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.

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

I'd like to preface this response to I AM LGB by suggesting that you not read this until after you've experienced the experiment. Or to only read it if you're now wishing you bought tickets but it's too late and the show's ended its run.

Are you ready?

It was next to impossible to tell what audience members – or should I say participants – could expect from I AM LGB. The artists behind the experiment refused to give individual interviews to the media (or even to Singapore International Festival of Arts official blogger Ng Yi-Sheng) and would only agree to be interviewed as the fictional collective of the Lan Gen Bah Society Of The Mind (LGBSM) or the fictional artist Lan Gen Bah (LGB). All I knew was that the show was four hours long, running from 7pm to 11pm, at 72-13, coupled with a some slight mental preparation given my familiarity with the work of Ray Langenbach, Loo Zihan and Bani Haykal, and their penchants for documentation, archiving, re-enactments, and dissecting that fine line between performance and performativity in everyday life.

The subsequent experience, which I'll try to summarise before digesting and processing it, was both incredibly frustrating but fascinating, a deep and hard look at individual freedoms, freedom of expression, groupthink, herd mentality, conformity and non-conformity, game-playing psychology and game design, all set against the looming backdrop of Singapore's own tumultuous history with performance art. I loved it.

After signing a form agreeing to allow ourselves to be documented on video etc, my sister and I are escorted into a cloak room where we get a lab coat, a number, and a bright, Mao-red textbook with a pencil. We're immediately complicit in the performance in some way, since we're all wearing costumes and carrying props, adopting a prescribed identity, if you will. Along with other bewildered and curious audience members, we're funnelled into the main playing area after having our photographs taken and pasted on a wall. Other lab-coated audience members are already there, either sitting down on rows of white chairs or playing what looks like a simple ball game. I'm coaxed into playing as well – you're supposed to throw a ball back and forth with increasing levels of complexity (clap your hands before catching the ball, lift one leg, etc) while being mindful of the ball, and not worrying about failure. None of which happens, of course; we are all embarrassed when we drop the ball, apologetic, shy.

We're then divided into four groups (Josef, Weng, Sharaad, Lucy – names that should sound familiar to anyone with a bit of knowledge of performance art) according to our coloured (and blank, identity-effacing) name tags. Loo Zihan/Josef sets out some ground rules:

- We have to wear the lab coat at all times
- We need to be punctual and present
- We need to get hall passes from the facilitators if we need to use the bathroom or take a smoke break
- We can 'set ourselves free' or 'liberate' ourselves at any time. The catch being – you can't come back into the playing area. Also, no one really knows what happens after someone gets 'liberated' or 'liberates' themselves. And, Zihan emphasises, everyone will be 'liberated' by the end of the experiment, save one person, who will be anointed the new LGB for tonight. So we'll all be set free at some point.

My coat comes with a green tag, so I'm in the 'green' group facilitated by Bani Haykal (or in this case, Weng), in a bright green coat and followed around by two black-clad assistants. The 20-plus of us are first instructed to do a kindergarten-type object sorting exercise. We're told to sort a pile of about 100 objects, but we're not told how or what categories they are to be sorted by. Some people, apparently already irritated with the infantilisation that's been happening since the start, have started to liberate themselves. The rest of us dutifully sort and re-sort objects, depending on the vague instructions given. Then we're told that two of our group members must liberate themselves, or we'll each have to justify to the group why we should not be liberated and made to liberate two people through voting. Two people quickly volunteer themselves as tribute in this bizarre subversion of The Hunger Games. Their photographs are struck out with a bright red marker.

We're then subjected to a long lecture about the origins of the artist Lan Gen Bah, her work, and her intelligentsia parents' relationship with Mao Zedong. The bell rings, and it's a common test. A common test? I panic. I'm going to liberated, I think, because I wasn't paying attention to the lecture. The common test has one logic question, one algebra question, and three random questions that really could have any answer, completely irrelevant to the lecture before. The final question can't even be marked, because it depends on group responses. Okay then. Fifteen minutes later, we peer mark this test paper. I get nine points, the girl next to me gets six. I feel a perverse, repugnant sense of pleasure, that awful Singaporean competitive spirit in me, that I'm above average in this game. We're all made to stand up, and sit down into safety as the marks are called, with a highest possible mark of 12. Nine is pretty safe. Everyone with a three? or four? and below is escorted out. I shake my internal fist at the sky – how can this be! Art is meant to be all-embracing! You don't need to be good at math!

There's 'recess', during which more people liberate themselves, and then Stage One: Hybridization. Every single group goes on a different trajectory now. Our group, which has dwindled significantly to about a dozen people, is led into a tiny, dark, confined room at the back of the playing area. Bani closes the door. We're all standing, shoulder to shoulder, as our eyes adjust to the darkness.

"You'll be in here for 50 minutes," he says, so anyone who's claustrophobic should leave now. Two people leave.

"50 minutes?" I ask, "not 15?"

"50, five zero," he says. We all titter nervously.

So we are in there for 50 minutes. First an excerpt of P. Ramlee's Labu dan Labi is screened on the ceiling, and we all have to lie down to watch it comfortably. Then we're given another audio lecture by a raspy, heavy breather, against a soundscape of water and industrial noises, about Cold War cultural diplomacy. Then we're made to have a discussion, within that hot, stuffy, confined space, about individual freedoms and freedom of expression. I feel as though I've regressed 10 years and am trying to out-perform or out-pretend freshman/first-year students at any given seminar in a liberal arts university. Another person leaves. At this point, about 40 minutes into our 50-minute slot, a live video feed of what is happening outside this room, in the large, spacious, air-conditioned playing area, is projected on the ceiling. When we finally step out, I feel as though my internal compass is whirling. I bend over to get over a sudden burst of vertigo. If I take off my lab coat – because I'm so hot – am I breaking the rules? Will I be liberated?

"Liberation is a wonderful thing," intones one of Bani's assistants, piously.

Bani/Weng, carrying an image of Haresh Sharma.

It's 10pm by this point, and I'm exhausted. But no, there are more stations yet: Essentialisation, Enculturation and Totalisation. We have a discussion about the letter of complaint sent by Ray Langenbach's students to the National Institute of Education in the wake of the 1994 crackdown on performance art in Singapore, and we list down what we think should be taught in schools, and what shouldn't. It's a very meaningful and heartfelt discussion, but at the end of it, another four people are liberated through drawing lots. We're then instructed to pick an object from before and use it as an object lesson to explain why we are all 'collectively dreaming'. I don't understand what we're required to do – and I'm guessing neither does anyone – but we do it anyway, make up some embarrassing, ridiculous, jargon-filled speech ("light brings clarity, clarity brings communality") about these trivial objects (matches, playdough, a sponge, etc). We have been collectively dreaming after all, because each inane dream speech has influenced the next. In the end, about 90% of us remaining audience members are forcibly liberated, and only four people, who chose the most popular object (the sponge), remain.

We're ferried to an upstairs room where most of the liberated audience members (about 50 of the 80 who came tonight) are talking, laughing and commiserating, framed by a breath-taking exhibition of what must have been hundreds of documents – whether from Langenbach's time at university or during the controversy surrounding 5th Passage and its performances at Parkway Parade in 1994. Hardly anyone is paying attention to the final four, who are making speeches off the cuff as to why they should be made LGB for the night. The voting is a farce. We vote at random, having not paid attention to anything. Someone 'wins' – but really, he's not winning anything, because everyone's going home. I hear myself asking someone: "Is it over? Can we leave?" Are we allowed to leave?

I AM LGB's tagline is 'between solitude and solidarity', and it's a skin-flaying experiment where the audience is pitted against itself. Just as the boundary between Lan Gen Bah and Langenbach's identity begins to blur, so do our own identities as audience members – it grows increasingly difficult to distinguish between our agency as an audience and being co-opted into this experiment. The paradox at the heart of this experiment is the promise that one can be liberated at any time, and do so voluntarily, but eventually realise that one can also be expelled through completely arbitrary means. This hinges on two fears: the fear of elimination, but also the fear that one cannot, as an audience members, 'finish' watching the show if one chooses to leave. This assumes some social contract between the artist and the audience, that by watching or participating in a production, we will gain some sort of entertainment or enlightenment by the 'end' through engaging with the artistic material. Do we game the system, or play the game? Does the machinery always win, since it boots you out if you decide not to be complicit? Does the machinery always co-opt you, since by staying you must decide to be complicit?

I took this to be analogous to any system we perceive ourselves to be in; in my case, I immediately mapped these circumstances to my experience of Singapore and the Singapore education system. By functioning within a system, are you subject to it, and can you ever transcend it without being co-opted into a sort of blind collective judgment/decision-making? Most audience members existed on a continuum, I think. There were those who immediately allergic to what they perceived as a structure of utter BS and left; on the other end, there were those who engaged enthusiastically with the game in the hopes of an eventual narrative payout; and there were those like myself, in the middle, trapped and frustrated in a mode of self-reflexivity and undecided if they should participate, observe, or leave.

From the first ball game to the final voting at the end, we're never really ourselves; we've relaxed into more comfortable, larger rhythms of groupthink and collective patterns. My sister, who went on a completely different journey, was subjected to a 'dance class' where participants had to interpret, through movement, a list of various dance genres. This began innocently enough, with 'ballet' and 'cha cha'. But what happens when it's 'Tibetan Bell Dance', or 'Amazonian Leaf Dance', or 'Dance 5.2678'? She quickly observed that the participants eventually began mimicking each other, regardless of how 'original' they perceived their movement lexicon to be. Resisting participation, she closed her eyes when she danced so she would be able to retain some shred of individuality and not bow to subconscious peer pressure. But even though she resisted participating, she felt genuine sadness when fellow participants chose to, or were made to leave.

There are hints of a larger history connected to this experiment, with the students' letter to the university, the acknowledgement of 5th Passage and the names of various prominent performance art figures and the nature of their work communicated through the various interactive stations, of being confined in an "Iron Room", to choose between a painless death, where you move straight from sleep into oblivion, or a painful one, where you fight your mortality even though it is futile – much like the fight that artists, activists and advocates undertake in Singapore every day, the tango with censorship and bureaucracy that must be danced. The experiment we are in is a surreal, bizarre microcosm, a metaphor for what we experience day to day. Who makes decisions to include one group and exclude another? How do you decide to speak up for a cause or to abandon it? How far can collectivism prolong your tolerance for psychological trauma (be it a dark room or a common test)?

I left, clutching my Little Red Textbook, with the sense that what was a complex, challenging and confronting social experiment was also a lesson; an object lesson about the process of education, miseducation, and re-education. We're first introduced to what it feels like to be part of a large, safe group, and immediately after, how it feels to go solo. Freedom and fear conflate and combine. Every interaction primes you for another moment of independent decision-making but also undercuts or subverts your expectations, the process of which moulds you into a form of perplexed cooperation. You realise that even as the rules matter less and less, you are striving, more and more, to submit to rules you have set for yourself. The facilitators initially appear to be impartial, at an arm's length, in their passing down of information and instruction. But our poor interpretations of this formal 'education' and what is required of us creates a hive mind of miseducation – where we look to those around us, going through the same experience, for validation. And I think it is only when we shed our costumes and retreat offstage, a marker for the end of a performance, that we can return to ourselves – not who we were performing as in this experiment - and finally evaluate what we have learnt.

I've been mulling over how artists in Singapore have moved from challenging and confronting Singapore's history in their work, to studying the gaps in its official narrative and turning the spotlight onto marginalised groups, to reclaiming history that has been taken from them by creating their own narratives, effectively rewriting the past. This reclamatory process felt especially keen on Thursday night, with the echo of the crackdown on performance art by the state in 1994 after Josef Ng's performance in Parkway Parade (which Zihan re-enacted at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival in 2012), of Ray Langenbach's Singaporean students calling for a boycott of his classes, of the many ways in which performance art and all its necessary provocations were proscribed or stamped out, and of which we were all partaking in I AM LGB. Both the experiment and the granular archives on show felt like a reclaiming of what performance art had lost in Singapore – and through us, a willing public audience. (Or were we completely willing? I suppose we will never know...)

Yi-Sheng had me write an immediate response, post-I AM LGB, for his "Everyone's A Critic" series. — Yi-Sheng had me write an immediate response, post-*I AM LGB*, for his "Everyone's A Critic" series.