Dramaturgy in Action II: Collaboration, the Interdisciplinary, and the Intercultural (Part 1) | ADN Symposium 2016

LHN: Well, good morning. Good morning! Thank you for being here on a Sunday morning. Welcome to the Esplanade Theatre Studio. Welcome to the inaugural Asian Dramaturgs Network Symposium Day 2. People are still trying to get seats. Carry on. No problem. I am very excited and honoured to moderate this session of Collaboration, the Interdisciplinary, and the Intercultural. Quite a mouthful, but I am indeed very excited about it. My name is How Ngean, by the way, and I’ll be moderating this session. 

As we only have one and a half hours, I am going to really rush through introductions of these speakers, and if you are from Singapore, they should actually need no introduction. But for the rest of you, you probably would have a handout or programme. But basically, on my extreme left, we have Alvin Tan. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of The Necessary Stage (TNS), a leading proponent of devising theatre in Singapore, and having directed more than 70 plays which have been staged locally and at international festivals. He has also been awarded a Fulbright scholarship and in 1998, was conferred the Young Artist Award for Theatre. In 2010, Alvin was conferred the Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in recognition of his significant contribution to the arts. The following year, he was awarded Best Director at the 2011 The Straits Times Life Theatre Awards for Model Citizens by The Necessary Stage. And we have Kok Heng Leun, Artistic Director of Singapore theatre company Drama Box, Nominated Member of Parliament, and prominent figure in both the English and Chinese language theatres in Singapore. He has thus far directed 60 plays including Kuo Pao Kun’s The Spirits Play, forum theatre work Trick or Threat!, HERstory and Drift. Heng Leun strongly believes in engaging the community in his work to promote critical dialogues about the world we live in. He is one of the most important practitioners in Singapore advocating applied engaged arts. And then we have Ken—Dr Ken Takiguchi, I beg your pardon. He is a research fellow at the Theatre Studies Programme, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. He obtained his PhD in Japanese Studies from NUS, specialising in theatre translations, intercultural theatre and cultural policy. As a theatre academic, Ken was Assistant Convener of a conference titled Unfinished Business: Krishen Jit’s Performance Practice and Contemporary Malaysian Theatre held in Kuala Lumpur in January 2015. And by some strange coincidence—and you will know why—let me introduce Charlene Rajendran, who is a theatre educator, researcher and practitioner who currently works at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. She researches issues of contemporary performance, identity, culture in urban multicultural contexts, and develops arts-based dialogic pedagogies that draw on contextually based knowledges to deepen critical and aesthetic thinking. Charlene has been involved as theatre director, performer and writer since she was a teenager. More recently, she has been dramaturg in a range of performance projects including Both Sides, Now, Gitanjali [I feel the earth move] and It Won’t Be Too Long. In January 2015, she convened a practice-based conference, strangely also entitled Unfinished Business: Krishen Jit’s Performance Practice and Contemporary Malaysian Theatre, run by Five Arrs Centre—organised by Five Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpur. 

Now, how this is going to work today is, we have been experimenting and trying out new formats of talks and presentations. For the first 10 minutes for each of the speakers, they will give a brief introduction of their work and themselves, and after around 40 minutes, there will be cross discussion among the four of them. And it will be clear why the cross discussion is a very integral part of what’s going to happen in the kinds of issues that will come up in dramaturgy, pertaining to collaboration, the interdisciplinary and the intercultural. Take it away.  

CR: OK. Good morning, everybody. Thank you very much to How Ngean, Centre 42 and the Esplanade for inviting me to be here, particularly to be on this panel where I’m with four very good friends, with whom I’ve done some very interesting thinking over the years. And yeah, earlier this morning, we were talking about you trying out the slides, and after yesterday, I feel that it should be “Becoming Penggangu”. But I really did prepare the slides before yesterday. 

Just a little bit of background before I go on to speak about my work as a dramaturg. I’m not a trained dramaturg in the formal sense. But I think, now, looking back on it, I’ve been doing dramaturgical thinking—which we talked about yesterday—since I was 13, because I was involved in a children’s theatre group led by Janet Pillai, pioneer children’s theatre director who’s now involved in issues of cultural policy and heritage. And I didn’t realise it at the time, but a lot of the theatre-making we were doing was actually a post-colonial critique of theatre-making at the time. And as a teenager, making and thinking and working and doing—and we took our theatre very seriously—began a process that has led to many other things. Working with Janet then led me, as a young adult, to work with a group of artists who then shaped in many ways—and continue to shape my dramaturgical thinking—and they’re a group called Five Arts Centre. Five Arts Centre was founded by Krishen Jit whom I’ve mentioned yesterday, and another co-founder who is here, Marion D’Cruz. Five co-founders came together from interdisciplinary arts to make a company and to make work that reflected contemporary Malaysia, drawing on the different art forms. So it’s interdisciplinary, multicultural, etc. So from being actor and performer, and then director, writer, I became an educator, researcher, and then only in the last few years, found myself engaged with this word ‘dramaturg’, which happened by accident. The first time I was asked—no, I wasn’t even asked to be dramaturg. Actually I was involved in a project with Heng Leun called Prism. IPS Prism. And I’ve been involved as an artist. And then when we got together the same team to do Both Sides, Now, I didn’t have the head space to be an artist. But I still wanted to be involved, and thankfully they still wanted me to be involved. So they said, “How?” So I said, “ OK, I be dramaturg lah.” So really, I didn’t know what that meant. They didn’t know what that meant. And then they said, “OK lah, we see how.” And that’s really what happened, for which I’m grateful. 

OK, so let me say a little bit about then this experience of being a dramaturg. My first expedition as dramaturg was, as I said, in 2013 for Both Sides, Now, produced by Drama Box and ArtsWok Collaborative. This is an interdisciplinary multi-arts project that calls itself an immersive arts experience that looks at the issue of death and dying. It was first located in the Khoo Teck Puat Hospital lobby, and then in 2014, in two outdoor community spaces. And the work was geared towards engaging the public in conversations about death and normalising the work of preparing for its eventuality. Using film, theatre, interactive installations and public talks, the project aimed at making it conducive and safe for the public to have difficult and risky conversations about this somewhat taboo topic. 

To prepare for and dream up the project, the creative team of artists and producers would need to discuss ideas and propose ways of making this happen. And it was at these meetings that this dramaturg offered perspectives, threw up questions about framing structure, content, etc. Everyone was involved in the dramaturgy, so my aim was to thicken the dialogue and prod the thinking. But I knew that eventually, there were decisions about what actually happened that were left to the artistic director, Heng Leun, and the artists, to make the final decision. So what does a dramaturg do, asked Poh Wah, one of the main stakeholders and funders, in a debrief meeting to discuss the project. And I had to make up something on the spot. I said something like “to provide critical dialogue and feedback”. He looked satisfied enough. It got me thinking. What do I do in relation to such a wide range of art forms? And the process of thinking about community arts beyond the usual notions of a specific community with a neatly defined boundary or specific art form. What kinds of sensibilities and skills does this dramaturg need to have? 

And in 2014, I was invited to become dramaturg for Gitanjali [I feel the earth move], a devised work produced by The Necessary Stage. This was an interdisciplinary and intercultural theatre production about an aging traditional dance teacher based in Madras and her relationships with her son who moves to Singapore and her star student who moves to Canada. The work engaged a classical dancer, classical singer, contemporary dancers, trained and untrained actors, experimental musician, designers, Haresh Sharma as writer, and Alvin Tan as director, Felipe Cervera as assistant director. Several languages and vocabularies of performance texts were created through the devised process. The work was an ambitious attempt to make sense of these varied, sometimes colliding and other times colluding vocabularies in interaction. Again, my task: to attend the discussion, mostly in rehearsals this time, to give critical feedback. Sometimes meetings with the writer, director and designers to have further discussions about the process and the frame. But eventually the decisions were in the hands of the artists: the writer, the director, the actors. So how to dramaturg this very fluctuating and evolving work, when so many skilled artists were already involved? Was I simply there to add flavour? If so, what flavour could I offer? When will I know what was useful, what was excessive, what would be too much? 

So in these projects, I’m fully aware that much as I may be a desirable option, I’m completely dispensable. The directors and writers are themselves skilled dramaturgs. So if I have a role to play, it’s as this extra ingredient that hopefully can make a significant and interesting difference. But if not, the production will go on just fine. The meal will still be a good one. Maybe even more so. Who’s to say? Too many flavours can sometimes spoil the dish—depends on your taste. As someone who’s wandered into becoming a dramaturg rather than setting out to be one, it’s been an ongoing process of improvisation and exploration, to find out about what this means, particularly in experimental projects, which are not easy to define or to describe. The truth is I feel I’ve responded to some delicious invitations to participate in theatre-making. And my own appetite to keep being part of it had made me say yes without any, any hesitation, within the demands of my full-time teaching job. And part of the luxury actually has been to know that I am desirable yet dispensable. 

My involvement with each project has been significantly different, and so it will take too long to go into the why and the how, and I think that’ll come up in the discussion later. So I’ve decided to say something about what seemed to me two primary questions that come up when I think about what has shaped my experiences as dramaturg in experimental and highly collaborative work. And these are the two questions. First one—oh, this should have come earlier, but never mind. Where do I sit? When I enter the rehearsal space, I’m present. But my presence needs to be minimal, likewise in a meeting. I am present, but it matters where I sit. Imminence matters. And I know that sitting in a corner writing notes in my book has an effect on actors and directors. So I try to remain out of the way as possible, but this changes with each project, with each phase of the project. It varies with each kind of meeting where I sit, how I attend. How do I sit? The active viewing of the dramaturg as first spectator or critical spectator means my watching is an intervention. I’m there to make comment, to discern concerns with the work, to raise problems, to ask questions. So it’s an intense watching and listening is part of my active presence. How I sit then affects how I see the project. So wherever and however I sit, I need to feel that I can sense and figure out what’s going on. And if I’m missing something, should I say something now? Wait. Later. What do I do with this building tension? How do I deal with the exhaustion? Am I showing too much on my face? Am I not showing enough on my face? How much is apparent from where I am sitting? I’m not able to attend all rehearsals, so I had to catch up, fill in the gaps. Between the last time I was present, what has changed? Does it matter? 

As a practitioner who has been a director, performer, writer etc. and watching through several lenses simultaneously, it’s like having multifocal lens that allows for different kinds of focus and distancing. Sometimes I zone in on the active capacity to connect with text. Sometimes I’m thinking about what the producer is saying to the artistic director and concerns of funding. Sometimes I watch the play of bodies in relation to sound. Sometimes I listen and I try to push against the silence. And on it goes. It shifts. It influences though what I’ll say later. And to do it adequately, it matters where I sit and how I sit. Yes, it’s about how I locate myself in the project. My role is not specified at the start. Negotiation is left open. Sometimes I need to be more absent than present. Sometimes I need to be more visible. It shifts with the needs of the project. So one example: in Gitanjali [I feel the earth move], I used to sit between the writer and the director. The director sat next to the assistant director. Now in the next phase of the project, Ghost Writer, I sit with the musician on the same side, because now the choreographer sits between the director and the writer. Things have changed. It’s not power play that I’m pointing to, but it’s just an example of how situations change and where I sit changes, and it’s quite a delightful treat. 

For me, it’s like attending a social event that I’ve been invited to in a home. I’m an invited guest. I need to figure out the dynamics of who’s present—friends and strangers. I need to know where to best locate myself, and then to move around and shift places. Working out the dynamics is part of my responsibilities when I accepted the invitation to come and join in the eating and drinking. I am meant to come with an appetite and a capacity to appreciate the food and the booze,  but also to bring something to contribute to the party apart from my presence. So what do I say? Apart from watching with intensity, I’m expected to respond and say something useful. What kind of conversation should I have? What sort of language should I use? Through comment, question, provocation, affirmation, uncertainty, a bit of whimsy, I jump into the fray, I become part of the work. Much more evident than where and how I sit perhaps. But is it really? 

I didn’t train as a dramaturg, so I don’t have a methodology. I improvise. Perhaps I’m a devising dramaturg. And I respond to what I see and what I sense. But I do have a politics of theatre. That’s implicit and that’s explicit. It emerges from my choice of where to sit and what to say. But I cannot have—claim to have a method or technique. So what I say reveals a lot about me, I’m sure. My theatre appetite, my inclination. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m there as a curiosity at the party, to test whether something will work, to figure out if an idea is worth pursuing. After all, I’m meant to be the guest who says the least but makes sure they make sense when they say something. 

I do have an appetite for theatre—experimental theatre and experimental art-making in particular. I enjoy being in these critical conversations, and I have the luxury of being a part-time dramaturg. I can be choosy about who I have these conversations with. That does make a difference. The conversations are multiple. They are multifarious. They move in many directions. But what has become increasingly important is being able to trust that the conversation matters, and the people with whom I have these conversations matter as well. So I feel it’s worth while, especially when the party heats up and there’s something stirring in the discussion. 

How to find words to articulate problems? Because I feel I’m not just accorded space to speak about the performance, but also to the stories that are emerging, the real life experience that are shaping the nature of the work. And what I say as dramaturg contributes somehow to this overarching project. I take responsibility for it. But because I’m dispensable, I think my role is to say what nobody else might say, to stir the pot such that I prod the process beyond its realistic and yet perhaps imagined limit. These are experimental works, so they don’t have a prescribed outcome that’s directing their shape, texture and feeling. Hence the conversations are about what is coming up in the laboratories of the artists’ minds, in the rehearsal space, in the meeting. What’s making sense or nonsense? Yet these are also fragile spaces, and they should not be pushed beyond a particular limit. How do I speak to these fragilities and these vulnerabilities, even as I’m aware of the strengths? Have I assessed the situation and read the momentum? Did I hear it enough? Some of these conversations take place over several phases, like Gitanjali [I feel the earth move] and Both Sides, Now. Some of them are shorter, like It Won’t Be Too Long: The Cemetery. But they all involve a level of play and purpose. This dialogue is part of a ludic process, in a very liminal space that I enjoy, in which the possibilities I imagine and entertain to create more advanced stages of the thinking about the work. But where I sit and what I say frame my work on a literal and metaphorical level. And I continue to ask myself, even as I sit here now, whether I should be seated elsewhere or if I should have spoken quite differently.  

KT: Hello, good morning. So in this presentation, I’ll like to talk about my experience as a dramaturg in a so-called intercultural theatre practice. And of course, the issue of intercultural theatre has been widely debated. I don’t want to repeat it anymore. But for me, intercultural theatre is a theatrical practice which bridges the different cultures. So it is a space where the practitioners from different cultural backgrounds gather and also negotiate their cultures, and they share the results of the process with the audience. So for me, intercultural theatre has always been a very process-oriented practice. 

My first involvement in a so-called intercultural performance was back in 2001, which was titled The Island in Between, written by the Malaysian Kam Raslan and Jo Kukathas, and it was directed by Kukathas herself. It was fully funded by the Japan Foundation, which is the cultural institution set up by the Japanese government. And in taking a programme booklet to prepare for this presentation, I found my name under the category of “Japan” in the programme booklet. It’s true that for most of the intercultural performances, the projects happen beyond the national borders. But I would like to highlight that what is at stake here is not the nation, but the culture. And I believe that a dramaturg in the intercultural performance has to be fully aware of this trap of, you know, to stick to, or to consider everything based on the nationality. Of course, you know, the nation state is such a huge cultural baggage for us, and we cannot escape from it, and we should not escape from that. But still I believe that we shouldn’t be too much trapped with that. 

And for me, the rehearsal room of the intercultural theatre is a microcosm of the way people interpret others and themselves in a great diversity of idioms with expanded communication and intercultural influence. So Mikhail Bakhtin call this kind of sphere the “heteroglossia”, and he pointed out that the languages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways. And the ethnographer James Clifford added to this: the bodies set to languages applies equally to cultures and subcultures. 

So if this is the case, then I would like to argue that the act of bridging languages, which is usually called translation, should be considered as an important and quite central part of the intercultural exploration in theatre. And the role of the translator as a linguistic/cultural mediator greatly overlaps with that of the role of the dramaturg, who is expected to be a cultural mediator in intercultural performances. So he or she provides a context in which each participant can absorb the elements that are alien to him or her in the creative process, and thus facilitate the intercultural negotiations. 

And this kind of conceptualisation of the translator/dramaturg makes very good sense to me, because I started my involvement in theatre-making as a translator, and gradually acquired the role of a dramaturg, in a very organic way. So I would say that my very first involvement as dramaturg was for this production called Reservoir, which was produced by TheatreWorks in 2008. So I was invited by the company as a script translator, and this project was themed with the Syonan Jinja shrine which was built by the Japanese army during the Occupation. And this shrine was built by the MacRitchie Reservoir, the largest reservoir in Singapore, located in the central location of this island, and it was destroyed when the Japanese surrendered. And I did a lot of research on this as I translated, and I shared it with the co-creators in the course of the production. I even joined the site visit of the ruins of the Syonan Jinja, and you can see [POINTING AT PROJECTED SLIDE] we are crossing the water to get to the site. 30 seconds after I took this photo, I fell across the water, and I slipped, and I almost drowned. So in the water, I was thinking, “OK, why this script translator is drowning now?” Usually the script translator doesn’t drown! So I felt, “OK, I am doing something different. I am extending my role in the production.” 

Yesterday there was a discussion that there was a role, but no name was given to it. And I felt the same thing in this project, because I was not credited, and I didn’t call myself a dramaturg. But actually I took a similar position in the projects that I participated in the translation, and the latest example was Hotel, which was done by the local theatre company W!LD RICE last year. I continued to participate in the intercultural performance as a translator, but I gradually extended my role as a dramaturg. 

[REFERRING TO A SLIDE ABOUT COGITO TRANSLATION PROJECT] This is a project that is ongoing, and I am doing the residency in Japan in this coming summer. So this is our project to explore the possibility of collaborative translation with the actors and the directors. 

But so far, probably the most extensive and the most complex intercultural project where I participated as a dramaturg was Mobile 2: Flat Cities, which was written by Haresh Sharma and directed by Alvin Tan of The Necessary Stage. And it was actually the very first production [where] I started to call myself a dramaturg, because Haresh Sharma told me, “Ken, you are the dramaturg.” Then I started to call myself dramaturg. And this was a new work devised by The Necessary Stage’s very signature three-phase structure of devising. And I participated in this project from a very, very early stage. And we had a very specific theme to discuss in this project, which was the whole idea of the nation. So we started this project by having this question on this issue. However, somehow, unfortunately, due to some practical reasons, we couldn’t have the second phase of the devising process, in which, generally speaking, we could’ve aimed to have intensive discussions and research to concretise the narratives to be included in the final production. As we were not able to meet physically to have workshop sessions, we set up a Facebook feed instead—and which was actually the idea of Alvin. Alvin is known, very well-known, as Facebook-crazed, and your thread is always filled with Alvin’s posts. But anyway, you know, this Facebook feed turned [out] to be very, very effective too for us to communicate and develop our narratives. So all collaborators, we set up this thread in October 2012, which was more than half a year before the actual performance. No, it’s nearly a year before the performance. And the collaborators posted articles, pictures and videos related to the theme, and episodes and narratives they collected personally, and also their thoughts on them and their reflections. At the end of the day, so after nearly one year of process, the total number of posts reached more than 1,000, and a very, very wide extent of topics were covered. And it was a unique and special experience for all of us, because all members constantly, you know, they were constantly engaged with the discussions for nearly a year. And the posts were added to the thread almost daily. So it’s a very, you know, it’s a kind of daily routine to look back to this Facebook feed and to share [our] thoughts. 

As a dramaturg, I observed the discussions and I also somehow curated them. I facilitated them as well. Translation of course took a very, very important portion of this process because every single post had to be translated from English to Japanese or vice versa. So I translated with my co-translator who volunteered kindly, Ritsuko Saito. And in the course of translating these posts, it was a very, very important learning process for me, to learn what are the gaps, perception gaps between these two—among the collaborators, and where the gaps are. And these gaps are not necessarily, you know, between Japan and Singapore, but it was also within [the] Japanese team. We found quite significant perception gaps as well. So in this thread, my role was to fill the gap, to mediate these perception gaps, cultural gaps, by putting my own thought on the questions. And this was also a very, very, you know, important process for me, to get prepared for the script translation. So the script was written by The Necessary Stage’s Resident Playwright Haresh Sharma, and I translated it into Japanese with my co-translator Nao Suzuki. And I worked very closely with Alvin and adjusted the Japanese translation, reflecting the findings in the final rehearsals happening in Singapore. So when Alvin changed the direction, I adjusted the Japanese translation accordingly, and the revisions happened very often, especially in the first two weeks of the rehearsal process. And I continued the discussion with my co-translator Nao Suzuki, who is based in Japan, using the comment function of Microsoft Word. So you can see [REFERS TO THE SLIDE], traces of our conversations in the Word document. 

So but that kind of, or you know, this kind of process, I would like to highlight that, was possible only because the trust was established to all the people through the preparation process. And there was the collaboration among the director, playwright, performers, and translators—so many translators involved in this process—and the dramaturg myself in the entire process. And I would say it is always a very difficult question, as Charlene raised just now, how can and should the dramaturg intervene with the process? And the answer can vary greatly from project to project. But my experience in Mobile 2 and other, you know, other translator/dramaturg experience gave me a kind of model that I can follow, that I can use in intercultural productions. And of course, this is not necessarily possible in every project, you know, and sometimes of course, I myself do dramaturging without having the translator’s role. But still, I would argue that the combination of these two roles of the translator and the dramaturg, can contribute in some way or another to the model of the dramaturg in intercultural productions and the process. Thank you. 

KHL: Uh, it’s a demonstration of what dramaturgy in directing is like. So sometimes you direct, you need to see a lot of details, so I’ll use this long-sighted one. [PUTS ON A NEW PAIR OF GLASSES] I can see close-up how the work is being made. As a dramaturg, we need this one. You sort of need to distance yourself in the process. 

Hi. I am a director. I also dramaturg. So actually, the relationship is actually very complex and today, as I sit here, I wish I was sitting there because it’s nice to hear a dramaturg talk about your work, rather than you sitting here, talking about how you dramaturg your work. 

OK, so I feel that maybe in today’s session, maybe what I’ll do is that, as a dramaturg, now I’m dramaturging the work that I’ve done, but with actually a lot of input that came from Charlene during the process. This is especially so when, you know, there’s some work that I do, actually I don’t quite know what I am doing. So the process was actually quite tedious. I would like to start by saying that actually, the act of creating work is almost like the act of getting lost. One of my favourite writers, Rebecca Solnit, talked about loss with two disparate meanings. One, losing things is about the familiar falling away—that means what is familiar going away. And the other kind is when you get lost, and it’s about something unfamiliar happening, appearing in front of you. So the first one, losing—so when you lose something, what’s happening is that it’s still familiar, except that the items are not there. You feel that sense of loss. The other kind is when you get lost, in which in this case, the world becomes larger than the knowledge of it. And I think those who are familiar with Thoreau, when he talks in Walden, he talks about how getting lost actually opened up a world of actually discovering yourself. So I would always imagine that when a director gets into working, actually he or she would actually be discovering that world. And there comes a very important dramaturgical question a lot of times, even when I ask the director who I work with, the very simple question: why this work now? It could [be] because we are talking about the content of the work in terms of its relevance, or it could mean why is it that it’s important for this particular director or this writer [who] wants to do this work at this moment. It could be kind of artistic exploration. It could be a kind of personal growth. Whatever it is, I find that question highly meaningful, even for myself as a director, as a dramaturg to constantly ask myself. 

And with that, then I was really looking—now I’m really looking at this project called Both Sides, Now. Both Sides, Now is actually a project which, just now Charlene has talked about, which is about living and dying. But not only that, it’s actually part of a programme that I’ve been doing since 2000, where I wanted to try out doing performances not inside the theatre but in public spaces, to redefine a kind of relationship between the audience and the performance, because being in Singapore, I find that the public space[s] are quite restricted and actually even discourse is very restricted. So I thought that, being naive, so let’s do it in the public space and see how we can actually look at the idea of discourse. And so the relation changed. The aesthetic is in a way very much in the relation. But this relation is also political in a way. So then from a relational aesthetic that we talk about in visual arts, we actually also talk about a kind of political aesthetic here. So when that happens, one of the things that is of great consideration is actually: what is this public space? How do you engage this public space? And in Singapore, actually because we are so small, right, to find good public space is difficult, public space that allows a conversation to happen. But at the same time, though Singapore is small, the people who visit these public space are actually very different and very complex. So it is not homogenous when you look at the community. It’s actually very heterogeneous. How you actually create that kind of space becomes a very important question that actually goes through our discussion in this process. 

One of the things that I had here in this project was Both Sides, Now, which is about living and dying, as a couple of projects. OK, the advantage of having this is actually it had two iterations. The first one we did was in the hospital, and the second one that we did is in [a] really public space. And I had the advantage of a dramaturg who followed us through these two things. So as a director, I knew right from the beginning that, you know, when you want to do engaged performance, the first thing, you know, the sort of structure or the way you want to approach is what Jan Cohen-Cruz had talked about as a call and response. So the work makes a call, and the audience responds, and the response becomes a call in that process. So it is interactive, it is interactive. So in the first iteration, we actually focused on that interactiveness of things. And it was an experience that we gained from Prism, which was about governance. And when we talk about governance, we are talking about citizens or Singaporeans and the government, and it’s not just about the government itself. The government and the governed. So we’re looking at that call and response relationship. 

However, after doing two iterations, I think one very important thing happened here. Between the call and the response, we realised—or one day, Charlene also mentioned, through our observations of what happened in the performances—you need another space in between. And we realised that that space is about listening. And now, we are talking about listening not in terms of just the ears, but listening with the five senses. So you can have your call, but if you do not create a listening experience, you actually would not have a response. So then, our dramaturgy actually went towards seeking for creating that listening—now we start calling it our own term—aesthetic, OK? That experience of listening and what does it mean. And I would define it as: creating the time and the space for you to listen. But what does listening mean then? A, for reflection. B, for an acknowledgement of the other at that moment. And C, actually, for a space then for you to respond, so that deeper listening can happen. So it’s very iterative. And I have to say pedagogically, actually, I’m quite influenced by Paolo Freire, the critical pedagogy of actions and reflections as part of the praxis in the engaged work that I do. 

So then it become—the work really became about creating the time and the space for people to actually respond. And we realised that this is a very complex thing which, as a team, we have to work with. And just now, Charlene has showed the team. The team includes producers. The team includes myself as Artistic Director and different artists and a dramaturg. And because of the number of people we had to work with, we realised then that the artwork is actually very complex. It’s not just about the final performances that happen. But a lot of times, it happened between us and the different stakeholders who we are corresponding or talking to. It could be the national health agencies, who were interested in the issues but didn’t know how to go about it and never had any dialogues with any other stakeholders about this issue. So there were a lot of presentations that we made to all these national agencies, which in the end, became like a performance, whereby you are actually facilitating their response with the needs of the community, and then creating platforms—for me, which is a very interesting work—so that they can work together. 

So at the same time, then I start to realise the structure was no longer, you know, this kind of… from a base and then you build up to more of a kind of a triangular structure. But I would describe the structure in a very rhizomic way. Or the other way, which I heard from Mark Teh, which I liked, was actually “multiplying”. OK? I like that idea. So it really became a kind of structure that we both start to look at: how to form that rhizomic system after all its feats. Because in the end, if an engaged work is supposed to create a kind of space whereby people can communicate, then it is not about creating a unitary utopia. It would be a heterotopia, a space where multiple voices and multiple possibilities can happen. 

And then so you see in this piece, we had to make time for people to communicate. You will see this is a forum theatre performance with a lot of audience in the evening, and they are all getting ready to talk about death. And they communicate and they shake hands with each other, and they sit down to watch a forum piece about how a young person is dealing with the immediate—or the coma of his father and whether to let his father just go. But there were also moments—so you can see this [REFERRING TO THE SLIDE]. So at the same time, the piece also creates very simple platforms where you have talks by lawyers. And the lawyers talk about the things you do to prepare for death. So we are looking at—we are trying to pitch the whole work in different levels—from really very simple kinds of talk, to performances. And then you also have, importantly, during that, a lot of “white space”, as I would call [it], just to allow the public to sit there and not do anything, or even to talk to people. So you will see this elderly [had] gone to the—because it had a number of series of activities within the public space. So they would have seen a piece of it, and then they go and buy the buah luku, and then they come back there, and then they eat. And then they continue. But there was also some reflective space. So the artwork that actually requires them to reflect [on] their lives, and then they start to, you know, jot down their journeys of their lives. So like, you see [REFERRING TO THE SLIDE], “being diagnosed with lymphoma”. And yet, all these are displayed to be a response, where it became a call whereby the audience responds. So the call and response requires a lot of time and space, and it happens from 10am, 10am to 10pm, people coming in and go[ing]. 

So in Both Sides, Now, the whole thing actually had both Charlene, being the dramaturg, who would always ask questions. But the producers became very important. The two producers—one producer looking at how the work would be put up, and the other producer actually looked at connecting all the various stakeholders, which is this organisation called ArtsWok. And we spent close to three to four months, constantly meeting, discussing, and then whatever ideas I put up, I get challenged, and then get reorganised. And then Charlene, who always sits there and listens, and then someday will just ask you one question, and you go, “OK, let me think about it.” And I think that space is so important. Because while you meander into this whole rhizomic structure, actually it’s hard for you to see it from a macro perspectives. 

I think this kind of work has become important, at least in my company, whereby we then realise that logically, it no longer makes sense—sometimes it doesn’t make sense to do just one work about one topic. You realise it has to engage on multiple levels. So the last work that—this was done in 2015 in SIFA [REFERRING TO THE SLIDE], where we were interested in the contestation, especially land contestation in Singapore. As I said, the land is small. So there was this cemetery, which is one of the oldest Chinese cemetery in Asia, part of it was going to be excavated. About 5,000 graves were supposed to be removed; in the end, it was 3,000. So that happened in 2011. And when I finally did this performance, part of the road was starting to be, you know, part of the cemetery was starting to be removed. But it was a trilogy in the way. The first part was actually this piece called The Cemetery, which happened in the cemetery in the morning at 5.30am. So [the] audience will come and watch the piece at 5.30am. It’s completely wordless; it’s just movement. I think that time, dramaturgically, we just wanted people to experience the space, take it in its glory from darkness to when dawn comes, and see the change that happens in the space. And there would be physical performances there. And then after that, in the evening, they would go to the theatre in SOTA, and the space is emptied up, and then with the map of the cemetery being drawn on the floor, the same actors who were doing the physical performance were there. And then we had a verbatim theatre that actually records or that documents the struggle between the government and the NGOs in the contestation of that space. There was a dramaturgical problem there, which I don’t know whether we had solved it in the end. In most verbatim theatre, you actually would interview the victims. But in this case, the perpetrator was there. We had the advantage of actually interviewing the minister then who was in charge of this project. So you have the story of the minister. You have the story of the people who felt that, you know, they should be saving this place. And how do you actually dramaturg a piece that has these two voices? And of course, the artists has a position, yet there is the voice at the same time. The ethics behind it becomes very complex. We had to go through—I’m still thinking whether how far we, you know, whether we have achieved, you know, any sense of that thing. 

But one more thing that—ah, this was the one that was done in the theatre [REFERRING TO SLIDE]. OK? And the last piece that we felt that, if we have done all this inside the theatre and in the cemetery, probably you only reach out to a certain group of audience. We wanted to reach out to the public at the same time, and engage them in the performance. And there is this piece called The Lesson. What you see is this little GoLi, which is our inflatable theatre that we bring from places to places. So in this piece, which is called The Lesson, we actually created an interactive kind of set-up, whereby the audience participates in deciding how to—whether, the contestation of a piece of land to be removed to build the MRT, and were fully involved in being participants. There was no play. It was just situation, facilitated by facilitators, so that they make choices. And they learn about democracy. There were questions about choice and decisions, so that it would bring back to the whole issue of, actually, land and of course, how do we make [a] choice in such a complex world? 

So we have realised actually, as a director and as a dramaturg, while doing all this work, I find that it’s always difficult to navigate such a complex—at least for me, this kind of set-up. I thought that a lot of time, having Charlene being the outsider, became so important because she would point out to me when I am lost. I think being lost is fine. Actually I enjoy the moment of being lost. But at the same time, there is something that I think is important in the sense that, while being a dramaturg, you tend to want to create a structure such that, you know, it’s neat and you know, everything can fall into place. But I think sometimes as art-makers, we just want those little weird moments whereby you just go, “Hah?” I think that tension is always healthy. And the interrogation of it with the dramaturg makes it extremely meaningful. You may not know where it goes to. At least you know the journey has started. Thank you.