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.”

---

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.

IgnorLAND of its Loss by Drama Box

The latest instalment of Drama Box's ongoing IgnorLAND series might very well be subtitled "A Eulogy for Dakota Crescent". It's an atmospheric, meditative piece where the location is the obvious star of the show, bringing the audience on several routes on a 2.5-hour walk through the nearly 60-year-old estate, its cosy, low-rise rental flats something of an anomaly against a backdrop of rising condominiums. Walking through the crumbly apartment buildings, however, I also felt a strong sense of deja vu, that once again we had arrived too late, done too little – that we were, yet again, holding a funeral for a place we didn't even have time to mourn.

This isn't the first time that Drama Box, or artists in Singapore for that matter, have created productions that focus on the perennial struggle between the old and the new. We are obsessed with this push and pull, perhaps because it renders us so helpless. I attended an art and photography exhibition held in the void decks of the colourful Rochor Centre last year before it went under the chopping block; there was another artist takeover at Eminent Plaza, a building in a similar situation, in 2014. What I find uncomfortable is that often – not always, but often – artists only seem to come in when the decision has already been made. We pay for destroyed spaces with the currency of nostalgia, and nostalgia has its limits.

Drama Box broke this trend last year with its three-part It Won't Be Too Long series that involved both a show at Bukit Brown Cemetery and one in Toa Payoh Central. It gave audience members a stake in what might happen in the future, when we are called on to decide which spaces to keep and which to discard. (It also helped that we were voting on these spaces during the weekend of the General Election, which added to the urgency.) It also documented the fight for Bukit Brown, where activists all over Singapore rallied together as best as they could to preserve the municipal cemetery. The fight was lost, but not for any lack of trying. 

But who will speak up for Dakota? In IgnorLAND, the residents are the performers. One of them, Billy, who has lived in the estate for 50 years, brings us on a tour of his small second-floor apartment, crowded with thriving plants and curious knick-knacks. Another, a volunteer at the eldercare centre, is disappointed that their VWO will not be able to continue their work with residents when they've been relocated (another VWO will take their place). IgnorLAND is as much for the audience members as it is for the Dakota residents, a production that allows them to at least share their grief with the public. But there seemed to be an overarching resignation to their performances, an undercurrent of bitterness I couldn't shake.

Drama Box tries to up the stakes we have in the estate as we wander through these buildings, paint little wooden rectangles and paste them on miniature recreations of the Dakota Crescent blocks. They make splendid use of a block of flats for an opening scene and a lovely green spot by the Geylang River for a closing scene. But it's really not enough. We see the work that has gone into this project – painstaking little dioramas by students and children, a complex "cat playground" for the dozens of affectionate, head-scratch-and-belly-rub-loving felines in the estate (what happens to them when all the residents leave??). But still our link to the estate feels observational, tenuous. I can appreciate the production as a period of tireless engagement with the Dakota community, an acknowledgement of the overlooked residents who have to vacate the premises after several long decades. And on that level, perhaps the production is enough, or even more than what they might have expected to receive. But I think shows like these have the potential to move beyond sympathy to empathy. We shouldn't just feel sad, or resigned, when we leave – else we will continue to lose more of a country that is less and less our own.

The final scene is a lovely tribute to Dakota residents: beautiful large-format photo portraits projected on a building wall. After the show, as I was walking back to the nearby Mountbatten MRT station, I passed an elderly auntie who had a cameo in the epilogue and who was walking, briskly, together with a volunteer, back to the location of the final scene. It had, of course, already ended. The auntie said, sadly: "哎呀, 我每次来不及..." ("Aiyah! I never get there in time (to see the slideshow)..."). It felt like the perfect, brutally depressing metaphor for Dakota Crescent. Aiyah, we never get there in time...

(Update: Drama Box gave this dear auntie a private screening of the slideshow!)

Manifesto by Drama Box & The Necessary Stage

Three years ago, I attended a press conference on the top floor of Drama Box's narrow shophouse premises in Chinatown. A group of arts practitioners had come together to unveil their Manifesto For The Arts (page here), what they hoped would be a call, a rallying cry, that artists and arts lovers would be able to align themselves with. I was a younger reporter at the time, only just beginning to understand my beat, and the sound of a 'manifesto' was at once empowering and intimidating to me.

This was their manifesto:

1. Do not attempt to define Art for others.
2. Art is fundamental.
3. Art unifies and divides.
4. Art is about possibilities.
5. Art can be challenged but not censored.
6. Art is political.

I wrote about it in the paper, as did several other journalists, but as time went on and other arts policy issues came to the fore – censorship, term licensing, grants structures, changes of leadership at the various ministries and statutory boards – the sound of that rallying cry got fainter. Until The Necessary Stage (TNS) and Drama Box announced that they would be doing a collaborative production titled Manifesto. 

Manifesto, I have come to realise, is all of the above. 

1. It does not attempt to define itself. When TNS and Drama Box said that this would be a 'challenging' play, they were putting it lightly. It ignores genre and convention. It is an epic but also a series of vignettes. It blends film with 'liveness' and more static audio and visual installations. It is a meta-play – you see the actors preparing to enter the stage, their costume changes, the actors playing an actor playing another actor, it presents a genre of theatre (e.g. forum theatre) within another genre of theatre (e.g. naturalism). Actors and designers – who would often take a more behind-the-scenes role in a production, such as the sound designer or the multimedia designer – were all on an equal, open footing, all visible on stage. All of them had speaking roles. 
2. It is fundamental. Manifesto depicts artists at their most elemental, creating work and examining why they create what they create, and how they respond to reactions to their work and who they are.
3. It unifies and divides. There has been an outpouring of support and critical acclaim for the production, but there have also been some detractors. 
4. It is about possibilities. Or perhaps finding possibility in impossibility. Artists are hemmed in by cycles of history that seem to repeat themselves. One theatre group with a cause is spawned, only to struggle, collapse, and then birth another theatre group half a century later out of its ashes – but is it a birth or just a moment before death? Forum theatre – where audience members are allowed to stop a scene and replace any of the actors to see how they might resolve a conflict better – is used heavily as a device of possibility. How can these narratives, these tragic personal histories, be altered? What knowledge and foresight can we draw from counterfactual history?
5. It can be challenged, but not censored. It was certainly challenged (see: 'Singapore play about role of artists gets R18 rating', The Straits Times; and Alfian's response to the rating), but we can debate whether it was subject to censorship or not. The play often depicts self-censorship as endemic of Singapore of the 1980s, where practitioners censor themselves by dropping key words at the end of each sentence, e.g.
   BT: "We can all speak—"
   Roslan: "All our plays have been—"
   Sheila: "I can write anything I—" 
6. It is political. Manifesto traces the struggles of a group of artists as they come up against the machinery of the state, be it detention or censorship. But it also looks at ideology, guiding principles and convictions, and purpose, and what it means to be not simply a political actor but a political being.

Manifesto was, in that sense, an artistic manifestation of the set of principles that a group of artists in Singapore had set out to be united by. It is the sort of ambitious, unflinching, chaotic and confrontational art that artists here have struggled, for decades on end, to defend. 

The linear timeline in Manifesto is often interrupted and most of the actors play multiple roles and speak a hodgepodge of several languages (English, Chinese, Malay, Hokkien), which might take some time to get a firm handle on (the disorientation is very deliberate and the production does not hand-hold the inexperienced theatregoer).

But in a nutshell, a group of artist-activists come together in 1956, during the tumultuous development of a national identity in pre-independence Singapore. Their establishment of a company lays the path for another group of artist-activists in 1986, who are swept up in the McCarthyistic Marxist arrests of the late 1980s. In the present day, 2015-2016, artists try to make sense of the industry's dark history and grapple with the ghosts of their past, while in the future, 2024, questions of artistic and political succession in Singapore (Who will be the next MP? Who will be the next artistic director?) come to the fore, placed on equal footing. The characters are sometimes very thinly sketched out, with a few feeling less like people and more like devices to move the narrative forward and throw some dramatic tension into the mix, but the actors do an absolutely stunning job within the confines of their short sketches to flesh out as much as they can of their talking heads, particularly the characters who are composites of real-life artists and detainees.

But, dare I say it, I don't think Manifesto will be remembered for its lack of characterisation, but for what it managed to condense and portray in a very short period of time. 

Manifesto draws from TNS and Drama Box's previous work: they were pioneering groups in promoting forum theatre in Singapore, and detention without trial and political choice are large themes in productions such as Gemuk Girls (2008) and Model Citizens (2010). But I think this marks the first time that they have turned their focus so strongly to the Singaporean creator of art. This self-reflexivity ties in with a tide of artwork that has also put the Singapore artist in the spotlight – some in more powerful ways than others – such as Sonny Liew's graphic novel The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015), which reimagines what Singapore might have been like if Lim Chin Siong had taken the reins instead of Lee Kuan Yew; Toy Factory Production's Upstage (2015), a measured, careful tribute to the origins of Singapore's Chinese-language theatre; or (to a, well, much less effective extent) Nanyang – The Musical (2015), which looked at the lives of the Nanyang-style painters in Singapore in the 1930s-50s. Then there has also been a swell of productions that look at alternative histories and narratives that don't completely align with the 'official narrative' that the Singapore authorities are fond of using as the definitive Singapore history. That official narrative is a valid take on the country's past – as are many of other narratives, told from different perspectives. Teater Ekamatra's Geng Rebut Cabinet (GRC; 2015) and Wild Rice's Hotel (2015), as well as Tan Pin Pin's documentary about political exiles To Singapore, With Love (2013) are some instances of productions that interrogate the political narratives that are often taken as fact, rather than a matter of perspective.

Taken together, Manifesto fits in well with this movement of artwork that seeks to overturn historical and cultural amnesia in Singapore. And if not to overturn, perhaps to introduce a few cracks in the armour. It is very bald, and very ballsy, about its agenda to expose the inordinate struggles of art-making in Singapore, and its manifesto for the arts is in full, showy, obvious view. This, as opposed to the opacity of the state's manifesto, e.g. it promotes a certain brand of art, but not others, without explaining why. (Case in point: The MDA's R18 rating of Manifesto for 'mature content', with very little elaboration.) I don't think it proclaims that artists should get away with murder, but that the role of the artist is to provoke, to confront, to challenge, to delight, and to dismay, that the artist is as equally prone to bouts of debilitating humanity as the rest of us: spying on and betraying their peers, hands tied by bureaucracy, self-censoring, sometimes incredibly entitled and bratty. 

Manifesto ends on an ambivalent, ambiguous note. A stage/production manager and an actress-director shake hands, having decided that they will start their own theatre company with their own manifesto to abide by. Yes, we all think, this is it. This is the moment where the cycle begins anew and they can strike out on their own, and make a difference.

Or is it? Will the cycle just continue as it has before? Do artists hold on to their manifesto, or simply fall in line behind the state's unspoken manifesto? Will art ever matter – and matter enough – in Singapore? Have we already lost the war, with a public that is largely more concerned with what they view as more important, bread-and-butter issues? Does Manifesto only preach to the converted (the artists, the artsgoers, the arts community), and with its brief run in a tiny black box space, will it ever send ripples far enough to ever make an impact? 

I don't have the answers to these questions. But I was thinking about the communality of Singapore theatre in the 1960s, captured in Dr Quah Sy Ren's authoritative book in Chinese-language theatre in Singapore, as well as in Upstage, where groups and individuals would come together on a regular basis, break bread with each other, and work collectively to create art. It is this coming together that Manifesto pieces together from the ashes of friendships and working relationships torn apart by detention and betrayal. The act of creating Manifesto itself was the result of two groups with overlapping histories coming back together. I think it is this arts community that we must come together to nurture, to heal, and protect. That is our manifesto.

UPDATE:

Stray thoughts about the performers and the use of multimedia:

• So many clever touches from the use of film as both documentary and mockumentary, courtesy of a lot of great experimentation from Loo Zihan. I liked how the present-day performance artist Rumiko uses an iPhone the way one might use Snapchat or Periscope today, to do a 'live' feed on arts events. And of course the 'documentary' snippets that recreate the confessions done on public TV during the 1980s that were breathtakingly authentic. 
• There's a scene that actress Goh Guat Kian does as her character Siok Dee towards the end of the play, captured on film, that was quite gutting and that I found out later she had improvised, i.e. her improvisation done in rehearsal made the cut into the final film with next to no changes. Guat Kian, you are incredible.
• Also cried buckets during a scene where the inimitable Siti Khalijah, as the long-suffering actress Som, waiting for her husband to come home, ages through the decades. I know I wasn't the only one.
• I have a soft spot for forum theatre, and it was very pleasing to see it used as a practical, matter-of-fact way of resolving conflict and trouble-shooting. Kind of a small reclamation of the 10 years where funding to forum theatre was proscribed here.
• "Art is the end of the reviewer." Well, that's really—