The Esplanade's Asian Theatremakers series

The Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay commissioned two essays from me recently as part of their Asian Theatremakers series.

The first looks at the work of the late Yukio Ninagawa, known for his stunning reinterpretations of the Western theatre canon with a strong Japanese sensibility, notably from Shakespeare and Ancient Greek tragedy.

Yukio Ninagawa. Image: Courtesy of Ninagawa Company (Japan)

The most recent essay tracks the artistic trajectory of Singaporean theatre company Nine Years Theatre and its co-founder, Nelson Chia.

Nelson Chia (far right) in Offending the Audience at the Esplanade's Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts in 2017. Image: Courtesy of the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay

MISSING: The City of Lost Things by Drama Box

“Welcome to The City of Lost Things.

You are now either on your way to the destination that you have in mind,
or wandering around not knowing where you can go.

There is no hurry.

Take a moment.
Look around.”

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Actress Karen Tan is coaxing me into making eye contact with the stranger (now friend? acquaintance?) sitting across from me in the Drama Box rehearsal studio. Or, at least, her voice is, piped in through the studio's speakers as a sort of omniscient narrator. I'm not sure if it's working. I stare at my hands, embarrassed, and glance up at my assigned partner, who is wearing the same sheepish smile as I am. Drama Box resident artist Han Xuemei's MISSING: The City of Lost Things begins with an invitation to surrender yourself to the production's main conceit. To be introspective, but open and willing to participate – and to keep skepticism at the door.

We're on a journey to reclaim a lost connection in our lives, a journey that begins from the moment a potential participant decides to text a phone number that will lead them to the ticketing portal for this experience. The City of Lost Things continues on trajectories of investigating urban alienation and interrogating public space that have surfaced in many of Drama Box's productions over the past decade, and looks at rediscovering the deeply personal in what can feel like a very impersonal city. The four-hour journey can be experienced in either English or Mandarin, with playwright Jean Tay contributing the text for the English sessions and practitioner Neo Hai Bin for the Mandarin ones, and a lush, industrial soundscape by Darren Ng.

The City of Lost Things grew out of a workshop Xuemei attended in Hong Kong in 2015, conducted by Ant Hampton (United Kingdom) and Christophe Meierhans (Switzerland). The duo and a group of participants came together to test out an 'automatic workshop' – a participant-led workshop with minimal intervention from the creative team, who would convey instructions by, say, text message or pre-recorded audio. It was a work in progress (which would eventually become THE THING), leaving participants both frustrated and intrigued by the workshop's demands for self-initiated action. Participants were instructed to talk to strangers beyond their zone of comfort in social interaction, or carry out unexpected actions – and then perhaps replicate the actions of their fellow participants out of context. Some did, others didn't. Regardless of their approaches to decision-making and the meaning they derived from it, one thing was clear: the participant had become the performer.

In a similar way, apart from Karen Tan's disembodied voiceovers, The City of Lost Things has no cast or prescribed narrative, and the participant determines the outcome of the experience. But where the automatic workshop was communal and encouraged some sort of social disruption or intervention in everyday life, The City of Lost Things is deeply private and personal. There's a tradeoff here in terms of dramatic effect. There is safety in numbers, and a group of 8-12 participants may be more willing to take risks as a whole than an individual with no one else to ascertain accountability in performance. There is no one to perform for or with, as it were, other than an unknowing public whose presence might be intimidating. I was certainly afraid, as a person alone, to enact gestures or draw with chalk in a public space.

One might argue, however, that the point of The City of Lost Things is not the 'narcissistic participation' or 'entrepreneurial participation' of a Punchdrunk-type show, where savvy audience members actively seek out hidden spaces and revel in the exclusivity of an intimate moment with a performer, basking in what's perceived as a unique moment of attention. The journey here demands an internal risk-taking rather than an external risk-taking, a four-hour version of a ten-day silent meditation retreat where you are left alone with your thoughts and forced to confront your self. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is an obvious influence, with an extended homage to his collection of prose poems investigating magical cities, hidden cities, cities between cities – peeling back the surface of Singapore's urban fortress to find moments of magic beneath through Jean Tay's meditative, lyrical text. You're loaned a beautifully designed travel kit for this purpose – a tiny plastic suitcase containing an array of interesting objects and curios to accompany you on your journey – but I found many of the objects (and the instructions they came with) tangential or irrelevant to my own journey in negotiating my friendship with a specific person I'd lost contact with. I understand the need for these instructions to be open-ended enough to suit most situations, i.e. lost connections with institutions or objects or places, but I craved some sort of structure with which to engage with my intangible past through these tangible objects – some of which were especially lovely to hold and turn over in the palm of my hand.

Xuemei's first foray into this vein of participatory work feels like a blend of Belgian group Ontroerend Goed's radical intimacy – where you find yourself in situations that test the limits of your personal space and how much you're willing to confide in or trust strangers – and the intimate audio walks of Singapore performance collective spell#7. Where it departs from these very structured, narrative-driven participatory experiences is Xuemei's experiments with automation and the text messages each participants receives en route, and what it means to have a self-initiated journey that's open to personal interpretation – and whether an audience can find meaning in plotting their own journey, or fail productively at it. The use of tech here was interesting to me – it allows the participant a great degree of autonomy in moving around a public space, but it also disrupted the more meditative parts of my journey, where I'd be journalling about an experience but half-expecting to receive a text message at any time prompting me to do something else, a sort of stop-start guided therapy or meditation that takes place in fits and spurts.

I'm not sure if it's an experience for everyone, and I wonder if The City of Lost Things is most effective with a very specific type of lost connection – those who seemed to enjoy the experience most either returned to places or institutions they'd never visited for over a decade, or sought closure for difficult relationships still aching years later. But the introspective flaneurs who wander the city on a regular basis may find this experience an extension of what they already do, day to day – and those who find the small activities frivolous and are unwilling to engage deeply with the material may find the four-hour journey unmeaningful and protracted.

The parts of the journey I realised I enjoyed the most – and this is probably more of a reflection of my introverted self than the piece's aesthetics – were the more structured encounters with the other participants, most of whom I had never met before, where we were encouraged to share experiences and initiate physical contact in ways that needled at my comfort zone. I felt as if I were laying a lost connection to rest while initiating a new one, even if it's a process that film and performance scholar Keren Zaointz describes as a 'presumptive intimacy' borne out of the spectator's desire to make the most of a singular experience, where audience members may 'feel entitled to proximate and intimate liaisons with performers or other audience members that are paid for and expected'. How much can a production or an experience intervene in a participant's personal, emotional relationship with person and place – and alter the outcome or provide closure? I'd like to think that I let go of a fragment of the past and embraced something new on my journey, and allowed myself to observe the city I move through from a slightly different vantage point. If anything, The City of Lost Things allows you four hours of suspended time, time spent with yourself rather than on something, letting you hit the pause button on the rattle and rush of city life.

• MISSING: The City of Lost Things runs till Jan 28. Details here.
• Thanks to Akanksha Raja of ArtsEquator for being such a wonderful partner on this journey! I attended the media preview and happened to be paired up with her for some of the exercises. 
• More thoughts to come after I experience the Mandarin session this weekend.

One Table Two Chairs triple bill at the Southernmost theatre festival

I arrived back in Singapore from London a week ago, and promptly presented a paper at the Southernmost theatre festival's Open Forum organised by the new experimental theatre company Emergency Stairs. The two-week festival first seemed to me an over-ambitious undertaking for a brand-new company, with some major hiccups in marketing and ticketing (both poorly done – and hopefully rectified by their next instalment). But the festival has its strengths and insights, and I'll be looking at its culminating event – a triple bill of performances directed by Liu Xiaoyi (Singapore), Makoto Sato (Japan) and Danny Yung (Hong Kong) in the Arts House's Chamber.

I'd watched several experiments with the One Table Two Chairs format at the annual M1 Chinese Theatre Festival organised by The Theatre Practice, the vanguard company that Southernmost festival director Liu Xiaoyi spent many years with before starting his own group. These were usually staged in a black box or flexible studio space, and the experiments were often both intriguing and frustrating, with some incredible movement and revelatory, high-concept imagery bookended by what felt a lot more like 'in-process' trial and error to see what might stick. It felt like a safe lab for directors to test out new directions, catering for an informed audience with the patience for challenging work. Xiaoyi has extended the One Table Two Chairs metaphor to an entire festival, and there's a clear cross-cultural backbone to its programming that emphasises dialogue – two chairs standing in for two different cultures, perhaps, or two different art forms, or two different approaches to performance, and a shared table between them. As to whether that table is a bridge or a barrier to communication is the question that the triple bill poses. 

The production places the audience in the steep public gallery overlooking the former parliamentary chamber, the very chamber where Singaporean parliamentarians and its early iterations of government debated policy. It's a setting redolent of centralised authority and decision-making – the dark, imposing wooden panelling; the rows of stiff-backed seats arranged like the opening to a chess match where opposing political parties might square off – which necessitates reading the production as a site-specific work. 

(The following images are by Tuckys Photography.)

The production opens with Xiaoyi's piece, a meeting between Javanese dancer, choreographer and mask performer Didik Nini Thowok (Indonesia) and Kunqu master Wang Bin (China). Stripped of their traditional attire, they're suited and briefcased instead – my mind wandered briefly to the idea of Japanese salarymen trapped in a parliamentary setting – drifting through the rows of seats with a fragment of a beautiful gesture or movement from their own art forms. Behind them, projected over the double doors leading out of the chamber, are broad statements in English and Chinese about decision-making. (I didn't take notes because I was watching this show for pleasure, so I hope I remembered this right.) This begins with choice, and free will:

"To become an artist was my own choice." 
"To become a cultural leader was my own choice."
"To become a eunuch was my own choice."

And so on, with other roles. This decision-making eventually leads to questions of fault, responsibility, and burden:

"To cross the border was your own problem."
"To become an artist was your own problem."

I couldn't help thinking of these statements as part of a parliamentary debate, where a piece of legislation can be construed in one way by its proponents and in another by its opponents. Did we choose to view the artist as troublemaker and rabblerouser, or were we coerced into seeing the artist that way? Did the cultural leaders we admire choose the path, or did they wrestle with reluctant moral obligation to play the part – and does it matter?

Didik Nini Thowok eventually removes a mask from his briefcase and puts it on, drawing on the archetype of politician as masked trickster; later, the two of them laugh and converse in their individual languages with the help of some charades (I catch, from my meagre understanding of Bahasa Indonesia, something to do with makan, eating). It's a callback to the themes from the late Kuo Pao Kun's Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral, where the Admiral Cheng Ho embarks on a journey of personal and cultural discovery, and Kuo's multilingual work such as Mama Looking for her Cat where characters also converse across languages, unsubtitled. In this case, the meeting of cultures moves beyond the Singaporean context to a larger Asian one, but I wasn't quite convinced by the marriage of images and text. Xiaoyi's construction of associative relationships between image and text has had some rich, delightful results – as was the case with one of his previous productions, Fluid (2014). But in this case the text didn't feel quite as resonant beyond a clever bait and switch ("choice"/"problem"), and the extended riff felt tangential rather than integral to the performances of the two master traditional artists – and vice versa.

The subsequent performance directed by Makoto Sato felt even more unsubtle in its overtures to interculturality. Sato-san's piece involves Wang Bin and Xiaoyi as torchbearers of two generations of performance, one traditional (kunqu) and one avant garde (experimental theatre). In showcasing two markedly different forms and cultures thrown together in the same environment, and relying solely on the friction produced from their widely differing physical vocabularies rubbing up against each other, the novelty of the juxtaposition quickly runs its course and the audience is left to contend with large swathes of stasis when all the symbolism from the encounter has been fully read. Because the piece is relatively brief, this intercultural commentary feels even shallower. A recorded voiceover in Mandarin Chinese is played over their performance in a strict binary:

"I am Liu Xiaoyi."
"I am Wang Bin."
"I am not Liu Xiaoyi."
"I am not Wang Bin."
"Do you know Emperor Yongle?" 
"Do you know Emperor Jianwen?" 

Some historical context might be useful for this cultural reference; Ming dynasty emperor Yongle, desirous of the throne, overthrew his nephew, the Jianwen emperor, at the turn of the 15th century on the pretext that he was executing powerful rivals. There is an obvious analogy for artistic succession here, whether by revolt or by hereditary decree, and in one particularly heated scene both performers attempt to drown each other out – Xiaoyi convulsing, shrieking and laughing; Wang Bin belting out an operatic solo at the top of his lungs.

Of the three pieces, Danny Yung's closing work felt the most satisfying and complete, juxtaposing the extraordinary physicality of Cambodian dancer Nget Rady and the measured stillness of Thai dancer Junior Dearden. The lights go up on Rady sitting in one of the parliamentary seats (was it LKY's?), and I felt an immediate physical reaction to his near-nakedness in the sacrosanct space of the chamber, even if it is a space that's no longer in official political use. It's a pointed and arresting visual statement – I understand that during the open rehearsals, Yung had initially planned for Rady to be sheathed in a pair of adult diapers, but they went for plain white briefs in the end. As Dearden keeps close to the red line dividing the chamber down the middle, putting one stately foot in front of the other, Rady tumbles and flips across the rows of chairs – he's the reckless mischief maker and airborne provocateur to Dearden's grounded, careful presence, all straight lines and right angles. 

Yung continues with the triple bill's refrain of repeated text, and this time he's chosen idiomatic Chinese phrases containing the word 道 (dao), or 'way'/'path' – 旁门左道，胡说八道，大学之道, and so on – with English translations that occasionally felt like they'd been run shoddily, and deliberately, through a poorer version of Google Translate. I couldn't quite tell if he was trolling us or testing us (perhaps both). Is there a single path to follow, or are we all making and remaking it as we go along? Yung's piece contained the most interesting physical counterpoint between the two figures, with a running commentary on authority and subversion, on the dictated path and the desire paths around it. His direction revels in the use of the parliamentary space and the meanings we immediately associate with it – and I could see the threads of inspiration that Xiaoyi has drawn from his body of work.

In a sense, all three pieces are encounters between performers, between cultures, between text and image, between movement and stasis – but I longed for a piece that would go beyond the novelty of the encounter to some sort of deeper engagement. The Southernmost festival has been an interesting introduction to Emergency Stairs' identity in the Singapore theatre scene – it's a niche occupied by groups such as Ang Gey Pin's Theatre OX and Beverly Yuen's In Source Theatre, and the work of Noor Effendy Ibrahim and his collective Akulah Bimbo Sakti (which will be doing some very interesting site-specific work on Pulau Ubin in January) – blending the heavy use of abstraction and physicality with an added emphasis on the academic rigour of interculturality and cultural exchange through masterclasses, workshops and public forums. This triple bill feels like an early greeting, an exchange of pleasantries, and I'm curious to see what comes next as the group begins to establish themselves and dig a little deeper.

Stray thoughts:

• Because of building conservation stipulations, the venues in The Arts House have typically been challenging to design and light, and this production was no different. I found myself straining to make out some of the precise movements by the performers, particularly in the dimly lit first segment.
• Incidentally, Ang Gey Pin is one of Emergency Stairs' associate artists.
• Had a really good time at the Open Forum on Dec 20. I drew from pretty specific literary theory by Mikhail Bakhtin and looked at monoglossia and heteroglossia in Singapore theatre (special thanks to Felipe Cervera for the excellent feedback) and I was paired up with the inimitable playwright Alfian Sa'at, whose topic was 'The Work of Intercultural Art in the Age of Cultural Appropriation'. We had a meaningful discussion after and some really thoughtful questions from the audience. Thank you all for being there, and thank you especially to Xiaoyi and the team for inviting us to be interlocutors of interculturality.

Even more stray thoughts:

• I've been thinking about this festival a fair amount in the past week, and the more I turn this over in my mind, the more I think the festival confuses ideas of inter-, multi-, and cross-culturalism with transnationalism. When we speak of the former, we're usually referring to cultural exchange and pollination within the framework of a specific society or in the case of Singapore, the city-state. Southernmost privileges transnational exchange (Chinese opera, Javanese dance, Hong Kong avant garde) over intercultural exchange (as, one would expect, between the various language and racial groups and cultures in Singapore), which leads to further confusion over representation, e.g. why were almost no Malay-language or Tamil-language groups or artists from Singapore (or other representative languages and cultures resident here) represented in the artist and panellist lineup? Is it because Southernmost is marketing an intercultural dynamic when it is in fact emphasising transnationalism? If the festival was indeed striving for an intercultural dialogue, does it draw too comfortably, even lazily, from its own networks, without venturing further? 

You Can Reach The Sky by Ellison Tan and Myra Loke

Full disclosure: Ellison Tan, who co-created this immersive theatrical production for pre-walking babies, is a friend of mine – she invited me to watch this performance at the Artground on December 22. 

The Artground, a new multi-disciplinary arts and play space for children under 12, opened in July this year. It's run by a new company, The Ground Co Ltd, in collaboration with the National Arts Council; The Ground is headed by Luanne Poh, formerly a producer with the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay who's been especially involved in programming for young children. The Esplanade's popular Playtime! series, for instance, caters to toddlers and children aged two to four. I remember having a long conversation with Luanne a few years ago about the need for performances that focus on narrower age ranges: 18-24 months, for instance, instead of ones targeted at, say, five to twelve-year-olds that will almost inevitably bore or elude some portion of that demographic because of their widely differing developmental milestones. 

Ellison and Myra met in April to begin work on You Can Reach the Sky. They had worked on several Playtime! shows together and had wanted to create a show specifically for babies for some time. By August they had embarked on a devising phase with the cast, bringing in an early childhood development specialist as a consultant, visiting infant care centres to get a sense of their audience and test out elements of the show, and experimenting on Ellison's young nephews to see what stuck and what didn't. Then they ran a couple of test shows in November to see what worked and what didn't. Here's my (adult) take on the experience.

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A heap of soft, textured textiles in the centre of the play space that babies could explore. Image: Foxing Film and Photography

Gurgling babies and their sets of parents are making themselves comfortable around a large mattress in the middle of the performance space. The centre of the room is heaped high with soft textiles, from bubble wrap to a collapsible play tunnel. It feels like the magic hour in the womb of Artground's White Box, that brief dusky moment between day and night where setting sun bathes the landscape in purples and oranges. Together with about ten pairs of parents and their infants, we've ducked out of the harsh afternoon sun for a half-hour of magical, suspended time.

As each baby-in-arms enters the space, they're inducted into the experience by the three performers, all dressed and made-up uniformly in dungarees and neat braids. The performers never loom over the tiny children; they approach them on hands and knees, mimicking the body language of each child – some shyer, others vocal and gregarious. Each baby gets a one-on-one introduction to the performance team to ease them into the space and the unfamiliar people in it. There's been a recent push in Singapore for more sensory-friendly and relaxed performances for very young children or for children on the autism spectrum who may not cope well with over-stimulation, and You Can Reach the Sky's gentle pre-show feels as crucial to the experience as the performance itself. The babies who were well-acquainted with the environment and performers prior to the main event always seemed relaxed and comfortable in the space, and more willing to explore; a child whose parents arrived late, about halfway through the piece, was nervous and fussy for a few minutes before eventually settling in, lulled by the music and coloured lights. 

It quickly becomes clear to me that You Can Reach the Sky focuses on building fine motor skills – reaching, grasping – as well as gaze guiding, with parents encouraging their children to follow the dramatic imagery around the studio. There's a loose arc to the six segments of the 30-minute production, starting off with gentler visual and aural stimuli – a folded accordion of rustling paper – before steeping the babies in more percussive rhythms and brighter lights. There's infectious live music courtesy of collaborative team Stan x Soap, who have also created lush soundscapes for the Esplanade's Playtime! series. The performers alternate between climactic moments of action – waving swathes of glittering cloth over the heads of their teeny audience members like a large passing cloud or ocean wave – and intimate exchanges – handing incandescent lamps wrapped in soft white cloth to their young charges to hold.

But it isn't all about holding on; parents are encouraged to let go, and let their children venture into the world of the theatre. Because the babies share the staging area with the performers, they are immediately part of the action, and eventually some of the bolder, more mobile infants begin crawling around the mattress, approaching their peers, vocalising, and observing them keenly. This participatory, social element is another cornerstone of the immersive production, with parents reminded to put their smartphones aside and be in the moment with their children. 

You Can Reach the Sky heightens that sense of communality about the theatre I've always loved, when you can feel the audience member and stranger next to you stiffen, gasp, giggle or sniffle and revel in that shared experience. Too often as adult theatre spectators we modulate our responses to those around us and question the responses expected of us; there is none of that here, with the babies free to turn their gaze to whatever engages them, even if it isn't the performers but their fellow audience members. It's a beautiful, profound experience, and one that infant amnesia will chip away at but also completely preserve, uncorrupted by the process of memory recall and retrieval that contaminates all adult memory. You Can Reach the Sky is a work in progress – theatre for babies is a nascent movement here and Ellison and Myra had little local work to go on in their research and development – but it feels like a confident first step in the right direction.

Stray thoughts:

• I highly recommend listening to this episode of the NPR podcast Invisibilia called 'The Personality Myth' that touches on infant amnesia and memory, and how the experiences and events that enter our lives before the ages of two and three are key to our development.
• Ellison and Myra are planning to bring You Can Reach the Sky to various communities and are looking at how to make the show as mobile as possible. Follow their Facebook page for more updates.

Co-creator Myra Loke with an excited audience member. Image: Foxing Film and Photography

Words Go Round workshops

As part of the Singapore Writers Festival's Words Go Round outreach programme in schools, I will be offering theatre reviewing workshops for pre-tertiary students in March 2018. Details below.

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This writing-based learning journey to the theatre by Words Go Round is part of the outreach programme's new Culture Critics series. Students will first get to watch Step Outta Line by Thong Pei Qin and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts students at the 2018 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival with arts writer Corrie Tan. They will then pen their reviews and attend a workshop to better understand the craft of theatre reviewing. The workshop and play are ticketed separately.

How to book:

Email info@singaporefringe.com with your preferred date (19 Jan, 8pm or 20 Jan, 3pm) to watch the play with Corrie. Bookings must be confirmed before 1 December 2017 to enjoy the Early Bird School Booking price.

Email nac_wgr@nac.gov.sg with your preferred date (1, 2, 8 or 9 March 2018) and time as well as the level and number of students attending the workshop.     

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(Workshop) CURTAIN CALL: MAKING SENSE OF THE SINGAPORE STAGE

Featuring: Corrie Tan
Suitable for: S3 – JC2 | Duration 3 hr | $600 per workshop
Dates available for booking: 1, 2, 8, 9 March 2018

What makes a good theatre production? Why are reviews important? Watch Step Outta Line at the 2018 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival with Corrie Tan, former anchor theatre critic for The Straits Times, and pen your own review. In the workshop that follows, explore Singapore's theatre history, evaluate your review (and that of your classmates'), and learn how these practical criticism skills can be applied beyond theatre. 

This session is recommended for Literature students, as well as students reading ‘O’ Level Drama and ‘A’ Level Theatre Studies and Drama.  

Each workshop is limited to 30 participants.

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(Play) M1 SINGAPORE FRINGE FESTIVAL 2018: STEP OUTTA LINE

Featuring the work of: Thong Pei Qin & Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts
Event dates with arts writer Corrie Tan: 19 Jan, 8pm or 20 Jan, 3pm

$17 per student, including SISTIC fees, for bookings confirmed before 1 Dec 2017
$20 per student, including SISTIC fees, for bookings confirmed after 1 Dec 2017

An army of quirky characters, as colourful as the assortment of ladies' high heels they brandish, questions female transgressions, aggressions and negotiations within a patriarchal society.

Step Outta Line is a rich collage of texts adapted from prolific playwright Ovidia Yu's selected writings, layered with movement, soundscapes and visuals in response to Amanda Heng's works. It is devised by Thong Pei Qin, her band of designer-collaborators, and performers from the BA (Hons) Theatre Arts course at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.

Through rhythms created from footsteps and movements in high heels, this theatrical piece explores how individuals can lay claim to different sorts of identities, by subverting clothing, tools and embodied ideals which conspire to keep them in line.

Co-presented with Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.

Visit www.singaporewritersfestival.com/wgr from November 2017 for full details on other WGR programmes.