SoftMachine: Yuya x Rianto by Choy Ka Fai

What a treat to see the work of Singaporean artist Choy Ka Fai on a London stage. I'd caught an earlier incarnation of SoftMachine: Yuya / Xiaoke x Zihan at the Esplanade's da:ns festival in Singapore last year, but was looking forward to a different pairing this time, of Yuya Tsukahara's Contact Gonzo (Japan) and lengger dancer Rianto (Indonesia), presented as part of Sadler's Wells' Out Of Asia series.

Photo by me, taken outside the Lilian Baylis studio.

(As a quick preface, we've been wrestling with Bourdieu, Durkheim and Nietzsche a fair amount in my cultural theory module at the moment, and I couldn't help but bring some of those theoretical lenses into the production with me...)

When Nietzsche attempted to reconcile the Dionysian and Apollonian halves of art and performance in The Birth Of Tragedy, he lamented that the intoxicating, the excessive, the visceral, collective and communal feel of Dionysus in Greek Tragedy had ultimately been sacrificed for the rational, measured, logical and representational aspect of Apollo. I'd argue that Ka Fai revels in the spirits of both Dionysus and Apollo in this pairing of SoftMachine, at once a celebration of that collective act of watching a group of performers and empathising with their ecstasy and pain, but also an individual act of marvelling at the architecture of the human body, the way one might regard the beauty of Michelangelo's sculpture of David, every sinew and muscle chiselled to perfection. 

Through SoftMachine, Ka Fai, a visual artist and performance maker, has created a work that both presents dance and archives it. Intimate video interviews with the performers punctuate dance excerpts that showcase not just a breathtaking range of genre-breaking work, but also the body as repository and the body as memory. It's a moving, long-exposure snapshot of a rapidly-evolving Asia, where traditional dance forms are simultaneously revered and discarded, and where there is a kaleidoscopic approach to dance as a shifting, hybrid form that draws from and transcends theatre, movement, performance art, installation, multimedia and religion. 

We start off with Contact Gonzo, a contemporary dance group from Japan that takes elements of contact improvisation to the extreme through their "philosophy of pain". Yuya and Ka Fai embark on a wary improvised duet with each other; Ka Fai attempts to interview Yuya about the company and its process while being punched, slapped, stroked, slammed into, sat on, thrown about. Every action begets a reaction and Ka Fai trips, falls, and becomes increasingly red-faced and contorted. "There's no emotion," Yuya emphasises of their work, "if you put emotion in, then it's just a fight." He quips that his favourite artist is Eric Cantona, an answer that once baffled a Korean art magazine who did not know who the footballer was. What makes every movement by Contact Gonzo so urgent and effective is how pain – so often an imagined pain that is represented, but not real, in theatre or dance productions – transforms into visible pain. That hollow impact of flesh on flesh, or flesh against the ground, the thud of a body's weight against the unyielding studio floor – everything ups the stakes as perceived pain becomes palpable pain. Eventually, another member of Contact Gonzo (Takuya Matsumi) joins the duo and the trio roll about on the stage, a fluid, brutal beast that has every single audience member wincing and gasping in a collective experience of pain. And as the audience members scramble to find a way to interpret this pain, it becomes a source of playfulness and mischief as the performers stretch it out or delight in moments of random comic timing with props that don't work as they should or fall in the "wrong" place. The humour is awkward, but it's also a relief, a valve for the pressure building up in the room. Just as an audience might have cheered on a charismatic gladiator in a sporting arena thousands of years ago, so has the dancer become the sportsman in the ring.

The performance by Indonesian artist Rianto is a different creature altogether, which begins as a controlled, precise and highly-codified presentation of lengger, a traditional erotic dance from Java. Rianto is performing as female, emphasising every coquettish curl of his arm and every arch of a come-hither eyebrow. As he invites the audience into the illusion, he subsequently breaks it completely when he transforms from the character of a princess into that of a prince, signified not just by a change of masks but by an entire shift in movement vocabulary. The sensual hips vanish; here come the wide-legged stances, the angular limbs, the scything arms. It's a gorgeous shift that takes time to register because of the chasm that yawns between presenting as masculine and presenting as feminine. And then he sheds his elaborate lengger makeup and, bare-faced, performs the modern choreographic practice he's embarked on since relocating to Japan with his Japanese wife. The style feels familiar, a series of movements that would not be out of place in a modern dance studio – a movement lexicon that, he says, has "no gender". The possibilities of the body are endless, unmarked territory. The final image that Ka Fai gives to us in the shimmering half-darkness, with Rianto barely lit by a dim spotlight, half-shadow and half-real, every muscle rippling, elevates dance from the earthly to the sublime. It's a transcendental several minutes, where we seem to have been lifted into a purgatorial space, where only the dance and the individual exists, and nothing else. 

A friend of mine described the evening as two perfect halves of pain and pleasure. Can we ever experience one without the other? They seem to heighten in each other's presence. Ka Fai didn't mean to combine Yuya and Rianto into the same production; it was a result of difficult scheduling. Yet the two halves cohered wonderfully, a layered interrogation of what movement in Asia is but also how it is perceived. Certain expected tropes are suggested – e.g. Yuya brings up Zen Buddhism, largely associated with a 'stoic' Japan – but then are immediately subverted – Yuya proceeds to rubbish any possibility of Zen in his work. We assume that Rianto's presentation will explore some sort of token Asian spirituality, but it morphs into a study of gender identity and the lenses we rely on to frame movement.

When I was at the Singapore Festival in France last year, a journalist friend of mine asked a Parisian museum director if a particular Asian exhibition, with its overtones of ritual and tradition, was cheap-shot, easy programming for a "spiritually bankrupt" West. The museum director looked very uncomfortable and tried to dispute it, citing a blend of "tradition and modernity". I'm tired of this binary, and I'm glad Ka Fai turns it on its head with the kind of copious performance research that brings a tapestry of diversity to the fore, with deep currents of history and memory layered beneath mould-breaking movement. SoftMachine is part of the "Out Of Asia" platform, and while I understand the desire for an "Out Of Asia" tagline as a sort of instant handle for a European audience, it leaves the production instantly framed by stereotyped mystique and exotica, evoking the sense that the dancers and performers had to somehow hack their way out of a dense eastern jungle to be liberated upon a western stage. An Asian artist's trajectory should not be marked by how much he/she embraces a 'fusion tradition' to make it palatable to a contemporary audience. SoftMachine presents its performers as they are, without easy handles or categories, and our experience of their work is the richer for it. It sheds that Dionysian-Apollonian dialectic, where the fight between the individual and collective ceases to matter (with apologies to Nietzsche) – because, well, why be one when you can be both?

---

Ka Fai and SoftMachine dramaturge Tang Fu Kuen will both be speaking at this upcoming talk, The Persistence of Exoticism, on November 22 at Sadler's Wells. The title of the talk draws from Ka Fai's directorial notes to SoftMachine, written in 2013:

On 7th of September 2011, London dance powerhouse Sadler's Wells uploaded a 5-minute promotional video titled "Out Of Asia – The Future of Contemporary Dance" for their new season preview. I was intrigued and disturbed at the same time by the video. As an Asian artist, my immediate response was: "Who are you to tell us what the future of contemporary dance is and what is coming out of Asia?"

From my personal perspective, the curatorial concern was superficial. Asia is extremely diverse culturally, it is difficult to access local knowledge and tradition without investing time for research or first-hand experience. There is a recurring sense of mystification put upon the cultural production from the East for the cultural consumption market of the West. The persistence of exoticism is sadly evident in the institutional promotion of contemporary dance from Asia.

My initial research revealed to me that it is clear that the discussion of contemporary dance in Asia is still in an embryonic state and has been mostly conducted through academic research under immense influence from the West. With this revelation as a starting point, I thought someone from Asia should create new spaces for such discourse. From the naive idea of "From Asia For Asians", I started an 18-month journey across 13 Asian cities in my search for what is "Inside Asia".

P.S. The programme booklet was beautiful. Here's an image of Rianto in it:

In conversation with playwright Alfian Sa'at

This is belated, but I thought I'd share the video recordings of the cozy Q&A session I had with prolific and popular Singapore playwright Alfian Sa'at last month (August 17). It was organised and hosted by Centre 42, Singapore's centre for text-based work for the stage. This is the write-up that accompanied the videos on the Centre 42 website:

Part 1: Corrie gets Alfian to talk about his childhood as a “Mendaki kid”, singled out for his strong academic performance. The pair then move on to Alfian’s mentorship under The Necessary Stage’s Resident Playwright Haresh Sharma, and how it actually spurred him to move away from English play-writing towards poetry, short stories and Malay plays, all in a bid to differentiate himself from his prolific mentor. Corrie also brings up Alfian’s shortlived career as a theatre reviewer for the Straits Times.
[*Due to technical difficulties, audio quality temporarily drops from 02:32 to 05:34.]

Part 2: Alfian and Corrie talk about censorship in the arts; telling alternative histories; verbatim theatre; developing memorable characters; intertextuality; and using social media as a public platform for discourse. Plays mentioned include “sex.violence.blood.gore” (1999), “Asian Boys Vol. 1: Dreamplay” (2000), “Asian Boys Vol. 3: Happy Endings”, “Cooling-Off Day” (2011), “To Cook a Pot of Curry” (2013), “Hotel” (2015), and “GRC” (2015).

Part 3: Alfian fields questions from the audience.

Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts I, II & III) by Suzan-Lori Parks

Hello from London, my home for the next year or so. I've been getting myself acquainted with the sprawling theatre industry here, and in-between the tangle of bureaucracy and settling into the city I managed to get reasonably-priced tickets for a few shows. One of them was Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home From The Wars (Parts I, II & III) at the Royal Court Theatre, a show I'd been longing to see when I first heard it had opened in New York two years ago. I'd given up all hope of seeing it – until I realised to my delight that it was in fact playing in London. 

Set against the turbulent American Civil War in 1862, Father Comes Home From The Wars unpacks one man's agonising choice. A slave, known to all as Hero, must decide between two terrible things: to stay home and be a slave and servant forever, or to go to war with his master on the "wrong side", fighting for the pro-slavery Confederates, with the tantalising possibility of gaining his freedom at the end. It's the sort of play that gnaws at you, slowly but insistently, and then leaves you gasping at the end.

We hear about Hero first before seeing him, as a chorus of farmhands on the same Texas property bicker and bet precious items as to whether he will fight or stay. And when he does stride onto the stage, he stands, quite literally, head and shoulders above everyone else, a veritable Greek demigod of a man ("Hero is as he was born: Big, brave, smart, honest and strong"). And there is a strong sense of the Greek epic in this three-hour, three-act play, with its nod to a Sophocles-type performing structure with a core of three actors in every scene and a chorus that comments on the unfurling action, not to mention that our hero is Hero and has a dog named Odd-See (a sly nod to The Odyssey, in case you were wondering), and that our Hero goes on a journey to fight a war and gains a name he has chosen for himself, Ulysses – after the Union general Ulysses S. Grant, but also the Latin name for Odysseus, he of Homer's epic poem of adventure and loss that is set during the Trojan War. There is also, incidentally, a character named Homer, and a Cassandra-like figure in Hero's lover Penny (named for Odysseus' lover Penelope), who sees signs and portents, and dreams of him. Parks sets up this structural metaphor skilfully, reclaiming a trampled, trodden-down history and elevating it to the same plane as the plays that were once created for an audience of the gods. 

I don't think this production, which could be considered by all means an historical play, can be dissected as a separate entity from the present-day #BlackLivesMatter movement and ongoing police brutality protests that have taken shape and also shaken America over the past two years. Parks has been remarkably prescient in her ability to negotiate and navigate the concept of "freedom" – both a collective freedom and an individual freedom – and how it applies to a wide swathe of a country's population. From the domestic setting of the first act, to the war-time chaos of the second, and then to the post-war uncertainty of the final act, Hero-Ulysses must make crucial decisions about his personal freedom, and the lengths to which he will go to attain it. What is the price of freedom – and what are the sacrifices made when one has been conditioned to live without it?

I found myself initially chafing at Steve Toussaint's portrayal of a mild, ambivalent Hero in the first act: Why so ineffectual, so indecisive? I thought. You're supposed to be a hero! But Hero was never meant to be a hero, even if he may look the part and even if everyone else deems him so. And in the same way, Parks gradually reveals that the concept of freedom isn't defined by one person; it depends on the majority's definitions and expectations of freedom. This also extends to perceptions of a man's worth – first debated baldly and uncomfortably in dollar and cents as it applies to the price of a slave, and then on a deeper level as the characters grapple with what it means to be a free man and to "own one's self". There's also some very, very clever and striking use of Confederate and Union uniforms as a visual metaphor to contrast between man's interior convictions, what he believes to be true, and his exterior facade, how he conforms to society. In the second act, Hero encounters a captured Union soldier on the battlefield, who tries to explain what freedom means. Hero cannot comprehend it. 

HERO: Who will I belong to?

SMITH: You'll belong to yourself.

HERO: So – when a Patroller comes up to me, when I'm walking down the road to work or what-have-you and a Patroller comes up to me and says, 'Whose n***** are you, N*****?' I'm gonna say, 'I belong to myself'? (...) 'I belong to the Colonel', I says now. That's how come they don't beat me. But when Freedom comes and they stop me and ask and I say, 'I'm my own. I'm on my own and I own my ownself,' you think they'll leave me be?

SMITH: I don't know. 

HERO: Seems like the worth of a Colored man, once he's made Free, is less than his worth when he's a slave.

And just as the choice of Freedom hangs over Hero's head like the sword of Damocles, so does his idea (or his ideated idea) of home. During the second act, the house in which he lives is suspended over the stage to, on a practical level, clear the stage for a battlefield scene, but to me personally, on a metaphorical level, felt like the ever-present and looming fixation on a warm, familiar home that exists, somewhere on the horizon. But by the time that home is lowered back onto the ground, everything has already changed, irrevocably. Odysseus returns home from the Trojan War, triumphant, to his beloved Penelope, but Parks isn't as optimistic about her faux-Ulysses. The civil war is over, but the larger, longer, and harder war has only just begun.

Stray thoughts:

• What an astonishing cast. The Royal Court run featured: Steve Toussaint (Hero), Leo Wringer (The Oldest Old Man), Jimmy Akingbola (Homer), Nadine Marshall (Penny), John Stahl (Colonel), Tom Bateman (Smith), Dex Lee (Odyssey Dog – personally my favourite character), Sibusiso Mamba (Chorus Leader/First Runaway), Jason Pennycooke (Second/Second Runaway), Sarah Niles (Third/Third Runaway). And not to mention the masterful music director and arranger Steven Bargonetti, who plays a narrative role of sorts as he accompanies the action on banjo and guitar, with songs written by Parks.
• Hovering in my mind, what Toni Morrison said many years ago: “What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.” (Emphasis my own.)
• The play runs till Oct 22, tickets from £12 here.

The exterior of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square.

I Am LGB – an experiment by the LGB Society of the Mind

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. 

Zihan/Josef, presiding.

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?

'LGB' for August 18 was Tim Nga.

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.

Rosnah by The Necessary Stage

I sat in on the first iteration of The Necessary Stage's Orange Playground laboratory series about two years ago as an 'observer'; the lab was meant to give artists an open space to experiment with new material. I signed up to follow Alin Mosbit and Siti Khalijah as they created their own work over the course of several months, culminating in a sort of work-in-progress performance lecture. It was very new and exciting to me, to be there in the rehearsal room, that intimate, boundless space, with two powerful actors. About halfway into their creative process, Alin and Siti embarked on a segment they nicknamed "Haresh's Heroines", a revisitation of various characters from Haresh Sharma's plays in new contexts and new pairings.

There was one improvisation in particular that has stayed with me. The Necessary Stage artistic director Alvin Tan, with a measure of glee, told Siti to perform two characters in conversation – Saloma from The Necessary Stage's seminal Off Centre (1993), who struggles with schizophrenia, and a new character Siti had just devised, a feisty fashion entrepreneur running her own plus-sized clothing label. Siti paused to think for about fifteen seconds. And then she stepped into the playing area and did just that. Those magical ten minutes where she embodied two wildly different characters – having a real time conversation, each with their own physical and verbal tics, lexicon and emotional landscapes – proved to me that she is truly one of the most gifted actors of her generation.

The Necessary Stage's revisitation of Rosnah (1995) at the Esplanade's Pesta Raya festival was a loud echo of "Haresh's Heroines". (MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD.) Rosnah (2016) really isn't a "restaging" by any means. It's an interrogation, deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of a defining monodrama. Siti sweeps onto the stage with a pink suitcase and red coat – ah, here's Rosnah, I think to myself – and then she immediately proceeds to tear away at that illusion. I'm Siti K, she says, after a selfie and some banter with a delighted audience, and I'll be playing Rosnah.

And this take on Rosnah is really hers to own. It's a thoughtful look at what it means to be a modern Malay-Muslim woman in today's world, a world of Brexit and Islamophobia, as Siti reflects on the original text of a young woman's journey to London and the deep cultural differences she encounters, and how she might have responded in the same situations as the character she's playing. (She is accompanied by the consistently excellent sound artist-musician-extraordinaire Bani Haykal, who has the ability to both blend into the audience and be the centre of attention all at once, through a few soaring musical interludes that give that extra tenderness and emotional heft to the main narrative.)

A friend of mine, who was weighing if she ought to watch this incarnation of Rosnah, had admitted that she'd found the original script dated and prescriptive. Rosnah of the mid-1990s inhabited a largely different world, where the term "brain drain" had only just entered the national lexicon and Dick Lee's national day anthem Home (1998) cajoled overseas Singaporeans into returning to, or at the very least thinking nostalgically of, their island home. Singapore's cosmopolitan, globalised identity was not yet in full bloom, and Siti, in this version and as "herself", comments strongly on the insularity and parochialism that deters Rosnah as the fictional character makes hesitant decisions on interracial relationships and slut-shames a fellow Malay Singaporean in London. "Siti" makes some solid insights about the work, but I found myself craving more depth to her commentary instead of her short, pithy statements, even if they were sharp and well-observed. Rosnah's character is achingly vulnerable, unburdening herself to the audience to the point of melodrama, but endearing nonetheless; in contrast, Siti's on-stage character seemed to always have her guard up, only letting slip glimpses of her personal life that allow the audience in at arm's length, often by way of comedy rather than tragedy. 

There is a breath-taking scene in which Siti inserts herself into two characters' ongoing conversation with perfect clarity, an even trickier three-way permutation of her Orange Playground feat. But I paused to wonder – are we marvelling at the way in which these characters interlock, and the self-reflexivity that The Necessary Stage is able to bring to its rich canon of work; or are we distracted by the loud statement of Siti's technical virtuosity? I suppose either could work, depending on what you're more intrigued by as an audience member, but I wonder if anything might be lost in choosing to focus on one over the other.

But there is absolutely no doubt as to Siti's ability to pull off the conceit of this deconstructed Rosnah. She's had some superb monodrama showings in Best Of (2013), Rosnah (2006), and How Did The Cat Get So Fat (2006), but this meta-monodrama takes it a step further in giving the performer the agency to be a sort of revisionist theatre historian. The Necessary Stage, as it approaches its 30th anniversary next year, has been putting the magnifying glass to its previous works, whether it's Best Of (His Story) (a new male-centered version of the original female-led monodrama to be staged later this year) or untitled women (which revised Haresh's abstract short plays untitled cow and untitled women) or Ghost Writer (a reincarnation of Gitanjali). As the company has evolved artistically over the years, its remakes, revivals and reconstructions of productions reflect a deep awareness of how its works fit into Singapore's artistic trajectory, but also how the ephemera of past work can continue to live and grow today.

• You can download the programme for Rosnah here.
• Incidentally, Alin Mosbit – the original Rosnah – translated this version into Malay.
• Before the show, I asked how long it would be. 1 hour and 10 minutes, one of the TNS staff told me. I checked my watch the moment I stepped out of the theatre – 1 hour and 9 minutes. Siti's timing is that impeccable.