The Intercultural & the Interdisciplinary | ADN Meeting 2017

SV: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen so we are here for the last panel discussion of the day. When I saw the programme it says the intercultural and the interdisciplinary and this is the only title that doesn’t have dramaturgy in it, I thought it was a great relief. [laughter in audience] But How Ngean busted it he said the next panel is going to be intercultural and interdisciplinary dramaturgies, so the illusion is gone, we come back to dramaturgy. So this panel we have distinguished speakers here for the panel, three of them are sitting here, they choose to sit there and then we’ll take turns to do our presentations. So starting with Ness Roque from Philippines, Ness is a co-member of Manila-based contemporary performance collective Sipat Lawin Ensemble. She is a theatre and film actress, performance-maker, writer, dramaturg and artist manager. Ness majored in theatre at the Philippines High School for Arts and has a Bachelor’s Degree in Filipino Literature from the Ateneo de Manila University. Trained primarily as a stage actress, Ness is still in search of how to move towards new articulations of acting in current forms of performance-making. She recently co-curated the ideas exchange platform of (unheard) festival 2016 a festival that supports the development of new devised work in Philippines. Ness has been exploring dramaturgy with Sipat Lawin in (Una Sola?) demonstration (foreign), and (foreign). 

NR: Good afternoon. In the interest of blocking I will stand. Thank you so much to ADN and TPAM for having us today. So I will talk about Sipat Lawin Ensemble and the work that I do with the company as a dramaturg. Sipat Lawin is a contemporary performance collective, we also like to call ourselves a community, we do performances, workshops, we also produce our own festival. Our training and vocabulary is rooted in Western Drama but as you will later on see in the works that I will discuss we have really deviated from that. I will share with you two works that we have done in the past five years. So the first one is called Battala Royale. It is a site-specific work and a choose-your-own-adventure type of performance. It is based on a Japanese novel, manga and movie where the students were asked to kill each other until only one of them remains alive. So this show runs for four hours and the audiences are free to roam around and choose which scenes they would like to see. So it is kind of like a battlefield, the audiences would have to run around as well. We had a live band who (live) scored the performance for four hours. So this was our first exploration on, this was our first massive work, we were actually attracting audiences by the thousands. Some of the audiences would actually come back to see the other scenes because they don’t get to see the whole thing. Friends will actually split up and have a plan like you follow that character and then we meet later and talk about what you saw and what I saw and things like that. They also had playing cards so they can bet on the characters they think will survive. Aside from the physical performance, Battala Royale also had an online performance. The characters all had Facebook profiles. So this was in 2012, five years ago. They had Facebook profiles and the actors will actually interact with one another. They will actually stage fake events like there was a fake prom, a fake birthday party, just so they can post photos of that. I was an actor for this performance it was very tiring because I would have to like, oh I have to update because my character would update at this time or sometimes I would have to go to Starbucks because my character does that and I would have to like buy something and then have my character’s name written on the Starbucks cup and then take a picture of that and things like that. So audiences were actually very interested in this kind of interactioin that they can do before going to the performance and even after the performance. So there are a lot of sub stories happening and you would have like I think otaku level audiences who would really invest in the sub stories of these characters. So two things that I would like to discuss about this work, first is that the Facebook profiles was not intended to be used as performance. It was actually a collaborative tool because Battala Royal is a collaboration between Sipat Lawin Ensemble, university theatre companies in Manila and a collective of Australian playwrights based in Melbourne. So we were struggling how to continue the collaboration if we were not together and we had to make a performance with like 40 characters. So the easiest solution that we could think of was to create Facebook profiles for the characters and develop the characters online. So the playwrights would sometimes give prompts for the actors and then actually at the beginning of the process there were only maybe 8 actors with 40 Facebook profiles, so sometimes you would be developing several characters at once. But then eventually the Facebook thing was already so rich and so many things were happening in it that we decided to make the Facebook profiles public. And then it actually became a very good tool to get young audiences to watch the show. I think that was why there were audiences of thousands coming to the performance. These are people who would otherwise not go to see a show. And I think another point is that we did not call it a play, we did not call it a performance actually we called it a live action game. So I think that whole semantics thing really affected how people received the performance. The second point that I would like to emphasise about Battalia is that I think my first dramaturgical moment arrived during this performance. I remember that there was a time that all 50 of us the actors and the crew, we were in a room, and we were discussing about audience agency. We were talking about how the audiences have agency because they choose their own adventure, they choose what scenes they would like to watch. But is that enough? So were thinking of how to push the idea of control even further and how to give the audiences more control. And then I remember putting forward a provocation. What if we asked the audiences, what if we give the audience a chance to stop the performance? So from this provocation, we developed a new scene, so halfway through the performance when 20 students  are already dead and there are still 20 students alive, we gather everyone and then the game master will ask the audience, okay if you think that the show is too violent or the game is too violent and you want the 20 other students to remain alive, you can vote to stop the game. So if we get two-thirds of the audiences to vote for that, we’ll stop the game. Um unfortunately during the whole run, we never got enough votes to stop the performance. But, I think what’s very interesting is that audiences would really start to argue amongst themselves, they would be screaming and then some people would actually cry, some audiences would actually cry. And they couldn’t believe that some of the audiences would actually vote to continue the game. And then some audiences they will even watch the show over and over again just so that they can vote to stop the show and convince other audience members to stop the show. So I guess that was a very strong moment for the whole company that these little things happened. And also other audiences resorted to small acts of kindness, because it’s an outdoor performance that runs for four hours and then sometimes it would rain really hard. Some audiences will come just to bring an umbrella and follow you around with their umbrella. And the rule is that we can’t see them so I can’t acknowledge that the rain is not pouring on me, but the audience’s actually sheltering me from the rain. Sometimes they will leave food or drinks for the actors during the game, and there was a blur between are they helping out the actors or are they helping out the character that they like. So yeah I think these are the questions that our company is interested in, performance, community, audience agency, negotiations of power and control. So that was five years ago I think. So our current, the second work that I would like to share with you is our current performance, it is called gobyerno, which means government in Tagalog, in Filipino. So here we are trying to push the question of audience agency even further because this time the audiences are the performers. So our idea is that performance is a rehearsal for revolution and we were playing around with the idea of performing citizenship. So in this performance a playing audience will form and perform their own government, their own ideal government, and they will document, they will create a film documentary of this government and then the last act, in the last act the space becomes a cinema and then they will watch themselves in the documentary that they have just made. It sounds complicated, because it is. And there’s another layer to that, where it’s actually a larger project, it’s a six year global project where actually we want to collect all of the ideal governments in all of these shows. So 2017 is our third year so we started this in 2015. 

[plays video]

So for this project as I mentioned before we want to develop it for six years, and we collaborate with artists from a specific place to ground the work in the context, so sometimes when we go to a place we will actually not perform. I will facilitate the performance because we don’t speak the language. So one of the examples is our performance in Korea. So actually this is one of the first prototypes we worked with [15:51 creative (inaudible)] to develop the work and we stayed there for two weeks, collaborated together, did a lot of conversations, we even attended a protest to have a feel of the community and then their company actually facilitated the performance in Korean. The next one is in Japan, we collaborated with [genos kei] from Tokyo Death Note so this is a smaller version of the performance. And the last one is in Darwin Australia where we collaborated with [lisa pelegrino] and we stayed there for two weeks. We actually did a lot of research during this time. We interviewed [genevive gribes] who is a professor and also she is from an indigenous community called the [inaudible] and she talked about the violent colonial history and ongoing colonial history in Australia. We also had an interview with a volunteer from Save the Children foundation who investigated the crimes against humanity happening in the refugee camps. So we had all of this research before we did the performance. So I think a few points I would like to share as the dramaturg of this work, so what I would like to put forward is that I believe that what we are doing is collective dramaturgy because the challenge is that we had to create a system of devising so that we can make a work that accommodates voices and negotiates power. So we cannot make a performance that asks the audience to be free and to play among themselves if the system of creating the work is not the same. I think one of the key points that we have found is that we have dual roles. So I’m a dramaturg but I’m also the performer, the director is also the performer so everyone has dual roles and I think that helps in decentralizing power. And also thinking of power as a positive thing, yes. Because it is a sexier project, I think it’s very luxurious for us, it is not usual in Manila to have as much time to work on something, so within that luxury oh it’s six years because the term of a president in Philippines is six years. So in that six years we are also testing within our process and in the performance itself dynamics of control and power, expanding audience agency and etc. etc. I would like to share that in our local context we have tried and failed to mount this production, because we can’t just stage it and ask audiences to come in and watch it because it’s so difficult to explain. So what’s interesting is that what happens is that communities will actually ask us to do the performance in their places. So in that sense even the mode of production of this performance cannot exist without the communities asking us to go there first, and recently there has been a lot of protests in the Philippines and we have received a lot of invitation to perform gobernyo during these protests and these commemorations of massacres because usually there’s a cultural element to these protests right, somebody will sing, there are poetry readings, because what will people do with like a long time. So we have been receiving a lot of invitation to do that and I think thats where our work is going to now. So it’s something that we did not imagine for the work but now we want to pursue that and also bringing this performance in grassroots communities. And then in the global context, some people will find it strange that it’s about governments but we’re performing it in different places, but I think it is important and necessary that this work is global, because the act of collaboration itself speaks about co-existence, there is an exercise in negotiating borders, authorship, navigating difference as they were saying celebrating difference and I think ultimately this is a performance of peace. Thank you.

[applause] 

SV: Thank you so much Ness. Wow the interdisciplinary, the intercultural, the community, the collective all leading to the empowerment of the audience. Wow. Thank you so much. The next speaker is David Pledger. He’s a contemporary artist and curator working within and between the performing, visual and media arts in Australia, Asia and Europe. His live performances, installations, interactive artwork, documentaries, digital arts and discursive events have been presented in various locations including theatres, galleries, museums, a carpark, stables, cattleyard, surburban house, a film studio and Australian Institute of Sport. His work is notable for engaging publics in productive and provocative ways. Recently cited as one of Australia’s true creative originals in a National Survey of the Performing Arts, David is a recipient of numerous projects and carrier of awards, grants, commissions for his works as director, designer, writer and actor in live performance and new media. David Pledger. 

DP: Hi, thanks Sankar, it’s always a pleasure to be in your company. Ness, that was absolutely brilliant presentation really very much for me to think about. I would like to thank ADN, a network that I’m very happy and proud to be part of for bringing me here. Centre 42, the organizers who have done an excellent job second time round and also TPAM for integrating ADN in the whole scheme here I think it’s been very interesting way for the network to infiltrate. So, my name’s David Pledger, I’m an artist, and all the other activities that I undertake, producing, curating, and engaging as a public commentator stem from my artistic practice. So some of these I did within the frame of my company not yet it’s difficult, and Peter Eckersall who’s here today is the dramaturg for not yet it’s difficult, and some I do outside the company structure. Today, because I was asked to very specifically and sometimes maybe once or twice a year I do exactly what I’m asked to do, I’m going to talk specifically about dramaturgy. So I’m not really not going to talk about the dramaturg, and when I talk about dramaturgy I’m not talking about the various activities of the dramaturg. For me, dramaturgy has always been about how a thing works, whether it’s a work of art, or the world itself. Today I’m going to try and cover that distance in the time that I’ve got allotted to me. During which I hope to communicate the application of dramaturgy to not just my artistic and curatorial practice, but more broadly to a social and cultural practice. In fact, that's where I’m going to start and telescope downwards, which is actually a key signature of my own dramaturgy as an artist. I start with the political context and I work artistically within that. 

Ten years ago in Australia the Prime Ministership of John Howard came to an end and his time is marked by what I would call corruption of public discourse. During which he waged a cultural war that carved the Australian polity into rigid, discursive units. The consequences of which, continue to resonate deeply in Australia’s culture. It marked the beginning of a long-term project of mine to insinuate progressive ideas from artistic practice into the national conversation. By valorizing the language of contemporary language in discussions inside and outside the realm of the arts. Open, inclusive and underscored by a desire for discovering new ways of working, creating and making, the language of contemporary arts practice has a flexibility required to deal with change and experiment and which if introduced into an amplified discursive space, has the potential to expand the quality and depth of civic discourse and civil action. It is of necessity, a language of progress. The word dramaturgy is a really good example of this. So as an artist I think of dramaturgy as the process of connecting and mapping ideas into practice. For some years I’ve pursued a project of applying dramaturgy more broadly. I’ve spoken of a dramaturgy as an adaptive notion that embraces the idea of an operating system. Whether that be of an artistic production, or a culture, at its core is the element of change. So central to this notion to this is the idea that under an artwork culture or society lies an operating system run by a kind of code if you like that generates random and non-deterministic algorithms that are entered and extracted by human agency. Dramaturgy is rarely fixed. It’s necessarily adaptive and, due to its reliance on collective collaborative actions, inherently resistant to the concretization and commodification of other practice-related works like creativity and innovation which pretty much have been voided of their original meaning. They’ve basically been corporatized. So I’ve been applying dramaturgy a lot in my public commentary and the essays that I write for wider society. So recently an essay on sport and politics, I talked to the dramaturgy of American football describing the playbook as the team’s operating system. I’ve been quite influenced in this approach by the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe who wrote, “What is needed in the current situation is a widening of the field of artistic intervention with artists working in a multiplicity of social spaces outside traditional spaces in order to oppose the program of the total social mobilization of capitalism.” My response has been argued that we need to develop not only an artistic dramaturgy and a cultural dramaturgy but a progressive social dramaturgy. We need to operate cross-sectorally and think transversely. We can no longer enjoy the luxury of being the antagonist. We need to drive the narrative and be a protagonist. An excellent word in which momentum is implicit in its meaning. The notion of the protagonist is intimately connected to the idea of dramaturgy, the idea that artists should shift their modus operandi, their operating system, and behave in ways that are not consistent with how they have been behaving. I don’t know if you know very much of what has been going on in Australia over the last couple of years, but basically, this idea of protagonists and dramaturgy has really had some traction. Because neoliberal politics has smashed headlong into cultural politics when the Vienna art minister about 8 months ago carved off large portions of our national arts agency the Australia council and just popped it into his ministry’s backpocket, and that was it. Independent artists, small medium companies, all the funds that were there designated for them, were basically stolen. So [inaudible 28:56] writing and popularizing these words, dramaturgy, protagonist, and reframing them in a broader discourse. In doing so I’m hoping that the operating system of culture and society can in some small way absorb and benefit from the progressive potential in them both. For now I’d like to telescope down a little bit and talk to how this amplified version of dramaturgy plays out in the development and creation of two projects, the first I will describe as a curatorial project and a second it’s an artistic project but there are very much crossovers between the two. Both projects are pilot projects which basically means they are start-ups so they’re things that did not exit before I began them, and they took place on the Gold Coast in Queensland. So two years ago I had the opportunity to apply Chantal Mouffe’s advice, widening the field of artistic intervention when I developed a new event called 2970°. My curatorial intention was to create an event in which the arts was the primary interface in a discursive event for non-arts sectors, specifically, in the first edition, sport, poetics, environment, science and technology. I was really interested in how I might use the event to develop a cross-sectoral operating system. With the arts as a first language in a conversation about how we might imagine new futures. So I had an open canvas, there was a new idea, and there were no real expectations. There was a fair amount of anxiety from all the funding organisations who contributed but that was their problem, it wasn’t mine. So I started to develop a dramaturgical template, and basically my starting point is acknowledging the context in which the thing, the artwork or the event occurs. 2970° was located on the Gold Coast in Queensland, the Northeastern state of Australia. Now the Gold Coast is not really known for it’s healthy cultural life. It’s pretty much associated with Australian kitsch, a wide-shoe brigade of elderly retirees, and metre maids strolling surfers paralysed in bright bikinis. And of course it’s Schoolies Week which every year attracts thousands of school-leavers from every corner of Australia who party really hard probably about as hard as they’re ever going to do in their young lives. And it’s one of Australia’s premiere tourist destinations. So a lot to recommend there absolutely. Of course like any city it’s story’s got more than one perspective. Another version tells of a Gold Coast that is a 70-kilometre strip city pressing hard up against the coast and compressed into a surfer’s paradise at the northern end and unraveling in a series of beautiful villages the further south you go. On one side is the ocean on the other is a hinterland so immersive and rich and luxurious it’s really another world. This alchemy of sea air and forest air and ocean and estuary river tide and current is quite unique. This Gold Coast revolves around the lived experience of revolving access of air, water and it’s interplay with the land. It has a cultural undertone that is not discernible on the surface. I wanted to intervene in the cultural imaginary. I wanted to put it in a Gold Coast that was much more like this and much less like the dream world, water world story of the advertising billboards. So that’s really the larger context of the Gold Coast, the cultural context is actually fairly uncomplicated because there’s really almost no cultural infrastructure there at all. Which is why I like working there, because it gives me an opportunity to be involved in developing a culture that is led by artists, and the arts rather than institutions and agencies. It really is kind of irresistible because theres very few places that actually provide such an opportunity. It’s also, you know this is also a very unfashionable idea the idea to have cultural development led by artists and the arts I mean what are we, what are people thinking? And it goes against the tide of what I would call current neoliberal practices in the arts and cultural sectors. So here I go. My task is to create an arts-led national event with international reach that was originally a concept arising out of the local culture, and it framed the city as a place in which intellectual and artistic discourse were valued and from which a unique view of the future could be projected. So that’s my context. In some ways, and I would say I have worked retrospectively on this, for me, my dramaturgy project is developed really out of three elements, context, structure and process. So that was my context for this event. The next thing was to develop a structure for it. So I’ve been running a whole series of workshops on the Gold Coast on and off for about a year working with lots of local artists and running workshops and mentorship programs. So I wanted the artists with whom I’ve been working closely to be a central cog in the operating system of 2970°. And the second point was that I was interested in speakers for whom a lot of them might not identify as artists the arts was an important element of their worldview. And the third point I was really interested in attracting to the event, people who may have had no interest in the arts at all but for whom the experience of engaging in deep conversation about the future was vital. And the final thing was well the mechanism of participation. I wanted everybody attending in the event to be a participant. I didn’t want the speakers to behave like experts, but as provocateurs. I wanted everyone to feel they had an equal voice and something valuable to say to contribute, and I wanted to develop visual and performing arts programs to amplify and talk to or even oppose the content that was being created in the discursive space. I wanted to create a temporal, miniature society and engage its citizens with powerful ideas through ad in the ambience of the arts. So I developed a structure around four concentric circles in which the first was the speakers and then the second pool around them was a pool of respondents who were all local artists and cultural operators and then there was a third pool of moderators and then a fourth was the general population of the event. There were five speakers, 12 respondents and 25 moderators and when they weren’t speaking, responding and moderating they folded back into the general population of the event and participated in the discussion. The opening keynote was delivered at the school of architecture Bond University which is an absolutely stunning building, beautiful architect design building by Kenneth [Peter] Cook and it spoke to the event’s ambitions to create a better world. And the second and third days took place at the Gold Coast arts centre which having toured a number of them in my time echoed the architecture of buildings of the Soviet Union. And so it was a kind of constant reminder of the [inaudible 1:23:38 cost for lack of] imagination. I curated a visual arts program for the opening night and a performing arts program that intervened in the second and third days. And the process which is the third element of the dramaturgy, unfolded in this way. In each of four separate sessions, keynote was developed in an hour, three local artists, cultural operators responded to the keynote in a five-minute presentation. The content created by this dialogue was taken to the tables and discussions were moderated by the moderators who after one hour, synthesised the discussions in a three-minute declaration. All of this was recorded and audience surveys became the diadem on which the event was assessed and recommendations for further iterations were made. It was a pilot project so there was a lot of fuzzy bits around some of it. The crucial element of a process of a curatorial dramaturgy and I really wanted to distinguish that from an artistic dramaturgy. From the curatorial dramaturgy, the crucial element is people. I consider the curation of people to be the fundamental element to my role as a curator. All the speakers, all the respondents and moderators were selected for their knowledge and social aptitude. The speakers had to be prepared to take off their experts’ hats and join the tables and engage in conversations that they’re provocations had stimulated. The local respondents many of them were pretty kind of nervous about speaking in such a large forum, were supported and encouraged to think and be bold. The moderators were mostly academics and public intellectuals, who were able to give succinct summaries of extended and complex discussions. A degree of ego is encouraged in this space but big heads, you have to check them in at the door. One of the key framings for the conference was a local indigenous presence. There are a number of protocols involved in inviting local indigenous persons whom I felt would amplify the event and this threaded all the way through, right from the beginning to the opening orientation, right through to the end and that was very much strong sensibility within the project. The last part about 2970 is I guess when I talk about curatorial dramaturgy I think of it as alchemy a kind of dark art, there are elements that are rational and logical and concrete, and there are others that are best left to the senses and one’s intuition. One of the conscious things I do as a curator, and as an artist is to defend this creative space and the constantly evolving posture as without the unknowable, art cannot occur. 

Now I’m going to shift to something completely different. So the second project I’d like to give a little time to is called, Hotelling which I guess I describe it as an artistic happening. For this project, I’m described as the lead artist and curator. 

[plays video]

So the Gold Coast comprises 150 hotels. I’m from Melbourne, and 25 years ago we had these things called laneways, people just used to dump their rubbish in. These days, people come from all over to look at the laneways because they’ve been transformed as a kind of cultural interface with the identity of Melbourne. Similarly it was the analogy I was using when I was invited to work on a project called Hotelling. Basically I came to the Gold Coast and as in the context of developing a cultural development project and I looked the hotels, and I though exactly what most people don’t think which is oh my god what a fantastic opportunity, some people would think, oh my god that’s so ugly. But actually one of the great things about the hotels is that they for me were like mini cities, mini societies, they kind of reconfigure themselves on a daily basis. The visitors and the staff and the tourists and the people who’ve come in and out, they’re really like the kind of you know a new citizenry that you have the potential to work with. So I was very interested in looking at them and I approached the idea of a project called 100 Hotels.  Basically I wanted to take over all of the hotels, on Surfers’ Paradise and insinuate art into these spaces. I took a while, took about a year for them to actually come back to the idea, and they set up a context for which I would say very bureaucratic because it came out of a local council. But the artistic context for it was pretty simple really. It was to respond directly to the hotel space, energy, sensibility and architecture. So in this sense my task was quite simple, and I’d also like to make an important distinction about curatorial dramaturgy and artistic dramaturgy, because it’s much more different, not say difficult, but developing a dramaturgy for a project that one is not directly producing, as we were as a curator, is a very different process to one in which you’re responsible solely for the program. So you actually don’t deal with so many of the poetics you are kind of protected from that if the producing context operates well. Much of was simple, create a program that would create a new audience. But I mean honestly I don’t think about audiences, certainly not in the way that an arts bureaucracy imposes upon us and I think Ong Keng Sen talked about that yesterday. Who is the work for, how will they respond, will there be any offence taken, what are you going to do, and you haven’t even made the work yet. This really is a trapped design to make artists make really crap work. Keng Sen talked about it much more elegantly yesterday but I think it’s real simple. Create something special in most cases people will come. For me, a hotel is a fascinating place. They kind of, I spend a lot of time in hotels and I knew this one incredibly well, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do there I wanted to make a program that would advertise the liminal spaces of the hotel, those points in which the public and the private spaces collide and collude, so I programmed work on the tennis court, in the swimming pool in the driveway in the building across the road from the hotel, so the people in the street on apartment blocks and on the amusement rides could watch or glimpse these artworks as they were going about their business which wasn’t really directly engaged with what the program was. So my idea really was this could remap the experience of this city for them. They could find a giant eel swimming in a pool, they catch sight of fifty red balloons bursting apart on a tennis court or a clutch of people watching a balcony party in another building. And a couple in the back of the parked panel van selling driving experiences to passers by. I wanted to take this experience of the hotel and ask the question, where does the hotel start as a private space and where does it begin as a public space. Inside the hotel in response to its interior design which is very colourful it’s a cutie hotel in Surfers’ Paradise it looks like a kind of, looks like candy, it’s like a lolly that you could just pick up and eat. So I created a program based around Alice’s trip down the rabbit hole. It started in the penthouse, ended up on the tennis court, rubber-banded all the way back up to the penthouse. Along the way the paying audience which was divided into four criss crossing groups, witnessed an experience in the hotel rooms a marriage breakup and international surveillance artist letters project, a bondage counselling session, an escape room, and immersive sound architecture that vibrated the daily sounds of the building through your body. All this content was drawn fro the daily life of the hotel, staff stories and things that I’d observed in many stays there. And on half a dozen floors, there were rabbits, lots of rabbits, lost rabbits, tall, elegant, briefcase-carrying rabbits, miniature rabbits, and recalcitrant rabbits, who refused to come out of their hotel rooms. I approached the dramaturgy of this work and the way I talk about it in a very different way to that which I approached an event like 2970. Largely because I’m developing an artistic dramaturgy alongside a curatorial dramaturgy, half the program, works I created myself in Hotelling and these were all new works that developed in collaboration with the artists so the dramaturgy was framed by my being implicated in an artistic process and needing to maintain a curatorial distance in order to be able to see the whole. So if I go back to my checklist of context, structure and process, dramaturgy of this work was determined by the context of the hotel and it’s operational protocols, tick, the structure was framed by the hotel’s interior architecture: rooms, corridors, elevators, lurking spaces such as the foyer, tick. One of the key dramaturgical mechanisms was the creation of an ensemble of local artists. Now all I’ve got here in front of me is…. Because at lunchtime, I was out there sitting in the café with Peter and [1:11:12], we were talking about the morning session and ___ said something really smart and I though yeah I really like that and I looked down and thought I don’t think I can finish my talk today, and I thought well that ‘s not a bad thing, because actually for me what dramaturgy is actually about an openness something that never close, something that never loops in on itself but is continually expanding. So when I think about the artistic dramaturgy of Hoteling I think of something that continually expands and then the politics of that event were in some ways it’s very much about engaging with the audience. But there’s nothing political in it. What’s political in it and which is where I started is the fact that in the place like the Gold Coast you have to build a sensibility a way forward for the artists to lead culture. And the politics is in that, to make an event that goes one year after another after another year that insinuates itself into all public and private spaces that makes people or helps people see that art is not a thing to be scared of, is not a thing to take money away from, it’s a thing that actually everybody needs that the arts is actually a pathway to much better society, and that's the politics of that project. Thanks very much for listening. Cheers. 

SV: Thank you David, thank you so much. Charlene is the next speaker. Charlene, we don’t need a big introduction we have been we know her since yesterday, so Charlene. Just to go back to David I forgot to introduce him, he’s also the federal minister for empathy in Australia. So from his talk I think he’s someone who snatches the politics away from the politicians and gives it to people.

CR: Thank you Sankar. I’ve written a paper so I’m just going to read it because otherwise I don’t think I’ll make any sense. So I want to propose that dramaturgs need to be good listeners if not compulsive ones. That a large part of what dramaturgs do, particularly in interdisciplinary and intercultural work is skilled listening. And that this is political work that affects the way an artwork is heeded and needed. Listening is generally underrated and not enough attention is given to being a good listener because it is overpowered by watching. We’ve become an intensely visual-oriented species and our hearing capacities are impaired making us overtly reliant on consuming what we see outside us but less reflective of what pervades comes inside us and thus occupies us the way sound does. We can only listen to what we allow in, listening takes time as it does not happen in an instant and sonic text unlike the visual is always ephemeral so to listen is to be intensely present and in Jean Luc Nancy terms on the edge of meaning. Because it means one has to increase attention to what constitutes resonance and that can never be fully captured. To listen is to unitask not multitask you may watch several screens at once but can you listen to several scores simultaneously? I think not. As dramaturgs who work with the interstitial spaces navigate between things we have to listen acutely, openly and receptively. Nancy the French philosopher who has written on listening, uses the word à l'écoute rather than entendre as the title of his book listening where he critiques listening that is task oriented solely to words determining what is signified. This in relation to listening to music in a specified and rigid manner but also pertains to listening as a whole in which being receptive to sound is valued above decoding sound. This listening is sensitive to the returns or referrals in French rendre of meaning that are in constant movement. Sound, like meaning is acknowledged as dependent on a range of references that get sent out only to return through other referrals. Here meaning is not fixed but contingent and sound is in movement across different materials not frozen in time and space. Listening is thus about the sensory qualities that are available to be heard and the relationship that ensues between listener and the world. Nancy calls for a resonant subject whose capacity to listen enables being affected by the object of listening and thus the resonance occurs in relation to both object and subject. So listening is not about zooming in on a particular interpretation but perhaps zooming out to feel the vibration and then perhaps zooming between and around. The dramaturg who is a resonant subject particularly in interdisciplinary intercultural work listens with openness and receptivity which are his words not simply seeking to decode what is there or determine meaning through signifiers. This means allowing for the returns and referrals of meaning to circulate and then discerning questions, ideas, vocabularies, texts that emerge for dialogue. The listening also attends to relationships between listener and text as multiple varied and an ongoing movement and it takes on resonance across already established forms of meaning as well as new forms that are first felt and sensed through an affective process and then possibly articulated later in dialogue. To think through this idea I draw on my experience as dramaturg in a project called “Both Sides Now”. This is an interdisciplinary immersive arts project that deals with issues of death and dying locates itself in the community in public spaces. Currently it’s just going into it’s third phase. It began in 2013 at a hospital dedicated to geriatric medicine and then moved in 2014 to two public spaces in the community and the images that you see are from phase two of the project. And I draw on some quotes from a research project that I was involved in that examined the impact of “Both Sides Now” and I have collaborators here Hui Ling and Xue Mei who are involved in “Both Sides Now” phase three and have been part of this discussion. So I’m very glad you are here, you two. This project is geared towards encouraging conversations about end of life issues, which are particularly taboo in Chinese majority Singapore. Aware that Singapore’s society is aging rapidly several sectors including the state seek to address this issue while recognizing it’s highly sensitive. The arts have been identified as a language that's able to confront audiences with difficult topics through symbolic and imaginative modes of meaning-making thus opening up the discourse for dialogue that is otherwise shunned or kept behind closed doors. The aim is to increase awareness of options available for aging and terminal care as well as open up ways to have difficult conversations that surround this. In “Both Sides Now” therefore relationality among the materials used and relationships with audience are crucial. Although targeted primarily at the elderly it’s meant to address the whole community and all age groups are welcome to participate. Each portal is meant to generate a space where audiences are prodded to visit their views on end of life and consider options for change. Volunteer guides are present throughout to help audiences navigate and these guides listen and they respond to what audiences need help with so that those who are not familiar with the languages or processes used don’t feel alienated. So drawing on the etymology of the word audience, which has its roots in the notion of hearing and listening audio we want to think about listening that exceeds deciphering to understand but which is focused on sensing resonance and being receptive to the sonority of meaning in these interstitial spaces and why it’s crucial for this kind of work to resonate. It cannot just be about decoding and deciphering, it must include sensing and feeling. Listening for what I call between sounds, the tones and tempers that are produced by artists, stakeholders audiences spaces disciplines and cultures. Talking to each other and finding ways to negotiate their differences within a shared space. Dramaturging the inter- then refers not just to what lies between betwixt and among but is about being in the midst of different voices languages texts entities. It makes one aware that certain modes of meaning-making do not produce overt text that can be immediately qualified and identified they need to be listened for and heard with a view to affecting the dialogue which follows. Listening in the midst of all this is not always clearly sorted out or exact. In fact it is itself in a state of return and referral. This between sounds are not always easy to score there are often a mixture of ways in which sound or meaning is carried. There are in between things that never fully fit a category or label they require open ears to acknowledge their presence and imaginative approaches towards giving them space. They require fluid and inventive vocabularies that can accommodate the need to articulate these ideas or meanings outside the rules of language that perhaps already prevail. Now dramaturgs and writers and dramaturging often allude to notions of watching or spectating but less is said about the work of listening. Marianne Van Kerkohven has asserted that one of the tasks of the dramaturg is to be first, spectator, whose watching provides useful perspectives and questions about the work. In the 1980s, Marco De Marinis writes about the dramaturgy of the spectator, and more recently Katia Arfara writes about a new dramaturgy of the spectator. John Keefe proposes a spectatorial dramaturgy and so on. And maybe this emphasis on the spectator is in part due to Ranciere’s notion of the emancipated spectator. Peter Boenisch writes about a reflexive dramaturgy that draws in the idea of the spectator viewing without completion. He makes reference to Zizek’s notion of the parallax or Mobius strip as an unending line that twists and turns on itself. I think this is a movement towards listening for the between sounds that I’m talking about. Where the line is continually turning and returning without providing an endpoint. In projects like “Both Sides Now” where the audience is crucial and there is a dialogical aesthetic to use Grant Kester’s terms, the incompletion creates an open space for new returns and referrals that depend on audience participation and intervention. So in preparing for a three-year proposal for the third phase of “Both Sides Now” which has just begun, artistic director Kok Heng Leun articulated the need to develop what he called a listening aesthetic for the project. In Heng Leun’s view the city has become “focused on being alive such that we hide everything that may suggest the opposite. Thus a city that does not make space for one to think about and accept dying is not a city that is humanised”. It has become tone deaf if not completely deaf to the sounds of ends of life. The dialogue that begins with the self through the artwork is then a dialogue that hopefully can extend to others including those who seem distant and disinterested. But for dialogue to work there must be listening, for listening to occur we must make space. Heng Leun explained the listening aesthetic as an approach to art making particularly in relation to community and the topic of mortality that is consciously attentive to giving an audience time and space for pause, the kind that initiates reflection and review in order to consider change. Heng Leun draws on the philosopher geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s idea of space and placemaking in which pause is pregnant with possibility and not stagnation or delay. So a listening aesthetic attempts to produce pause that leads to dialogue. It’s not meant to be a silencing but a voicing. A listening that creates meaningful articulation rather than repeated statements that are indifferent to what resonates within. A listening that hopefully produces a resonant subject. So I’m using this paper to listen for what needs to be done to cultivate a listening dramaturgy for a listening aesthetic because I’m still the dramaturg. I want to consider how listening dramaturg or if I may [57:41 apendenga] could enrich the process. How this is a politics of making space for a slowed down process and how this contests a way of working that is not just rushed very often but constantly seeking the easiest solution. To allow a resonance to speak is to wait for it to make sense, to feel for how it vibrates. It is to allocate resources to the complexities that manifest in complex between sounds, which are usually ignored, as they demand more effort. So I want to suggest that the project demands a listening dramaturg in three main capacities and none of these have priority but need to be listened to in dialogue. Listening to the artists and creative producers, listening to the space and context, listening to audiences and stakeholders. In creative team meetings where artists share their ideas concerns anxieties aspirations and creative producers respond and articulate what stakeholders community partners audiences expect or need I find myself allocated the role of listener. Most of the time I am silent and as Geoffrey Proehl has observed, the dramaturg must learn the discipline of silences. This is not a passive position but one in which the role is to elicit or provide a ear or lend an ear to what transpires so that dialogue occurs with a listener in place. For Proehl the value of the dramaturg is to provide “a living presence that encourages everyone to attend more carefully to what is ever present but often under examined, the inner workings of a play.” So in “Both Sides Now” the inner workings of the project are very hard to pin down. So the work is not based on a single text or idea, there could be a working frame or theme but the portals are varied and developed by different artists. So the inner workings are not some kind of essentialised meaning. They are more like a network of associations in a dissemblage and if we think actor-network theory and I won’t go into it but for those of you whomake the reference, certain principles prevail such as in actor network theory no group only group formation here, no product only product formation. Objects too have agency objects too have presence. Matters of fact versus matters of concern, matters of taste versus matters of experience and so on. Decisions are made through a collaborative process, the collaborative listening in which everyone involved needs to feel part of a listening presence. Peter Szendy in his book Listen: A History of Our Ears suggests that deep listening draws a listening presence from others as it executes a role that then produces a listening response. So if my role as a listener is in part to get others to develop their listening presence, then perhaps we all become more able to hear the between sounds the networks the associations which are crucial to how we receive and respond to the needs of the project, particularly in relation to issues of death and dying, where silence is often very potent and bursting with the unspeakable or inexplicable and where listening is crucial to comfort in consolation. In a recent discussion for phase three Heng Leun proposed the idea of a school for end of life in which learning across occurs across multiple disciplines and where the line between teacher and learner is fluid. Listening for what this idea could create is part of my work. I need to resonate with these ideas, listen to how they are vibrating in the room and across multiple voices. I need to feed off the sonority to prod another layer of possibility – how is a school a space of learning as well as resistance? What are the hard walls of a curriculum that curtail rather than open up discovery? How could we take risks in schools when they are so geared towards a success? Is death and dying a failure that schooling avoids? Perhaps school for end of life is too authority-driven a frame in a context like Singapore where school rules are held dearly and formal education remains a very high priority. Maybe we need to find another word for school to open it up to more interaction, less assessment. Singapore schools are noted for high stakes examination pressures. What if we think about it as playground or think tank? Would it make a difference? If so what sort of difference? This for me is listening to the space, which is not just the site but the context. We need to listen to the calls that are being made for end of life issues to be heard. Recent stories in the news including a documentary in which a journalist checks into a hospice to learn about palliative care and aging need to figure in our listening. There are sensitivities, proclivities but more importantly there are fears and deep disappointments that mark the way the space creates its voice. In relation to death and dying much that is unsaid needs to be heard in a deep listening that seeks to hear the weeping and grieving is needed. A listening that recognizes why certain vibrations remain entrenched like cultural beliefs, religious practices, social norms, vibrations that impact the referrals and returns of meaning when an engaged arts project is proposed and produced for a particular public. There are huge differences between how Malay Muslims, Hindu Christians, Chinese Christians, and Taoist Chinese deal with death. Across age groups and linguistic profiles, the sounds of end of life are played in multiple keys using very different tuning systems. The space is both the public sphere and the private self and whether the aim is to work to wards a relational, reflective or spectatorial dramaturgy for the project we have to first listen to how the spaces sound in its grievances and then respond. We cannot just decide on a few interpretations of meaning or preferred significations that make sense and then decide what to do. So what does it mean to let the resonances be admitted into our sensing capacity and then work from there? To start I think it begins to my taking myself out of my comfort zones to be in other spaces, to be elsewhere and thus become a resonant subject. Particularly for audiences, listening to audiences and getting audiences to listen in response may be the most important aspect of this work. To generate an environment of pause as Heng Leun suggests, that is also receptive to the vibrations and sounds that enable critical reflection within the space and then taking an audience outside its norm of comfort zone. The politics is that the pause is a prodding space that leads to action and reflection. The pause is a potentiality that may lead to awareness and agency and then possibly political action. As dramaturg I need to remind the project, and myself, that what audiences are likely to hear, the resonances they may feel, rely on a combination of elements that create the tone and temper which are an assemblage that we must listen to if we are to create work that is valuable for this purpose. Each part of the project is a referral or return of meaning that connects and creates a larger sound. Listening for the harmonics that are created is as critical as reading and hearing the score. This is not unusual for dramaturgs involved in interdisciplinary and intercultural work where the dramaturgy is to be found in between things. There are multiple directions from which texts emerge and sounds are produced. The dramaturg must choose carefully what to highlight, what to notice, what to dig up, what to leave. A dramaturgy of process and relationality, a dramaturgy on shifting ground, rather than one that is unitary and seeking to be solidified, dialogical, open seeking resonance among the many elements and participants what [49:46 Meelans Varda] might term an interactive dramaturgy rather than a one-way dramaturgy, what Peter Boenisch might term a relational dramaturgy which the relations matter more than the materials and the audience takes responsibility as acting agents. In Eugenio Barba terms this might be called a dramaturgy of changing states in which “the entirety of what we show manages to evoke something totally different similar to a when a song develops another sound line through the harmonics”. For now I’ll call this a listening dramaturgy and thank you for listening.

SV: Thank you so much Charlene, thank you. The last speaker of today is Ken Takiguchi and from listening I hope we can go into language translation, transliteration which is an area which Ken deals with. Ken 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 National University of Singapore, specialising in theatre translations, intercultural theatre and cultural policy. As a theatre academic Ken was an assistant convenor of the conference titled “Unfinished Business Krishen Jit’s performance practice and contemporary Malaysian theatre”, held in Kuala Lumpur in January 2015. He convened the symposium on Malaysian theatre for Japan association for Malaysian Studies in December 2015. Ken is also the deputy director and translation editor for an online archive project called the Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive. Ken, a Japanese citizen has been living in Southeast Asia for the last two decades and he’s just back. Thank you, Ken.

KT: Thank you, thank you Sankar. Ladies and Gentlemen now we are the very last paper for today, so just one more listening. I’m sorry that I didn’t update my profile I’m not with National University of Singapore anymore, but anyway, so I would like to start by remembering last meeting in Singapore back in April 2016. It was a very good opportunity to me to go back to very basic questions on my engagement in theatre in a very fundamental way but at the same time I felt extremely nervous and also very somehow uncomfortable to sit with my colleagues who called themselves dramaturgs. The reason for my anxiety was pretty simple because I was not trained as a dramaturg and very frankly I never hoped to call myself dramaturg. So my practical involvement in theatre was basically limited in the so-called intercultural theatre and particularly collaborations between Southeast Asia and Japan. As I will discuss later, my role in each production had a great diversity actually so let me talk about the very beginning. In 2016, soon after I moved to Singapore from Kuala Lumpur, I was invited by a local theatre company by the name of The Necessary Stage or TNS as a script translator of their production titled Mobile. It was a collaboration of the artists from four Asian countries namely Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Japan. I happened to know most of them through another intercultural project initiated by Kentaro Matsui and actually through the project he mentioned this morning the Hotel Grand Asia so I had the opportunity to observe the entire process of creation so that through that process I had the privilege to know most of the other artists participating in this Mobile as well. So during the rehearsals of course I had a lot of chances to talk with these artists as well as the artistic director of The Necessary Stage, Alvin Tan and its legendary playwright Haresh Sharma. Mobile was first staged in Kuala Lumpur in 2006 and it toured to Tokyo to Setagaya Pubic Theatre in 2007. Mobile was a story about the migrant workers who moved beyond national borders. I was particularly interested in the gaps, the cultural gaps, the [00:44:33 inaudible] gaps and the communication gaps among the characters from different cultures. As a Japanese who moved to Southeast Asia I wish to explore the story that deals with these kinds of gaps. So I continued the discussion with Alvin and Haresh and it resulted in Mobile 2: Flat Cities, which was staged in 2013. It was also a story of people who became mobile across national borders, but they faced very specific gaps because of historical and cultural baggage each character bears. So these gaps were actually the ones I found in my own experience living in Malaysia and Singapore for nearly two decades. In the creative process of Mobile 2 the scope of my role was very extensive including research, translation, and even I did some negotiation with Japanese counterparts. So I did some of the producer’s role as well But all of them helped me to clarify my idea on the gaps I had been sensing and I also found more and more gaps I had never recognised. So indeed for me the Mobile 2 was about finding and filing gaps. What was striking for me in the creative process was that what I did in the rehearsal room of this production was also filling gaps. During the entire creative process I found many different gaps, very very different kinds of gaps among the members of the creative team and they are artists from Singapore and Japan and from very different age groups. So I kept filling these gaps all through the rehearsal process. I would like to discuss how and what I did in detail later but it was really about filling the gaps in many different levels. When the publicity started, the TNS was wondering what title should be given to me. Eventually they came up with this promotional flyer and yes, dramaturg, and it was Haresh Sharma who said, “Okay, Ken’s dramaturg.” My response was “Am I?” But yes, my name was credited as dramaturg. I suspect that, and it was the first time for TNS to have dramaturg on their production. Actually they had many many artists who played the dramaturg’s role in their creative process but probably they have no definition, company’s definition of dramaturg, so when it comes to this situation it is very very messy, you know I played very messy role so that maybe the company gave me this undefined title to describe too. Anyway they need to put some title upon my name so that it came with this title of dramaturg. But later on to be fair, the TNS continues to have dramaturgs with more specific scope of work I think. And Charlene Rajendran actually is working as a dramaturg of the company and with very different capacity I did in Mobile 2. So that's why in the title of this presentation I called myself I’m a deceptive dramaturg. However what was striking for me, so that's why I was pretty nervous to attend the first edition of the ADN meeting last year but what was striking for me was that at the very beginning of the three day session, we had group meetings. In the group I participated, somebody, I believe it was [luhani 39:37], pardon me if it’s not you, stated that she has been filling gaps among the creative team. Regardless of the tile she has she would continue filling the gaps. So it gave me a huge relief and yes I do believe that there are gaps to fill and I will continue to fill these gaps regardless of the title given to me. I do wish that this kind of work should be recognised as a part of the creation that's why I shamelessly came up to the second edition talking about filling the gaps. For me the gap-filling is a very mediative act. In the rehearsal room of an intercultural theatre, the mediation between different cultures is the key to fill the gaps. The culture mediation would be done in very very different and various ways and responding to the development in the creative process so they are very unpredictable and also probably not very theorisable. I nevertheless would like to share some of my practice of culture mediation with some categorisation hoping this might lead to more consolidated understanding of the culture mediation in this presentation. The first mediation I would like to mention is about the very basic idea of theatre making and collaboration. I encountered this issue when I co-produced a Malaysia-Japan collaboration titled Spring in Kuala Lumpur that I co-produced this with Marion D’ Cruz sitting over there. It happened in 2003, and it was directed by Japanese artist Hiroshi Koike. His company Pappa Tarahumara which was disbanded in 2012, this company came to Kuala Lumpur to perform in 2001, and after this first staging in KL they came back to the city very regularly and had a series of workshops. After several workshops, the participating artists from Kuala Lumpur and also Koike himself started to feel that they should create something, and it resulted in this particular production. Rehearsals took place in KL for one and a half months, so after about a week the Malaysian performers started to complain that it was not collaboration they wished. What they wanted was a process in which they could improvise by themselves and contribute to the collective creation. What Koike basically intended was to direct them. So even after a few workshops and accumulated shared experiences, their idea of collaboration was fundamentally different. I produced all of these workshops I was so ignorant and I didn’t notice this gap until the rehearsal took place. And then Marion intervened and mediate, and Marion told the participants, this may not be a collaboration you are familiar with and that you want to participate, but this is a great opportunity to be directed by a talented director. Let’s focus on the [inaudible 35:29]. So it was a very very bitter lesson for me and I learned that we cannot take anything for granted. The very basic concept of theatre-making can be very different between artists and cultures. So recently I have been involved in another intercultural collaboration between The Necessary Stage and the Japanese theatre company Hanchu-Yuei. This project started last year and is still ongoing. But during the first phase of the project I somehow started to notice that there could be a gap in the idea of collaboration between these two companies so I proposed to have a dedicated discussion about the whole idea of collaboration. What do you really want to mean by collaboration what do you want to achieve in this process? This project will be continued until next year if funding continues so that I will, I am sure that I will continue intervening and mediating these kind of gaps all throughout the process. The first mediation was probably from the point of view of a producer. But the second mediation I want to talk about is from the position of translator. So I called the rehearsal room of intercultural theatre, a heteroglossia, borrowing Mikhail Bakhtin’s words in my last year presentation. So I just copied this from last year’s presentation slide. Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia is a microcosm where people interpret others under themselves in a great diversity of idioms, with expanded communication and intercultural inference. According to Bakhtin the languages do not exclude each other but rather intersect with each other in many different ways in this heteroglossia, and I quoted this from the ethonography journal [32:56 the politician] from Bakhtin and he suggested that this whole concept of heteroglossia can be extended to the culture as a whole. But still I believe that the glossia, the word and the speech would continue to take the central position in our intercultural experience. So much so in the rehearsal room of intercultural theatre and translator will play the critical role to establish such a microcosm I think. So I am now working on a translation workshop at Kinosaki International Arts Centre in collaboration with Singaporean theatre company Checkpoint Theatre. This project aims to share the process of translator’s dramaturgical analysis with the director and performers and collectively translate Checkpoint Theatre’s joint artistic director Huzir Sulaiman’s play Cogito into Japanese. So we have the first phase at Kinosaki last June and now doing the second artist [inaudible 31:42] actually it is ongoing so I need to go back to Kinosaki after this. So this is from the June sessions and of course it is very cold now, I took this photo two days ago, we have a lot of snow in Kinosaki at the moment. So translator is a cultural mediator by nature. So transposing a text from one language into another inevitably require various treatments to let the sociocultural elements in the source text be absorbed in the target culture and language. However in this workshop completely different level of cultural mediation was required to realise the collaborative translation through the rehearsal process. So what we are doing basically is that I provide a very basic word to word kind of translation to the Japanese performers and director and we collaboratively examine the line by line and we do the translation and we make a decision, the relationship and also in Japanese the level of politeness is a key to define the relationship between characters. We discussed and we rehearsed and we decide what level of politeness for example should be use in what particular conversation. So that kind of collective translation is ongoing in this project. During the first phase the directors, performers and myself did a very very close examination of the text, and the playwright Huzir Sulaiman and another dramaturg Claire Wong who’s not here actually well they’re two and they responded to the questions the Japanese team asked. We continued this examination for more than two weeks and what was interesting for me was that the direct question and answer between Huzir and Japanese performers sometimes didn’t work very well. In some occasions actors were even more confused by Huzir’s response. And Huzir was even more confused by what we are trying to do in Japanese. So I had to intervene and mediate what we are doing and provide the information to fill the gap between Huzir, Singapore team and the Japanese team. So several types of information was given. The first was my own observation of Singapore’s society as a culture, from the point of view of a foreigner who stayed in the country long enough to make a comment with some degree of confidence. This kind of information helped the Japanese to decide how much treatment was needed in order to make one particular line to be comprehensible and absorbable in Japanese society for the Japanese audience. Also second was the information from Huzir himself and his writings. So I located Cogito in his [28:10 productionography], and pointed out the specific characteristics in the language used. So we could decide what kind of language we should use in the Japanese translation of this particular script. So now this project is ongoing and in this phase the second phase which is currently going on, we are working more on the finetuning of Japanese text. So performers are now experimenting different kind of expressions as they speak lines in the rehearsals and they are now experimenting different sets of relationship and how the expressions levels of politeness or the language can be changed as the relationship among the characters changes in the rehearsals. So I am expecting quite different kind of mediation should be needed in the next couple of weeks. The third kind of mediation happened through researches. So in the creative process of Mobile 2 I mentioned that I played multiple roles but I would say contacting another a kind of academic research was very key to fill the two major gaps. The first gap was in the perception of Japanese Occupation of Singapore among the participants. So several scenes of the play were set during that period as a background of the current events and resonated through the story of the interracial family of Japanese husband and Malaysian wife living in contemporary Kuala Lumpur. So I conducted some historical and sociological researches on the perceptions of the war in Japan and Singapore and which was basically contributed for the very basic conceptualisation of the project at the very beginning, very early period of the project. And of course my research and the information that I provided was even further explored by all members of the creative team through the discussions via Facebook chat in this manner. And of course every single post was translated into Japanese or into English and the number of the posts on this totalled around 2000 in the entire process. So it was somehow like writing a research paper of the area studies. It was actually the most familiar thing for me because my degree is from Japanese Studies. So I provided various references from primary and secondary sources and my own readings of them. Some of the participating artists have very different or rather opposite readings of them and it was a starting point for our discussion. Even dealing with the second gap however I stepped away and basically played a role of facilitator of the discussion. This gap was about the perception on the mode of communication. There were clear gaps between generations rather than the nationalities. The project involved the artists in two distinctively different generations the younger members were in their early to mid 20s both from Japan and Singapore and had a lot in common in terms of their usage of text message and SNSes in communicating with each other, whereas the older generation including myself were in 40s and 50s and we had a very different mode of communicating, the usage of this medium in communication. I did some primary research on this topic and posted several articles both in Japanese and English. However I soon realised that our conversation on Facebook itself is a very interesting primary source of information to discuss further. So on the Facebook chat I often referred back to our own posts and tried to develop our discussion from that past postings. My position was still a kind of researcher but I stopped far before producing my own research paper. So these three models of cultural mediation intervention were not of course exhaustive, there must be more and more ways of mediating between cultures but even among these three areas they are not exclusive to each other. Rather they were often entangled and I took several positions at the same time. What I wish to underline is that the relationship with the collaborating artists really matters when you find your position in the creative process. In many cases gaps were to be found only in the process and if your collaborators are flexible enough to let you go beyond the role originally expected you can enjoy the liberty to fill the gaps as you find them. Let me conclude with an example of that. When I was invited to the Singapore theatre company Wild Rice production Hotel in 2015. My original role was a script translator and I was. So I did the translation. The production had several scenes in Japanese and after finishing my first draft of the translation, of the script by Alfian Sa’at I met him and made some suggestions based on the research I did for my translation. So it was a very very last minute intervention. Very last minute actually. But Alfian was open to accept them, accommodate them. And I started as a translator then a researcher and my cultural mediation eventually influenced the script. So securing such openness among the collaborators in the creative process would expand the possibility of a gap filling through the cultural mediation. And I hope our discussion at ADN would be helpful recognising such a role and lead to a bigger possibility of such mediation in the creative process. Thank you. 

SV: Thank you so much Ken Takiguchi-san. Now may I invite Charlene, David and Ness to come and take a seat so that we have the panel and we open the floor for Q&A. And we also have Tomoko-san who will translate for us whoever who wants a translation. You put up your hand and you can get Tomoko-san’s help.

Wow, that was a quite a big sort of bombardment for me sitting here starting with Ness’s work and then going into widening the field of artistic interventions and then creating the space for listening and filling up the gaps. It’s quite a lot of material here and thoughts and ideas that we can discuss develop, deepen. 

Questions? No questions? Ha ha.

Audience member: I think I kind of heard from the first three panellists about the dramaturgy as political, as being political. I’ve heard from the three panellists about dramaturgy as being political maybe can you talk more about that, don’t know. 

CR: Ness?

DP: I suppose the, I mean for me the dramaturgy it sort of exist in another orientation to it is a thing sort of as something is being something is political. I am not sure that dramaturgy itself is political. But how you engage with dramaturgy can be political. So in my kind of view of the world itself has a dramaturgy so the engagement with it the politics actually goes around it. The operating system if you like may and may not be political. But for me I think of it as being politically neutral and that the way in which the system operates by people that is when it becomes political and you need to intervene. This morning I was listening to a conversation and we were talking about the state you know can you intervene in the state and the kind of can you apply this idea of dramaturgy to intervening in the state. I think you can and in some ways it is one of the things that I’m very interested in doing in terms of language. Because one of the things that I think is really problematic for us wherever we are in the world at the moment is that neoliberalism has basically carved language into such spaces that we actually can’t move. So where do you find or how do you develop a language that is much more fluid that allows progressive thinking and progressive action. Which is one of the reasons why I’m interested in introducing into the vernacular, words that come from contemporary arts practice which is of it’s very nature and of necessity progressive. So I like to think of the idea of being able to infect the dramaturgy of government, to infect the dramaturgy of society to kind of insinuate into that you know virally a series of ideas that actually that really can transform the current dramaturgy of neoliberalism that really controls and determines a lot of the kind of political consequences. I’d like to find I actually believe that it’s possible to be able to insert into that space something that comes out of the arts and really can kind of transform without necessarily understanding that it is being transformed. And that's what I’m very interested in because I think there’s great store in invisibility and actually this process of insinuating into a system.

SV: Just a thought after I listened to your questions, Ken’s work is also when I listen to him speaking it’s also very political in a way. Because usually from my experience the intercultural practices are always the modes are predetermined and usually determined by these institutions and organisations which have the agency to facilitate these cultural exchanges and processes and in that sometimes there is an absolute insensitivity towards the personal connections and associations that artists would make. And that is where I think Ken-san steps in to fill up the gaps and sort of resist this politics of cultural practice. 

KT: Thank you Sankar. Ya, you have said what I have to say. But yes indeed, because these intercultural practices usually costs a lot. They are very prone for the intervention by the government to the funding. This happens, and this kind of politics always comes in. And if it happens our relationship among the collaborating artists really affected. For example, the Mobile, four-country production: Singapore, Japan, Thailand and the Philippines. It was initiated, this whole project was initiated using the Japanese funding and it was all funded by Singapore government National Arts Council. Are we appropriating the artists from Thailand and the Philippines? This is a big question during the process. And we really have to fill this gap as well, thank you. 

CR: Sorry to disagree. I don’t think anything is politically neutral. There is no such thing. And if dramaturgy is the act of questioning and intervention and interruption and mediation, it is constantly, highly political.

DP: Ya, when those words came out of my mouth I was thinking there’s a load of untruth there. Because of course when you make a work the relations between people and the content and the kind of the manning of ideas and the practice are deeply political, that's true. I guess what I’m interested in I suppose is I’m interested in kind of appreciating and using the word dramaturgy within the artistic context absolutely and I understand that that’s the case. I’m very interested in actually amplifying it so it has a position elsewhere. So that it can be used in a way that's actually is very progressive and sits outside the artistic context. So you are absolutely correct it’s impossible for it to be politically neural particularly in the artistic context. What I’m interested in though is how you elevate it as a sort of idea and concept and you insert it into a space like a little time bomb that can actually start to pulse inside there and change the dynamics of it. Because what you are actually doing is trying to import or export into that space a whole way of thinking about how you operate which is contrary to the way in which things operate currently.

CR: Which is even more political. Because that’s really subversive.  And art should be subversive. 

DP: Yes, absolutely I’m talking about it in terms of the word itself and to take it out of that context and how you apply it in that context. And it is absolutely subversive. I guess what I’m trying to do is to give it as much value as possible. So if you insert it into that kind of larger civic space and it is characterised as political, it will almost immediately lose its value. And that's what I really really would like, because I think that the biggest for me, dramaturgy is actually a prism through which to discover and talk about so many things that allows us a greater space than what is currently available to us in civic discourse. 

Robin Loon: My name is Robin I’m from Centre 42. I’ve a question for Ken, I’m interested in the practice of the dramaturg and what the dramaturg did in the intervention. And Alfian since you are here and since you’re mentioned, it’s very rare that we have the opportunity where the dramaturg and the person that upon which was intervened was here. You know there’s this talk about it being very last minute and really kind of like parachuting somebody in can you tell, we’ve heard from Ken the dramaturgy and the mediation, would you kind of tell us what it was like responding to that dramaturgy, that dramaturg’s intervention. 

Alfian Sa’at: Ya so Ken did say his entry or designation and the work was very last minute, but in truth actually the whole work is very last minute. So he did fit perfectly into the rhythm of how we were creating this work, there were lots of drafts that we were doing, right it was a festival commission. But I guess for me, as a theatremaker when I first write it I just thought what I needed was a translator. It was only later on when I realised hey I can’t just translate these lines without actually having a sense of the cultural import of these things and that’s what I think Ken brought to the table. So later the suggestions so I’ll give you an example there’s a story there between Japanese soldier and a comfort woman he saved and they have a child and then later on that soldier was scolded by his superior who talks about you know what do you think you are doing you are just a soldier, you know why do you have a child and a wife? So the line was just like that. So interestingly Ken stepped in and said oh there’s this interesting phrase during the wartime about the Japanese soldiers as being children of the emperor for example and I thought that was eh a connection there between the child and the mother so that's a concrete example of the kind of benefits Ken brought to the production which I appreciated very deeply. It was really as you said not just filling in gaps but also I think giving us all these layers and really enriching the piece. 

Robin Loon: The script, you responded to him or did you work collaboratively. 

Alfian Sa’at: I think a lot of the script was initially written in English and then Ken just translated it. And he was very he didn’t want to interfere at the beginning I think, but slowly as we discussed more and more I could feel that there was stuff he wanted to add to my regret though I’m not sure whether we credited him as a dramaturg, [laughter] in the programme, because everything was last minute. So we might not have sent it in time for the publishers to put in his name but he definitely was, very helpful to us.

Robin Loon: Thank you Alfian I just wanted to also add on to that that actually a lot of the times and this is the conflict of being a dramaturg, your work should be invisible. And it should be underlying, underscoring but yet it has a certain level of contribution to it. So how do we make that particular balance because ultimately you know you are just one person that is there giving… no Charlene you disagree? 

CR: I think you have to clarify invisible to whom. Because I think it’s very present and I like to think my work is very present and visible to the artist that I am working with. Okay Xue Mei is nodding so it’s okay. 

RL: But to the public I think…

CR: But yeah to the public that’s fine it’s invisible that’s not a problem, but I think…

Robin Loon: Because you won’t know whose decision it was, because you know.

CR: For me the visibility invisibility is not the question actually. Because in collaborative work which is the kind of work I’ve been involved with, you can’t claim ownership in those ways anyway and even in some instances like [etanjelay 05:03] and ghost writer Haresh Sharma is credited as writer which is the way The Necessary Stage deals with those things he is the writer, but that writing process devising process means writing has a different meaning. It’s not that he’s not bringing a writer intelligence into it but he’s not sitting in a room writing. So the writing is the result of a certain process even the directing and you know a range of other things, what more in something like Both Sides Now where an artist might bring an idea to the table but by the time it emerges in the public, it’s something else very often. Very rarely has it remained that idea and continued as it was, so visibility invisibility I really don’t think is the question in this kind of work, unless of course you have that whole issue with I think it’s Rent, where there was a big controversy, the dramaturg wanted to claim rights because there was money made and then of course your visibility means money, then it’s different. And you kind of feel okay, something else is going on here, Natalie’s hand has come up and that’s visible. Over to you. 

Natalie Hennedige: I feel strongly that it has to be visible. And even if we don’t and I may have made, and I understand as a theatre company this thing where you make you know things have to go out and get published you know you have to print something out and so I really appreciate what Alfian said. But we have to struggle to find how we credit the people that are involved that somehow breathe something, even if it’s a difficult thing even if we don't have the immediate word. It’s so easy to say someone is a director or a writer or set designer, it’s easy, a prop maker. So we have to find it I think and I don’t think personally that it should be, no one should be invisible. 

Alfian Sa’at: Just to be clear we credited Ken as a translator. We just didn’t put dramaturg.

CR: I want to clarify before Merryn clarifies, that I don’t think I’m invisible. I really don’t think I’m invisible but I think the work that I do being visible is something that that's what I agree with Robin, it can’t be pinned down as a specific thing in my Instance. In Ken’s example it can in certain examples like Alfina has pointed out a certain example and maybe if we trace conversations that we’ve had Heng Leun might say Charlene said this and then this happen and then this but then Charlene said this in the context of so many other peoples saying so many other things that I agree with you it is a difficult thing to quantify we should struggle what it means to acknowledge creative work in any form and guise that I agree with. I’m not so hot on this idea that it has to be visible but I am visible.

Merryn: Basically I just wanted to add just a little bit towards what Natalie was saying, ya I think of course it’s very difficult to absolutely quantify and identify what this nugget you did this nugget you did in that sense you know it all melds into the final process and product. But I think it is very important to identify the creators in somewhere on the credit whatever one wants to call it in as much as we are trying to make honest work, that has integrity and that is transparency because in the world of dance for example there are a lot of choreographers who are armchair choreographers and they sit there, myself included and go and a bunch of good dancers or performers and go okay can you show me a jump can you this jump and you do this and you do this and you do this. The work is entirely choreographed by the dancers and the billing comes up choreography Marion de Cruz that is so so wrong. And it’s happening all the time in the world of dance.

SV: We are running really short of time, we have gone past the allowed time, so thank you thank you Ken thank you David thank you Charlene thank you Ness for this very lively lively presentation thank you audience thank you so much for your active participation in this thank you so much.