Chong Gua Khee: Holding Space for Shiok

In an economy where productivity is king, Chong Gua Khee’s work occupies a unique position in the performing arts ecosystem with projects that span years, often manifesting in various iterations and characterised by revisitations and re-confluences.

In fact, her first exploration, HOT POT TALK: Theatre & the Arts (2017), a participatory performance developed in-residence at Centre 42, was framed as a long-term series right from the start. Since then, Gua Khee has gone on to create HOT POT TALK: The Measure of a Meal (2021) and HOT POT TALK: Cooking Up Recipes (2023). Likewise, Tactility Studies has been presented across four different iterations.

A performance-maker, director, dramaturg and facilitator, Gua Khee’s put on different hats over the years to explore meandering pathways, but always toward spaces of what she calls “gentler ways of being”, be it with oneself, others, or the larger environment.

Some would recall her 2020 work with dance artist Bernice Lee, Touch You Later!, an intimate participatory performance created for the video conferencing platform Zoom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst unprecedented times and lockdown anxieties, Touch You Later! shone with a bright new curiosity about what it meant to be together, apart–a sliver of solace offered through co-creation and play.

Ask anyone, and they would also mention the activism Gua Khee’s been involved in for the arts and theatre landscape. She has co-founded several working groups interested in the conditions and environments surrounding artistic practice, such as knowledge production, mental and emotional well-being and collaborative partnerships. 

One such group is CITRUS practices, which came together in 2020, and which formalised after a Centre 42 Co-Lab Residency in 2021. CITRUS practices is a working group focused on exploring concrete ways towards improved mental, emotional, and physical well-being of arts and cultural workers for a more sustainable arts ecosystem. At the time of writing, CITRUS practices has just wrapped up CITRUS fest: Who Cares?, a three-day 'potluck' festival of communal dinners, workshops and conversations. 

No matter the varied explorations, one constant is that Gua Khee cares. 

Since the start, Gua Khee has shared that care and thought as a familiar resident, frequent collaborator and firm supporter of the Centre and fellow artists. Now, as part of Centre 42’s tenth anniversary special, Gua Khee chats with Shu Yu on ‘shiokness’, the nature of her practice and her relationship with the Centre. 

If you could describe yourself and your practice with an object, what would you pick?

My collapsible silicone cup! It’s pretty, it’s environmentally friendly, and it’s a great conversation starter about the environment and more, so I’d say the cup really echoes my key interests in having bridging conversations, lightness/pleasure, and sustainability. Also, as a director, I see myself as providing a container and frame for projects and for people in the project. 

I’ve compared my directorial process to that of cooking, and I’ve recently also spoken about it as foraging, as I have a sense of what ‘dish’ I want to create, but I  draw on the natural abundance out there in terms of what my collaborators are willing to offer in that season of their life! 

What are your current interest areas in theatre-making?

I recently got accepted into a two-year Master's of Directing programme at University of the Arts Helsinki (Uniarts Helsinki), so I'm in that headspace. 

The modules I’m particularly excited about are those focusing on the non-human, thinking about the parallels between the organs of plants and the organs of the body, or about mythologies of the sea. I’m also excited about the opera module where dramaturgy, music, and directing students would get to collaborate on creating a new work, as a way for me to explore ways by which music and text can come together beyond just the form of a musical.

That said, I do want to keep my connection to Singapore. In my practice, site, space and context are important to me. So, something I’m a bit stressed about is how to juggle keeping in touch with the Singaporean perspective (as someone who doesn’t go on social media) alongside trying to understand what's going on in Finland. 

But I think the Master’s will really be a good stretch for me. And actually even just the rigorous examination process has already led me to refine how I articulate my practice. I’ve been talking about ‘shiok’ beyond just pleasure and desire, which I drew from adrienne maree brown’s work on pleasure activism and Augusto Boal’s writings on Theatre of the Oppressed. What does shiok mean to you?

What does shiok mean to me? Satisfying, rejuvenating, often includes some form of community experience that makes me feel like I bore witness to something with my friends. Wow, where did that come from!

I love that! I’ve been thinking about shiok as a specific flavour of pleasure, where there’s both a visceral enjoyment as well as an emotional quality. Shiok also evokes a sense of a larger environment, be it the communal aspect, which you brought up, or a physical aspect, such as how it's shiok for us to be inside having a cup of hot tea while it’s raining outside. 

And that’s something I want to do as an artist - to create work that is as shiok as possible for myself, my team, the audience and the environment.

Art-making itself is tough; we are trying to create a sense of coherence from a lot of information and chaos. So, is there anything within our control that can be more shiok? Maybe it could be pacing out the frequency or intensity of rehearsals, how much compensation is afforded, or forms of care that can be offered in the process.

If we use shiok as an aspirational direction, how does that shift the kind of decisions that we are making? How does that shift the rhythm in which we are producing, or the relationships and dynamics in the art-making itself?

I like it because it's such a local slang, but more than that, it's a lived experience. A lot of things can be shiok on a gratuitous level, but it’s rewarding to pursue a shiokness that fulfils and sustains us too.

Yes, I think about shiokness as having an existential function too: Italo Calvino talks about lightness as a reaction to the weight of living, and I see shiokness in those lines as well. We need more pleasure and lightness and shiokness as resistance to capitalism and fear-based politicking. 

I mentioned earlier how my practice draws on that of Augusto Boal, and I’d say another big influence for me has been Paolo Friere and his work around the pedagogy of hope. 

Put together, I often wonder: Rather than focusing on the things that we don't want, can we examine our desires and try to put forth what we do want to see in the world? So, a lot of my works are created as propositions, as speculations. 

For instance, Tactility Studies (2019, 2020, 2021, 2022), was a proposal that there can be more textures to touch beyond the familial or sexual–that we can also physically relate to each other and objects in playful, fun and tender ways.

How did you decide that theatre is what you wanted to do?

Reading was a big part of my growing up experiences, but in school (in my time!), the literature we read around war poems for instance lent themselves to more limited interpretations. Then in Secondary 4, a friend brought me to watch Fundamentally Happy (2006) by The Necessary Stage. 

I remember coming out of the performance, turning to my friend and saying, "Oh, I thought this and that." And they said they didn’t see that at all! I thought, "Wait, wait, wait. Did we not just watch the same thing?" 

It was incredible to me that suddenly our subjectivities were brought to the fore. Gaps and slippages between how people think are not often seen. Even now, there’s an assumption that we both understand each other. But our personal subjectivities come out so clearly when we talk about something we’ve watched and that was the beauty of theatre for me. I love hearing different opinions and it's how I grow and how I think our world becomes much richer. Theatre and the arts create space for us to explore that.

Along the way you have had many opportunities to work with Centre 42. Is there one that's near and dear to you? 

There’s too many! 

But HOT POT TALK for sure. It was the first project I did as an independent creator, developed in-residence at Centre 42 in 2017. With Centre 42 as a secure base, I could explore and experiment at a comfortable scale. 

Centre 42’s Co-Lab Residencies have also been quite important for imagining future practices. It was where we started formalising CITRUS practices and expanding the scope of the Something-Something Working Group.

CITRUS practices started out as a loose collection of individuals who just wanted to keep having conversations around care following the workshop series Making Performances with Care (2020). So the Co-Lab Residency was helpful in providing a frame–a space, a set duration, a bit of budget and the need to be accountable to someone other than ourselves–within which we could then discuss what we wanted to do and what was actually manageable or not within our capacities and desires. From that residency, we pulled together a proposal for the Self-Employed Person Grant to create the Library of Care, and that’s how CITRUS practices came about more formally.

As for the residency with the Something-Something Working Group, that was precious to me because we were thinking about institutional dramaturgies, and Centre 42 gamely said yes to experimenting with us. So we had a number of conversations with Centre 42 as a way to reciprocate their generosity in hosting us instead of simply having a one-directional relationship with them.

What do you wish to see in the theatre landscape? 

I feel like Singapore today has so many exciting things going on all the time in the arts! This is energising to me, and I love being in all these different conversations!

At the same time, I have my own projects and I also want to rest! So when the scene is so saturated, at some point it’s not possible to support everyone’s work. So my wish is that there’s more breathing space in the scene, which relates in turn to the larger ecosystem–that money aside, I’d also like for the environment to support a sense of emotional security, so people don’t feel like they need to run themselves dry to produce work non-stop to be ‘visible’ and they can feel comfortable to take time to develop stronger work before showing it to others. 

Something else I love and wish we can do more of is Centre 42’s emphasis on documentation and archival. So much time and effort and life experience goes into creating a piece of work, and I find it a huge pity that it doesn’t always circulate in the ecosystem or flow back to the larger discourses from which it’s drawn.

Do you have a birthday wish for Centre 42?

I hope the team finds more time for rest and nourishment! They do lots of good work and also need to recharge. 休息是为了走更长远的路！(Resting is what helps us walk further in the future!) 

Published: 16 July 2024

Centre 42 celebrates our 10th Anniversary in 2024, marking ten years of supporting the theatre community around us. As part of our anniversary celebrations, we chart the growth of 10 noteworthy practitioners who have worked with us in the past decade, through a series of editorials that trace their personal and artistic development and Centre 42's role in their journeys so far. 

Read the other articles in this series: