The suite of programmes is an outcome of a 6-month long research project mapping the new writing landscape in Singapore. This project was conducted in partnership with independent playwright Joel Tan and independent producer Shridar Mani, and supported by the National Arts Council's Self-Employed Persons Grant (NAC-SEPG), from Nov 2021 to March 2022.

As part of the research to understand the landscape and developments in the local theatre scene in the most recent 5 to 10 years, the project team conducted:

• 18 structured interviews with new writing developers, presenters, and educators
• 6 focus group interviews with 29 independent playwrights
• literature reviews on international best practices / models

3 key challenges were identified from the scope of interviews collected:

1. A wide gap continues to persist between the development space and the professional space for new writing/works (eg no feasible pipeline between developmental platforms and presentation platforms)
2. Imbalance between development spaces that meet short-term script-specific development needs, and more long-term writer-development needs (eg many play/script specific platforms, but little writer-focused platforms)
3. No sustainable and overt advocacy for (emerging) writers and their work to producing companies and presenters

With a desire to bridge some of these gaps, the project team modeled a suite of residencies centered around building an ecology of support for new writing development for playwrights, directors and dramaturgs. Discussions and consultations with practitioners were conducted to receive feedback on the feasibility of such programmes.

The New Writing Development Programmes was borne from this research. A pilot iteration will take place in 2022 - 2023, with the aim of refining the programmes for 2023 and beyond.