Silence and Sound
Nanyang Technological University English Graduate Research Symposium
4-5th October 2024
Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan (SHHK) Building
48 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639818
Performing Bodies
Day 2, 18 February | 2.15PM - 3.45PM
Moderator: Daniel Kong Wei Ming
The critic as pendamping-pengganggu: acts of critical accompanying in Singaporean performance
Corrie Tan
My doctoral project looks at the figure of the theatre and performance critic in 21st-century archipelagic Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines)—and how the role of the critic and the relationships and labours they engage in might offer us new insights into how criticism is appropriated and subverted from its western lineages, and how it is practised in syncretic ways across the Southeast Asian region. Drawing from informal performance discourse in Indonesia, I consider how the critic can be both a companion (pendamping) and a provocateur (pengganggu). While the intertwined pendamping-pengganggu role has its origins in Indonesian dramaturgical practice, it has been popularised throughout archipelagic performance networks by way of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network (Minarti 2016). At first glance, the pendamping-pengganggu may look like two separate and even contradictory approaches, but they are consistently introduced as an inseparable set of dispositions inhabiting the same role or body. Through the figure of the companion-provocateur, I look at how critics might enact a care ethics in a criticism that leaves room to adjust for various intimacies and proximities: when to draw close and when to step away; when public interventions might be effective and when private conversations are wise; when urgent political action is needed and when slowness and consideration take priority. I look at how this concept might be adapted to the critic’s role through examples of “embedded criticism” with Singaporean arts companies.
Corrie Tan is a researcher, facilitator, dramaturg and critic from Singapore. She works at the intersection of care ethics, collaborative performance practices, and new articulations of arts criticism in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Corrie is completing her Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies on the joint programme between King’s College London and the National University of Singapore. She is contributing editor and resident critic with the arts media platform ArtsEquator and assistant editor with the independent academic collective AcademiaSG. www.corrie-tan.com
Embodying the Performative Present in the Theatre of Melati Suryodarmo
Daniel Kong Wei Ming
This thesis examines Melati Suryodarmo, an Indonesian artist whose work blends the genre of dance, performance art, and various traditional practices into a visceral expression of the body and its exertion. I contend that Suryodarmo offers a distinctive modification of ideas of presence and sensation that are central to performance art and scholarship. Suryodarmo centres the body in her work but does so in a less oppositional manner as compared to her forebears. Instead of enshrining the body and the idea of presence as an inviolable principle, her work emphasises the embeddedness of the body in discursive and cultural contexts that are in themselves — shaped by the sensory nature of human experience.
In doing so, Suryodarmo crafts a catalogue of work that invests energy into elevating the artistic present and future of performance, drawing in the body’s experience and its ties to more abstract flows of discourse and culture. The thesis charts out Suryodarmo’s method across the themes of body, space, and representation, using a broad variety of critical approaches that often exceed what is expected of performance scholarship. This analytical diversity responds to the richness of Suryodarmo’s work and her method, which is unafraid to draw from disparate influences and as such demands a degree of flexibility in how she is assessed as an artist and as an articulator of aesthetic concepts.
As a whole, Suryodarmo’s work can be understood through the lenses of renewal and reconstruction. Her oeuvre is deeply conversant with seemingly disparate fields of artistry and critical thought — linking these areas in her practice, and similarly, motivating unorthodox connections in critical efforts to respond to her work, such as what is attempted in this thesis. Suryodarmo remakes presence for the present. She draws from her own rich experience an argument for urgent, interconnected art and criticism.
Postgraduate student and researcher in the fields of Performance Studies, Modernism, the Theatre of the Absurd, and Postmodernism. My work explores the use of the body in a variety of artistic and critical contexts. Recent interests include artistic expressions of mental health conditions, with a particular focus on Antonin Artaud, psychosis, and literary and medical understandings of schizophrenia. Passionate educator for English Literature and other forms of writing in the Humanities and Communications.
The Intercultural Encounters and Exchanges Behind the Making of a Singapore Chinese Theatre
Koh Yee Cheng
Theatre Ox, a Grotowskian-based, Singaporean Chinese troupe, was active from the mid-1990s till the early 2000s. Inspired by the artistic practices of U Theatre, another Grotowskian-based theatre troupe from Taiwan, Theatre Ox studied and followed very closely the training methods and practices of the former troupe, fusing U Theatre’s Grotowskian-based training with their own brand of Taichi, meditation, and anthropological research. The result of such experiments led to a creation of works infused with novelty within traditional Chinese performances, stretching the style to the point of leaving the vestiges of the art forms at times. In this essay, I study the intercultural encounters and exchanges behind the making of Theatre Ox, tracing the genealogy of practices which began with the Polish theatre master Grotowski himself, to the appropriation of Grotowski’s methods by Taiwanese U Theatre, and the subsequent transmission of ideas and methods to Singapore’s Theatre Ox, which later brought their craft back to Grotowski himself in a dissimilar yet recognisable form. In light of Theatre Ox’s attempts to re-imagine their cultural identities through Grotowski, I argue that in the aftermath of cultural displacement, the ahistorical and universalising characteristics of intercultural theatre — with all its promises and problems — did offer resources for some theatre troupes in Singapore to re-imagine their cultural identities.
Koh Yee Cheng is a first-year PhD student at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests lie in theatre historiography, theatre in Singapore and Southeast Asia, as well as biopolitics in theatre.