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
