To fulfil my vision of having theatre be a tool for talking more openly about “taboo” topics here in Singapore, I hope to be able to expand the Touring Show Project that I have personally been a part of from LASALLE College of the Arts. I believe a touring show around the various communities in Singapore will be a great opportunity to share about the lives of different people living in Singapore.
The Touring Show Project is a yearly project under the Performance Project Module that is mandatory for all Level 2 Diploma in Performance students. It aims to teach students to devise, write, and stage a theatre piece, before taking it on tour all across Singapore, mostly to audiences like international and local schools. The students also learn how to be their own independent performance troupe, managing everything from staging the show itself, to marketing the show, and or managing public relations. Its design as an independent entity makes it productive and efficient, requiring little to no external interference. I have witnessed this myself, noticing how little manpower the Touring Show Project requires.
However, what really draws me into this project is the devising process itself. A huge variety of topics have been chosen before. The director of all the Touring Show Projects so far, Mr. Daniel Jenkins, has always asked the same question before deciding on the topic which fuels the nature of the piece. “What does our audience need to hear?” Thus, many topics that have been chosen in all the projects so far, have been deemed as “taboo”. Topics ranging from bullying, to body dysmorphia, to one of the most recent projects in 2016: LABEL ME.
LABEL ME was a self-devised piece by the then Level 2 students of the LASALLE College of the Arts Diploma in Performance Programme which I happened to be a part of. LABEL ME was about the labels and stereotypes that we give to people from a very early age, and how that definition of them influences them in the later stages of their lives. Covering many topics from racism to sexism and homophobia, LABEL ME talked about how these preconceived notions of someone based on stereotypes were outdated and even harmful in some cases.
Its plot was packaged as a dystopian future where parents were given the chance to have “Designer Babies” by first putting these “LABELS” on them that defined them before they were even born. However, what really caught my attention was the decision to intersperse monologues between the central plot. These monologues were based on real life interviews we had with one another and other people, about the prejudice they had experienced in their lives. With some of them written verbatim, they made the entire play relatable, and even empathetic at some points.
“LABEL ME” was generally well received, with many schools happy that we had brought up such a timely topic, in a time filled with prejudice. My vision is to propose the Touring Show Project to already existing theatre companies all over Singapore, thereby starting a movement. With the existence of youth theatre training such as W!ld Rice’s Young and W!ld division, I hope to imbue the companies with the skills necessary to implement this non-invasive initiative, with the youth divisions independently leading the project without much interference from the parent company. The youth divisions will then tour around all sorts of Singaporean communities, hopefully sharing stories that matter, and help us understand each other just a little better.
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