Nabilah Said: Community and Belonging

“Once in a while, I will message Yanling in an urgent state: ‘oh my God, we need this. By any chance, do you have it?’ And she always comes through.” Playwright Nabilah Said is referring to Ma Yanling, Centre 42’s General Manager, while recalling one of many instances over the past decade when Centre 42 has supported her — in that particular case, by lending her a light that her show needed.

While Nabilah has spent a lot of time at Centre 42, her playwriting journey began a few years before Centre 42 opened in 2014. She began playwriting with Teater Ekamatra’s training programme, merEKA, in 2010. With no prior background in theatre, the programme was her introduction to different aspects of theatre-making, and to Singapore theatre at large. 

After merEKA, she carried on writing short plays as part of Teater Ekamatra’s Playwright-Director Mentorship Programme from 2012-2015.

Nabilah’s first contact with Centre 42 was as one of two playwrights selected for their second round of the Boiler Room development programme in 2015. She was working on a play then titled State Land, about former residents of Singapore’s offshore islands. It was inspired by Singapore’s ubiquitous State Land signs, which led her to think about who the land really belonged to. Her earlier writing had also shown seeds of her interest in these issues: Sesat was about a couple being lost in a cemetery, exploring the use of land and Singaporeans’ feeling of being displaced.

Concurrently with Boiler Room, Nabilah was associate artist in residence at Teater Ekamatra, writing Angkat, a play about adoption in Malay families (“anak angkat” being the Malay term for an adopted child). But after finding herself overwhelmed by the deadlines for writing both plays at once, she started to think about combining the two plays. 

Teater Ekamatra and her Boiler Room mentors, Casey Lim and Robin Loon, were sceptical when she first floated the idea. But Nabilah took a 6-month break from both plays, fleshing out her thoughts and ultimately moving the play away from realism towards a more allegorical, abstract direction. 

“In hindsight, I take very long to create work… to think through all the different issues and concepts before I can really show it to people and get them to truly understand what I'm aiming for. So reflecting on Angkat and that process, of course, not everything was ideal, right? But it felt like a journey that was necessary before it got staged.”

Nabilah developed Angkat further for its full staging at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2019, and approached Centre 42 for rehearsal venue support. They agreed, placing it under the Basement Workshop (now known as the Creation Residency). “When they said yes, it was a big relief. It was not just ‘we’ll sponsor this’, but ‘we believe in you’. It felt very collaborative and not ‘we will give you this with strings attached’. The relationship is so different from a grant-giver or people who give in-kind sponsorship but need something back. Centre 42 doesn't have that kind of pressure on the artist. I already have a lot of pressure on other fronts, so that’s such a relief for me as an artist.”

One of Nabilah’s other major projects supported by Centre 42 is Main Tulis Group (MTG), a collective that works on developing English and Malay plays.

Having participated in Checkpoint Theatre’s playwriting masterclass and enjoying the group setting, Nabilah approached other Malay playwrights about forming a playwrights collective in 2016. Then she asked Centre 42 about supporting the group, and they agreed to provide a meeting space.

“Without their support, I don't know if we would have formed, especially [when] meeting in person was such an important thing,” Nabilah says. “Being in Centre 42 and having them really understand why we are needed, it's validation of the work that we wanted to do.”

With MTG up and running, Nabilah decided in 2017 that it was time for her to do a Masters in Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. “I was playwriting on the side and I felt like everything I knew, I just knew it from whatever I was doing, but I didn't actually know [the fundamentals of] how to write a play. Because I'd never gone to school for it, just workshops.”

She also needed a break from her job as arts correspondent for The Straits Times, and wanted to see if levelling up in her playwriting craft would help her figure out if she ultimately wanted to work in journalism or the arts. 

Not only did Nabilah’s time in London expose her to classes on different kinds of writing, she also made the most of opportunities in London’s theatre scene. She submitted Inside Voices, written for her masters course, for readings at Soho Theatre and Arcola Theatre. Having received positive feedback and interest from potential collaborators, Nabilah then presented it at the Vault Festival 2019, where it received the Origins Award for Outstanding New Work. “The festival experience was beyond my wildest dreams.”

Even wilder was the fact that Nabilah had three plays running in January 2019: Inside Voices in London, and Angkat and yesterday it rained salt at the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. How did she make it work? After graduation from her Masters programme, she returned to Singapore for rehearsals of her two plays and caught the opening performances before flying to London to watch Inside Voices conclude its run. 

A year later, topping off the play’s 5-year-long development process, Angkat won three awards at the Life Theatre Awards 2020: Best Original Script, Best Director (for Noor Effendy Ibrahim) and Best Supporting Actor (for Adib Kosnan).

After returning to Singapore, Nabilah spent three years writing and editing arts criticism as editor of ArtsEquator, while continuing her work in theatre alongside her full-time job. More recently, she took her editorial skills to data-storytelling studio Kontinentalist, a decision which initially gave her an existential crisis about ‘leaving’ the arts.

Nabilah has gradually come to understand that this shift didn’t mean she was leaving the arts. “I'll still be doing stuff in the arts. It's just that I want to develop myself in the media space and learn new skills in the tech side of things, like data visualisation. I shouldn't be ashamed of wanting to grow. I’m still dealing with it, but I'm less black and white now about ‘leaving’ the arts. It was a bit difficult initially, but now I realise both can feed into each other.” 

Nabilah’s current playwriting project is Territori, developed with the support of Teater Ekamatra, Malthouse Theatre (Australia) and Office of the Arts of the Australian Federal Government. The play follows a Singaporean woman on Christmas Island, an Australian territory south of Java with a significant Malay community. Nabilah has family ties to Christmas Island: her father worked there in the 1970s and her parents got married there. Territori is a continuation of her interest in writing about Malayness, identity and belonging, set on an island not that far from Singapore. 

After our conversation at Centre 42’s office, Nabilah walks down Waterloo Street towards Stamford Arts Centre for a rehearsal for Territori’s work-in-progress reading at SIFA 2024: Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Reflecting on her journey, she says, “I'm an artist that has grown with Centre 42 in many ways. Now I'm trying to give back to the community and I can see why it's so important for them to be supporting new writers who wouldn't otherwise know where to submit their works that's not a company setting. I want them to continue that journey, hopefully for many years to come.”

For Nabilah, giving back to the community includes being on the team of readers for Centre 42’s New Scripts Garage platform, which provides dramaturgical support to scripts in progress. While acknowledging that people might categorise her as a ‘mid-career artist’ with enough experience to pass onto others, she also muses on how the trajectory of an artist is viewed: “It’s been great being part of initiatives like New Scripts Garage. It’s like paying it forward, and I recognise I have something to share. Maybe what’s unsettling is that the label feels attached to something unidirectional — we’ve ‘levelled up’ and ‘should’ continue moving up. There are also challenges attached to being a mid-career artist — some opportunities are no longer open to you. There’s excitement and specific funds and opportunities attached to youth.

While I don’t deny this categorisation, I’m thinking about how to keep that excitement and learning more porous and open, and allowing the learning to happen more porously in the industry, no matter how old or experienced you are. There’s so many things I’m still figuring out about my practice, and some of the most joyous feelings I have are when I connect with other artmakers, and we’re figuring things out together.”

Published: 24 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: