Live Conversations #2: Navigating the pandemic

The evolving coronavirus pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of each society. Our obsession with productivity, efficiency, and economic growth have not only failed us, but limited us in creating creative, empathetic and equal societies.

In this conversation, trilingual academician Prof. Chinmoy Guha and theatre practitioner T.Sasitharan will discuss how we can look to the arts (literature, history, philosophy and theatre) for solutions or methods in approaching the crisis, and how mankind can learn to reconnect and find new ways of collective art-making.

Prof. Guha will be referencing multiple literary works and his work—Bridging East and West: Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland Correspondence 1919–1941, which shares how two Nobel Laureate from different backgrounds and corners of the world share their views. T.Sasitharan will comment on how education has failed to help us understand the 'other' and how theatre can create zones of discomfort to meet the 'other'.

Live Conversations #3: Complexities & Contradictions of Political Cartoons

From the assassinations at Charlie Hebdo in Paris to the financial pressures on “Charlie Chan Hock Chye” in Singapore, cartoon censorship controversies encompass a wide range of motives and methods.

Although one of the most basic forms of art and journalism, political cartooning is capable of provoking disproportionately strong reactions — for better or worse. Their symbolic power has been used for progressive, democratic purposes, as well as to serve power and incite hate. Their opponents have been known to kill, jail and torture cartoonists, or – increasingly – wrap them in a culture of self-censorship.

Writer Cherian George and cartoonist Sonny Liew will explore these complexities and contradictions in a conversation with T. Sasitharan. Cherian and Sonny are currently collaborating on Red Lines, a graphic non-fiction book about the political censorship of cartoons around the world.

In a period of mass isolation, the idea of “audience” seems counterintuitive. With alternative platforms for adaptation of theatre (film, interactive theatre on Zoom etc), we see a changing nature of spectatorship—from the silence before a show begins to an outburst of commentary on the live chat of online shows.

As an artform that thrives on communal experience, can theatre continue to create a psychological interaction or ideological exchange with the audience? Could this new form of spectatorship mark the beginnings of theatre’s irrelevance? Or should its measure of relevance be divorced from an audience's relationship to the work?

In a conversation with playwright and educator Michelle Tan, two theatre luminaries Tan Tarn How and Rody Vera will discuss the relevance and place of theatre as it faces the threats of commodification, commercialisation and trivialisation. Tan will be referencing his work, Fear of Writing and The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate ‘S’ Machine while Rody will be sharing about the annual Virgin Labfest Festival, a platform that presents unpublished, unstaged, untried and untested works.

Alfian Sa’at
(Singapore)

Alfian Sa’at is the Resident Playwright of Wild Rice. His published works include three collections of poetry, ‘One Fierce Hour’, ‘A History of Amnesia’ and ‘The Invisible Manuscript’, a collection of short stories, ‘Corridor’, a collection of flash fiction, ‘Malay Sketches’, three collections of plays as well as the published play ‘Cooling Off Day’.

In 2001, Alfian won the Golden Point Award for Poetry as well as the National Arts Council Young Artist Award for Literature. He has also been nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize three times, for 'Corridor' (1999, Commendation Prize), ‘A History of Amnesia’ (2004) and his translation of the novel ‘The Widower’ (2016).

Alfian has won Best Original Script at the Life! Theatre Awards four times, for ‘Landmarks’ (2004), ‘Nadirah’ (2010), 'Kakak Kau Punya Laki' (Your Sister's Husband, 2013) and Hotel’ (with Marcia Vanderstraaten, 2016). He is also the co-artistic director of the biennial Singapore Theatre Festival.

Alfonse Chiu (Singapore)

Alfonse Chiu is a writer, artist, and researcher working at the intersection of text, space, and the moving image. He is currently Editor and Creative Lead of moving image editorial platform, SINdie, where he heads editorial direction, research, and special projects. He is also an independent culture journalist and researcher, who has worked with the Department of Architecture at National University of Singapore and the Singapore Heritage Society on projects concerning urban development, heritage conservation, and architectural modernism. He is a co-founder of the Centre of Urban Mythologies, a collective and research platform investigating the urban condition in Southeast Asia. His writings have been published internationally in publications such as Hyperallergic, Nang, and KINEMA.

Amanda Chong (Singapore)

Amanda Chong is a lawyer trained in Cambridge and Harvard, who writes poems during lunch breaks. Her first collection, Professions, was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. Her poetry has been engraved on the Marina Bay Helix Bridge and included in the Cambridge International GCSE syllabus. She also co-founded ReadAble, a non-profit which aims to improve social mobility through empowering children and migrant women in low-income communities with literacy.

Cecil Rajendra (Malaysia)

Cecil Rajendra is a lawyer by profession but a poet by compulsion. Despite being in active legal practice, notably in human rights cases, he has authored 27 books and published over 20 collections of his poems, many of which are published in over 60 countries and translated into several languages. Some of his recent collections include Personal and Profane (Malaysia, 2015) and Extremists & Other Deviants (Ireland, 2018).

Cecil Rajendra has received multiple awards for his poetry and human rights work, including the Malaysian Lifetime Humanitarian Award (2004), Danish International Visiting Artist award (2011), Lifetime Achievement Award (2019) by the Malaysian Bar for his services to Legal Aid, Law Awareness & Human Rights and Pro Bono Award (2019) by the International Bar Association (IBA). In 2015, he was declared a Living Heritage Treasure by Penang Heritage Trust (PHT) for his legal, literary & cultural contributions to society.

Cherian George (Singapore/
Hong Kong)

Cherian George is a Professor of Media Studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University School of Communication. He researches media freedom, censorship, and hate propaganda. His books on these subjects include Media and Power in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2019, co-authored with Gayathry Venkiteswaran) and Hate Spin: The Manufacture of Religious Offense and its Threat to Democracy (The MIT Press, 2016), which was placed on the Publishers Weekly list of 100 Best Books of the year. He was the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural Media@Risk Scholar in 2018.

Chinmoy Guha (India)

Chinmoy Guha is an academician and author. He is a Professor of English, University of Calcutta, former vice-chancellor of Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata; and former director of publications, Embassy of France in India, New Delhi. He has been the literary editor of the prestigious Bengali literary magazine Desh for a decade (2002–12).

Recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award (2019) and Vidyasagar Puroshkar (2017). The French Government conferred on him the titles of Chevalier des Palmes Académiques (2010) and Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (2013). The President of France has bestowed on him the National Order of Merit (2019). He has been a member of the jury of the Prix Romain Rolland, instituted by the Institute of France in 2018, and conferred at the Jaipur Lit Festival.

His works include Bridging East and West: Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland Correspondence 1919-1941, Where the Dreams Cross: T.S. Eliot and French Poetry, The Tower and the Sea: Romain Rolland–Kalidas Nag Correspondence 1922–1938, Tagore at Home in the World (co-editor), a biography of Victor Hugo, and Bengali translations of La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, Flaubert’s The Dictionary of Received Ideas, Romain Rolland’s Danton, and André Gide’s Strait Is the Gate. His best-known works in Bengali are Chilekothhar Unmadini, Garho Shankher Khonje, and Ghumer Darja Thele. He has anchored several documentaries for the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore.

Michelle Tan (Singapore)

Michelle is a writer and drama educator. As a playwright, her work has been produced by several local theatre companies, including Cake Theatrical Productions and Singapore Repertory Theatre. Her last play, I Am Trying To Say Something True, was commissioned as part of the Esplanade Studios 2018 season. Currently, Michelle teaches in the theatre department at the School of the Arts (SOTA).

Rody Vera (Philippines)

Rody Vera is a playwright, screenwriter, and theatre artist from the Philippines. He has written around 70 plays, (original and adaptations). He is the Co-Founder of the Virgin Labfest, an annual theatre festival of new works for the stage and he currently heads the Writer's Bloc, Inc, a group of Filipino playwrights. He is a recipient of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature (Hall of Fame). His Palanca Winning works include: Luna: Isang Romansang Aswang, Ismail at Isabel, Indigo Child and the film scripts Death March, Lakambini, and Ang Aking Juan Luna among others. He was also involved in several projects with The Necessary Stage (TNS), including Mardi Gras/Top or Bottom (2004) and Good People (2008), where he was nominated as Best Actor in Singapore's Life! Theatre Awards. He was part of TNS’ godeatgod (2004), which toured several theatre festivals in Hong Kong, Sibiu (Romania), and Budapest (Hungary).

Sonny Liew (Singapore)

Sonny Liew is a cartoonist best known for The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (Epigram, 2015 & Pantheon, 2016), which won three Eisner Awards including Best Writer/Artist. His other works include The Shadow Hero (with Gene Luen Yang), Doctor Fate (with Paul Levitz) and Malinky Robot, as well as titles for Marvel Comics, DC Comics, DC Vertigo, First Second Books, Boom Studios, Disney Press and Image Comics.

Tan Tarn How (Singapore)

Tan Tarn How is a playwright, who is best known for his works, Fear of Writing (2011), The Lady of Soul and Her Ultimate 'S' Machine (1993) and Press Gang (2018). He is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Society and Culture Department at the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) and researches on arts and cultural policy, arts censorship and media regulation/freedom. Prior to that, he was a former journalist at The Straits Times. He also recently published a children’s book series, Sengkang Snoopers (Epigram, 2020). As an arts activist, he is part of Arts Engage, a network of arts practitioners from various disciplines that comes together to discuss the policies that govern and impact their respective practices.

T. Sasitharan (Singapore)

T. Sasitharan (Sasi) is Co-Founder and Director of the Intercultural Theatre Institute. With the late Kuo Pao Kun, he conceived and started ITI in 2000. He was Artistic Director of Substation (1995-2000), still Singapore’s only independent arts centre, and the Theatre and Visual Arts critic of The Straits Times (1988-1995). Between 1983 and 1988, he taught Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. For 40 years he has worked as an actor/performer, director and producer. He writes and lectures on art, theatre training, performance practice and Singapore culture. Sasi received the Cultural Medallion in 2012.