We’re coming to the end of what’s been quite a breathless year. I’m currently working on writing up my PhD dissertation (working title: The Intimate Critic: Contemporary performance criticism in the Southeast Asian archipelago) and will be taking on fewer projects in the final quarter and the year ahead as I focus on the finish line.
Here are some projects I’ve been working on:
The Critical Ecologies Working Group supported by performance incubation space Centre 42 (Singapore). This six-month transnational residency for 12 critics and practitioners from across archipelagic Southeast Asia formally concluded in September 2021, but we’re continuing to meet and collaborate with each other on an informal basis. Here’s a more extended introduction to the group and how we’ve been spending our time together. We’ve also documented our critical influences and inspirations here, as well as a little round-robin Q&A we did as a group. The working group began as a space to map ecologies and vocabularies of critique in the region, and theorise criticism from Southeast Asia a collaborative way. We paid attention to care ethics and care studies as applied to performance criticism, how critics are situated or embedded within a specific community or context, as well as trans-local exchanges between sites – which would allow us to think about what is specific to local sites or micro-contexts.
Took part in several public conferences, including the groundbreaking Doing Theory in Southeast Asia (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) and Arrhythmia: Performance Pedagogy and Practice (LASALLE College of the Arts). My presentations at these conference all revolve around my perennial interests in performance criticism, care work and performance pedagogies.
I also facilitated a few panels, such as Critics Live at the Singapore International Festival of Arts, responding to Nine Years Theatre and SITI Company’s Three Sisters (transcript and recording here); another ArtsEquator-organised panel on “Critical Writing Training: Models, Methods and Pitfalls” (summary and recording here); and the launch of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network’s Re/View Vol. 1 (which you can download and read here). Re/View is a series of three e-zines that offer insight into the work of the Network, excerpting, annotating and condensing the presentations and dialogues that have occurred at Network symposiums and labs since 2016.
Tactility Studies, for which I am dramaturg, continues in several forms! We were part of the 2021 Singapore International Festival of Arts with Tactility Studies: Hold to Reset, which unfolded in three parts: mini-workshops that invited audience members to hold space and care for their own bodies; durational live performances that paid attention to our collective bodies; and an experiential installation where anyone could sit and spend time with other human, object and plant bodies. I’ve written a short review of a previous Tactility Studies work, Pandemic Distances (Objectifs, October 2020) that will be published in Performance Research’s forthcoming issue “On Perception” (November 2021).
I’m part of the core project team working on “The Library of Care: A Digital Resource for the Arts (working title)”. The team comprises several of us from the newly set up Care & Intimacy Working Group at Centre 42 (Chong Gua Khee, Elizabeth Chan, Faye Lim, Teo Xiao Ting, Ang Kia Yee, Hoo Kuan Cien, Jaclyn Chong, and myself). This project emerged out of a desire to collect and gather together knowledges and experiences around the ‘whys’ and ‘how-tos’ of care and intimacy practices in Singapore’s arts context. We see this as a public resource that we want to continue developing over the next few years and are currently in the process of workshopping and gathering feedback from practitioners about this resource.
As an incoming member of Performance Studies international’s (PSi’s) Future Advisory Board (FAB), I supported and helped to organise their annual Summer School for postgraduates, artist-researchers and early-career academics titled “Attentions and Attunements”. We spent six weeks considering responsibility and response-ability to global crises and disciplinary concerns; relational ethics and cultural safety and care; procedures of listening and choreographies of attention; movements between reaction and activation; diverse localisms and power relations in and through performance studies. Some of our guest speakers included Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma (The Necessary Stage, Singapore) and Annie Jael Kwan (Asia Art Activism).
AcademiaSG’s Junior Scholar Seminar Series was a blast to organise, and I learnt so much from every single one of our early-career/doctoral presenters. You can watch recordings of their seminars here, ranging from food experiences for individuals at the end-of-life stage (Paul Victor Patinadan), domestic work and elderly care (Lynn Ng), and disability studies and inclusion in Singapore (Victor Zhuang). Applications are open for the next round of this series! Apply here.
I’m teaching part-time at the LASALLE College of the Arts, primarily supervising students and doing guest lectures for the BA (Hons) Arts Management programme, as well as the BA (Hons) Acting programme. Am looking forward to doing a lot more work with some really incredible and creative students.
I’m a newcomer to access work, and underwent training in Speech-to-Text Interpretation (STTI) conducted by the fantastic social enterprise Equal Dreams Singapore. It’s a truly well-organised and well-facilitated introduction to working with D/deaf and Hard of Hearing clients and communities, particularly in higher education contexts. It brings together both historical context about disability education and policymaking in Singapore, as well as really rigorous practical exercises and simulations. Perfect for anyone hoping to embark on access work or who want to incorporate access structures into their current workplaces or industries.
My friends, family and I helped to raise S$9,000 (roughly 11 million Myanmar kyat prior to currency devaluation) in mutual aid for various marginal communities in Myanmar. The funding has been disbursed to a variety of groups who most urgently needed it, including internally displaced persons and frontline healthcare workers, and we are deeply grateful to everyone who contributed. Do continue to contribute to the country here.
A teaser for the end of the year… and the year ahead:
As part of Dance Nucleus’ Element #10, I’m working with the brilliant artist, researcher and dramaturg Shawn Chua on a project titled “Ill-Disciplined: Research-Creation-Something”. Together with Chong Gua Khee and Deanna Dzulkifli, we will convene as a working group “to deconstruct, imagine and prototype new paradigms and infrastructures for knowledge-production, artistic practice and their contingent entanglements. We experiment by asking how might the context of research-creation-something be diffractively reconceptualised, and how art might be practiced in this altered discursive ecology.” We will be testing this out at the upcoming artist sharing platform SCOPE #12.
I’m giving a short guest lecture on performance criticism in Southeast Asia as part of the 32nd Singapore International Film Festival’s Youth Jury and Critics programme.
Keep an eye out for Centre 42’s Year in Review, their annual year-end gathering to reflect on issues, trends, concerns and hopes in the performing arts in Singapore. I’ll be facilitating a discussion related to care ethics and care work.
After a fair amount of mutual flirtation, I’m finally getting to work with the wonderful dance company P7:1SMA (say “prisma”) on an upcoming performance project that will unfurl sometime in the middle of next year :)