"Exile, Return, Exile Again": #THEATRE by Index
a collaboration with Gee Dock Convos!
This conversation was first published on Gee Dock Convos, a platform initiated by arts practitioner and critic Ke Weiliang “to provide an accessible point of entry into arts and cultural discourse, and deconsolidate the final say about such offerings and/or issues from the hands of the Almighty Critic.” You can find out more about the platform here.
This conversation spanned five months, and mulls over the decimation of the Singapore theatre industry during the pandemic, the precarity of arts labour and arts spaces, as well as the memories and bodily imprints we make in these spaces – and what remains.
#THEATRE by INDEX ran between 14 – 17 January 2021 at Esplanade Theatre. It was presented as part of Esplanade Presents: The Studios.
The following Gee Dock Convo took place between Corrie Tan (Corrie) and Ke Weiliang (kewl). Corrie attended the 8PM show on 15 January 2021, while Weiliang attended the 10PM show on the same day.
kewl:
(17 January 2021)
At the end of #THEATRE, I had a discussion with a friend who works as a freelance production/stage manager in the theatre industry. While we both agreed that there were several aesthetically beautiful moments during the show, where our opinions differed was that they were not emotionally moved by it. According to them, watching #THEATRE was as mundane as turning on the lights in a typical office setting. And I totally understand where they come from. People like them have spent hundreds to thousands of hours toiling behind the scenes, and are the reason why theatre shows run like clockwork. So perhaps seeing the Esplanade Theatre stripped to its barest wasn’t at all eye-opening for them, and elicited more of a “Huh? But what’s so special about these air vents or overhead catwalks, I see them almost everyday…” response.
I, on the other hand, am currently observing a pandemic-triggered distance not just from a full-time livelihood in the theatre industry, but also from the Esplanade itself – a place that I used to be professionally intimate with. You see, I used to work not just as a freelance theatre practitioner, but also as a casual worker with the Esplanade. Although technical/production work was not a main component of what I did as a theatre practitioner/casual worker at the Esplanade, for more than 5 years I spent my fair share of time zipping around restricted sections of the venue, including ostensibly never-seen-before parts of the Esplanade Theatre Stage that were eventually spotlighted in #THEATRE. Yet, the familiarity of the surroundings didn’t preclude me from shedding a tear. I think for me, what emotionally moved me had less to do with discovering previously obscured architectural features during the 45 minute experience. It had more to do with the fact that I still have not come to terms with being abruptly ‘ejected’ from a space that I used to treat as my second home, somewhat against my volition thanks to the pandemic. I am still grieving the loss of access that was once second nature to me.
As someone who’s been acquainted with the Esplanade Theatre mostly as an audience member (correct me if I am wrong), I wonder how your encounter with #THEATRE was like?
Corrie:
(22 January 2021)
Like you, I felt that loss quite keenly. You’re quite right to say that my relationship with the Esplanade Theatre has largely been that of a spectator taking my seat in the stalls. But the first time I entered the Esplanade Theatre was as a very, very young practitioner: an eighteen-year-old working as a shadow puppeteer on the Singapore Lyric Opera’s Madama Butterfly (2005) directed by Ivan Heng. The founder of Paper Monkey Theatre, Benjamin Ho, had been tasked with choreographing a short piece of shadow puppetry to a musical interlude in the opera, and he’d recruited four theatre students to be his object manipulators and puppeteers. Because we’d mostly been rehearsing and crafting these puppets in a small studio, the four of us teenagers were quite overcome when we stepped onto the Esplanade Theatre stage for the first time. This was barely two years after the theatre had opened its doors to the public, and the concept of “doing theatre” as a profession was still something extraordinary to me. As we trailed the production team around the sprawling stage, we whispered to each other: How were we going to run across the stage, on cue, in seconds – with our overhead projectors and fragile paper landscapes in tow? What if something went wrong? What would 1,600 bodies in a theatre feel like?
I didn’t know then, of course, how much my life would become intertwined with the theatre. But of all the memories that #THEATRE excavated from within my body as I lay on the stage, gazing at a hallowed sky of descending flybars, this memory of Madama Butterfly felt the most electric and immediate. I almost could feel #THEATRE activating old neural pathways in my mind, including those full-body epiphanic delights that come with learning about the worlds one can conjure through shadow and sleight of hand, or with varying one’s distance from and proximity to a source of light. Till then I think I’d assumed that the magic of the theatre was contingent on the “suspension of disbelief”, but here I had come to the realisation that the magic of theatre is more durable than that – that one could reveal all of one’s stage secrets and render this magic even more delightful and profound.
Many of the reflections about #THEATRE that have since emerged have picked up on the site of a theatre as a metaphor for the body: the red veins and arteries of pipes that wind their way around the stage; the rumble of ventilation like the constancy of breath through lungs; the spines of staircases and catwalks that form the proscenium arch. It’s a metaphor that is telegraphed quite overtly throughout the production, with lighting designer Lim Woan Wen’s very precise light work drawing our eyes to the sinews and limbs the collective wants us to focus on. I thought a lot about what it means to find kinesthetic empathies with a nonhuman being. We’ve been talking so much about viral contagion over the past year and we sometimes overlook the fact that choreography is also contagious! This may be the choreography of a performer on stage – or the new choreographies of staying 1m apart, of swivelling away from each other in the street. The scholar Susan Leigh Foster, who has long been fascinated by what our bodies do when we watch someone else move, argues that “any notion of choreography contains, embodied within it, a kinesthesis, a designated way of experiencing physicality and movement that, in turn, summons other bodies into a specific way of feeling towards it”. Foster extends this to the choreography of empathy: how we can construct and cultivate ways of being physical that might guide us to perceive, understand and connect with how someone else is feeling. (I’m quoting all of this from Foster’s 2011 book Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance, which incidentally you can also borrow from library@esplanade, a few floors above the Esplanade Theatre.) It makes me wonder: what (and how) does a theatre feel? Were all of us seated on our tiny cushions in the bowels of the Esplanade Theatre stage a manifestation of the loss one might feel in the gut, a loss heightened by absence, pressed down by the weight of hundreds of flybars carrying nothing, close enough to brush with our fingers?
INDEX’s interventions in theatrical sites have, for me, been experiments in recalibrating not just our human responses to objects and sites, but to reveal how much these nonhuman things shimmer and shiver with agencies and energies not unlike our own. There are, of course, many decisions you can make about facilitating this object autonomy. I remember Woan Wen’s first solo show, Light Matters 拾光 (2012) at the chapel gallery at Middle Road (formerly Sculpture Square, now Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film), which involved curating a careful assemblage of objects that would interact with the sunlight coming through the space’s lone circular window. This durational site-specific work depended on so many things: whether the leaves outside the window were rustling in the wind, the angle and slant of the sun’s rays as it passed overhead, the density of a passing cloud. I think I sat there for two hours, watching the sun creep across the room and paint the walls in abstract, energetic strokes as it reflected and refracted through Woan Wen’s array of glass bottles and translucent trinkets. I think this was the first time I was apprehended by the sheer force that things – both celestial or otherwise – exert on the shape of our lives.
In the case of #THEATRE, there’s less room for happenstance. When a tiny fan goes off in the back, we know it’s part of a very deliberate soundscape by sound designer and composer-musician Darren Ng, and likely to have been placed in that very spot by spatial designer Lim Wei Ling. It’s that tension I am curious about: how much INDEX can or wants to control the architecture of an environment and the objects it houses – and how much the Esplanade Theatre dictates how we move through and experience it, or bends the wills and desires of INDEX to its own unyielding set of rules and boundaries.
What do you think it was about this work that prompted you to see beyond the “banal” and the “everyday”, and to delight – and mourn – in your return to the theatre? Was there anything you craved that satisfied you – or perhaps didn’t sate that sense of loss? What objects and actants lingered with you?
kewl:
(12 February 2021)
During the first 10 minutes of the show, I was thinking – “Wow, what a beautiful tribute to the technicians and crew who painstakingly operate and maintain the various fixtures and machinery backstage”. But after I left the Esplanade Theatre that night, I began to question myself – why did I initially think of paying tribute to technicians and crew that I could not see, but not the fixtures and machinery that were in such plain sight for 45 minutes? It’s a deceptively classic instance of the Chinese adage “远在天边, 近在眼前” (yuǎn zài tiān biān, jìn zài yǎn qián) – a phrase typically used to describe a situation when something you have been looking for a long time, has actually been right in front of you all along.
Months ago, I watched Loving Things by Ang Kia Yee, and was moved by how Kia Yee credited every inanimate object that featured in the show as a performer. In a parallel manner, I would argue that #THEATRE is a long overdue curtain call for the house curtain, the fly bars, the lighting board, the sound condenser, and every other thing that I previously regarded a thorn in the flesh to talk about every time I found myself laden with the unenviable task of preparing a technical rider for bump in. In that sense, I was most struck by precisely what you have aptly pointed out – the idea that nonhuman things shimmer and shiver with agencies and energies not unlike our own. If anything, what I took away from the show was that nonhuman things do lead “lives” of their own (even if it is not apparent to us – cc: Pixar’s Toy Story series), and that we will do well to take care of them, given the unconditional amount of silent labour that they go through for us. Now I feel so guilty about the countless times I’ve neglected to remove the sticky residue left behind by the things that I apply scotch tape on…
But speaking of leaving ‘residue’ behind – #THEATRE also reminded me that the Esplanade Theatre is truly an example of a tabula rasa taken to the extreme. Usually when I enter a room that two or more people have just had an argument in, I can somehow sense the tension left behind in that room, even if I don’t know what they were arguing about. On that note, I find it frustrating that within the Esplanade Theatre, there is zero semblance of the presences (human or otherwise) that have previously traversed that proscenium arch since 2002. Even though my brain has relatively clear memories of the shows that I’ve both watched and worked on there, my body doesn’t feel that way whenever I return to the space – do you know what I mean? I suspect it has to do with how venue management protocol dictates that the theatre MUST be reset perfectly to its original state after a show bumps out.
Of course, I expect no less from a state-of-the-art performing arts centre like the Esplanade, and I appreciate that this protocol ensures that every batch of venue hirers can set up their show on their own terms. But I cannot help but wonder: What if that blotch of paint that was accidentally spilled onto the stage floor from a previous production was never cleaned up? What if the incumbent hirer is responsible for responding to the lighting rig left behind by the previous hirer?What if every time a seat in the stalls is damaged, rather than fix it immediately, we retire it unless requested for otherwise? This is not to say that I encourage the Esplanade to abandon the high venue management standards that it has developed. Nonetheless, seeing the bare bones of the Esplanade Theatre during #THEATRE made me realise that there are barely any spontaneous interactions that take place between different generations of hirers as a result of the tangible imprints left behind in the space. It’s a kind of dynamic that I felt a lot more keenly in a ‘DIY’ venue like The Substation Theatre, where you somehow can really feel the collective energies of its past occupants since 1990.
Come to think of it, I would say that I have a detached sort of familiarity with the Esplanade Theatre. I am familiar with the Esplanade Theatre because I have always seen it in its perfect ‘zero state’, not because I have seen how the space, over time, evolves in direct response to what was left behind.
Corrie:
(30 April 2021)
I’m responding to you several months later and trying to summon the fragments of this experience in the process! So much has happened since, and I’m particularly drawn to your reference of The Substation and the kind of “collective energies” that are etched and embedded into a space, how each space has a different personality and invites (or imposes) different things from and on our bodies. And I do feel similarly about the Esplanade, that it’s significantly harder to find those traces of performances and relationships past because of the constant tabula rasa. And maybe the Esplanade had to fight for its right to be in the early 2000s, and to assert its cultural identity, but it’s never been under threat of disappearing. It can stay empty, but it will always stay open.
We can’t quite say the same of other arts spaces, and in the intervening pandemic months, we’ve said hello and goodbye to so many of them – we’ve had our welcome back through #THEATRE, but also had difficult farewells like The Last Chapter. I’m reminded in this comparison about the spaces that are granted perpetuity and immunity, and the spaces we took for granted that are facing their mortality, but also navigating reincarnations in different forms. In retrospect, while I enjoyed #THEATRE and the meandering, gentle journey it gave us, it hasn’t lingered with me as much as I thought it would because there are no stakes for the Esplanade’s survival at the moment. And while the space is for artists and art-making, the space doesn’t quite belong to artists. It’s subject to other hierarchies, other protocols, other institutional mechanisms, other regulations. We move in, and we move out. It’s the other spaces we’ve had to justify, defend, strategize collectively about: Centre 42, The Necessary Stage, the Intercultural Theatre Institute, the Substation. These spaces can also be virtual ones, like ArtsEquator.
This response is going to be a truncated one… My heart, mind and work have been preoccupied by the situation in Myanmar over the past three months because of my personal relationship with the country. But it has also made me think about the geographical fixity of the spaces and places we call home, and how to sustain that sense of belonging in the diaspora when people are forcibly dispersed from a place they had always thought was their own. In some cases the fight to reclaim or defend a space is a protracted one, one that might take months, years, decades. What happens when we are exiled from a space indefinitely? What sustains us during this process? I think radical hope is one, a hope that refuses to be hemmed in by what feels impossible, and that cannot be sustained by one individual but must be birthed by the speculative hope of many: hundreds, thousands, even millions. And this hope allows us to imagine and dream wildly about what can be, and then bring it into being.
kewl:
(27 June 2021)
And in return, I am responding to you almost two months later, hahaha. It’s incredible how stretching the duration of this Gee Dock Convo has drastically changed what #THEATRE makes me feel. I still haven’t fully processed the surreality of the month-long pseudo lockdown – called Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) – that we just experienced in Singapore. Having already experienced a full blown lockdown – i.e. the Circuit Breaker – last year, this time round I was a lot more prepared for the prospect of being forced to minimise in-person social interactions.
What I found truly bizarre, however, is that… While there was a blanket ban on dining in (which effectively deters many of us from socialising outside of our homes for prolonged periods of time), most arts and cultural activities – which some would label as a ‘not-so-essential’ endeavour given the pandemic – were somehow allowed to proceed, albeit under very stringent conditions. I had the privilege of attending several Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) programmes in-person (kudos to the festival team for responding so quickly to the ever evolving COVID-19 situation in Singapore, really!), and I still cannot reconcile the pandemic-induced dissonance between the conventional idea of a festival being an occasion where masses of people get together to do something, and the necessary safe distancing measures that we have to observe. Never mind that there was the minor inconvenience of having to undergo pre-event testing (PET) before shows with larger audience sizes – what I found harder to wrap my head around, was being hyper aware of not putting myself in situations where I ended up talking to more than one other person at any one point of time, so as to not break any rules! It was saddening to not be able to freely catch up with a peer whom I serendipitously spy at front of house, because to me, socialising with people pre/post-show is an integral part of the festival-going experience – as equally important as the performance-watching experience itself. As much as I am grateful to have been at the in-person SIFA shows that I had tickets to, it almost felt as if my presence there merely… fulfilled some sort of logistical requirement? Not being able to freely do what I would usually do as a festival-goer made me feel like – ah, I’m attending this show so that the creative and production team’s efforts don’t go to waste – and not because I really want to have the time of my life. I mean – how do I have the time of my life when the spontaneity that typically comes along with festival-going is no more, and one misstep from me as an audience member (e.g. if I were to lower my mask for a few seconds to catch a breath of air) can potentially ruin the efforts of an entire festival team?
I am thinking about the questions you have posed in your last contribution to this conversation. What happens when we are exiled from a space indefinitely? What sustains us during this process? How do communities of people share that radical hope that you alluded to if they have nowhere to congregate in real-time, and physically see for themselves that they have comrades who are also dreaming wildly about what can be, let alone bring it into being? And as I write this, I am reminded that The Substation will be no more in a month’s time. Whether or not The Substation spirit will manifest elsewhere, I do not know. I suppose that is why my personal creative practice is now centred on scattered, physically distanced interactions – because I am interested in the solidarities that we can still nurture when the fruits of reciprocity no longer surface as immediately as we want, and when we have no choice to be alone, together. Because I have finally accepted that – at least in the context of the Singapore arts and culture scene, and especially against the backdrop of this volatile pandemic – we will probably find ourselves in the cycle of exile, return, exile again for the foreseeable future.
Corrie Tan is a practitioner-researcher interested in the intersections of critique and care, particularly in Southeast Asia.
Ke Weiliang is the editor of Gee Dock Convos.
Other publicly accessible reflections on #THEATRE:
“#THEATRE stories” by multiple individuals, published on Esplanade Offstage: https://www.esplanade.com/offstage/arts/theatre-stories
“A Conversation about Being Physically Present in #THEATRE” by Cheryl Tan, Max Yam and Sam Kee, published on Arts Republic: https://artsrepublic.sg/thoughts/review-a-conversation-about-being-physically-present-in-theatre
“Review: #THEATRE by INDEX” by Bakchormeeboy: https://bakchormeeboy.com/2021/01/15/review-theatre-by-index
“Theatre review: A magnificent #Theatre, with its own humanity” by Benson Ang, for The Straits Times: https://www.straitstimes.com/life/arts/theatre-review-a-magnificent-theatre-with-its-own-humanity