I began 2023 a broken person. My 10-year marriage had disintegrated, fairly dramatically, the year before. My PhD dissertation was nowhere near complete, apart from a single shaky chapter. I didn’t have any visible job prospects, and was growing increasingly nervous about entering the academic job market. This has been one of the most traumatic and transformative years of my life, and I am beyond grateful for the people who have loved me and supported me through it. The year has been marked by both recovery and rediscovery. My creative practice has become deeply intertwined with my personal ethos, and many of the projects I embarked on and relationships I’ve built over the past year have allowed me to construct a more intentional life and a more honest ethics of living that I hadn’t paid much attention to before or had wilfully ignored.
In March, while on a short residency with the dance group P7:1SMA, I had the chance to handle a batik tambal from the collection of docent and batik aficionado Hafiz Rashid. As Hafiz talked us through the various motifs in each piece of batik he laid out before us, a few of us began to wrap the cloths around ourselves, trying to render ourselves porous to the potency of each piece. Tambal means “to patch” or “to repair [something]”, and batik tambal is made specifically for the healing of the wearer. You must be broken before you can be remade, repaired, restored.
With P7:1SMA after a workshop exploring various types of batik. I have the batik tambal draped around my shoulders. (Photo courtesy of P7:1SMA)
I think of all the pieces and chapters of this year as parts of a living batik tambal that has put me back together. Here are key parts of a broader patchwork quilt of my life:
The Something-Something Working Group went on a brief residency to Yogyakarta in early February, where we were hosted by arts administrator Theodora Agni and curator Riksa Afiaty, formerly of the residency platform MARANTAU. We wanted to take stock of our how working group was evolving, including the shared language we wanted to use in describing the work that we do, and how we might continue that work beyond our initial explorations with implementing “The Hologram”, a discursive facilitation structure that draws from the work of artist and activist Cassie Thornton, who in turn was inspired by the volunteer-run “austerity clinics” that emerged in Greece in the wake of their economic and refugee crisis. We met up with several other collectives in Yogyakarta, whose ways of organising and practising we resonated with, but were most deeply inspired and nourished by our co-hosts Agni and Riksa, and how they both tended to our needs and trusted in our growth. You can read our collective reflections about the residency here.
I recently took up directorship of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network (ADN), a role I inherited from co-founders Dr Charlene Rajendran, Dr Lim How Ngean and Dr Robin Loon with a mix of excitement and trepidation. This initial year will mostly be about establishing and sustaining relationships, before we build towards a larger anchor event in 2025. For the past few months we’ve done a bit of a circuit around Southeast Asia to launch and promote the inaugural ADN book, with a panel at the Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting (BIPAM) in March together with three emerging Thai dramaturgs, as well as a more formal book launch at the Esplanade in August featuring all editors and contributors who worked on the text. We’ve also extended Centre 42’s in-house “Dramaturgy 101” workshop series to include and support Southeast Asian practitioners.
In April and May, I was invited to be an industry representative and external assessor for the Fine Art degree and diploma programmes at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), now part of the brand-new University of the Arts Singapore. It was a pleasure and a privilege to interact with the graduating cohorts and get a sense of the kinds of projects they were invested in, both personally and politically. What I didn’t realise was that this series of engagements would act as an informal audition. Through a miraculously timed job opening, I was hired as a Senior Lecturer in their School of Fine Art, and am currently co-developing their inaugural MFA Fine Art programme. Our first intake enrols in August 2024, and applications are open for potential candidates interested in reflecting on their practice and engaging in cross- and trans-disciplinary experiments in an environment that is both supportive and provocative. I’m still adjusting to the demands of full-time work and the kind of deep attention that teaching and pedagogy requires, but it has been rewarding to lean into a new multi-hyphenate identity that centres education and facilitation.
Perhaps the most significant conclusion to a chapter in my professional life this year was the submission of my PhD thesis in August. I will be defending my doctoral project in the first quarter of next year, but the moment I typed the final fullstop of my manuscript, I closed my laptop and cried. I embarked on the PhD in August 2018, and five years on it still feels surreal that this massive research project—which survived a pandemic, a military coup and the end of a marriage—came together in the way that it did. I have written this PhD through depressive episodes that rendered me almost catatonic, while sobbing in a cafe as sympathetic baristas slipped extra napkins onto the table together with my coffee, and as I transitioned from student life and treaded the deep waters of full-time institutional work. There are too many people to thank, but I am indebted to all the Southeast Asian critics who committed their time and conversations to this work, to all the artists who allowed me into their performance and rehearsal spaces, and to friends and family who held my heart. I presented an excerpt of my thesis as part of NTU’s Singapore Studies Research Cluster seminar series, which you can read about here.
With the close of the PhD chapter I’ve been slowly exploring new ways of practising the work that I do. I am currently collaborating with Singaporean theatre company Drama Box on their long-term Project 12, which considers the broader ecological and sociopolitical reverberations of Singapore’s exponential pursuit of growth and development, and how this unfurls within and against a lush, languid site that is considered one of the final bastions of “old kampung (village) life” in Singapore. Over the past few months, I have witnessed Ubin residents, whether long-time inhabitants or migrant workers, mark out their resource-sharing, mobilities and psychogeographies on and around the island space through guided facilitation and mapping processes by the Drama Box team headed by Kok Heng Leun. As writer-in-residence for the company, I’m looking forward to critically documenting other strands of this pilot project.
Finally, I’ve said goodbye to AcademiaSG, the independent collective of brilliant scholars who have fostered my intellectual and activist growth. I spent three years with them as assistant editor, where I helped co-organise their various webinars, in particular our Junior Scholar Seminar Series. But I’ve said hello to a new editorship—I’m now arts editor at independent media platform and weekly magazine Jom, where I both commission and edit arts writing about and from Singapore, and write their weekly arts blurbs. I’m really excited to shape the critical voice of the platform, which is very much an opportunity to put my doctoral work into practice. Do get in touch if you have any pitches for us.
I thought I’d end off this year’s round-up a little differently. Since the Yogyakarta residency, I’ve been asking artists about three key words or phrases they find themselves returning to repeatedly in this phase of their artistic life. A performer and facilitator told me recently that they’ve been considering “discernment”, “loneliness/aloneness”, and “practice”. These are the words I’ve been sitting with that I’d like to bring into the new year:
“Encounter”: How do we make acquaintance with the new? This could be a person, place, animal, situation, thing—what positions and dispositions do we take? As a writer (including my roles as journalist and critic), I relish the interview format and the textual afterlives it can take, because I get to structure (a) someone’s encounter with who I am, (b) with who they are, and (c) as a writer writing about them, how to introduce them to the world through the encounter of the page. I love asking (and being asked) questions that allow a person to discover or process something new or forgotten about themselves. I also love being able to offer an encounter with a performance or an artwork through the sensorium of writing. In all cases I hope my writing can be a space to make sense of an experience, or to make acquaintance between reader and subject.
“Hosting”: I like how hosting comes after the encounter. I’ve been starting to pay more attention to how I am hosted by others: whether by couples, by individuals, by performance experiences, or by institutions and organisations. Hosting is fascinating to observe in couples, particularly when one person’s invisible labour (anticipating, refilling, cleaning, coordinating, introducing, offering social lubrication) far exceeds the other’s—and this asymmetry tends to be gendered. I’ve also started to observe how I’ve been hosted by the different companies I’ve worked with throughout my life (onboarding processes, HR programming, mentorship, personal development). I enjoy hosting my students during their consults or conversations with me, and thinking about the ways in which they might feel held and listened to in that space.
“Abundance”: We cannot host from a space of scarcity. I don’t mean financial scarcity; one can have severe fiscal limitations and still offer room for others from a space of abundance. I spent so much of this year thinking about what it meant to furnish others with generosity as “the good host”, but I realise now that being a good guest also requires a similar degree of consideration. A host may attempt to anticipate everyone’s needs, but the good host also leaves the guest room to offer what they want to share, and adjusts to how their guests desire to be cared for. And the good guest arrives into that hospitality by recognising the resources of their host, what might be an imposition and what can be a pleasure, but also by allowing the self to receive and be revived by the abundance of the host environment. I like to think of being a host as making yourself a hospitable site for the growth of others.
For so long I’ve felt my internal landscapes denuded of life, shrunken and withered from the austerity of an emotional winter I wasn’t sure I could survive. I am still restoring that inner verdancy while learning how to think of “survival as a creative act”, as writer Suleika Jaouad puts it. I was walking through the sandy washes of Joshua Tree National Park several weeks ago, thinking about how shrubs shore up water in the deceptive barrenness of the desert, waiting for the conditions of a superbloom; or a determined spurt of green pushing through a scar in the limestone. To hold on to every flush of life, to store it within yourself, to bloom when the succour of love arrives. I wish for all of you to encounter the hospitality of abundance in the new year.