Ong Keng Sen: Dramaturgical Methodologies and Strategies | ADN Meeting 2017

Charlene Rajendran:

Hi, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back from your tea break. Just a quick announcement that this session will not have simultaneous translation unfortunately, but we will have question and answer at the end where we will have the capacity for translation and Tomoko has kindly agreed to help us, so I would just ask her to translate that before we sort of start and people are trickling in.

Okay, thank you and welcome to the session. It is not going to be a conventional keynote. It is going to be a dialogue instead, an interview. We are very, very privileged and happy to have Ong Keng Sen to be a person who talks about dramaturgy in relation to the festival that he curates currently which is the Singapore International Festival of Arts. I will introduce Keng Sen a little bit, although it is usual to say a person needs no introduction, but sometimes it is good to remind ourselves about who we are talking with and some of the things that he has done. So, just as an entry point into perhaps some of the things that he is going to say later. 

Keng Sen has been an active theatre maker for a very long time and has been described as someone who has contributed actively to the evolution of an Asian identity in performance and aesthetic for contemporary performance in the 21st century in Asia and beyond. He studied intercultural performance with the Performance Studies Department at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, however, he holds a law degree, and I think that is significant when we come to our discussion later. 

And this I draw from a bio that was written in relation to a production called <em>The Red Ballerina</em> where I think some of Keng Sen’s ideas came to play, and I think the relevance of this bio, so I didn’t write this, I just want to acknowledge that this was a written bio. 

His belief in the juxtaposition of different art forms and cultural styles has helped him create his own epic performance style of directing. These productions are often in collaboration with international artists, both traditional and contemporary and from across disciplines. And he is well-known, especially for his Asian Shakespeare Trilogy which had Lear, Desdemona and Search: Hamlet, and docu-performances like The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields, The Myths of Memory, Sandakan Threnody so on and so forth.

His productions have been presented in numerous cities and centres including Lincoln Center in New York, Tanzquartier Vienna, Göteborg Dance and Theatre Festival, et cetera. 

And in 1994, Keng Sen conceptualised The Flying Circus Project, which some of you may know about or have participated in, a laboratory project that brings together traditional and contemporary Asian artists from all disciplines. 

He also initiated a new network for Asian artists to encourage inter-Asian engagement, known as the Arts Network Asia, which some of you here have been involved in. (0:05:00) 

And as a curator, he is known for these inter-disciplinary approaches. He conceived and directed In-Transit, for the House of World Cultures, Berlin. Also, curated Insomnia@ICA Season of Southeast Asian cutting edge young visual artists and filmmakers for London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and so on and so forth. 

He is a Fulbright Scholar. He is also Singapore’s first artist to have received both the Young Artist Award in 1992 and the Cultural Medallion award in 2003.

However, for today most relevantly Keng Sen is the festival director for the Singapore International Festival of Arts or SIFA as we will be calling it. And his mission, to quote from the festival of program, has been “to artistically reinvigorate and transform the festival”. And to do this, he looked firstly at the naming of the festival and so it moved from Singapore Arts Festival, which was inaugurated in 1977, to the Singapore International Festival of Arts. In addition, he initiated something called The O.P.E.N.. O.P.E.N. is an acronym for open, participate, engage and negotiate, which is a pre-festival of ideas to engage diverse audiences with the ideas, issues and themes of SIFA, and we will talk about these. 

So, today we have the privilege of talking with Keng Sen about dramaturgy of the festival, and what are some dramaturgical strategies that he draws upon to make this festival work. What sorts of vision artistic and otherwise has he spearheaded the kinds of relationships that he wants to cultivate with audiences or spectators, what is he set out to look at and what has he done to engage with the work of creating, developing, curating, dramaturging a festival for Singapore which is Keng Sen’s home country, birth country, however, is a place that he has frequently moved in and out of as well particularly in the last couple of decades I would say.

Ong Keng Sen:

Sounds a little bit old.

Charlene Rajendran:

Isn’t that a good thing?

Ong Keng Sen:

No, that is okay.

Charlene Rajendran:

You are not a spring chicken? Otherwise we would be suspect. 

So, what is the consciousness of this public space, this city space, and what is the political context into which this festival enters. 

So, thank you Keng Sen for doing this and being open to this dialogue session. We will have time at the end of it as has been said earlier for questions from the floor, so hold on to your questions as they emerge. 

So, to begin I just want to start with asking very basically what does it mean to talk about dramaturgy of a festival as a festival director, and as somebody who has got specific ideas about the thematic trajectories that you have created for this festival and a festival for Singapore?

Ong Keng Sen:

Thank you. Very nice to see all of you. I am sorry that we had to shift the talk today from 18th, and hence we have no translation, so of course this is always a little bit of a tragedy when you have no translation, but I hope that everybody will be okay. 

I think that in terms of festival dramaturgy I think there is a way in which the festival puts a frame around a period of time that it is playing, and it could be a theme, it could be a way of engaging the public, it could be a way of putting certain politics to the forefront, so I think that is for me a kind of festival dramaturgy, there is of course also it is not stable in a sense that it is in transition all the time over the number of years, and even within the frame of let’s say the six weeks or four weeks there is a kind of a journey I think, a trajectory.

Charlene Rajendran:

So, just to fill the audience in, Keng Sen has already put together three festivals and he is putting together one more which is the last one in this series for now as it were. And for those of you who aren’t aware, the themes have been 2014 Legacy, 2015 Post Empires, and 2015 was significant in Singapore because it was 50 years since independence and the whole year was a celebration, Post Empires. 2016 Potentialities and 2017 coming up, Enchantment. So, tell us a bit about the selection of these particular themes and how they worked individually and together?

Ong Keng Sen:

Actually, always I try very hard to put the themes in plural mainly because it (0:10:00) is about pluralities and multiplicities. So, it’s Legacies, for example. And it is always a big debate, like now, this year we are doing a project called Open Parliament and, of course, I said that “let’s call it Open Parliaments”. And then somebody in my team, my colleague, who is in charge of The O.P.E.N. in terms of all the engagement, Noorlinah Mohamed, she said “sounds a bit strange because usually it is only one parliament”. 

But this idea of plurality and we started with Legacies, and I wanted to have a way to reframe this kind of journey of moving back in time and moving forward in time in the past, present and future that we are any one time existing in these three – at least these three frames if not more. And I wanted to look at legacies and not so much histories mainly because I think legacies felt a little bit broader, so we had Legacies of Science and we had Legacies of Violence like Apartheid which came from the 20th century, so it is a kind of immediate reflection on the 20th century misdemeanours as well as – actually they are mostly misdemeanours. So, it was Legacies. And Post Empires, I think that it was looking at very strongly at the individual and looking at archiving in specific how individual archival processes are redefining the empires from which we have come from. And then last year was looking into the future but it was framed more as Potentialities rather than future. 

And this year. When I first agreed to do four years of the four editions I said that the last edition will be a kind of the wild card. Actually, I thought that it was just going to be a summary of all the three years because we are always living with legacies and we are always living with potentialities at the same time. But then post-Brexit and post-Trump, I often like to say that Singapore has pre-Trumped Trump, and this idea that perhaps in this kind of age of disenchantment we have to look at enchantment seriously, how do we continue to be enchanted with the world so that we can fight for it and we can sustain, because we can still believe and not become cynical in a process.

Charlene Rajendran:

So, unpack a little bit. What are some of the strategies then once you decide on a theme and you have an idea of how this theme is meant to connect with an audience, potential audience, a legacy of an audience? What are the kinds of things that begin to inform some of the strategic decisions, choices, and planning processes that go into place?

Ong Keng Sen:

I suppose that it is usually a kind of a landscape that we are in, like a domain. So, we enter a kind of domain and in a way we move through the domain of, let’s say, legacies. And I suppose coming from a generation that is not the digital generation, because in that year, in the first year of Legacies, we invited Hans Ulrich Obrist, for example, to do his project called 89plus. They were focused on individuals born 1989 and after, mainly the digital age and the digital generation. And I don’t come from the generation but I suppose that in a way looking at a kind of post-modern and beyond post-modernism, a kind of fractured surfaces perhaps reflecting each other. So I normally do think of working through a number of different lateral ways rather than trying to go to building a kind of monolithic approach towards legacies.

And this I think is something which is quite interesting because I have been asked before, let’s say for The O.P.E.N., why is it that I don’t become more didactic, kind of teach the audience what to think about legacies? And of course, I just don’t really think this is possible, and it is not also the agenda. And particularly, in Singapore, which is so top-down, I have seen my role as the festival director in a very specific way (0:15:00) and the main thing that I would say is I see my festival directorship actually as an intervention on many different levels. It is an intervention into the city, in a way to cut into the policies which politicians make about the arts in Singapore, and also to perhaps disrupt some of the kind of capitalist tendencies of the city. So, I see my festivals really as a kind of a pause or a way in which there is an interruption of the festival process in Singapore. And I think this is very important and I do always reflect on the fact that, being an artist, what does it mean to actually run a city festival. So, I consider that as one of the biggest frames that I use which is I see my festivals as an intervention.

Charlene Rajendran:

Very interesting, because earlier we were talking about rupture and that notion of how something is not destroyed but troubled, interrogated, taken off, a word which Peter introduced into the discussion this morning. But before we go there, and I am going to pursue that a little bit further, but before we go there I would like you to talk about The O.P.E.N., because I think that is a significant intervention in festival programming, in a way, it is an aspect that hasn’t been in the festival before. So, what led you to generate The O.P.E.N., and, well, firstly, what is The O.P.E.N. in your perspective, and what led you to make that happen?

Ong Keng Sen:

I suppose The O.P.E.N. is an open space, so it doesn’t have a particular fixed format. But it is a way in which I do believe that the festival deals with its vagueness and it reflects my own frustration as an audience member. For example, you see Gob Squad or you see maybe a show, let’s say that is happening here, Apichatpong, you go and you see <em>Fever Room</em>, and you want to know a little bit more, but then he is gone. He is gone and the show disappears in a few days, and there is always this frustration that you are chasing after UFO that has landed and it is going off again. It is unidentified, you get some sense of it, “oh, I think this is some vague sense of what the Martians wanted”, but you can’t really confirm. And this vagueness is what I think The O.P.E.N. tried. The O.P.E.N. tries to create an ecosystem – an ecosystem before the festival arrives where audience members are thinking about potentialities, for example, “what does this mean?”.

Charlene Rajendran:

So, it happens, correct me if I am wrong, about two months beforehand? It happens in June and the festival begins in August, September?

Ong Keng Sen:

It happens June, July and then there is usually a month in-between.

Charlene Rajendran:

It occurs slightly differently also because the way in which tickets and programmes are framed is not the usual festival ticketing/programming thing. So just talk about that, talk about The O.P.E.N. pass and how that encourages a certain kind of viewing that is not your typical conventional festival.

Ong Keng Sen:

I think that one of the things which we are always working with in festivals is about pricing of tickets, right. This is always, not just festivals, but even when you run a theatre company, I am thinking how to price, how not to discourage people who cannot afford. And I will say that, in Singapore, most people can afford, it is just how people want to spend their money. 

And, in a way, it is also about trying to create a flexibility of thought which I suppose is a kind of a post-discipline, or at least interdisciplinary to post-disciplinary process, whereby you actually move between a film and a talk like today and, then, maybe the next day you are in a photo exhibition; the sense of being able to slip and to actually transit between these genres. 

And The O.P.E.N. pass allows, let’s say, for $25 a student can actually watch 70 events in three weekends, all on that same pass. So, I don’t think that audiences in SIFA are all prohibited (0:20:00) by pricing. But of course, it is also a kind of a way in which I do believe that, as you are slipping between the genres, as you are slipping between the disciplines, something productive happens. And The O.P.E.N. operates on that way where you are actually put into a kind of mindfuck* or dream-state where you are moving between all these things and, without an audience choosing, because usually the audience chooses, an audience member chooses let’s say “I have $50, what can I watch, and these are my top three things”. And we actually try to create that sense where you can – you don’t have to feel the pressure.

Charlene Rajendran:

So, tell us then how that pertains to your thinking about Singapore as the city where this festival is happening, and why in particular your reading of Singapore as a city, as a city-state, as a nation as well, then warrants this kind of open session before the festival, and an ongoing commitment to that way of presenting the festival that there is always a festival, but there is always The O.P.E.N. beforehand, and there is a different layer of thinking or a different approach to working that is specific to this Singapore that you are responding to.

Ong Keng Sen:

I think that Singapore, for me, is a land of censorship where you are very often directed to think in a certain way, so you have a pathway which you follow and you very seldom are allowed to discover or to fall because you are not even allowed to fall. So, basically you are supported in a way you actually start to think only of, not just the possible, but the successful possible. And because of that, I think The O.P.E.N. allows for a space where you are not told why you are watching it and how you should be thinking about it, and this kind of openness, I think, is really important as a kind of life experience. So, the festival tries to draw on that. I suppose that I do think that a festival responds to the city, responds to the context in which the festival is in. I was asked by Charlene yesterday about what do I think were the moments where I think, okay, the festival has worked, and I gave her an answer, of course as you are talking you are discovering certain things, that, for me, I feel that the festival is particularly successful when it makes the political processes transparent. When a play is censored, and the festival production is censored, that is when the process becomes – the political process becomes transparent. And actually, that is when I feel that as an intervention we have collided against the wall, and that collision becomes visible, and the invisible political system becomes visible. 

I will give you an example. At the time when we publicise productions, it is usually in April and the festival, let’s say, is in June or in August, and the plays are not yet classified or the productions are not classified. So, it is always something like “rating TBC”, rating to be confirmed, this then becomes our leverage because, then, when performance is censored or disallowed, audiences begin to ask why, “I bought a ticket for it, why is it taken off the shelf?”. This is when the political process becomes transparent, and of course what the sensors want us to do, as companies, as artists, as festivals, as institutions, is to pre-censor, so that the audience does not know that they are denied the show. But when you say, “rating to be confirmed”, they want to see, let’s say, Apichatpong, and then it is taken off, and then they begin to ask, “why, what was wrong about the show, which scene was problematic?”. So, this is when the political process becomes visible, and I think the festival, as a kind of national performing arts festival, as a (0:25:00) clustered series of events, becomes very visible and politically very strong. And in that way, I think that I see my office actually as a public office, and I see my intervention as a festival director almost like an ombudsman, which is again another legal term where you actually create a kind of check-and-balance, and you reveal some of the quiet censorships that are happening.

Charlene Rajendran:

Ombudsman, that is really about mediation or facilitation of a process and a very different kind of role to the assumptions made about the director. Earlier, obviously we were talking about the dramaturg and what kind of role is that and what are the hierarchies of that kind of collaborative process, so say a little bit more please about this notion of ombudsman when the title is festival director and here we are talking about dramaturgy of it or dramaturging it. Because the festival is meant to have a national role to play as you say, and I think public office is interesting because there is public interest engaged with public office, it is meant to have this national role and, in Singapore particularly, it is meant to be a highly attractive hub for a range of things to happen, so infrastructure and a range of support systems go towards that. Then if one is ombudsman, one is assuming conflict, because you really go to an ombudsman or a mediator if there isn’t some conflict that needs to be settled and a conflict that needs to be settled outside the right of the law, one that is more humane, hopefully, one that is more geared towards the people who are involved. So, how does that work?

Ong Keng Sen:

I think that one of the realizations that happened for me when I started to be festival director was that sometimes I am dealing with Singapore commissions which run up to SG$300,000, and the festival supports the entire commission, that is maybe very easily €180,000, for example, one production itself. I have been questioned before. Of course, sometimes you get the National Arts Council breathing down your neck and saying that “why are you commissioning this artist?” and I say “well, because he is interesting” or “she is good”, and they will say that “but don’t you think there are some issues in the work?”, and all these euphemisms always are floating around. Also, because we are having a situation right now where funding is being pegged to being aligned with the party, in many ways, so in that sense, there is a situation where companies are denied funding because they are critical, or they are maybe not exactly penalised but they are definitely affected in the funding process. So, I see my work, then, as a way to actually negotiate that because I sometimes commission artists which are difficult for the system. And I can see very directly that, when I give a commission to an artist of €180,000, that is substantial money, it allows some kind of process of opening up and making transparent certain democratic thoughts, for example, in a city. 

It is I think just specifics of how funding works in Singapore. You know you don’t normally have a festival commissioning alone that kind of big production, you have a budget of €180,000 to be shared between six parties or six festivals. Because of that I do think that there is a public role in the position of festival director. And I know, for example, that I have been very strong with my board because I say things like “I am not here just to turn in a profit for the company”, but I see how we have to use the money because the arts is the public space and so I don’t stand for the National Arts Council and neither do I stand for the private profit-making process of (0:30:00) the company that holds the festival.

Charlene Rajendran:

We could go on, but I am going to move on to this idea of public space then, because you talked earlier about the festival as an intervention into the city, so what are the kinds of interventions, ruptures that you perceive happening with audiences, with spectators who come with particular kinds of intentions for viewing or who are more open, or who are really kind of seeking to scale themselves up or learn? There is a range of kinds of ways in which audiences are participating in this work, not just by buying tickets obviously, but being part of an ecosystem, some becoming volunteers, some actually being parts of production, some which take on the role of ushers in outdoor events, I mean there is a range of ways in which this ecosystem is operating and, so what kinds of interventionary, if there is such a word, sites are you imagining when you think about intervention for audiences?

Ong Keng Sen:

First of all, I think that I am dealing with imagined audiences. Benedict Anderson talks about “imagined communities” and I think that there is no such thing as who is your audience, because you cannot predict, no matter how many surveys. Are there any survey companies here? I think survey companies are the easiest way to make a fast buck, because they survey and they say “oh, your audience is generally young, mostly women, all professionals”, and it is like “okay, I don’t need to do a survey and I know that”. So, the thing about the audiences is that you really don’t know who your audience is. But how do you deal with that vacuum? You have to then imagine an audience. 

I love this art collective in Zagreb called What, How & for Whom/WHW and I always use their way of organising my thoughts especially in a kind of a quick lecture like this, like “what, how and for whom”. So, one of the hows I think that a festival is very strong for is that we try to have intimacies with the audience. So, we reject a kind of strategies of 1,000 people or 3,000 people in a football field, we don’t really believe in that kind of process. I remember a funder who said to me that “how can you justify supporting a show with 25 audience only or 15 audience members” and I said to her “would you like your child to go to a classroom of 40 students or 15 students?”. One of the things that we do therefore is that we try to do projects like, in 2015, a project called Open Homes, which happens in the home of an individual, of a resident. And these Open Homes are usually only like, 15 people can fit into the room. And this year, for example, we have a project called O.P.E.N. Kitchens. We are inviting a Lebanese food activist, his name is Kamal Mouzawak, and he has a tagline called “Make Food Not War.” There is so much silent censorship in Singapore right now that I think that we are in some kind of cultural war at the moment, but again always invisible, so we wanted very much this idea of “Make Food Not War”, and to open up into 18 home cooks who are cooking in their homes for audiences. But of course, again, 15 people, maybe 30 people if you are lucky, in a house.

This idea of intimate experience rather than something with 1,000 people, these are all deliberate ways to reinvent the way of looking at performance indicators, because one performance indicator of course is numbers. How many people came to your show, how many people, what is your cost recovery, all these things which are insidiously being appropriated by different arts councils, around the world, it is not just in Singapore, but they are all learning from each other a kind of language which is that (0:35:00) how effective is your art making. And we deny that instinct or that accounting process by actually saying that we want intimacy, and we actually push for that as a how, as a strategy of trying to reduce this sense of being in the mass so to speak.

Charlene Rajendran:

So, it is interesting for me as an educator somebody who teaches at the National Institute of Education, that is how entrenched in education I am, that the analogy you presented to this funder is of a child going to school, right, and the association is that for schooling you want good education by having smaller numbers because of quality interaction, but there is a different pedagogy that is working what you are doing in relation to this public space, not necessarily a schooling, in which you are intervening or you are seeking to intervene in an imaginative literacy, if I can call it that, where the imagination is meant to operate according to certain rules and stipulations, and you go to learn how to do art appreciation, you go to learn how to do music appreciation, drama, dance, and then you come back with the right words for it, but here you are suggesting something else is operative, political, sensorial, and something about the pedagogical then links back to being director, ombudsman, mediator, dramaturg.

Ong Keng Sen:

I think that in that particular case the funder was looking at funding education in the arts, so that is why the specific example of a classroom. But that is why I keep talking about this idea that the festival which I am creating is an intervention, and I am also very happy that it is happening only for four years, because I think that, as an intervention, you cannot be a sustained intervention forever. You constantly have to come in and intervene as appropriate for those number of years. I am a completely uninstitutional person, non-institutionalised and rejecting this institutional process. And I think that this sense of being some kind of a foreign body, I am a foreign body, I am an alien with viral potentials for the National Arts Council, because they probably felt that after a couple of years I would become less virulent, but I have become more or perhaps sustained that, and being this foreign body and hence also a kind of constant suspicion of the other, so I have been seen to be disloyal because I am a disloyal artist who constantly bites the hand that feeds them. This is a kind of public speak in Singapore, they will say something like how can you as an artist bite the hand that is funding you. That is why I feel like there is a kind of a specificity with this festival that I have made here in Singapore. It is very specific to that context, and I think that all festival directors’ dramaturgy is very much linked to the city that they are making the festival for.

Charlene Rajendran:

So, how much are artists aware of this going on when they come and be part of the festival, how much are they conscious of these broader questions that they are in some ways either participant in or implicated in or empowered to then take further in relation to how they want to see their work and engage their work in relation to other works, because there is a conscription in a way of their work and how they operate if this broader agenda is also operative?

Ong Keng Sen:

Yes, I think that for the international artists who arrive they are probably not so privy to all this background, mainly because they may not be touched by censorship. There are many standards of censorship or classification as the ministries call it, so for example, I think that if (0:40:00) there was nudity, sustained nudity in a show by an international artist, it will probably be okay, but with a Singapore group there would be issues, there would be questions. So, a very stupid thing, you have a production about an art studio with a nude model, and for a Singapore group they are told that you cannot be nude, you must wear something, and it is like, “okay, this is a drawing class, so do I wear a brassier and do I wear my underwear as I am standing there in the nude drawing session?”, but they probably wouldn’t say that with an international group, for example.

So, you have these different standards of censorship or classification, and I think that most Singapore artists are very privy. There are times when we have to be strategic, there are times when we discuss as the artist and as the festival director, what is the best way to clear the path for this work to happen. It has so many ramifications, censorship, because you just have like thousands of people running after the censor, because, even as much as that, we have to have a clause in the contract, for example, that if the performance is censored it is almost like force majeure, therefore the contract stops and how would the artist be remunerated, how would the festival, what are the relationships between the commissioner and the commissionee, so to speak. I would say all the Singapore companies are very privy to this conversation because right from the very beginning you are inside that conversation. Of course, different people become complicit in different ways, and even myself. The National Arts Council always says, “why do you all have to talk about censorship all the time, because you are doing so many other things, why do you want to concentrate on that one work that is censored?”, for example, and what they don’t realise is that it is very, very basic to the process of art making, because you become complicit in so many different ways.

However, with an international production like <em> Five Easy Pieces </em> by Milo Rau, that was a production which is about pedophilia and performed by young actors, for young audiences, and it was rated R18, which means the only young people or children in the performance were the actors. So, can you imagine how cannibalistic we were as the audience watching a play being done by seven children between 8 to 12? It is really like, “okay, let’s eat them”. That is the kind of structure which then makes it so problematic, it is not just a play being classified or censored, it creates a kind of a culture of ungenerosity. This is what happens.

Charlene Rajendran:

It seems like a lot of the dramaturging, I am going to bring it back to that before opening the discussion to the floor, that you are doing is making links, sometimes suturing them, sometimes leaving them open, but seeing the associations that are possible as a result of certain choices that are made, and therefore put in motion, and that this kind of dramaturging work involves an aesthetic consciousness or political consciousness and a force of capacity to then have a wide network of ways of working that make it possible apart from a team that is working as well. 

If I can just go back to the idea of dramaturgy, you are being a performance maker and therefore being involved in the dramaturgy of particular kinds of work with art, intercultural, interdisciplinary, and therefore drawing on difference, and difference being a key part of this. A lot of the festivals have brought in different forms, different countries, different ways of engaging material but also sensibility, I would say, (0:45:00) so, affective in that sense. How would you suggest that, for the purposes of somebody who is thinking of creating a festival, is a new festival director, is negotiating festivals because they want to be part of festivals, how does one read the dramaturgy of festivals, and work within these dramaturgies or resist them, contest them, oppose them, but begin to have a literacy that doesn’t mean that that leads to an artist or a producer not feeling, “okay, I just got to go because somebody has asked me”?

Ong Keng Sen:

I suppose for me it is about the dramaturgies of ownerships, that’s really a very central thing for me, that how the audiences can own what they are doing in those 10 days or three weeks. In a sense, for whom is this festival for? Of course there is also a kind of luxury in Singapore, because there are so many festivals, there is one festival every week, so we are just one of a very multifarious landscape. I insist on saying that, well, this is a festival for those who want, who desire it, so it is not just the artist but the audiences, and so it is not a festival for all members of everyone on the street, and I actually say that very directly to the National Arts Council that it is not for people who are just on the street. It is about people who have made a commitment and a choice to be there, be as an artist or an audience member. There is the question then of what is ownership and how do you own a festival that is actually being directed by somebody that is not you, but you are an audience member. I would say making transparent, your thinking process is quite important I think, because when it is transparent then ownership can start to creep in and people can dialogue, resist or disavow the festival that you are making, because it is transparent.

For example, we are now,       is involved in this and several other playwrights as well, we are making a project called Open Parliament, which will open the festival this year. Open Parliament is really having three new plays being presented to a public jury, and the public jury will decide whether the play is to be censored or not. It is really a confrontational process, so we might be banned. Of course, the media development authority, the IMDA doesn’t want to talk about censorship, they prefer that it is hidden, there is no censorship in Singapore. When you have this public jury, 50 members every night looking at these works which are being read perhaps, you begin to see that it is very, very transparent and it is frightening, and the volunteers have to stand up in parliament, because we have – our old parliament is now in an arts venue called Arts House, so you can actually sit in the parliament where the Prime Minister used to sit and stand up and discourse on why this play should or should not be performed. And this kind of not just having an opinion but pinning the opinion to your face is almost never done in Singapore, this is hidden behind so many layers. It is a kind of work which I think is quite confrontational but at the same time it perhaps has to be done in this last year of the intervention, perhaps we do have to then see what is at stake, what is at stake is that what is hidden behind this very opaque – sometimes you just get a newspaper saying, “oh these performances are disallowed because they are not rated”. Not rated means censored. I think that the mediation is a way (0:50:00) to make something transparent I think, and there are many different ways of mediating, and this is one way which I have chosen, but at the same time it is about getting this buy-in also from the artist and from the audiences, and that is why we say that it is only for the people who really have a desire, because for many people they don’t see censorship as affecting them.

Charlene Rajendran:

Open Parliament, I think it is time to open the floor to dialogue from these not so very opaque faces in front of me. Questions, and if you have a question to ask, there is a question right here to begin with, please put up your hands so that the mic can come to you, because we are translating.

Questioner 1:

Hello. I am Walter Heun from Tanzquartier in Vienna. I very much appreciate your presentation and I am very much a friend of your sorts. From my own experience with working with certain topics in festivals or research events, I would like to know a bit more about how you are constructing your topics for the festival, and whether or not there are first artistic works or first just a topic, and how you differentiate between the topic that you develop for the festival and just a model for the festival, like just a buzzword that kind of rings a bell to people but as oppose to really have a concise planning of a content, you know what I mean?

Ong Keng Sen:

I am not so linear in a way in which I am constructing the content of the festival. As I said there is a kind of landscape where there are high points, low points, and it tends to be more fluid. I would say that I do have some kind of building blocks, like for example, when I look at Post Empires I am looking at the individual as opposed to the empire, and, for example, I also look at archives and how individuals are archiving. So, through these individual ways of re-archiving the empire you also start to break down the monolith of one empire into many small empires, perhaps. There are some building blocks, and (0:55:00) I usually do work with a book or with a theorist, for example, so for example with Enchantment, I am working with a writer called Jane Bennett, and she has a key line which I love very much, where she talks about how enchantment is the antidote to cynicism, that you have to not be cynical and you have to remain enchanted with the world.

So, I do have these keywords and key phrases which then allow me to enter into the curation. So like Potentialities, I work with, of course, some theories, but also the idea that the potential is also dangerous and rather than, let’s say, a much more rational way of looking at the positivities of potentials, but we are often looking at the ambiguity of potentialities as well. So, is Xinjiang or Uyghur land in China a site of terrorism or a site of potentiality? So, this kind of questions, I have these little steps or little pointers. And very seldom do I start with wanting to bring a particular artist, partly because I personally feel that there has been very little discourse development in performing arts festivals because most curators in performing arts are not really curating according to themes, they just say, “oh, I like this artist”, “I want to bring this artist”, “I brought this artist last year and so I will bring this artist again this year”, and I think then it is too much artist driven, and I actually think that it starts to kind of affect the discourse in performing arts curation, because it is just about, “oh, I like him” or “I like her”, but why this year do you do this, do you present him or her?

Charlene Rajendran:

Two hands came up at the same time. We will go one at a time.

Questioner 2:

My name is ___ from Hong Kong. I want to ask a question from your observation or experience when you talk to the government or artists in Singapore, to what extent is your dramaturgical direction emancipating future directors or festivals or local artists, or your dramaturgical direction is ringing the alarm of funders or the government in supporting future directors?

Ong Keng Sen:

I think that art is not something which can be docile, art has an ambivalence and an ambiguity, and so I think in trying to make something transparent there is also then the danger that funders don’t want to fund trouble. But at the same time, I think it is very important that artists don’t become too dependent. I always cite the example of Singapore and Indonesia, that Indonesia has no money, no artist has any grant to start, but they are so creative and they are making things from scratch, from whatever, their Coca-Cola can or something, and in Singapore very often the artist doesn’t start until they have a confirmed grant. And I think that it is about a kind of a dependence, and I have been very critical on grant bodies and I am very critical about how we are over granted, and this begins to (1:00:00) take the edge out of why an artist is making work. I think that artists should very often be supported by their communities, meaning that people who think like them, people who would write a check for them even if it is just $50 a year, and these are ways in which I think that the grant system has to move forward and the festival system has to move forward. 

Of course, then you can’t think big all the time, you have to go underground, you have to do something with a group of people who turn up like you, and make an event, and in that sense it is more true to the landscape of Asia where I think that politicians are very afraid of the arts, because the arts is a rupture to control, and it is a questioning mechanism, it is a self-questioning mechanism in society, and I think that as the arts festival I am very aware, for example, that we need the money to make big shows, and you can’t always have small scratchy solo performances. But this is a tension which, as the festival director, you have to think about. So, sometimes it also means that, “okay, let’s just cook for each other and not make a show”. So, this idea of, for example, in the kitchen what is happening as you are cooking together, so it is not that you go as an audience member and you are just waiting to be fed but you have to cut the chilies and you have to dice and you have to cook and you have to do things, not just wash the dishes, but you have to do things. So, I think that this sense of bringing back art making to what we have rather than always saying that it must be in a big auditorium, some of these things I do value and I try to bring in as part of the festival.

Questioner 3:

Thank you. I am just wondering if you could say a little bit more about the terminology of your theme for the festival, Enchantment. I guess in the context of Singapore, for example why not vibrancy? And follow up from that is, maybe you could, I invite you to talk a little bit about the possibility or the role that dramaturgy might play to ensure that that term does not get co-opted as a kind of consensual euphoria or a kind of euphoric reverie that becomes in a sense an apolitical space outside of critique.

Ong Keng Sen:

I think that a part of the dramaturgical process, and that is why I think when ___ was talking earlier about how there is no dramaturg and, there is at the moment, we are talking about dramaturgical sensibility, I think that the dramaturg is the ombudsman in many ways in a process. You have a director or you have a number of creators and the dramaturg is a kind of sometimes stopping the process, so that you can rethink, so that we don’t get oppressed, we don’t just keep running with the ideas but we stop and we rethink, and so the dramaturg is for me someone that we don’t really have in Asia and that is why we were talking earlier, How Ngean was talking about dramaturgical sensibility, and that is because it is almost a luxury to think of having somebody there to check and balance you so to speak. 

But I think that it is important for a festival theme to be ambiguous, to be dual, and so it is not enchantment like Disney, for example, or escapism, (1:05:00) but it is to have a kind of a turn – a kind of a turn on the word enchantment, so it is like Erika Fischer-Lichte talked about affective turn that this turn of affect in performing arts where you then become – you own something because you have affect to watch this thing, so I like the themes to have some kind of potential for turn, so that is turned on its head, for example, so usually we get some key thoughts about the theme like Enchantment, we start off like “oh enchantment is a shot in the arm, it is animation of animating pleasure”, but then it gets more and more serious, and it starts to become an antidote against control, it becomes a kind of a comment on the age of disenchantment that we live in. And I don’t think it is just Singapore but I think it is very complicated right now, be it in Abe’s Japan, or Trump’s America or Brexit UK, these are all clear examples of kind of disenchanted world where people are very often not voting, and not feeling that their vote counts, for example, these are all parts of disenchantment I think. So, of course it can be vibrant matter, it can be vibrancy, it can be vibration, but at the same time I feel like I want the audience to feel they understand the word but then yet they don’t understand the word, so there is some kind of duality of that term, which is interesting.

In terms of how the dramaturg can rethink the festival which the festival director is thinking, I think this is really crucial, and of course we become very used to wearing two hats, so we are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so we go A, B, A, B, sometimes you are the director and sometimes you are the dramaturg because you are one person, and it of course is ideal that you should have a dramaturg, and I think that it is just being able to bounce ideas off and to – we were discussing a little bit yesterday about what is the role of, not so much the role of a dramaturg, but when do you think you have been a good dramaturg, when were you effective – effective is a terrible word, but when did you think that you were contributing to the process beyond just being a logbook or beyond just being kind of watching the rehearsal and giving some comments. So, I think that a festival team ideally should have a dramaturg looking at the festival dramaturgy, but this is something which is not yet there, of course.  Usually the engagement director or the person who is doing conferences would be having that role, for example, of being the dramaturg in the festival, and in SIFA we have that person in Noorlinah she is very involved in terms of just bouncing off, especially for The O.P.E.N., the pre-festival.

Charlene Rajendran:

Is there a burning question, because time is up? We have exceeded our 5 o’clock timing, but if there is a burning question we will take one more, if not, I am just going to ask Keng Sen to respond to the idea that this is an Asian dramaturg’s network meeting and we are trying to trace Asian dramaturgy, and as somebody who has been observing and watching and participating and curating, and in a sense Peter’s question leads nicely into this, in your view the notion of an Asian dramaturgy, what does that signify, bring up because this is one of the questions that we have been raising and I know you have done a lot of work that you now term inter-Asian

Ong Keng Sen:

Or intra-Asian.

Charlene Rajendran:

Or (1:10:00) intra-Asian which then raises…

Ong Keng Sen:

Intra-Asian, inter-Asian.

Charlene Rajendran:

And then multi-Asian as well, trans-Asian. But it is a question because all the things that you have been identifying in relation to your festival in Singapore emerges from an Asian context, and first and foremost we kind of tend to identify what is Asia by where we are and, so if this is Asia then it counts, but if you are West Asia obviously you count less because there is difficulty getting people from West Asia to be accepted as Asian. Where are they? So, I think as a final thought this notion of an Asian way to approach the question of dramaturgy and the dramaturg.

Ong Keng Sen:

I suppose for me it deals with the politics of difference, because in Asia it is not unusual for most of us to be in a mixed room of Asians where we are speaking a default language of English, but I think that it is something which I don’t see so much when I am in Europe where people are not so often talking about the politics of performance. Yes, everybody is political, but being in a same rehearsal room with many different languages, because it is almost like this is something which then has hierarchies, tradition and contemporary has hierarchies, the disciplines have hierarchy, for example, film has perhaps a higher hierarchy today in Asia than performing arts, and in terms of funding, for example, in terms of reach, so I think that in a strange way the dramaturg in Asia has to address hierarchies. This is – this wasn’t so much an issue in Europe, although now it is changing, we have a changing Europe, who is European, and this is something which I think is very, very pronounced in an Asian dramaturg’s role that he or she has to address the hierarchy of Ong Keng Sen in the rehearsal floor or Tadashi Suzuki in the rehearsal floor, but you don’t have to do that if you are in Ariane Mnouchkine’s theatre, there is no dramaturg addressing hierarchy, or in Grotowski’s theatre, for example, there is almost a sense that I think that the Asian dramaturg deals with negotiating hierarchies and negotiating these kind of divisive differences on the floor I think.

Charlene Rajendran:

Thank you very much Keng Sen. It feeds into many things that have begun to be discussed and will continue to be discussed. Thank you for articulating those ideas and those principles and those spaces and bringing that, making that available to us. Thank you very much audience for your time and attention. And please welcome me in thanking Keng Sen.

Ong Keng Sen:

I am sorry I won’t be here over the next two days, but have a great time.