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“Cultural Desert” of Singapore

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“Cultural Desert” of Singapore 84 critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical mirez. Reply Affirmation in Further Support of Motion to Dismiss for Facial In- sufficiency. Ramirez, Garrett 2002 “Legal Statement.” Email to lawyer, forwarded to author, 31 July. Reclaim the Streets 2001 “MAYDAY WRESTLING MADNESS!! SUPERBARRIO MAN!!” Email to author, 19 April. R2Kphilly.org 2000 “Remaining RNC Puppet Warehouse Defendants Cleared of All Charges.” Ͻhttp://www.r2kphilly.org/r2klegal/press/pr-121300.htmlϾ (23 June 2003). Scott, James C. 1985 The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia.New Haven: Yale University Press. Shepard, Benjamin 2003 Email to author. 13 April. Vitale, Alex 2003 “Open Letter to Mayor Bloomberg.” Email to author, 13 April. Wilson, David L. 2001 “Superbarrio Eludes NYC Police on May Day.” Indypendent, May: 5. L.M. Bogad is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birming- ham in the UK. His book, Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Speaking Mirth to Power, an international study of satirical election campaigns, will be published by Routledge Press in 2004. His writings have also appeared in Radical Society and TDR (45:2, T170). Bogad is a veteran of the Lincoln Center Theatre Director’s Lab and a member of LaLutta New Media Collective. Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore C.J.W.-L. Wee This essay is dedicated to the memory of Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) Singapore, with a population of 3.2 million (4 million, including foreigners) is distinct from other postcolonial societies in its desire to emulate the ad- vancements of the West while forsaking not only many of the political dimen- sions of democratic life but also its cultural dimensions. The result is an industrial and commercial understanding of culture; manufacturing and pro- ductive institutions have become the collective basis of social life. And yet, de- The Drama Review 47, 4 (T180), Winter 2003. Copyright ᭧ 2003 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764043 by guest on 01 October 2021 acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts 85 spite this rather dour and puritanical modernity, experimental theatre and visual art has begun to flourish since the 1980s. What further has transpired is an understanding by the state that in order to be a “creative economy” and a “happening” Global City that can retain the “best” foreign and local business and industrial talent, Singapore cannot dis- play only a philistine modernity. Consequently, public policies have been set in place since the 1990s to foster artistic creativity and even create an arts mar- ket, in the hope that such creativity will in turn encourage technological and entrepreneurial innovation. Ironically, this poses challenges for those very same innovative artists that the state professes to want to foster. This essay ex- plores some of the tensions, if not actual contradictions, of the recent changes. I The city-state Singapore, under the leadership of the People’s Action Party (PAP) since 1959, represents a capitalist modernity that deliberately forsook autochthony in cultural development for economic success (see Wee forth- coming). The PAP’s reputation for forging an uncreative society composed mainly of shopping centers by and large stemmed from a pragmatic, petit- bourgeois vision of a hard-working modern society. Nonetheless, since the late 1980s it has been open to creating a cultural superstructure that would match its status as a major regional financial and industrial hub. In the 20-odd years prior, “culture” had referred more to multiethnic cultures and values, though by the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, “culture” also signified the myth- icized “Asian/Confucian” values that were the alleged foundation of Singa- pore’s “East-Asian Miracle” status. Cultural policy—policy that fostered the arts and high culture—was not a real concern. By 1989, the government began to articulate a recognizable cultural policy with the government-authorized Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (Ong et al. 1989). By this time, there was already a burgeoning theatre scene principally led by The Theatre Practice (TTP), The Necessary Stage (TNS), and TheatreWorks (Singapore), among the first contemporary profes- sional theatre companies. There was also a nascent experimental visual arts de- velopment, led by Tang Da Wu. TTP’s Kuo Pao Kun (1939–2002) was the major enabling personality in the new theatre scene. He had been detained without trial by the PAP govern- ment between 1976 and 1980 for alleged communist activities. Kuo bounced back into prominence in the 1980s with plays that examined the possibility of trans-ethnic understanding and the destruction of culture and cultural mem- ory in the wake of a statist modernity with totalizing impulses. He also broke the mold of single-language theatre and created plays, such as Mama Looking for Her Cat (1988), which utilized a range of the languages spoken in Singa- pore.1 Significantly, Kuo was a natural institution builder able to recognize and generously support younger talent; he was able to harness the energy of visual artists involved with newer genres such as performance art—introduced to Singapore by visual artist and Fukuoka Cultural Prize winner Tang Da Wu— thereby helping to pioneer an emerging multidisciplinary contemporary art scene. The three theatre companies created adventurous productions, often for- mally bold (many of the plays were “devised,” with the scripts created in a workshop setting) and dealing with issues of memory, ethnicity, and other identity issues. These were artistic reactions against the singular and sometimes acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420403322764043 by guest on 01 October 2021 86 critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical acts critical strident top-down disciplinary modernization of Singapore since the mid- 1960s, which had allowed little space for reflection on cultural or historical is- sues. What was notable about the theatre of the 1980s to mid-1990s was that “difficult” theatre—even if text based—formed the mainstream of the more important theatre groups; devised theatre even coexisted within companies with fledgling, indigenized Broadway-style musicals. Gender issues were no- ticeable by the early 1990s. All in all, these were invigorating years. Theatre is now the most prominent and, not surprisingly, visible art form in the city- state. The formulation of cultural policy and the increased financial resources that were poured into the arts, along with the creation of other theatre com- panies—2002 well represents these changes—has dramatically altered the overall cultural and certainly theatrical landscape since the mid-1990s. The visual arts scene has also changed. Tang Da Wu returned from London in 1988 (after the best part of 20 years in England, with occasional return trips), and founded a group called the Artists’ Village in 1989. The group was established in an abandoned village in a then-rural area called Sembawang as a critical response to the petit-bourgeois urban society that Singapore was be- coming.2 The art that arrived helter-skelter with Tang was contemporary, anticom- mercial, and eclectic. Suddenly, there were dynamic experiments in concep- tual art, performance, installation sculpture that used Duchampian “found” objects, figurative painting that had German expressionist antecedents (but was executed with personal rather than historical references), pop art, and Happenings. There had been earlier intimations of such artistic possibilities, but they were just that—intimations. Not surprisingly, the experiments that sprang up around Tang did not definitively reference their origins. If, by the mid-1970s, conceptual art in the West was either popular or beginning to grow stale, to be followed by a very plural visual culture that had an unpre- dictable and innovative diversity, the corporate “arrival” of contemporary art in its various forms in Singapore in the ’90s was confusing but energizing. The predominantly young artists Tang mentored, who were of various ethnicities, experimented with themes that implicitly or explicitly critiqued the state’s wished-for bland identity and urban modernity. The environment, sex, vio- lence, identity, and rebellion became valid areas for enquiry. The world of ab- stract modern art that dominated the local arts in the 1970s exploded. What was also notable was that many artists were from the less-privileged and often non-English speaking social strata, which distinguished them from the more bourgeois backgrounds of English-language theatre practitioners, providing a distinctive edge to the visual arts. Ironically, the arts flourished during the 1980s up to the early 1990s pre- cisely because of the pragmatic, philistine modernity promoted by the govern- ment. Singapore society—in its mercantile/industrial-oriented indifference to the artsy-craftsy—allowed space for artistic growth,3 as such growth
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