the game Life Is Strange, where (no spoilers) the player feels a great sense of agency by affecting the outcome of other characters in the game. So, I accepted the unpolished nature of the PowerPoint mockup in favour of looking at the scenes more closely, taking a change in direction to do justice to the play and the absolutely heartbreaking and heartwarming moments that Those Who Can’t, Teach brought to us.

I may not have gotten any more clarity as to what sets theatre apart from other media, but this was a great exercise in storytelling, which, after all, is fundamental to any good piece of theatre, isn’t it?

Lim Shien Hian, Reflections on Those Who Can’t, Teach: An Interactive Fiction Piece

Those Who Can’t, Teach: An Interactive Fiction Piece by Lim Shien Hian was developed under The Vault Lite: A Whole New World in respond to Haresh Sharma’s play, Those Who Can’t, Teach. This edition of The Vault: Lite ran from January to February 2021. Find out more about The Vault: Lite and Shien Hian’s work here.

When I first came across the play, La Libre Latifah by Aidli Mosbit, I thought I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do to respond to it. I wanted to explore the life of Latifah that wasn’t in the play. I wanted to create a life for her after the play. However, the more I read the play, more ideas started to generate. I thought about creating a social media presence for her. I thought about playing her in real life. I thought about duplicating her; I thought maybe the original Latifah (played by actress Molizah Mohter) can meet her “clones” or fans played by other actresses who look like her or dressed up like her. Too many ideas: a recipe for madness! 

A sculpture in Bishan Park.

This was coupled with my proposal about experimenting with nostalgia and augmenting bodies between social media and real life. I really wanted to expand Latifah like how Arsene Lupin was recently remade in a Netflix series, Lupin (2020). I thought that it was an interesting way of keeping our local plays alive and current. Very ambitious, I know. But hey, dream big, eh? 

(Before I proceed, I would like to clarify a couple of terms. I used Latifah and Latifah. For convenience, ‘Latifah’ refers to the character and ‘Latifah’ to refer to the play, sometimes both.)

The beginning stage started quite well. I took pictures of some aged neighbourhood and places like the HDBs in Hougang and exercise areas in Bishan. I also took pictures of some sculptures that reminded me of nostalgia.

Picture of a HDB in Hougang.

I had fun during this stage. I had fun trying to create a fictional world from materials in the real world and to create a relationship between Latifah and the audience, especially for those who didn’t read the play or watch the performances in 2003 either in Singapore or in Kuala Lumpur. I took the pictures also because I wanted to document Latifah’s life like how Kemal from Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence did. Those places were nostalgic to me and to some Singaporeans. They hold sentimental value for some of us. Perhaps it could be the same for Latifah herself. 

However, a couple of weeks in, I began to doubt my materials. I started to wonder if I am presenting a museum theatre piece. (Thinking back, it could have been a sexy idea had I pursued it.)  Also, some dramaturgical questions began to creep up. Questions such as: 

Sand writing at Coney Island beach.

• How do I want to set my response piece? 
• What are the limitations and potential of the digital medium? 
• What aspects of Latifah’s life do I want to present? 
• What aspects of her life had been shown? 
• Who will be playing Latifah? 
• What performance style do I want to present in? 
• What am I asking from Latifah? 

To answer these questions, I went back to the play and new questions arose. Questions about the theme, characters and performance style kept resurfacing. 

• What is Latifah about?
• Who is Latifah? How much do I know about her? Do I know a “Latifah” in my life?
• What about the performance style? How can I use the extra performative elements (video, songs, costumes) in my way?

I ruminated on my proposal. 

• Where are the parts about ‘nostalgia’ and the ‘augmentation of bodies’? Have I forgotten all about them? 
• How did Aidli Mosbit treat the text and the performative elements?

Ironically, in the midst of my frustration, I saw how limiting my thinking was and therein lay the solutions. It was obvious and I felt ridiculous.

I returned to the play and studied it carefully. The play, Latifah, was dramaturgically quite tight. Aidli Mosbit was very neat with her play text and its staging. The play was dramaturgically quite good. There was a lot to learn from her narrative- and performance-making techniques. I revered her skills so much that I did not want to do the play a disservice by trying to rearrange the scenes or reimagine the performative video elements. It would be a dramaturgical suicide. Therefore, the most plausible “solution” I could think of (in those moment of languor) was to go in the opposite way of how the play was structured; to completely break it apart and to radically reimagine Latifah (the play and character). I thought, “Why not deconstruct completely and then build another story from the fragments? Why disassemble something only to reassemble it again?” And so, I went on my merry way.

Since it was a dramatic style of theatre, I could go post-dramatic. Since there was a linear plot, I could make it post-structural. Since it was centred around a human body, I could use inanimate objects or disembodied body parts to represent the character. Since the play was presentational, I could make it representational. Since there was human language, I ought to break away from that too. It was truly liberating (I even had Miley Cyrus’s Wrecking Ball playing in my mind as I completely deconstruct the play’s structure and narrative.) 

What it did was it opened up possibilities for my performance-making aesthetics. I played more with Time and Space. I asked myself questions like:

• How can I play with real and imaginary time? 
• With diegetic and non-diegetic sounds? 
• With colours? 
• With puppetries? 
• With language? 

I was essentially applying my knowledge of Viewpoints in creating a “language” for my performative response. And to avoid the same mistake I did in the beginning, I kept thinking about Latifah and ensured that I was responding accordingly to its theme, character and performative elements. This was what I did. 

Ruzaini in a scene in his Les austres Latifahs performance video presented at The Vault Lite: A Whole New World? Artist-in-Residence Sharing.

I started to translate some of the scenes from the original play. For example, the ‘Test Drive’ scene (the romance / love-making scene between Latifah and her lover, Raj) became a poetry reading about lovemaking juxtaposed against pulsating lights in the dark. The ‘La Libre Latifah’ (the diary scene) became a dance with one arm and its shadow. The drag queen video in ‘Abang Is Alone’ became a scene of a man transforming into semi-drag with a popular Malay song about finding a partner who is faithful. The gossip queens, Cik Ana and the neighbours, were presented as puppets using a broom and a mop speaking in “Latifahs.” I kept experimenting until I had too much material. Then came the second problem: finding a narrative to string the materials together.

I was aware that my audience may not be familiar with Latifah (the play and the character) hence they may not get the references of what I was doing. Or they do and still be lost to the references I am making. I asked myself again: “Does that matter? And if so, how much do I care about that?” It was back to the drawing board. 

After much deliberation, I decided to find a middle ground; to present Latifah (the play and the character) where the audience may be familiar with and also to introduce a new one. I wanted an esoteric presentation of the character and my response piece. I wanted the audience to be lost yet had enough attention to check in once in a while. I wanted the audience to experience something new and hopefully appreciate it, even though it was far removed from the original. I guess I was also trying to also be Romeo Castellucci about it. I was, of course, curious to know the audience’s response so I thought I asked during the Q&A.

(The response I received was… lukewarm. They didn’t really respond to it as how I wanted to but it’s alright. It was weird. They might have needed some time to think about it. Or they might have hated it and forgot all about it. I don’t know. I may come back to this.) 

I would like to say that by this mad whirlwind point, when everything (presentation style, finding a narrative, dramaturgical conundrums) was confusing for me, I felt closer to text than when I started. It was bizarre. I felt I was really exploring the limits of what stories I could tell, and how to tell them. I was excavating, discovering and putting together a puzzle of the essence of the play and its character, and then regrowing them. The mad amount of material generated all came from within Latifah. At first, I thought that I was going further from Latifah (the play and character) when in fact, I was going deeper into Latifah’s (the play and the character) “world”.

Ruzaini in a scene in his Les autres Latifahs performance video presented at The Vault Lite: A Whole New World? Artist-in-Residence Sharing.

Bonus: I realised that in my exploration of materials for the response piece I was also actually experimenting with the idea of “augmenting the bodies”. True that it was very far from what I started. It wasn’t two bodies – one in the physical space and the other in the virtual. But it was breaking the body apart and taking parts of it on/off screen. It was “augmenting the souls” into different bodies. I somehow managed to tackle the “augmentation of bodies” part of my proposal albeit it being more philosophical on this aspect. And the same for nostalgia. ‘Nostalgia’, as a concept, is about Time and Space. Nostalgia happens in the past and in the mental space whereas the person recollecting it is in the present and living in the physical space. Nostalgia is a narrative constructed by the mind, pieced together by shards of memories that contain images and sound. Nostalgia is created by disembodied memories. Nostalgia is all about going into a different Time and Space. I am actually, unknowingly and deeply exploring nostalgia, augmenting bodies and Latifah (the play and character). In short, I was keeping in line with fulfilling my proposal’s objective after all. Voila! My worries slowly eased up and I continued to play. The last bit was finding a narrative which I found was the easiest of the Herculean tasks.

In the end, I would say that the final product was an homage to the writer, Aidli Mosbit, and her play. To me, Latifah was a story about someone finding her identity and herself. The writer took us on a journey of Latifah’s life and ended her play by asking us to do the same. To discover who we are. To make mistakes and learn from them. To keep going even when the going gets tough. To brave through the unknown. To look at the pieces of our lives and make memories from them. To create a film out of what we choose to remember and present. And I felt I had done exactly that. Je suis content!

It was impossible to imagine this leg of the journey when I started.  It was very far from where I thought I would be. The paths that led me to this leg were unnerving, stressful, terrifying and unknown. (I said paths because it was a rabbit hole.) And through them I learnt more about the play, and also discover my voice as an artist. An artist who is becoming surer of his performance aesthetics and ways of working. An artist who is deepening his craft. Thinking back, it didn’t matter if the response piece (finally called Les Autres Latifah (the other Latifahs)) wasn’t well-received by the audience. It was after all an experimental response. What mattered more was the learning process, like how Latifah (the play and the character) had taught me. Indeed, it was a mad world(wind) of a journey. But I would do it all over again.

Ruzaini Mazani, Reflections on Les autres Latifahs

Les autres Latifahs by Ruzaini Mazani was developed under The Vault Lite: A Whole New World in respond to Aidil ‘Alin’ Mosbit’s play, La Libre Latifah. This edition of The Vault: Lite ran from January to February 2021. Find out more about The Vault: Lite and Ruzaini’s work here.

Cheryl introducing the sequel to Poop! by Chong Tze Chien that she and her teammate Isaiah Lee wrote. For this sequel, they had also conceptualised a set to communicate their themes and messages.

“Why is the measure of love loss?” — Jeanette Winterson, Written On the Body

All things amalgamate in Emptiness, to a serene and inevitable futility that awaits our best efforts at understanding and knowing the world in all of its physical and metaphysical, literal and figurative, empirical and conceptual states. Our world exists on its own terms, unconcerned about overwhelm of dichotomous thought and categorisation that ironically both guides and limits our quest for understanding. According to Buddhist philosophy, existence exists in perpetual flux between, above, and beyond states of being and non-being, form and non-form. There is no beginning and no end, no sin and no salvation. There just Is. This is one of the most poignant things I came across in the course of my research on Buddhist philosophy on death and mortality for this residency — the concept of the ineffability of perceiving our world and our immeasurable yet insignificant existence within it according to space and time, the two concepts we have spent centuries constructing instruments and methods with which to measure what we often fail to see is already ironically inherently immeasurable: “Incalculable is the beginning, brethren, of this faring on. The earliest point is not revealed of the running-on, the faring-on, of beings cloaked in ignorance, tied to craving.” (Samyutta 15.1-2). Fearsome and insurmountable is the vastitude of mystery that lies beyond what we think we will ever be capable of understanding, that eludes and slips beyond grasp of even the best of us. 

The concept of mortality has haunted humanity through the ages, and throughout all of history we find ourselves trying — oftentimes in vain — to preserve what each age and culture defines as the essence of humanity. Through the ages we have turned to religion, folklore, and mythology, to preserve ourselves and through the stories we tell about the people we love and about ourselves. We find remnants of ourselves scratched on the walls of caves and tombs, in rock sculpted in our own image, in the accounts of sacred texts documenting teachings we have clung onto in man’s search for meaning, in parables that shape who we are and what we believe in. As time as we know and measure it passes, we preserve the worst and best moments of our personal and cultural narratives in photographs, visual art, and oral histories we keep repeating to ourselves, as if repetition solidifies and validates the versions of reality we deem our personal truths. We are obsessed with our own mortality. Perhaps then, it is no wonder that our dead haunt the living: of all the spirits and supernatural beings we fear and believe in and of all the hauntings we ascribe to the dead, the most ultimate and beautifully cruel haunting is in the way we haunt ourselves. 

There is a space between the realms of the living and dying that I have been obsessed with since I was a little girl. We segregate the living and the dead too fast too soon. We fear the dead and the afterlife, forgetting that life just marginally precedes death, and being dead is only a different state of being. For most of us, life and death are separated by a world of difference. But how vast, a world!; how vast, the spaces that lie within, that lie between! It is this in-between that with an iron fist grips my intrigue. It is this in-between that I have started to delve into spurred by the research for this residency. Having grown up against a backdrop of loss in which absence is ironically the loudest presence, concepts of grief, death, suicide and all that surround it heavily influence my experience of this world and are spaces that, for better or worse, I may know too much too well. And yet, never fully; never enough. 

Death: The Time of Your Life’— this is a title of one of my favourite graphic novels by Neil Gaiman. What is death if not the summation of all our lived experiences, the inevitable conclusion of the time of our lives? What is death if not the end of life? The very simplicity of this thought begs endless interrogation. Firstly, what is an end, and are endings an inherently finite cessation of existence? Are endings and existence truly mutually exclusive? May I suggest: death is a bridge? In the course of my research for this residency I have found myself forced to unlearn everything I know about existence and mortality, all that has been influenced by religion and its affirmation and renunciation, and look at the world like the character of Emily did in Tze Chien’s work — through the lens of unassuming wonder. As children we know how to approach life with wonder and excitement. Along the way, we forget. Revisiting POOP!, identifying a little too well with Emily’s life, and conducting research to write the script for this project reminded me that it is not life that gets complicated as we grow older. It is not true that the more we learn about this world, cruel as it reveals itself to be, the less there is to hope for and to love. It is in the asking of all the wrong questions we demand answers for, in our uncompromisingly held Copernicus complex that we lose our wonder and feel life’s walls closing in on us. If we recklessly abandon ourselves for even just a moment, we realise the world has always been wide enough. 

Cheryl’s creative teammate, Isaiah Lee, opening the presentation of Rehearsals for (Im)permanence during the Artist Sharing of The Vault Lite: A Whole New World?

Our initial intention to revisit the absurdism of POOP! through the lens of trauma studies eventually carried us through to the core of what influences Tze Chien’s work — his beliefs and interpretations on Buddhist philosophy and various perspectives on life. What started out as my favourite local play became something more, became a springboard from which I began looking at life in a drastically different way. Because I had not properly engaged with Buddhist philosophy on an academic level prior to this residency, the learning curve was admittedly steep for me. A wealth of information and inspiration was required to be collected and subsequently curated in order to deliver a work in response to not just Tze Chien’s writing but to the very texts he had read at the time of his writing that had inspired it. In engaging with these texts, we found ourselves instinctively returning polarised and dichotomous assumptions about existence and perceptions on the world. These presuppositions and linear modes of thought are scattered everywhere throughout all of history in art, culture, and tradition. Each individual narrative on life and death assumes an inherent dichotomy, a finality, an end. It took us a while to take a step back and see that despite this, all narratives point to something more, much more. Everything I could not find about death and life in the Christian and Catholic teachings I grew up with I began to find in Buddhist philosophy. Everything I knew about looking at the world with polarised perspectives was challenged and subverted. Every utterly inconceivable concept reminded me how the search for answers and reasons will ultimately prove utterly redundant. Strangely, the juxtaposition of an insatiable thirst for understanding and its eventual impossibility has always filled me with hope — there is a beauty in the redundancy and in the futility of the attempt that is at once both humbling and enlightening. The more I research Death, mortality, and the spaces between living and dying, the more I realise how much I have yet to understand about this tragically beautiful and transient world. 

The longer I spend embarking on and deeper I dive into this quest to understand death, love, and life through my various art practices, the more I am reminded how much I can understand things without truly understanding anything at all. All the disciplines of art I have done, am doing, and will ever do in this

lifetime merely serve as frames through which I attempt to observe, learn about, make sense of, and speak to the world. And therein lies its fallibility, and the fallibility of all of humanity’s great endeavours — it is inherently limited because I am inherently fallible and limited. As Plath said, “I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.”. I can never create enough art that will ever adequately explore, understand, or express enough to say I have lived as fully as I want to. If art is language then its essence of expression runs only as deep as the heart and as vast as the soul of its artist. 

This residency experience has reframed the way I think about the possibilities of artmaking in Singapore, where everything is measured too much too cautiously. After all, all art is love. In my conversations with Isaiah during the course of this residency and even in our projects outside of this project, this is the one thing we hold on to that grounds us and influences what and why we create. But what if it is not enough? What if love is not enough? And therein lies the paradox — that which governs the space between the living and dying, between love and creation and its inherent futility: it will never be enough. 

And yet there is something sacred in the struggle, in the striving and grasping: we can learn to find value in the verb and not the noun. There is something sacred in reaching for what can never be obtained — for a complete understanding of mortality and death; for the creation of art stemming from a place of love that no longer fears if it will ever be enough; for the expression and understanding of the human condition, the concept of which underlies all of art; for the ways by which we measure our lives. It is worth staying where things are undefined, in spaces of formlessness and emptiness — in the spaces between. And at the end of it all, how then would we measure our life? “You lived what anybody gets,” Gaiman writes, “You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”. 

Cheryl Charli Tan, Reflections on Rehearsals for (Im)permanence

Rehearsals for (Im)permanence by Cheryl Tan & Isaiah Lee was developed under The Vault Lite: A Whole New World in respond to Chong Tze Chien’s play, POOP!. This edition of The Vault: Lite ran from January to February 2021. Find out more about The Vault: Lite and Cheryl & Isaiah’s work here.

Weiliang shares a sample of a postcard exchanged with Tysha Khan who pretended to be Rosnah from 1995.

Letters to/from Rosnah is an experiment I conducted with visual/performance artist ila and actor/writer Tysha Khan, in response to Haresh Sharma’s monodrama Rosnah. For this experiment, I invited both artists to embody two different versions of Rosnah, and interacted with them over a series of letters exchanged via snail mail. While ila embodied Rosnah who time travels to the present day for x number of days, Tysha embodied Rosnah who stayed in her original 1990s universe. You may view the letters exchanged between myself and ila/Tysha here.

What did you find meaningful or generative about this exploration?

I am now convinced that there is a future for theatrical experiences to occur over scattered interactions that don’t require artists and audiences alike to gather in real-time in the same physical or digital space. Having experimented with artists who took up the challenge of embodying the titular protagonist Rosnah via letter writing, I am starting to see value in participatory work that allows audiences to take their time to respond to the stimuli being presented to them. In this case, I realised that the luxury of time is necessary for a meaningful relationship to develop between Rosnah and the audience member writing to her, and for both parties to hold space for each other.

How has your relationship with the text evolved with this residency?

Embarking on this residency has made me realise that the manner in which Rosnah is written provides so many entry points for one to craft an artistic response to the text. Having embarked on this residency, it has become apparent to me that the time capsule-like conversations that happen between Rosnah and the actor playing her encourages intergenerational dialogue about the play’s themes. Writing letters to ila’s Rosnah, for instance, led to a dialogue about what “home” means. In the context of Rosnah, the notion of “home” is more directly tied to leaving a tangible place – given that Rosnah finds leaves behind her family in Singapore to pursue undergraduate studies in London. But once ila’s Rosnah found herself in quarantine in a Stay-Home Notice hotel after time travelling to 2021, a conversation unfolded over what else “home” can mean. Can one call a place their home after just fourteen days, if a sense of familiarity arising from the routine of not being able to physically leave a hotel room has emerged?

Her response prompted me to bring up the recent news about the impending permanent closure of The Substation and whether it could live on after being displaced from its building at 45 Armenian Street. As a result, ila’s Rosnah and I are now discussing: Does “home” need to be rooted to one place? Can one’s “home” fluidly oscillate between multiple places? Or does home even need to be rooted to a place to begin with?

What was the most paradoxical or unexpected discovery you made in your process?

I now realise how much I took for granted how difficult it was to foster a relationship with a legacy character! When writing letters to Tysha’s Rosnah (who lived in the 1995 universe), I learnt the hard way that a great deal of patience is needed to help Rosnah get accustomed to what is happening in the present day. If sending Rosnah a $2 note from the present day alone is enough to leave her in a state of shock, what more when she realises the complexity of intersectionality in 2021?

Ke Weiliang, Reflections on Letter to/from Rosnah

Letters to/from Rosnah by Ke Weiliang was developed under The Vault Lite: A Whole New World in respond to Haresh Sharma’s play, Rosnah. This edition of The Vault: Lite ran from January to February 2021. Find out more about The Vault: Lite and Weiliang’s work here.

Si Hui presenting a piece of her writing devised in response to the themes of Breastissues by Ovidia Yu at the Artist-in-Residence Sharing of The Vault Lite: A Whole New World?

A Letter to My Breastless Selves

In closing out the project, I wanted to draw on the intimacy and personal nature of the past two months of research. This reflection, inspired by Weiliang’s project medium, takes the form of letters to my past and future selves.

i.

(To my self at 9, before sprouting)

I wonder if you count, at this age, as woman yet.

At the end, my response to Breastissues felt like it was written for you: For daughters that grow up with a legacy of grief, loss, and uncertainty over their own bodies. It’s my way of taking care of you from where I am, which surprised me: When I started the project I thought about outrage, and social pressure, and body dysmorphia.

I didn’t think about you — however.

It seems now inevitable to me that crisis and trauma will always go back to who we were and what we suffered in childhood. We cannot talk about community without talking about the harm we do one another, even through rituals of care.

I envy your youth and your solid belief that your body belongs to yourself. That it is untouchable by time. You are loud, and spunky, and full of opinions ready to be shared. I spent a long time rebuilding that confidence you find so easy; when I first read the text I thought, all three women are me. You are part of my multitudes.

ii.

(To my self at 19, bereaved and escaping)

One day last year I dared to put something out in the world that came from myy interpretation, my eyes, and nobody else’s. I finally believed in my work enough to put my name on it, and that made all the difference. I haven’t written a novel (not yet), but you’d be surprised how much two months and a constructed space can open a window of possibility.

You’d be surprised how much that means when you suspect an artistic identity has slipped right through your fingers.

To know something is not the same as to feel it. It is not the same as putting yourself and your body through the experience; self as research. As you will find out in discovering theatre, and the way it feels larger than life for you. The way you keep chasing this sensation, until the possibility of recreating it is within your grasp.

Do you see yourself as a woman yet? No, I don’t think so; only how to use your femininity to play acceptable tunes.

Over the course of research I talk and act with strong, smart, incisive women and it makes me think about how breasts are not just about breasts: They are about our self worth, our ugliness, our fashion choices, our crude jokes, our sex drives, our bleeding hurting fucked up wombs, our families of origin; they come back to the question: This is what you were born with, so, what are you going to do about it?

A thought from this vantage point: A text can have its own sort of life, the way a body doesn’t always go the way you want. To be in conversation with a text is not to agree with it, always, but to be particularly clear and honest in both your critique of and love for it.

The same with people. The same with a life.

iii.

(To my self at 49, undergoing surgery)

I want to know: Did writing for instructional touch change everything for you, like I think it might?

There is a deep pleasure I get from people being moved by what I’ve written, like the shiver I got out of my first laugh from improv. I think these moments will get even more important as I stay alive. Are you already used to them, bored of them?

Words I associate with you at this age: Cancer. Mastectomy. Radiation.

Does it feel like you thought it would when in conversation with Breastissues; do you have children, a partner, something to lose?

Working with this text was like looking through a portal into potential futures. I kept wondering: What decision would I make? To lose one breast, or both, for some semblance of certainty and symmetry, to keep my pride intact if not my body?

I haven’t arrived at an answer. After all, a text is a text. I do believe it gave me the channel to talk about emotions beyond myself, a window to reach out across time to an audience; but it is not a human life.

At the end of my sharing someone asked about gendered gaze and the representation of women’s bodies, and whether I thought theatre could create social change.

I said, I think that’s asking a lot of theatre. Good, great, brilliant theatre gives you an experience that reaches the heart and transforms your lens on your life. That is the most I can ask of theatre.

What can theatre — any art, any text — ask of me?

How have we spent the last twenty years answering?

Lim Si Hui, Reflections on Bodies in Community

Bodies in Community by Lim Si Hui was developed under The Vault Lite: A Whole New World in respond to Ovidia Yu’s play, Breastissues. This edition of The Vault: Lite ran from January to February 2021. Find out more about The Vault: Lite and Si Hui’s work here.

Isaiah introducing the Tibetian Bhavacakra (Wheel of Life), with the image of Kala, the god of death, standing for impermanance, amongst other concepts of life and death at The Vault Lite: A Whole New World? Artist-in-Residence Sharing.

“The responsibility for bringing about an enlightening situation is finally our own.”*

Everything flows into each other in the end; without the ancient scriptures that crystallised Vedic thought, there would not be an Asia we have come to know of today. Without the articulation of the trope of “neither nor”, a concept I borrow from the scholarship of the Vedas that partakes of the principle of “not to” to make sense of the seemingly paradoxical and incongruous elements of lived reality, there would be no Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Without these ancient modes of thought, there would be no text that would eventually find its way into Tze Chien’s life and into his contemporary writing. The more I research, the more I realise how my ignorance will always outweigh my own limited knowledge conditioned my training and experiences.

This research process is just one amongst many that I hope to partake in throughout my life as an arts practitioner, for I strongly believe that art was never meant to be created, established, and interacted with within a vacuum. The artist is also an academic. The artist is also a thinker. The artist must be that. Through surveys and interviews that we conducted throughout this residency, the impetus to return to our modern modes of linear thinking in attempting to unpack Tze Chien’s work and reimagine a contemporary afterlife for it was far more tempting than expected. Our conscious decision not to simply regurgitate what scripturally seemed sound was part of this process of acknowledging the slippages that exist within current theological, artistic and academic discourses. In so doing, we at least glimpsed a transcendence of modern dualistic thinking and in the last stages of our residency came to grips with what it meant to dispense with dichotomic oppositions and rethink our own assumptions and presuppositions about death and loss.

Tze Chien’s work is at the heart of this journey. There will never be enough words, or the right words to capture how eloquent he is or how diverse his prolofic thoughts are. His humility was something that struck as a point of emulation, a jewel that reflected everything he believes in and everything he stood for. Just as all phenomena is conceived as components of a network of interconnected nodes containing and reflecting one another like a net of polished jewels as per the metaphor of Indra’s net standing for concepts of void or śūnyatā, and dependent origination or Pratītyasamutpāda in the Buddhist Avataṃsaka, or Flower Adornment Sūtra.

This exploration process was particularly generative in terms of what it yielded out of reimagining the meaning of loss in the context of a Buddhist worldview and its associative artistic legacies. In other words, what we eventually arrived at was an amalgamation of resources that now extend Tze Chien’s original work by furthering the exploration of Buddhist visuality in the set design, props, text and so on. The exploration also allowed us the space and community to gather feedback on our research methodology so that we could better cater the final script to represent a new generation of individuals based on their ruminations on death and loss.

Initially, I came into this residency having read the play and wanted very much to work on something that deals so pertinently with the aftermath of trauma. The final work, however, deviated from our initial proposal of looking at healing through the lenses of a contemporary pandemic. Rather, we narrowed the focus to rethink and re-envision a world that has become so used to loss, especially through the subversion of subaltern voices to give the dead characters a voice in our afterlife of ‘Poop!’.

One of the unexpected aspects of our exploratory journey was how the uneven the current scholarship is on Southeast Asian Buddhism provided both challenges and potentials for further discourses and artistic creations based on existing scriptures or frontiers of knowledge. Additionally, we found the results for our survey done on loss, grief and death particularly interesting because of the diverse range of responses from different Singaporeans aged 20-30+. 

Ultimately, this entire residency and research journey has offered me deeper insight into the ways in which we might think about and conceive the arts and artistic practice in Singapore. It is perhaps this attitude of continually questioning existing notions of “art” and “Singaporean” works that we might be able to innovatively push the boundaries and limitations of our knowledge. Only through the liberation of previously hidden voices will new stories emerge and come into our contemporary canons of art. Thus bringing into light what was once unseen, to experience what had once been an illusion, and to listen to what was once unheard of.

Isaiah Christopher Lee, Reflections on Rehearsals for (Im)permanence  

References

Peter D. Hershock, Chan Buddhism: Dimensions of Asian Spirituality (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press), 4.

Rehearsals for (Im)permanence by Cheryl Tan & Isaiah Lee was developed under The Vault Lite: A Whole New World in respond to Chong Tze Chien’s play, POOP!. This edition of The Vault: Lite ran from January to February 2021. Find out more about The Vault: Lite and Cheryl & Isaiah’s work here.

“Sau(dara)” was performed as part of a double bill, which was co-presented by Centre 42 and Malaysia’s Five Arts Centre in March 2019.

As an applied theatre practitioner, I am most interested in the phenomenological human condition. Essentially, phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness, as experienced from the first-person point of view. We are each the complex sum of our experiences. As Sau(dara)’s dramaturg, I am interested in an individual artist’s intentionality within the work. I seek to place his or her direct experience of participating in a creative process under a magnifying glass, for it is an intersectional human context that I will endeavour to comprehend.

As a dramaturg working with an eclectic ensemble of artists from various backgrounds and artistic disciplines, nothing stimulates me more than sitting down over coffee and simply getting to know my multi-disciplinary collaborators as human beings. As we embark on the mission to create a multi-disciplinary and highly personal response to Leow Puay Tin’s seminal play Three Children, I was keen to create the space for everyone to mull over two things. The first is the team’s creative input (sharing personal stories, finding common ground as modern Malay women in Singapore), and the second is their degree of autonomy (the process of giving and receiving direction, breaking out of their comfort zones) in a creative process. As usual, the more I learn, the more I realise how much I don’t know.

That was exactly what we did on the first day I joined the team in January 2019. At that point, Sau(dara) had already showcased its first iteration under Centre 42’s The Vault, and it was going to be reworked to form part of a double bill called Are You Game, Sau(dara)?, which would be staged in both Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. The cast and I spent our first four hours together responding to a single line, “Tell me about your journey as a performer”. The sociological paradigm of the modern Malay Muslim woman who chooses the performing arts as her vocation, be it as a musician, a traditional or contemporary dancer or vocalist in a band, is worth excavating and analysed from a dramaturgical perspective. In Singapore, she is the minority amongst minorities. In Kuala Lumpur, maybe she is? Maybe she’s not? What a delicious point of inquiry!

The “Sau(dara)” team, including Grace (far right) rehearsing at Centre 42. Photo: Bhumi Collective

As Amin’s second pair of eyes, my area of observations and probes ranges from stage blocking, set and lighting design to the cast-generated play script. A concrete example would be my perspective of the opening scene in the original cast-generated text. Titled “Summary”, the scene was confessional, a generous invitation into the world of four saudaras – young maidens facing days of gentle breeze, raging winds, blazing heat and everything in between.  The scene was emotionally driven, replete with strong, impassioned vocabulary such as shame, disappointment or the sense of being put one’s place. It was also vague and inaccessible to me, as I hold the standpoint that we cannot impose feelings on the audience. We can, however, encourage and cultivate it. I consulted with Amin and the cast to disclose gritty details, to visit the real events that resulted in those lingering emotions, and eventually to share them with an audience.

A reaffirming takeaway is that it takes a bedrock of trust to facilitate such an intimate process and I am thankful to be able to draw from my Theatre for Development (TFD) experiences. TFD is a participatory theatre practice that allows communities to write their own stories, and perform them in a drama based on the messages that emerge from the storytelling process. It is a practice that operates from the performers’ perspectives. From day one, Amin and I shared the consensus that our performers must use their own language and idioms of expression. In a sense, Sau(dara) is a truly performer-centred work, where both the director and dramaturg had to work conscientiously together to demystify the ‘expert syndrome’ within the rehearsal room.

Another example, which I would fondly cherish, is traditional Malay dancer [Nurul] Farahani literally finding her inner roar within the context of fighting over a seat on the bench, which we lovingly refer to as “bangku” (Malay for bench). Nearing the end of the performance, in Scene 10, the bangku is literally a seat at the table coveted by all the young artists. Sweet Farahani’s instinct is to avoid the scrum; she would not allow herself to last for more than a second in the struggle. Three weeks into the process, we organically found the space for a conversation of how art compels us to venture into new territory and gain new experiences safely. Scene 10 demanded her grit and tenacity, and it would only work if she summoned enough courage and energy while banishing her instinct to avoid confrontation. Farahani had nothing to lose in the rehearsal room and after a particular invigorating attempt, I asked her if she liked what she just experienced. She said she did, and that scene was never the same again. The applied theatre practitioner in me also slipped in a little suggestion: that what she discovered in the safety of the rehearsal room was hers to keep. If she liked that feisty, unrelenting Farahani on the bench, she can keep her, bring her into real life and the real Farahani will never be the same again. Much like Scene 10.

I constantly scrutinise my role as a dramaturg and how it evolves in different contexts of collaboration. In the case of Sau(dara), my duty was to pinpoint the DNA of the response to Three Children. Within this context, the DNA lies in the four young Malay female performers who Amin wants to empower, and what they are searching for. Theatre-making is essentially a rehearsal for real life, and I’m always trying to get a sense of the performers’ personhood through playing drama games. Through play, I record their authentic interactions with the original play and open them up for discussion and reflection in the rehearsal room. It is the opposite of escapism through performance making. The Sau(dara) team collectively discovered that they should look backwards in order to move forwards. Amin and I witnessed transformative qualities in each and every performer as they grew in confidence, by locating their professional and personal centres and identifying the directions they want to work towards. This is a result of their complete ownership in Sau(dara).

By Grace Lee-Khoo
Published on 5 April 2019

Find out more about The Vault: Sau(dara) here and Are You Game, Sau(dara)? here.

This article was published in Blueprint Issue #9.

“我们一起做一出戏。”张文扬在午饭上桌之前这么说。语气笃定，而且虔诚。

作为剧场工作者，有这样的念头一点也不奇怪。我们总是有很多的想法，想法像入暮的星光层出不穷，耀眼，充满诱惑。在幽深的夜空里，也总有许多许多想法趋于破灭，短命的星星啊。

但结果我们真的想做一出戏。好，要做戏并不难。要实践的话，首先在一切创作之前，必须先解决空间的问题。然后，还是必须解决空间的问题。然而这两个“空间”，定义不同。

为了做好一出戏，我们先开始见面讨论。见面需要地方，我们首先在麦当劳见面。

麦当劳毕竟有Wi-Fi（方便随时查询资料）、有桌椅（虽然没有也ok）、可以自在地高谈阔论（这对我们来说是很重要的）、可以自在地饮食（这也是很重要的好不好）、而且有冷气（这对张文扬很重要）。

麦当劳、小贩中心—— 在一切开始之前，所有的准备工作都是在这些地方进行。到了创作的下一个阶段，当我们需要进行排练和即兴创作时，我们已经不可能再到快餐店和小贩中心去了。

所以我们只好找熟悉的朋友们帮忙。

在排练初期，我们得以利用实践剧场的排练室。那对我们来说简直是好运气，我们答应在没人用排练室的时候才去用那个空间。我们也尽量配合，例如不开冷气（节省电费），还有确保排练室的清洁和整洁。

但我们也不能一直这样去实践剧场排练室创作。再这样下去我们脸皮再厚都会觉得很不好意思。所以我们开始会到月眠艺术中心（Goodman Arts Centre）的草地旁去。我们在星空下，坐在草地旁的石桌椅，讨论我们的research、讨论剧本、讨论戏。

其实这个画面一点都不浪漫，因为两个男人拿着啤酒高谈阔论的场面怎么样都不能引人遐想。而且赤道的热天气，晚间肆无忌惮的蚊子，都是创意的杀手。

好运气又来了—— 好运气以“42新剧中心”（Centre 42）的 Basement Workshop的形式而来。

C42创立以来，一直都致力于培养本地剧作人才，也旨在为本地剧场人提供最重要的空间，让他们能够进行他们的艺术理念和创作—— 对任何一个剧场人而言，这无疑是非常大方、非常诚心的支持。

C42如此无私地为本地剧场工作者解决最根本的问题—— 我们绝对心存感激。

尤其我们两人都是剧场新人，对我们而言，要在新加坡搞戏剧，空间和金钱都是我们最大的难关。而C42的支持，为我们大大减少了那一方面的顾虑，使我们终于能够静下心来，专心做我们想做的—— 戏剧创作。

所以，C42不仅仅为我们提供了实体空间。他们给予我们的支持与信任，其实也是一种精神空间。这是我之前谈及的，所谓的另一个“空间”—— 一种比较虚的，属于精神上的、心理上的“空间”。

在新加坡搞艺术创作，我想，我们剧场人更加需要的其实是一种精神的空间。精神的空间，别人却给不了，你只能自己来。

你能够为自己腾出一个精神空间来专心写戏吗？你能够腾出一个心理空间来专心创作吗？你能够腾出一个空间来好好检视自我、质问自我、和自我相处吗？

这究竟是一个什么样的空间呢？这样的空间无法以金钱衡量，无法以数据计算，几近宗教式：像一个基督教徒睡前的祷告、或是道教徒燃起一枝香…… 那些仪式，都是在打开一个空间，让自己接近神。

而戏剧工作者，或任何创作者，也都需要为自己打开一个这样的空间。因为那是创作的一切泉源。

有时候，我们会轻易地说：没有钱，怎么做戏？没有空间，怎么做戏？但反过来想：就算金钱唾手可得、资源唾手可得、整个剧场界都愿意伸出援手帮你，你到底有多大的信念去搞戏剧呢？

我想，要做戏之前，在我们高呼“我们要创作！”之前，最重要的问题其实不是有没有实体空间，而是自己愿不愿意为自己开拓这样的“精神空间”。有了这一空间，接下来的道路再艰难也都不是大问题了。

虽然实体空间和精神空间，二者毕竟都缺一不可。我听说在90年代，有人可以跑到组屋楼下（void deck）排戏，在公园排戏。到了今天我们应该不能这么做了吧。啊，我们的城市越来越清洁干净，我却不敢说我们进步了。

感谢C42开启的空间和空间，让本地剧场的夜空，因此而有了许多许多闪烁的小星星，构成这幅美丽的星空。

文／梁海彬

《招》 When The Cold Wind Blows (formerly known as Project Men) by Neo Hai Bin and Chong Woon Yong is work that explores the Singaporean male identity. The incubation process is from January to September 2016 – the pair had their first read here in May, and will be having another work-in-progress showcase on 10 & 11 September. Find out more about Basement Workshop and Hai Bin’s work here.

The Vault: #3 three revisits Quah Sy Ren’s Invisibility through the eyes of theatre design collective INDEX. We asked the three INDEX designers to reflect on the conceptualisation and development of their works in this design-centred series. A short summary video of the respective installation accompanies each designers’ reflections.
More on The Vault: #3 three series here.

| Reflections on #3.1 In/Visibility | Reflections on #3.2 For the Time Being | Reflections on #3.3 scale 1.333 333.333… |

May 21 – 23, 2015
THE VAULT: #3.1 IN/VISIBILITY
By Lim Woan Wen

July 22 – 24, 2015
THE VAULT: #3.2 FOR THE TIME BEING
By Darren Ng

September 30 – October 3, 2015
THE VAULT: #3.3 scale 1:333 333.333…
By Lim Wei Ling

If you attended any of The Vault: #3 three installations and would like to share your thoughts and/or personal reflections with us, please send us an email at info@centre42.sg. We would love to hear from you!

“Functioning as a critic and commentator within a production, the dramaturg is a highly valuable resource-without agency to dictate change. Embarking on this Apprenticeship with an open mind has allowed me to understand the intricacies involved with this vocation-one that I strongly believe is necessary for local theatre and dance productions alike.

The initial phase involved analyzing literature review and two mock dramaturgy tasks. The caucus and research element of the first Festival of Monodramas task pushed me out of my comfort zone due to the content. Nonetheless, my intention to specialize in dance dramaturgy has encouraged me to obtained scholarly writings on dance dramaturgy. Although I could draw on my expertise and experiences of working with Asian theatre practices-making the research work more manageable for the second intercultural theatre mock exercise-offering viable approaches to the intended host company was tricky but fulfilling.

A dramaturg provides research and approaches so that the director/choreographer can exercise artistic liberty. Building a relationship and interpersonal skills are extremely crucial.

In the upcoming phase where I am slated to be an observer-dramaturg for a few productions, I hope to hone this. This would sensitize the dramaturg to the performance integrity of the company before offering specialized knowledge for each unique production. This is what I am looking forward to.”

~ Nidya Shanthini Manokara, Dramaturg Apprentice 2015