A Cultural History of the Singapore Arts Festival, 1959 to 2012

Designing Culture, Policies and Festivals: A Cultural History of the Singapore Arts Festival, 1959 to 2012

VENKATESWARA PURUSHOTHAMAN

ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0861-3824

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

July 2017

Screen & Cultural Studies School of Culture and Communication Faculty of Arts

The University of Melbourne

Abstract

This thesis studies the culture and cultural policies of postcolonial Singapore to chart the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival from 1959 to 2012. The study undertakes a detailed examination of the production of culture and contextualises the morphing cultural landscape that informs the Singapore Arts Festival. This thesis is in two parts.

Part One sets out the historical contexts and conditions that inform the nature and direction of the Singapore Arts Festival. It studies the design of culture built around multiculturalism, Asian Values and Shared Values and shows how dynamic and pragmatic cultural policies weave these ideas into economic and cultural development in Singapore. The thesis sketches the role of arts in nation-building in the late 20th century and how the role metamorphoses to support economic imperatives of the 21st century. This sets the backdrop for the study of the Singapore Arts Festival.

Part Two maps the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival through the study of all documented arts festivals from 1959 to 2012. The thesis shows how the Singapore Arts Festival harnessed artistic communities, inspired audiences, developed new platforms for the arts and became an artistic creator and arbiter of cutting-edge performances and productions for a global arts market. The thesis will show how over the decades while adhering to cultural and policy imperatives, it has evolved to present a unique set of programmes that have bonded multicultural communities, re- imagined Asia and served as a laboratory for the arts.

This thesis makes a significant contribution to the study of postcolonial Singapore, which is mere fifty-two years, articulating its transformation from a colonial trading post into a global city and a renaissance city for the

2 arts. This thesis will serve as a cultural history and archive of the transformation of an otherwise imagined city-state.

3 Declaration

This is to certify that:

i. the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated in the Preface,

ii. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,

iii. the thesis is fewer than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

Venkateswara Purushothaman Student ID: 126822

July 2017

4 Preface

This thesis is informed by my work and research in arts, cultural policies and arts festivals in Singapore.

My research during my candidature coincided with the National Arts Council's (NAC) desire to commemorate the Singapore Arts Festival from 1977 to 2007. They afforded me with research funding, facilitated access to archives, connected me to individuals with first-hand festival experience and commissioned me to publish my primary research. I am deeply grateful to the NAC.

An early version of my research was published by the NAC in a commemorative festival monograph, Making Visible the Invisible: Three Decades of the Singapore Arts Festival (2007). Published during my candidature, the work is entirely my own. Part Two of this thesis, in particular, is a reworked version of this material. I am grateful to the NAC for its permission.

I thank the National University of Singapore’s Centre for the Arts for giving me an opportunity to present my research in January 2017 at the NUS Arts Festival’s inaugural public forum Critical Conversations: Looking to the Past for the Future, Arts Festivals in Context.

Research funding from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore enabled me to complete the research for which I am greatly indebted. Research residencies, in recent years, at Goldsmiths College, University of London and Trinity College, Dublin, enabled me to reflect and research on the larger enterprise of cultural policies. I am most thankful to my hosts.

5 Acknowledgements

This thesis is borne by my work as an arts writer, arts and cultural manager and arts educator in Singapore. I have had the privilege of working with numerous individuals critical to the shape of culture and arts festivals in Singapore today. In a way, I have been there through Singapore’s journey in arts and cultural development from the early 1990s.

My interest in festivals was sparked by a rare opportunity to be an artist liaison to the world-renowned mime artist, Marcel Marceau during the 1994 Singapore Arts Festival. I spent considerable time looking after him. Our conversations were magical and inspirational. I learned about the world through his art, his friendship with French intellectuals, his love for his audience and fans and his frustrations with the media. Till today, I cherish that moment of being able to see the festival through the lens of an incredible artist.

This thesis would not be possible without the inspiring insights gained from conversations I have had with various artists, civil servants, policymakers and festival workers from Singapore and around the world who were deeply involved in the Arts Festival at different points in time. The list is too long to enumerate but I would like to thank especially Ms Goh Ching Lee and Professor Bernard Tan.

My PhD research into the arts and culture was seeded through a casual but inspiring conversation with Professor Simon During at the University of Melbourne in the late 1990s when I was working as a management trainee at the Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne, Australia. That followed suit with an intense study and contextualisation of the arts in Singapore.

6 I must sincerely thank my supervisor Professor Audrey Yue at the University of Melbourne for her guidance, patience and endurance in seeing me through this. Her avowed belief in my research kept me vigilant in completing it. I also thank Professor Fran Martin for her insightful feedback in the final stages of the thesis. I thank Dr Bernard Platzdasch and Ms Yvonne Choo for their feedback and comments at various stages of this thesis.

Finally, this thesis is dedicated to Aiyah and Moi.

7 Designing Culture, Policies and Festivals: A Cultural History of the Singapore Arts Festival, 1959 to 2012

8 Contents

Abstract 2 Declaration 4 Preface 5 Acknowledgements 6

Chapter One: Introduction

1.1 Introduction 13 1.2 Purpose of Study: Singapore Arts Festival from 1959 to 2012 14 1.3 Literature Review: Arts Development in Context 17 1.3.1 Understanding Socio-Political Context 20 1.4 Methodology and Challenges 33 1.5 Understanding Festivals 40 1.5.1 The Concept of the Festival 42 1.5.2 The Cultural-Anthropological View 44 1.5.3 Migratory Movement, Tourism and Globalisation 50 1.5.4 Festivals as Management Systems 54 1.6 Chapter Outline 62

PART ONE: SINGAPORE: CULTURAL CONTEXT

Chapter Two: Designing Culture and Policy for a Global City

2.1 Introduction 65 2.2 Understanding Culture 68

9 2.3 Designing Culture for a Global City 72 2.3.1 Multiculturalism 85 2.3.2 Asian Values 93 2.3.3 Shared Values 99 2.4 Conclusion 104

Chapter Three: Culture and Policy in a Renaissance City

3.1 Introduction 105 3.2 Understanding Cultural Policy 106 3.3 Buildings as Culture: The ACCA Report, 1989 121 3.4 The Renaissance Nation: The Renaissance City Report, 2000 137 3.5 The Creative Economy 149 3.5.1 Understanding the Creative Industries 152 3.5.2 Creative Singapore 168 3.5.3 Fields for Creative Practice 177 3.6 Conclusion 205

PART TWO: THE SINGAPORE ARTS FESTIVAL AND THE PRODUCTION OF CULTURE

Chapter Four: The Emerging Years: 1950s to 1980s

4.1 Introduction 208 4.2 Arts in a Newly-Emerging Nation: 1950s and 1960s 209 4.2.1 Singapore Arts Festival 1959 211 4.2.2 Southeast Asia Cultural Festival 1963 217 4.3 Arts in an Independent Singapore: 1970s 219

10 4.3.1 Arts Festivals as Private, Public and People Enterprise 222 4.4 The People’s Festival: 1980s 226 4.4.1 Internationalism and Bringing the World to Singapore 229 4.5 Conclusion 245

Chapter Five: The Arts Festival in a Global City: 1990s

5.1 Introduction 246 5.2 Arts in a Global City: 1990s 248 5.2.1 Fringe Acts & Arts Activism 259 5.2.2 Urban Vibrancy through the Arts Festival 264 5.2.3 Festival of Asian Performing Arts 272 5.3 Conclusion 276

Chapter Six: New Inspiration for a 21st Century Renaissance City

6.1 Introduction 278 6.2 The Arts Festival in a New Creative Economy: 2000-2009 279 6.2.1 Taking Risks 289 6.3 ACSR Report 2012 and Communitarian Ideals: 303 Arts Festival 2010-2012 6.4 Conclusion 310

Chapter Seven: The Arts Festival as Business

7.1 Introduction 312 7.2 The Business of Managing the Arts Festival 313

11 7.3 Global Challenges 319 7.4 Understanding Audiences 322 7.4.1 The Media as Audience 329 7.4.2 The Sponsor as Audience 333 7.5 Conclusion 338

Chapter Eight: Conclusion 340

References 347

12 Chapter One

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction

Located in a complex and diverse contemporary Asia, the city-state of Singapore annually conjures an imagining of the world through the prism of the Singapore Arts Festival (Arts Festival henceforth). The Arts Festival, which has been running for several decades, serves as a means to shape culture and influence cultural expression in postcolonial Singapore. A key player in the global festival market, the Arts Festival celebrates the best of the artistic and aesthetic in the performing arts in Singapore and to date remains an event of national enjoyment. As Singapore's home-grown iconic international event, it has served as an engine of transformation for the Singapore arts scene. It has invested in developing audiences, spawned the development of professional arts companies, and acted as a springboard for diverse artistic careers into the global arts market.

The assiduous use of the word ‘imagining,' above, is aimed at representing the manner in which the Arts Festival has grown over the years, in scale, dimension, depth and breadth. Each year, it embarks on an adventure to create a context for artists, audiences and support constituencies (festival workers, sponsors, government officials, etc.) to gather and engage with a fascinating concoction of top-class acts. In presenting finely tuned programmes that reflect polish, finesse and edge, the Arts Festival serves to heighten the city-state's position as a global city of festivals. Singapore is indeed a city of festivals, and it is timely to pause to examine the Arts

13 Festival, not only as a site of ‘staging' and ‘performing' an arts renaissance but also as an international site for the global exchange of culture.

This chapter will lay out the rationale for the thesis, its methodology and challenges. A detailed literature review covering the historical conditions and cultural context of Singapore provides the reader with the opportunity to understand the rapid development that has propelled Singapore into a city admired by many developing countries. It will historicise arts development within specific time periods. A study of an arts festival is incomplete without an engagement with relevant theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Here the vast field of events management and cultural studies is funnelled into a framework that supports the understanding of arts festivals. The final section will give a brief outline of the ensuing chapters.

1.2 Purpose of Study: Singapore Arts Festival from 1959 to 2012

The purpose of this thesis is to study the culture and cultural policies of postcolonial Singapore to chart the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival from 1959 to 2012. Trapped within the notion that it is a government funded public event, the Arts Festival is understood, evaluated and critiqued within a context of its temporal function (its placement in the annual calendar), its annual artistic offerings, and its ability to reach the community (general global/local public, media, sponsors, policy makers, etc.). The Arts Festival's role in the production and circulation of culture in Singapore has not been adequately studied.

This thesis argues that the Arts Festival has remained central to the production of culture in Singapore from 1959 to 2012. The period locates the Arts Festival at the entrance of postcolonial Singapore's self-governance

14 in 1959 leading to its significant transformation into a global city for the arts in the 21st century. The period 1959 to 2012 bookends the Arts Festival as a new cultural enterprise for a new nation and a flailing event in the second decade of the 21st century. The thesis foregrounds the centrality of the arts in nation-building through the birth of the Arts Festival in 1959 as a formally structured offering to the public, to the festival's transformation into an international site of cultural and aesthetic production by 2012. In this study, there is a particular emphasis on arts and cultural development from 1990 through to 2012. This is because, in this period, the arts were framed by an economic imperative which saw the emergence of Singapore's cultural and creative industries; and, second, the period gave rise to a slew of transformative cultural policies that defined both the Arts Festival and the production of culture in Singapore. The Arts Festival, through its strategic programming, capacity-building of local arts companies and individuals, and audience development, has served - and continues to serve - nation- building. It encouraged the professionalisation of arts companies and developed major fields of creative practice with a Singaporean voice ranging from literary arts, film art, performance and experimental art, integrated arts and technology to simulcast global performances. The Arts Festival remains a model of a creative enterprise for many Singaporean and global organisations today. In fact, most Singaporean artists or arts groups would have an originary beginning with the Arts Festival thereby becoming participants of nation-building. Lo (2004), Velayutham (2007) and Chong (2010) assert that while globalisation may enforce the erosion of national and cultural boundaries, nationalism remains central to collective identity in postcolonial societies such as Singapore. This thesis acknowledges that the notion of the nation remains central to any new endeavour to both shape and re-fashion Singaporean society through the Arts Festival.

15 Second, in focussing on the Arts Festival, my aim is to study the critical shifts in the economic formations of Singapore that inform the shaping of national identity. I have been following the development of the arts since the 1990s, through my writings, representations in various government committees and work as an arts and cultural worker with major agencies such as the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay and the National Arts Council (NAC) in Singapore. I posit that the arts have been framed within an Arnoldian rubric of high culture and aesthetics with the aim of transforming a population of economic migrants into cultural connoisseurs and to gentrify the city with the veneer of vibrancy. Through the analysis of historical, cultural, economic and political drivers of the arts in Singapore, this thesis argues that the production of the arts in its aesthetic form is politicised by the government to maintain economic pre-eminence. Scholars of cultural policies (DiMaggio, 1987; Esping-Anderson, 1990; Heibrun and Gray, 1993; Toepler and Zimmer, 2002; Lewis and Miller, 2003; McGuigan, 2004; Hesmondhalgh and Pratt, 2005; Mercer, 2006; Throsby, 2010, Flew, 2011; Frey, 2013; Paquette and Redaelli, 2015) have shown that governments, particularly in Western democracies, develop cultural policies to improve the production of the arts, which will lead to public support for the arts. An engaged public will be a beneficiary of cultural and social equity. However, in Singapore, the political nature of the arts (embedded in concepts and content) has been ignored, avoided and even circumscribed by the government to prioritise, instead, their economic function.

The final aim of this thesis is the study of cultural representation developed through cultural policies and the interventions and resistance proposed by artists to this construction. While the government invests in refashioning Singapore into a global city, I am interested in the tactics employed by the Arts Festival to find ways around policies that counteract artists' projects' aim to "denaturalise and dismantle dominant narratives of power and enable

16 alternative subjectivities and the politics to be articulated" (Lo, 2004: 2). This thesis looks at how the Arts Festival while being a state-funded enterprise, demarcates interstitial spaces and places for alternative artistic expression and ventilation.

1.3 Literature Review: Arts Development in Context

In this section, I will briefly discuss arts development in the period of study. The arts have played a critical role in shaping colonial and postcolonial Singapore. Literature around it remains richly diverse but lacks what art critic Lee Weng Choy calls “discursive density” (Lee, 2008). That is, there is inadequate critical engagement, research and scholarship across art forms in Singapore to facilitate further study. Literature that is available is drawn from and across traditional and contemporary practices embodied within ethnic communities inherited from civilisations around Asia. A body of writing in the English language around contemporary visual and performing arts practices is available - primarily contained within programme and artist monographs; catalogues; industry journals; and, publication. Since 2010, much of this has been archived by the National Library Board in Singapore.

However, since the 1990s, the English language theatre community has been contextualising and critically appraising Singaporean theatre. Publications such as Nine Lives: Ten Years of Singapore Theatre (1997); Theatre and the Politics of Culture in Contemporary Singapore (Peterson, 2001); Staging Nation: English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore (Lo, 2004); and, The Theatre and the State in Singapore: Orthodoxy and Resistance (Chong, 2011) have been tremendously useful insofar as to highlight Singapore to the world. They are critical and almost essential to illustrate the evolution of theatre, especially the tensions

17 between the government and artistic practice. The study of music and dance development falls far behind theatre studies, reflective of the evolution of the practices themselves. Recently, a few edited books have emerged. Stephanie Burridge and Caren Carino, two dance teachers, co-edited an overview on dance titled Evolving Synergies: Celebrating Dance in Singapore (2014). Jun Zubillaga-Pow and Ho Chee-Kong co-edited an e- book on music in Singapore titled Singapore Soundscapes: Musical Renaissance of a Global City (2014). These emerging texts are welcome but more needs to be done in the fields of music and dance to support arts education.

The study of visual arts remains the most robust and critically evaluated by historians, critics and scholars. One cannot negate the work of art historians- writers (Sabapathy, Kevin Chua); curator-writers (Constance Sheares, Chia Wai Hon, Ahmad Mashadi, Joanna Lee, Seng Yu Jin, Kwok Kian Chow, Low Sze Wee, Bridget Tracy Tan, Eugene Tan); artist-writers (Susie Wong, Susie Lingham, Ray Langenbach); cultural critics/academics-writers (Lee Weng Choy, Peter Schoppard, Venka Purushothaman, Gunalan Nadarajan, Jane Chia, Wee Wan-Ling) and journalist-writers (Teo Han Wue, Leong Weng Kam, Parvathi Nayar). This represents a rich body of study on contemporary visual art development since the early 20th century.

Cultural policy analysis has been rich in the works of scholars Terence Chong (2005), Lily Kong (2000, 2012, 2014), Lorraine Lim (2012, 2014), Ooi Can-Seng (2010, 2011), Wee CJ Wan-Ling (2003, 2007) and Audrey Yue (2006); and, cultural workers and critics Lee Weng Choy (1995), T. Sasitharan (2002), and Audrey Wong (2012). The in-depth scrutiny of policy is primarily driven by Singapore's enthusiasm to position itself as a gateway to Asia or a renaissance city for the arts. Singapore’s

18 transformation from a ‘mudflat to a metropolis’ or a ‘cultural desert to a global city for the arts’ in a mere fifty years warrants study.

The study of arts higher education is a more recent development in Singapore with seminal essays emerging from Roberta Communian and Ooi Can-Seng (2016) and Purushothaman (2016) seeking to study the role of arts schools and their relationship to the creative economy and educational policy in Singapore. The active uptake on this is that there is a greater dialogue with government agencies about the importance of arts schools to the cultural and creative economy.

However, there is a gap. Singapore has an extensive range of arts platforms, from arts centres, museums to heritage centres; from biennales to museum- curated exhibitions; from commercial galleries to art fairs; from academic centres to not-for-profit sites; and from artist collectives to art consultancies. All are central contributors to the cultural and creative industries. They remain under-contextualised, historicised and critiqued. It is opportune to look deeply at the production and circulation of meanings and the making of culture through these platforms. This thesis is an attempt to look at one sliver of this development, the Arts Festival.

With this limitation and opportunity in the background, framing arts and culture remains notoriously complex in Singapore which is at once Asian, postcolonial, multiethnic, multilingual and multicultural. It reflects the migrant history and the multicultural policies of the post-independence government of Singapore. From Chinese Opera to Malay Opera (Bangsawan), Indian classical dance (Bharatanatyam) to intercultural theatre, Indonesian Gamelan to Jazz, and from Chinese calligraphy to performance art, the range is enormous, representing the globalised

19 dimension of Singapore. Hence, it is vital to understand the socio-political history of Singapore and how it informs the development of the arts.

1.3.1 Understanding Socio-Political Context

In this section, I will discuss the socio-political context of Singapore to understand the manner in which the Arts Festival developed as an event of community expression to becoming an instrument of cultural policy. This thesis does pay particular attention to the period 1990 to 2012 as the subsequent chapters will reveal. It is a period that demonstrates the steady hand of cultural policy in the development of the arts; the impact of economic crises experienced in the 1990s in framing the context for why the Arts Festival, and the arts in general, manifest in the way they do in Singapore today.

Singapore is an economic miracle in Southeast Asia. A former British trading port city, Singapore grew to become an economic wonder under the stewardship of the late Lee Kuan Yew from1965 to 1990; a culturally vibrant city under Goh Chok Tong from 1991 to 2003 and an economic and financial powerhouse under Lee Hsien Loong from 2004 to today. All three prime ministers invested in a stable system of governmentality and political economy built around a value system of pragmatism, multiracialism and Asian Values (Chua, 1999; Barr, 2002; Wee, 2007, Chong, 2011). For a society with no natural resources, this value system was effectively used to organise, mobilise and manage Singaporeans. It became a utopic model for postcolonial and third world societies that sought effective political, economic, human and urban capital management.

Work, play and living in modern Singapore remain neatly and tightly defined within this political economy, which infiltrates the core of social

20 existence, and, in particular, education and leisure. In the face of protestations over the years from critics within and without Singapore over Singaporean-style authoritarianism, its one-party system, and its biased language and racial policies, etc., the government's response privileged ideals of nation-building and economic relevance as the means of survival, whatever form (authoritarian, Asian) it may take. Governance of this kind led to clean and green parks, safe streets, abundant business opportunities and a subservient workforce. Singapore became a model for newly industrialising nations.

Effective financial and people management throughout the 1970s and 1980s allowed the government to build adequate financial reserves to enable the existence of a Singaporean society for several more decades. Singapore was seen as a pot of gold where “all who pursue that rainbow [economic growth] will have a joyous and exhilarating ride and some profit” (Lee Kuan Yew cited in Straits Times, 13 June 1996). However, this embrace of material well-being as a priori of Singaporean society has over the years blurred the relationship between Lee’s role as the founding father of modern Singapore, the ruling People’s Action Party’s (PAP) corporate governance and the nation called ‘Singapore’, making it near impossible for Singaporeans to demarcate the differences leading critics to brand Singapore a ‘state fatherhood’ (Devan and Heng, 1992). The embrace of finance as a primary source of sustainability for Singaporean society - negating social, historical, and cultural realities of Southeast Asia - and the blurring of the politics, economics and party power came at a price: a disenfranchised community of people seeking new economic pastures overseas posing a formidable hurdle to the formation of a national identity. This was particularly acute in the late 1980s through to the 1990s. Those who left represented a new generation of well-educated and travelled middle-class who could not subscribe to an aged and failing ideological structure termed Asian Values (Birch, 1998;

21 Chua, 1999; Barr, 2002) and a government that was seen to be paternalistic, dictatorial, arrogant, impatient, unforgiving and vindictive (Lim, 1994; Chua, 1995; CNN, 9 Feb 2004). The high cost of living, the high regulation of society, the allure of pastoral life in Western societies such as Australia and New Zealand, new employment opportunities and an uncertain future for Singapore remain key reasons for emigration even today (Fetzer and Millan, 2015). Garry Rodan (1996) observes that Singaporeans were asserting their preferences for greater autonomy as consumers of cultural products and experiences rather than mere autonomy from tightly reigned political power of the PAP. Emigration was a clear answer to those seeking democratic changes to politics and social life (Sullivan and Gunasekaran, 1991; Yap, 1999). Furthermore, rapid globalisation saw people operating out of a borderless world where the concept of ‘home' was rapidly giving way to notions of multiple locales, multiple travel visas, multiple identities and multiple loyalties (Sarup, 1994: 93-104; Kwok, 2001; Velayutham, 2007; Fetzer and Millan, 2015). There was an urgent need for the government to embark on a shift in political management from an autocratic to a democratic ideology designed to build an active citizenry out of a community disenfranchised by the policies of pragmatic governance and a style of governance built around a culture of fear and victimisation and a culture obsessed with success.

The 1990s was a period of vibrant change in Singapore but volatile on the international front. The USA consolidated its position as an economic power influencing world financial markets; Europe saw the end of the Cold War, while in Asia, China was confronted with the challenge to re-define communism hallmarked by the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Southeast Asian nations were confronted with the stupendous growth of China and India hence, these nations aligned their socio-economic presence by embracing principles of Asian Values and a free-market economy,

22 designed around technology, capital and knowledge, earning the accolade of ‘Tiger Economies’ of Asia. More importantly, the growth of technology through dot.coms and the Internet marked the pernicious overflow of capitalism.

Goh Chok Tong took over the reign of prime minister from Lee Kuan Yew in this period of high global volatility. Departing from Lee's instrumentalist and paternalistic approach to governance, Goh aimed to build a ‘nation of character' through the design of a "more gracious, gentler, more culturally vibrant nation" (The Next Lap, 1991). In his inaugural speech as premier, Goh ensured prosperous continuity for the city-state. At the same time, he invited Singaporeans to work with him to "build a nation of character and grace where people live lives of dignity, fulfilment and care for one another" (Peterson, 2001: 13). This set the stage for a consultative mode of governance. Under Goh's leadership, artists and Singaporeans, in general, were given social space to air alternative viewpoints (a nearly impossible act in the past) in the hope that it could foster community spirit and at the same time, generate ideas that would sell.

However, Goh's tenure was marked by four key challenges that rocked Singapore's position as an economic power changing the social landscape of Singapore. First, globalising economies such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia competed aggressively against each other for multinational investment and capital. The world was looking anew at Asia, especially Southeast Asia, in light of the potential rise of economic giants China and India, and it was vital for Singapore to position itself at the forefront, distinct from other competitors in the region. Hence, an urgent need emerged to shift general perception of Singapore from an authoritarian and disciplinarian society to one that is cultural, fun and

23 spunky – in other words, one that is attractive to investors as a gateway to a new Asia.

Second, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 was a major socio-economic setback for the young nation. The crisis was propelled by the astonishing speed of growth in Southeast Asia leading to a shortage of foreign exchange which dramatically devalued currencies and equities in East Asia (South Korea) and Southeast Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia) (Rasiah, Cheong and Doner, 2014). The growing economies were ill-prepared and lacked the requisite financial infrastructure to manage this sudden spurt of growth leading to corporate and financial mayhem revealing deep-seated corruption in some of these economies. The crisis, further compounded by currency depreciation and a weakening US market, struck at the core of Singapore's economic fundamentals. Multinational corporations left as quickly as they came opting for cheaper options in China, India and elsewhere as Singapore's meteoric growth made it an expensive place to invest. Economic growth plummeted to a record low, and unemployment reached a record high of 4.4 per cent in 2002, a remarkably high figure for a country that had not experienced unemployment above 2 per cent (Time, 2003: 33). The crisis placed tremendous pressure on the social network built by Lee Kuan Yew and Singaporeans felt abandoned by a government that once managed every aspect of their lives.

Third, while economics globalised the world, ideology divided and insulated different parts of the world. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001 resulted in nations becoming parochial, localised and suspicious of each other. Southeast Asia came under the microscope of the American-led war on terror and was found to be site of terrorist insurgency for organisations like Jemaah Islamiyah, which were believed to have had direct links with the Al-Qaeda

24 in the Middle East. Singapore, which was at the heart of the tiger economies in the 1990s, was now near the epicentre of terrorism in Indonesia. Singapore's close relationship with the USA made it an easy target for terrorists. While attacks on public transport systems and American centres were averted (Soh: 2003), Singapore's international image as a safe city in Asia was under threat in the eyes of investors.

Fourth, globalisation took many forms, including a deadly viral form that distressed Asia in particular. Diseases of sorts (bird flu, chicken flu, swine flu, mad cow disease) were prevalent in the 1990s and early 21st century. In 2003, Singapore suffered a major setback to its drive to globalise in the form of SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), which was framed by the media as an Asian problem. While this pernicious form of racism was not verbally articulated, it was publicly demonstrated as the world quarantined Asia (Newsweek, 14 April 2003). This isolation affected every conceivable service industry from travel to tourism to retail. Singapore was no longer a gateway to a prosperous and vibrant Asia but a crisis-ridden, corrupt, infested and diseased Asia.

Singapore was ill-prepared for the reality of these crises, which were different in scale, impact and the degree of public involvement compared to the forms of crises throughout the 1970s and 1980s, which were generated and managed by the government (Birch, 1993) and where public participation was primarily a quiet acquiescence. Public communications strategies, through clichéd metaphors (Kwa, 2002: 108-132) and professionally executed public campaigns, claimed to manage - yet rather worsened - these crises. Alarming campaign statements were rapidly issued: "small governments are perpetually ‘in danger'; ‘there is always a fear that small governments will become satellites of larger ones, or will be absorbed by them" (Lee Kuan Yew cited in Sunday Times, 8 Dec 1996), and; “threats

25 are everywhere to derail the country’s path to future growth” (Goh Chok Tong cited in Straits Times, 6 Dec 1996). Furthermore, words such as ‘survival’ and ‘problems’ became leitmotifs in political discourse (Chew, 1995: 125), justifying tough government actions on policies. Chua (1985) asserts that notions of crisis and vulnerability became institutionalised and invisible instruments of social management so much so that Singaporeans are no longer “conscious of the ideological character of these metaphors, and many, including social scientists, regard these as reflecting pragmatism, the only rational choice, and therefore non-ideological” (29- 42). Singaporeans can be forgiven if they believe that government power permeates the crevices of everyday life since they have had the same single political party run government since independence. It is a reality, socio- anthropologist and critic Yao Souchou claims, that consumes many Southeast Asia nations: “…from the time we pick up the morning paper, the moment we turn on the radio or television, the government is there with its busy pronouncements of another achievement of economic and national development, of another victorious crushing of political dissent which threatens national security or misleads the public about the doing of the government” (Yao, 2001: 5).

Living in this hyper-real world based on Lee’s mantra of success and Goh’s practical politics, Singaporeans familiar with the role of history, politics and economics in their everyday lives experienced a sense of loss, trauma and hopelessness during periods of crisis. Let down by a government that had managed all aspects of their lives; many headed for greener pastures (Yap, 1999). In a Parliament session in 1997, the government acknowledged the mass emigration of its intellectual elite and that it was posing a particular social problem in an economically prosperous Singapore. A MasterCard survey found that 1 in 5 Singaporeans wished to emigrate (Straits Times, 6 June 1997). A 2002 study by AC Nielsen revealed that immigration rates to

26 a favoured destination – Australia – doubled in 2002, and a September 2002 survey found that one-fifth of the country's population has been severely contemplating permanent departure (Time, 7 July 2003: 34). These new world crises, discussed above, shifted the power play in Singapore, with Singaporeans demanding the government take the lead, like it always has, to resolve joblessness, disease and general social malaise. The government, on the other hand, was fervently seeking to cut the apron strings of social control (Time, 7 July 2003: 34).

Goh endeavoured to cement the relationship between the people and government through a vision for an active citizenry drawing upon Lee’s principles of Asian and family values. He mapped a vision in a major policy blueprint aptly titled Singapore: The Next Lap (1991) to re-fashion Singapore into a vibrant global city, which would create a ‘home’ for a nation of immigrants who were unable to keep up with globalisation and were disenfranchised by past government policies. He developed numerous cultural policies that placed the Singaporean at the centre of his governance. He championed strong family ties, equal opportunities for all in the hope of developing a ‘Singapore Heartbeat’, a cultural voice and an active citizenry (S21 Report, 2001). While this blueprint is underscored by an economic consciousness to develop entrepreneurial zeal amongst Singaporeans – to develop inventive ways to generate business opportunities to aid the ailing economy – Goh’s vision for a vibrant nation allowed the arts to flourish. As mentioned earlier, artists had space to experiment and explore alternative viewpoints and through this generate ideas that would be economically viable.

The arts in Singapore saw unprecedented government investment from 1990 onwards. While the ailing economy was victim to financial tragedies, the arts gained momentum unimaginable to many Singaporeans and cultural

27 observers. The investment was three-fold: first, to generate alternative industries that would position Singapore back into global financial markets. This was part of larger strategy to identify new economies to trade with for the 21st century. Second, in a typical approach of social welfarism, the government used the arts to assuage a population that was increasingly dissatisfied with the government inefficiency in managing unemployment, disease and high cost of living (Chong, 2010). Singapore’s approach was not new. Scholars have identified that governments generally seek to assuage and manage the public through the promotion of the arts (Pick, 1980; DiMaggio, 1987; Esping-Andersen, 1990). The arts can thrive under such conditions and I am reminded of the rise of Hollywood musicals and Tin-Pan Alley music during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s and how the rise of these art forms, on one level, developed a whole new cultural economy, and on another level, was critical in managing public anxieties (Mcelvaine, 1993; Cohan, 2001). While the same argument cannot be directly imposed on the Singaporean experience it, however, lends to speculation and possible future research. Third, the investment in the arts was to convert it into a communications tool (unlike the use of public campaigns) to connect citizens to Singapore to help cultivate and foster a national identity. The increase in Singaporeans leaving the country,1

1 The government has always developed fascinating strategies of crisis to cope with Singaporeans emigrating elsewhere. During Lee Kuan Yew’s tenure, it was common to brandish Singaporeans seeking an overseas education as someone who could not make it in Singapore. Economic Development Board (EDB) chairman, Philip Yeo is noted for policing this situation. In one interview, he commented that “if you could not make it in Singapore you go to Perth” (I am paraphrasing). In another instance, where Singaporean government scholarship-holders studying abroad sought to extend their course of study or requested to pay off their bonds were demonised as ‘bond-breakers.’ It turned ugly as Philip Yeo publicly chastised these scholars by publishing their pictures in the main dailies (Sunday Times, 9 June 2000) similar to the men arrested for acts of homosexuality in public places in 1992. The debate, as one journalist put it,

28 especially the intelligentsia who expected similar quality of life to that of other international cities such as London, New York and Sydney was of concern. A 2002 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit observed that "Singapore ranked below regional rivals Tokyo and Hong Kong as a desirable place for expatriates because of its lack of cultural activities" (Financial Times, 14 Oct 2002). The government responded immediately and addressed this using the arts to promote a global positioning for Singapore.

The response was swift. From arts centres to arts councils to musicals and circuses; from arts festivals to pop stars; from food festivals to shopping festivals; and from gay parties to bar-top and topless dancing, Singapore opened up to the possibilities of the creative world in ways that were hitherto unknown in a city known for its fines and authoritarianism. It became a city of celebrations. Articles in major international dailies and magazines carried enviable titles: “Arts as Attraction” (Variety, 9 June 1997), “A Global City for the Arts?” (Art in America, Dec 1997), “Singapore Lightens Up” (Time, 19 July 1999), “Taking to the World” (Business Times, 5 April 2002), “Singapore Stages a Cultural Renaissance” (London Financial Times, 14 Oct 2002), “Exporting Local Culture: Singapore Takes New Measures to Market its Artists Overseas” (Newsweek, 25 Oct 2004) and “It’s case of kick up your heels in Singapore: The New

"set this nation on a soul-searching quest". However, then arts minister George Yeo when asked, by Asiaweek in 1997 about wooing back Singaporean artists, his response was ironically different. “I don't think we should. Our strength is that we don't try to stake total claim on a talent. We send people out, and let the world polish and cut our gems. If you are really good, you would not only perform in the Singapore stage. Also, if you are really good, you would be performing here from time to time. Because the arts industry serves the region….” (12 Sept 1997).

29 Mecca for Asia’s pink dollar” (Melbourne Age, 14 August 2004; see also Yao, 2007: 119).

Singapore became the talk of town. In 2001, Goh led 400,000 Singaporeans in a ‘Swing’ party in the heart of Orchard Road, to usher in the new millennium, with a resolve “to make Singapore the best home for all Singaporeans” (Kwok, 2001). While liberalisation as an idea was a common theme in the Economic Review Committee (ERC) Reports (1998, 2003), it did not equate to less regulation. In his 2000 National Day Rally Speech, Goh urged Singaporeans to "think and act like revolutionaries or insurgents: We have to innovate, not merely imitate….we need Singaporeans who can lead the way in creating new wealth for our economy" (Goh cited in Kwok, 2001). The government liberalised the financial, media, manufacturing sectors but took a measured approach to managing arts and culture in Singapore.

In 2004, Lee Hsien Loong succeeded Goh and remains prime minister to date. A trained mathematician and the son of Lee Kuan Yew, Lee HL continued the work of Goh but focussed on engaging the community; increasing the economic profile of the country; and fostering science and technology. Under his prime ministership, Singapore has built two controversial casinos integrating community-focussed spaces such as the Art Science Museum, exhibition and convention centres and aquaria. His leadership is marked by the development of the Natural History Museum, R&D and scientific research centres such as ASTAR, investment in fibre optics and artificial intelligence. His tenure has seen a changing population profile - one that is better educated, travelled and technologically connected. While arts activities remain high, government investment has not been as intense as that experienced during Goh's tenure. In actual fact, the most significant arts infrastructure during Lee HL’s tenure would be the National

30 Gallery Singapore which opened in 2015. During Goh's period the arts headlined a government ministry (i.e. the ministry of information, communication and the arts) emphasising it priority and specificity. Under Lee HL, the arts have been dropped and the ministry refocused on a broad church ambit of culture, community and youth which incorporates the arts with sports and culture. This foretells the place of the arts in the new millennium.

Terence Lee (2004) in his study of cultural policy in Singapore, stresses that while the government uses the arts as a technology of governmentality to achieve economic objectives, “culture in Singapore has become more than ever a site of governmentality and control” (281). Citing Raymond Williams (1984) and Theodor Adorno (1991), Lee contends that cultural policies designed and dictated by the government lead to an administration, commodification and industrialisation of culture rather than an engagement with it as a social practice (282-283). By the turn of the 21st century, the arts in Singapore had become a public good: funded by taxpayers for the larger benefit of the community. Singapore's preoccupation with economic objectives meant that the arts will be state-dictated (Lee, 2004: 284). Yao Souchou (2004) argues that government's creation of ‘national enjoyment' through the arts and culture is "economically sensible, ideologically astute and designed to deliver benefits to the people" and as a social policy it generates a "culture of gratitude" and complicity amongst the people to the government's firm hold on power through the delivery of tangible benefits that they (the people) recognise and enjoy. While Yao speaks to the management of artists within social policy, Audrey Yue (2006) reminds us that economic imperatives loom large. She argues that place-branding is an essential feature of a top-down cultural and creative sector policy. Playing to the strength and place of Singapore in the emerging region, Yue points out that this "strategy focuses on building creative capabilities through

31 education, niche branding through product differentiation and place competitiveness" thereby facilitating Singapore into becoming a gateway to Asia (18). She agrees with Lee (2004) that this intense top-down approach did lend itself to the creation of "new identities and subjectivities", contrarian to government imperatives, that were subsequently co-opted into the overall cultural development (Yue, 2006: 26). Lily Kong (2012) reinforces Yue's point that despite Singapore's proposition to be a global city for the arts, the government did not lose sight of the cultural and creative industries’ contribution to GDP growth. It introduced strategies to spur this from "offering economic incentives to addressing infrastructural needs, to attracting foreign expertise, to efforts at more fundamental change, particularly in the education system" (283).

Despite this looming economic imperative, artists were charged by a purpose to wrest a space for their art and the communities that supported them. Artistic luminaries, who were cartographers of Singaporean culture, guided them through their own practice and by mentoring young artists. Playwright Kuo Pao Kun, choreographer Goh Choo San, theatre director Ong Keng Sen, performance artist Tang Da Wu, painter Teo Eng Seng any many others, amidst all the vibrancy, quietly worked away in developing art that was meaningful to them and encouraged Singaporeans to explore a road less travelled.

32 1.4 Methodology and Challenges

This thesis draws motivation from Raymond William’s proclamation:

Culture is ordinary: this is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these, in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact, and discovery, writing themselves into the land (Williams, 1989: 4).

This motivation fuels the interest to study the history of the Arts Festival as a means to find that common meaning and direction, and understand why representations of the past have been shaped in the manner they have. Thus, this thesis records a cultural history of the Arts Festival, through the study of archived government documents; interviews with people involved in the Arts Festival; and analysis of cultural policies prevailing at specific periods of the event. Through this study, the aim is to locate the Arts Festival within a time and place to draw out the social, cultural and political attitudes, value, and beliefs that inform it. Let me address the methodological approach as follows: cultural history, archival material and cultural policy.

Cultural history probes and studies historical records and archives of activity, moment, ritual or event within a time and place (Geertz, 1973; Eley, 1995, Hall, 2004; McCaffery, 2013). It enables researchers to contextualise how culture, and in particular the arts which are often invisible, shape society and its evolution. Historian Peter Burke (1997, 2007) remains authoritative about the place of history in cultural history. Drawing back to the works of Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt 1818-1897, considered the founder of cultural history, and German historian- philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, 1833-1911, he argues that there are as many ways of looking at cultural history as there are ways of looking at culture. Scholars Melching and Velema (1994), Jelavich (1995) and Arcangeli (2011) argue that cultural history resists standardisation as it crosses "interpretation and causal explanation, between humanities and science" and "macro and micro objectives" (Czaplicka et al., 1995: 4-5). Such a formulation gives rise to the opportunity to not only look to the past to document and archive but to also illuminate the ways and means we understand how society and its various communities evolve.

While the tradition of Burke emphasises the ‘history' in cultural history, over the years, the development of cultural studies has enriched ‘culture’ in cultural history (Steinberg, 1995). Theoretical explications such as thick description (Geertz, 1973); public sphere (Habermas, 1962); cultural power (Eley, 1995); archaeology of knowledge (Foucault, 1972) and memory and temporality (Huyssen, 1995) have profoundly enabled the understanding of the cultural history of the arts embedded in communities and established cultural history as a formal method of inquiry. Geoffrey Eley (1995) proposes that in undertaking an exercise in cultural history, one would unmask the instrumental nature of cultural representations in relations to power, “in this sense, ‘culture’ is defining a ground of politics beyond the

34 space2 considered conventionally recognised by most political traditions as the appropriate context for policy making in education and the arts" (26). But to enter the appropriate context, one would need to access the archival material.

Art historian Charles Merewether (2006) states that the archive, unlike a library, is a vault for significant official and personal memories and knowledge-keeping. Drawing from the works of poststructuralists such as Derrida, he foregrounds that while it informs important research and scholarship from anthropology to art, the archive remains a contested and problematic space of structural gaps and informational fissures. Bearing this in mind, the cultural history of the Arts Festival is constructed in this thesis through the study of historical documents and materials produced by the parent ministry responsible for the Arts Festival at various stages of its incarnation since the 1950s and, over the years, archived in government registries. Many of these have not been accessed before or have not been released into the public domain. I am humbly reminded of Max Weber’s (1968) oft-cited assessment that “the management of the modern office is based upon written documents (the ‘files’), which are preserved in their original or draft form, and upon a staff of subaltern officials and scribes of all sorts” (957). Ben Kafka (2012), while drawing on Weber, extends this further to look at the study of bureaucratic paperwork as a mythic praxis of its own.

My journey into the archive was not poetic but pragmatic. I undertook to study historical documents to draw out the cultural policy of that period; the method and approach to the design of programmes; the level of involvement

2 Eley’s reference to space is directed at practices considered in cultural studies as high, low, mass and popular culture.

35 of the government, artists or corporate sponsors in programming; and the business operations of the enterprise. Much of the materials were accessed through the NAC’s registry which is composed of historical information from various cultural agencies of the past; the National Library which has extensive archive of arts paraphernalia; catalogues and brochures; the National University of Singapore's library which has newspaper clippings on the arts catalogued in its stacks.

My way-finding into the smallish but well-maintained and silently melancholic non-digital registry of the NAC was daunting but exciting in that many more histories could be unearthed and written. Over eighteen months spent in the registry, I accessed materials that include cultural policies; white and green papers on the arts; economic policy reports; arts and cultural development plans; Arts Festival planning committee minutes, proposals, contracts; press statements; English language newspaper articles; and festival paraphernalia and programme notes. But, as Merewether already foretold, there were complexities. There were gaps and inconsistencies in documentation. Record-keeping was, at best, a study in allegiance to time and chronology. An essential reckoning was the reconciliation between archived confidential official documents and publicly released press statements relating to definition of activities, statistics, audience size, and reasons for not allowing particular productions. The reconciliation, where possible, emerged when one was able to plough through multiple drafts of a final document revealing the imprint of the various hands on the margins of the documents showing at once hierarchy, power and decision-making (on the supplementary margins of the documents).

The research was supplemented by interviews with Arts Festival directors, sponsors, arts administrators and artists conducted from 2005 to 2007

36 (referred to in the thesis as Purushothaman, 2007). Having been a member of the Arts Festival Steering Committee from 2004-2009, and the Arts Festival Review Committee in 2012-2013, I had the privilege and opportunity to verify, review and update past data with the NAC. The interviews afforded many with an opportunity to revisit the untold stories of decision-making, of making the arts in Singapore. I conducted interviews with past directors of the Arts Festival in particular, Robert Liew, Goh Ching Lee, Liew Chin-Choy, Low Kee-Hong. Past chairpersons of the Arts Festival steering committees, notably Professor Bernard Tan Dr Uma Rajan and Arun Mahizhnan. Close to twenty past and current civil servants working the arts were interviewed and views of approximately sixty participating artists and sponsors where solicited through email correspondence. Over eighteen months of research, with an approximate quantum of 250 hours of interviews and meetings, I ploughed through the archive of aiming to construct and make meaning of the data.

Written permission was granted and facilitated under the auspices of the NAC for me to access individuals for interviews. Mindful that any discussion of the arts lends to memorialisation, I conducted interviews in order to verify information found in the archives, confirm interviewees individual roles (as a number of individuals claimed ownership of projects), and understand the cultural and political milieu of the period. I chose to function as a rapporteur in the first instance rather than a researcher to help interviews talk through their experience. A number of civil servants requested not to be recorded as such I listened and wrote down by hand. Interviewees were engaging, helpful and animated, though some senior civil servants choose not to be cited on the basis of confidentiality.

As this research is the first of its kind, it was important that the cultural history of the Arts Festival was constructed through “thick description”

37 (Geertz, 1973) seeking to outline, describe and place on record the existence of the activities and issues relating to the Arts Festival thereby bringing into the public sphere for future critique and development. The thesis will unfold a density of information, constructed through detailed and methodical study of the Arts Festival’s existence. This is critical to help understand the integral role of the arts in nation-building in modern Singapore and locate the Arts Festival into the culture history of the city-state. As mentioned earlier, I accessed a huge archive of recorded files deliberations by festival committees and departments, statistics, financials and published government reports alongside paraphernalia and printed collaterals associated with each edition of the Arts Festival. In studying and considering these primary sources, the thesis identifies the significant role of Singaporean cultural policy as key determinant of the Arts Festival over the decades.

Cultural policies map the way peoples’ lives are grounded, be it in language, religion or social practice, through educational institutions and cultural industries, thereby nurturing a sense of belonging (Lewis and Miller, 2003: 2). Cultural policies engage in principles of developing and preserving new and existing ideas and practices of culture to develop social and personal identities and also to locate culture within a global perspective so as to facilitate the flow of cultures. Cultural policies often are structured within broad frameworks such as the need to preserve and safeguard history and artefacts; the dissemination of grants for the production of the arts and audience outreach; arts research; education and training for artists and arts administrators; job creation; infrastructural development; and law and regulations (copyright, licensing, censorship). In Singapore, since 1959 cultural policies have served as gatekeepers of social access and political agency (Bereson, 2003; Lee, 2004; Chong, 2010). It is this perspective that informs the engine of the thesis. In subsequent chapters, I devote considerable space to analyse the cultural policy paradigm in Singapore.

This thesis is a major study of the cultural history of the Arts Festival over a period of fifty-three years. Recently available studies include a few journal articles (Foley et al., 2006; Peterson, 2009; Lim, 2012; Chang and Mahadevan, 2014) and the NAC’s commemorative book on the thirty years of the Art Festival celebrating its achievements which draws from this research (Purushothaman, 2007). Having said that, any attempt to historicise the Arts Festival is a major undertaking which would inevitably mean leaving out many histories, artistic adventures, narratives, serendipities and moments that touched the hundreds and thousands of people involved in creating and experiencing the Arts Festival. While these provide essential critical density to the existence of festivals, they remain oral, anecdotal and experiential and intensely valued for these very purposes. Landry et al. (1993) define this as social impact going beyond the performances and productions having a continuing effect and influence on people's lives.

Finally, the concept of the arts festival remains under-theorised. This is despite having a rich and dense discourse built around an agglomeration of individual festivals’ programme and director’s notes; festival talks, lectures and conference proceedings; catalogues, professional and trade magazine articles, press reviews and previews; and leadership development programmes for festival managers. Furthermore, throughout the course of this research, I found that festivals as events are studied and widely distributed across realms such as events and tourism management, arts management, cultural policy, anthropology, performance studies, urban studies, sociology and even political science. Recent publications (EFA Books) by the European Festival Association, such as Inside/Insight Festivals (2012) edited by Katherine Deventer and Goh Ching Lee, have been useful in foregrounding festival studies as a distinct and freestanding field of inquiry that orchestrates information from various areas of study.

39 European universities such as Edinburgh Napier University (Scotland) and University of Limerick (Ireland) have started to offer postgraduate programmes dedicated to festivals to first, aid the development of festival studies as a discipline; and, second, to prepare students to develop their skills as festival administrators to support the burgeoning field. These new initiatives are a welcome proposition.

1.5 Understanding Festivals

A festival is a gathering of that which has been scattered, a moment to pause, a reason to notice what has been moving just below the surface or hovering just overhead, or in any case what has been living just outside the narrow field of vision that has been established by our daily routine. It is a moment in which the world is turned upside down and we can rethink which end is up. And it is an occasion for people to meet and talk, for stars to be made, for points to be made, and for the creation of a context.

Peter Sellars, Festival Director, Los Angeles Arts Festival programme guide, 1990.

40 To undertake a literature review of arts festivals is complex. It remains an under-theorised field as many scholars have demonstrated (Isar, 1976; Falassi, 1987; Fricker; 2003; Klaic, 2009; Getz, 2010; Quinn, 2010; Delanty et. al, 2012) but its study is widespread in fields such as events management, arts management, cultural policy, anthropology, performance studies, sociology, urban tourism, and even political science. Often these studies refer strictly to specific festivals as case studies. In 2003, Contemporary Theatre Review (Vol. 13, No. 4, 2003) released a first-ever attempt to present a critical reading of festivals inviting both scholars and public intellectuals who were artistic directors of festivals to critically assess the place and contribution of festivals to society and the arts. It remains the most scholarly review of festivals through the lens of performance and performativity to date. Donald Getz (1991, 2008, 2009), a scholar of festivals and events, mounted a large-scale literature review of ‘Festival Studies’, which was published in the International Journal of Event Management Research (Vol. 5, No. 1, 2010). With an annotated bibliography, it remains the first attempt to organise and contextualise this highly fragmented field of study and distinguishes it from ‘events studies’. Getz’s review propositions three discourses or systems of knowledge emerging within festival studies, which can be instrumental in shaping the various areas of study. They are the cultural-anthropological discourse; festival tourism discourse; and, festival management discourse. Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere (2012), edited by Gerard Delanty, Liana Giorgi and Monica Sassatelli, propositions the "first comprehensive socio- scientific study of contemporary arts festivals" looking at how they negotiate and communicate collective identities (political or otherwise) by locating them into Habermas’ public sphere. These emerging studies are instructive in guiding a deeper understanding of the way the cultural history of an arts festival is shaped; however, they do not necessarily go beyond a critical review of festival programming. By this, I mean that while a theory

41 of festivals emerges, it is far from having an impact on the praxis of festivals.

In this section, I study the theoretical frameworks within which festivals can be understood and develop my argument that contemporary arts festivals are primarily instruments of governmentality. I acknowledge that the rich systems of cultural-anthropological studies, tourism studies, and festival management studies, that are available, have helped shape and direct discourse on festival cultures. These systems contribute to shifting the arts festival from being merely an event that informs and entertains to one that produces and shapes culture.

1.5.1 The Concept of the Festival

An arts festival is an event: one that is designated for a particular time (usually annually) and space (performance venues, locales) to stage and celebrate a social function honouring artistic excellence and innovation (Allain and Harvey, 2006: 155). Drawing from its gnarled roots in ancient rites and ritualistic practices that organised communities and their social energies (Isar, 1976), festivals in the 20th and 21st centuries are held around cultural fields that enable creative licence, social cohesion and sheer celebration (Newbold et al., 2015). These can be broadly categorised as:

• Celebrations of Imagination – visual and performing arts festivals, film festivals, literary festivals, fashion festivals, academic conferences, fringe festivals;

• Celebrations of Rituals – religious rites and harvest festivals;

• Celebrations of Community – food festivals, mardi gras, pride marches, children’s festivals, military festivities, national parades; and,

• Celebrations of People – Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Mozart.

All of these can also be, and often are, celebrations of commerce. Within these categories, community celebrations often display values, cultural practices and identities for the members of the community and others to peer into them through a contextual event such as a festival. These community events can thus be both private and public in nature. Celebrations that represent society, as an agglomeration of communities, feature large public display large spectacles that are purposed to cater for intense public involvement and participation, leading to an exercise performing democracy. But I want to shift the arts festival from being a merely an ‘event' and seek out some of the theoretical underpinnings that culturally drive festivals around the world and read the concept of an arts festival closely, as it would help illuminate the manner in which Singapore’s festival has been shaped over the years.

Arts festivals today are both national and international entities serving as sites of contestation and interpretations of the status quo by both professional and amateur arts groups and companies. As one critic noted,

43 "[F]estivals are temporal and spatial zones marked off for heightened experiences of consumption, corporeal excess, reflexive contemplation, and collective expression. But they can also stage turbulent encounters between creativity and governmentality, commerce and affect, state boosterism and civic dissent, powerful feelings of communitas and jarring encounters with difference” (Werry, 2004). Furthermore, festivals are a set of planned activities that seek to highlight, communicate and create dialogue with various publics regarding critical ideas in art. Festivals are about a total experience: holistic and organic. In this regard, the centrality of a festival in fostering community spirit and provoking national interests cannot be undermined. While festivals may celebrate the arts, they often contain a carnival ethos that makes spectacular the cultural collectivism of a community. Through a public display of exposure, abjection, marginality, parody and excess, festivals become signifying systems of socio-cultural practices that seek to critique/reinforce social structures, stabilise/problematise identities and shift proscribed boundaries of propriety and common sense, as evidenced by the research work of Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz and Mikhail Bakhtin. In this spirit, the harsh alienating elements of governmentality, conventionality, tradition and history are often overturned releasing a potent mix of personal and sub- cultural identities that infect and inflict mainstream living and everyday life.

1.5.2 The Cultural-Anthropological View

The cultural-anthropological view of festivals is a well-established approach in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies emphasising the roles, meanings and impact of festivals in society and culture. Constructed around the scholarship of Geertz (1973), Isar (1976), Falassi (1987) and Turner (1969, 1987), this view builds upon lived experience, religious life,

44 meaning-making systems and structures of performativity and celebration to locate the festival within a communal expression thereby giving voice to values, ideologies and ways of life. This form of study has historically been linked to ethnographic study of societies as human mobility increased exposure to new communities over the centuries. The study of symbols, rituals, mythic structures, performative and liminal structures, spectacles, and celebrations, power structures emerged through this process. There is much documentation in this area, and it continues to inform the place of festival-making within a community. However, much of the documentation of 20th and 21st century festivals are located within the realm of cultural studies. Cultural studies continue to study festivals within meaning-making structures, spectatorship, identity formations and sites of cultural and ideological contestation.

Alessandro Falassi’s 1987 introductory essay “Festival: Definition and Morphology” remains authoritative and relevant in defining the cultural- anthropological perspective. Falassi notes,

Since the 19th century, scholars from disciplines such as comparative religion, anthropology, sociology, and folklore have concerned themselves with the description, the analysis, and, more recently, the interpretation of festivities. Little explicit theoretical effort has been devoted to the nomenclature of festive events or the definition of the term festival. As a result, the meaning of festival in the social sciences is simply taken from

45 common language, where the term covers a constellation of very different events, sacred and profane, private and public, sanctioning tradition and introducing innovation, proposing nostalgic revivals, providing the expressive means for the survival of the most archaic folk customs, and celebrating the highly speculative and experimental avant- garde of the elite fine arts (1).

Festivals are “a sacred or profane time of celebration, marked by special observances” (2) but they are important in as much as they are ritual and social events at once. The social function and symbolic meaning derived from the ritual of having a time-based festival enforces a relationship to the event and the “overt values that the community recognises as essential to its ideology and worldview, to its social identity, its historical continuity, and to its physical survival, which is ultimately what festival celebrates” (2).

French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s, Elementary Form of Religious Life (1912) provides a critical link between ritual, social behaviour, and the adherence to order. Critically evaluated over many decades, his analysis that the "collective veneration of the sacred" as a centralising factor for rituals and socio-cultural practices that inform a collective imagining of community remains the cornerstone of study of contemporary events, cultural forms and practices. Through participatory rites, the community brings an individual into the community. The gelling agent remains the veneration of a sacred object that is continuously affirmed by the community through a complex matrix of religious rituals, education and

46 daily practices. Faith, fear and subordination are important features that emerge through this practice and are open to interpretation, empowerment, control and abuse, thus locating the community experience within a belief system of the sacred and the profane. Durkheim asserts that any idea, object or system could fall between the two and ritualised engagements of these entrench the imagining of a community.

British anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-1983) shares Durkheim’s view that social order depends on rituals and ceremonial performances (Barrie, 1988). In his writings on tribes and customary practices, in particular in his critical texts, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (1969) and Anthropology of Performance (1987), Turner foregrounds ritual to a "stereotyped sequence of activities" evolving around a sequestered place and time coalescing events that inaugurate a season (harvest); a change in life pattern (coming of age, birthdays); crisis (death, calamity); divinity (remembering gods); ceremonies performed by political authorities to ensure the well-being of their communities; initiations (priesthoods, secret societies), and ancestral worship. For Turner, rituals form the structure of community. He is especially interested in the way expressions of anti- structure manifested itself in the culture of a society. This interest was a major engine of his vast body of work. He identified a liminal space, a state of being in between phases where "liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial" (Turner, 1969: 95). It is an unmediated period of emergence, (for example childhood to adulthood), between the inevitable destabilising space of the binary structure; space where the sacred and profane blend and provide a rich source of new socio- cultural formulations. It is a holding area before an individual, or a community gets co-opted into another pre-existing social structure.

47 This liminal space - as an unmediated space – brings the extreme in the sacred and profane to collide through interplay of joy, laughter and excess. Russian philosopher and semiotician, Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnival is instructive in furthering the liminal space. In his study of medieval carnivals in Rabelais and his World (1984), Bakhtin cites the carnival where the division between performer and audience disappear and they live in the moment according to the rules in effect (Fiske, 1987; Storey, 2001). It is a space where all forms of hierarchies, beliefs and values around the appropriate, sacred and profane are suspended. This fosters a free- spirited engagement between people where learned social behaviour and discipline is cast aside to allow "latent sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves" (Bakhtin, 1984). In the medieval European carnival, this temporary suspension of the official world fosters some practices: first, a ritualistic replacement of leadership (mock crowning and de-crowning of a king) to emphasise the liminal space devoid of power structures and the symbolic riddance of the lived world. Second, the revival of what it means to be human. By shifting the concept of human self from a neutered state of being conditioned (obliging and subordinate to external systems and practices and member of a collective imagination) to a self that is free of all conditioning. This freedom is achieved through the reclamation of the human body and celebrating its corporeality; that is, the physical body and its natural functions from copulation, eating, drinking, defecation, etc., thereby celebrating the process of being in existence and being connected with others through a grotesque realism. Bakhtin notes that, a person lives two lives: "the official life, monolithically grave and gloomy, subjugated to s strict hierarchical order, full of terror, dogmatism, reverence, and piety; the other was the life of the carnival square, free and unrestricted, full of ambivalent laughter, blasphemy, the profanation of everything sacred, full of debasing obscenities" (Bakhtin, 1984: 11). He asserts that both lives are legitimate but separated by boundaries placed over time. Bakhtin's theory

48 brings to site both Durkheim and Turner into a space that can be reasonable contextualised and analysed as evidenced by late 20th century cultural and media studies' obsession with Bakhtin's concept of the carnival.

Unfortunately, it has become fashionably limited to render the theoretical framework to the analysis of binary play in everyday life where the relationships are reduced to an analysis of people, officialdom, excess and oppositional politics (Turner, 1990: 217) instead of looking at the carnival as a cultural or political enterprise in its own right with its own terms and conditions. Cultural theorist Tony Bennett highlights this by saying that the value of excess in carnival is in harnessing people as “boundless, unstoppable material force” capable of facing any obstacle (Bennett cited in Fiske, 1987: 249). This distinction is critical if we are to evaluate the usefulness of the theoretical frameworks in studying contemporary arts festivals.

The cultural-anthropological view of festivals is often applied to religious and traditional festivals. In contemporary discourse, cultural studies have attempted to contextualise this view into the realm of the everyday. Having said that, it remains limited. Durkheim's ritual, Turner's liminality and Bakhtin's carnival theories continue to inform contemporary performance, media and cultural studies literature, but they have not been critically linked to the study of contemporary arts festivals. If these views of culture can help to contextualise contemporary arts festivals as a location of ritual, the liminal and carnivalesque, we need to return to the primordial site of festival making: a site, where one will find socio-cultural rituals replaced with economic and political rituals. The liminal space is the space that exists between the core proscenium-arch festival programmes (institutional, time- tested and safe to audiences) to the fringe programmes (contemporary, experimental and unsafe to audiences).

Contemporary arts festivals are instruments of governmentality. Unlike festival systems derived through religious and social interactivity and practice, they are - whether private or public-funded - subject to participate in the social engineering of everyday life and lived experience, thereby becoming inseparable from the government apparatus’ of a given culture. As Foucault remarkably demonstrates, power is legitimated through the use of history, rituals, and mythology and for that matter, the everyday (Foucault, 1979). The everyday is determined not only by internal social concerns of the daily such as food, shelter, jobs and education but also shaped by external global factors that facilitate the movement of peoples and cultures through communities (Newbold et. al, 2015). Festivals remain social events for people and it often showcases their concerns of the day as the next section reveals.

1.5.3 Migratory Movement, Tourism and Globalisation

The world is filled with arts festivals of various range and scope. This proliferation is driven in part by access to migration amongst communities and cultures, globalisation and the "democratisation of cultural taste" (Giorgi and Sassatelli, 2011: 2) Major league festivals with long European traditions have often inclined towards one art form, and that is music. Cultural economist Bruno Frey (1994), traces music festivals to 11th century France. One of the oldest known contemporary music festival is the Three Choirs Festival that began in the early 18th century. Today, the most acclaimed music festivals include Richard Wagner's Bayreuther Festspiele (since 1876), the Glyndebourne Festival (since 1934), the Salzburger Festspiele (since 1920) and the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds (since 1958). Asia has traditionally built festivals around religious and folk

50 activities such as harvests, lunar events and milestones in family life as in births, weddings and deaths. While these are not limited to Asia, traditional forms such as the Indian Navarathri festival (nine evenings of song, dance and music in praise of deities); the Ramayana performances on full moon evenings in Indonesia; or Chinese Opera performances during the Hungry Ghosts Festival, cater to social functions that exclude the concept of entertainment as an end in itself. These events were primarily developed to fulfil socio-religious needs and purposes. The secularisation of these practices – exorcised off their religious-folk context – occurred as colonialism and capitalism penetrated into traditional societies to open and display their cultures and practices to others, that is, to allow their practices to be presented as events emblematic of culture and tradition.

The arts festival as we know today owes its form and function to post- second world war festivals that began in Europe in response to the social anomie that the war had created (Klaic, 2014; Newbold et al., 2015). Major festivals such as Edinburgh International Festival, UK (1947); Festival d'Avignon, France (1947); Holland Festival, the Netherlands (1947); and Berliner Festwochen, Germany (1951) aimed to celebrate European culture and its accomplishments, thereby lending itself to post-war healing and urban rejuvenation. What made Edinburgh and Avignon distinctive was their ability to provide an alternative to the "traditional rituals of cultural life" found in the major cities and their high-art infrastructure such as museums and concert halls (Bradby and Delgado, 2003: 2). Their success was pegged on two principles: first, in providing an alternative to the institutionalised, time-tested art forms, the two festivals were able to provide an opportunity for new and contemporary expression for local artists; and second, the internationalisation of the festival, through the injection of performances from different parts of the world, served to

51 position the cities and the festivals as sites of culture, life and excitement. Today, these two festivals remain sites of arts pilgrimage.3

Here, festivals become a source of human movement, engagement and consumption providing tourism with a source of study. The point here is not in tourism studies per se but to acknowledge that events are produced, circulated and commoditised for consumption by the public (Wilson and Richard, 2007; Quinn, 2010). The Annals of Tourism Research (1998, Vol. 15:3) foregrounds two fundamental assumptions that underscore festivals in the literature of tourism: They are the commodification of arts experiences and the creation of “staged authenticity” for tourists. The Journal argues that commodification adds new experiences and meanings to existing arts skills and that it does not necessarily destroy original meanings. Authenticity, on the other hand, is often negotiated through a veneer of an “aspired touristic experience”. Festivals enhance a city. In projecting cities as lifestyle destinations, arts festivals work with public policymakers “to strengthen the economic competitiveness of their cities” (Mustard and Kovacs, 2013). Quinn (2010) argues that the “proliferation of arts festivals around the world is in the interest of invigorating urban economies, regenerating entire cities or city districts, and introducing or repositioning cities on the ever more competitive global stage" (266). Quinn citing Waterman (1998) observes that arts festivals have to increasingly straddle multiple stakeholders and their agendas with an allegiance to artistic objectives. If these varied interests are not carefully managed, organisers of arts festivals risk being dictated to and framed by tourism which in itself is driven by an agency to shape culture in a particular manner (266). But here the proposition is the advent of a global city where arts, media, entertainment, creative business

3 For an excellent study of the Edinburgh Festivals, see Angela Bartie’s Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-War Britain (2013).

52 services, architecture, publishing and design help create a networked city that is truly international and attractive to the business. Both established and developing second-tier and third-tier cities, with different economic outputs, are seeking to compete and propel development through festivals. In this discourse, Getz argues the focal point is cost-benefit analysis, consumption, impact and profile. The world-renowned Edinburgh International Arts Festival, which continues to serve as a model and inspiration for emerging festivals, continues to determine its existence through impact studies.

The Edinburgh International Festival, and the Festival d’Avignon, as sites of arts pilgrimage, spawned the global development of global festivals and they continue to inspire and function as models for cities to develop festivals to promote tourism. Global festivals, unlike localised communitarian festivals, create a tapestry of viewpoints that are at once ideological, entertaining, perspectival and propositional. Contrarian views on aesthetics and politics get thrown into a cauldron where global concerns on liberal humanism versus traditional conservatism; power structures versus censorship; and cultural altruism versus exceptionalism are pitted for audiences. Audiences, in experiencing a mélange of programmes and events, contribute to the creation of a high cultural and global flow of energy that formulates into networks, thus facilitating art and artists to travel to global festival sites.

Global festivals are not limited to arts festivals. Film festivals (Cannes Film Festival), literary festival (Jaipur Literary Festival), music festivals (WOMAD), shopping festivals (Dubai Shopping Festival), etc. provide cities and municipalities their unique niche to raise the profile of the city. While many festivals blur the line between art, literature, and film, etc. my focus remains arts festivals – the aesthetic over the commercial. Global arts festivals allow aspiring cities to programme events and performances that

53 emulate the two established festivals. As many cities aspire to present global festivals in a move to demonstrate their arrival as first-class cities, arts festivals provide an opportunity to celebrate a city's capability but, more importantly, serve as an economic soft sell to encourage investment from multi-national corporations. Concerning film festivals, apt for this research on arts festivals, I draw on Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong's (2011) research on film festivals that festivals do "showcase a complex world" that are international, historical and contemporary (14). She asserts that it is easy to overlook this holistic aim in the quest for novelty and variety and that festival organiser and audiences must not forget that festivals catalogue ideas and approaches; create retrospectives on styles and artists, and; canonise works, through research scholarship and knowledge production, the proposition of new trends, and establishing standards of quality. Global festivals identify and showcase new talents, not at their emergent or experiment phase, but rather at a stage where the work is ready to contribute an aesthetic proposition that is executed excellently. Through a process of commissioning and presenting works global festivals ordain artists and their works and by facilitating touring to other festivals through joint commissions and co-productions help them gain momentum, significance and importance.

1.5.4 The Festival as Management System

An artistic or festival director leads an arts festival. Taking responsibility for an arts festival’s overall aesthetic architecture, they are supported by a team of curators and managers, who have oversight of programming, marketing and administrating the event and its resources. Working with local and international artists, patrons and specialists, the director develops a concept, which is realised through a performance-oriented set of activities that display sensitivity towards aesthetic and social experiences. To this end, the

54 director plans, schedules and presents a range of visual, aural, kinaesthetic and emotional experiences that excite, entertain and educate audiences. Programming often highlights artistic vision, community aspirations, national agenda and economic potential. Bearing descriptors such as cutting-edge, classic, old favourites, etc., programming helps establish the festival in the minds of its audience. Programming is driven primarily, but not exclusively, by the need to offer arts appreciation to audiences to highlight connectivity between art, state and the public to fulfil a social agenda through the arts. Programming is vital to the vibrancy of space, city or society, and today successful programming is gauged against audienceship and revenues (ticketing and sponsorship) and less so on aesthetic criticality. In balancing the financial viability of a festival with its artistic programming, directors have to balance creative risk which bears potential alienation of the public (thereby lending to poor sales) with artistic merit that is often new and untested.

Festivals often bear one of the following models of organisation: niche model, broad-based model and mega festival model.

A niche festival represents aesthetic exclusivity and offers a programme of thematic focus and interest. A niche festival can concentrate on a fare ranging from the traditional to the contemporary, and it could also focus on a particular artist, movement, period, theme, instrument or practice. It is often appealing to small agencies and organisations especially those that seek to devote themselves entirely to cutting-edge practice. For example, the prestigious Festival d'Automne in Paris or Hong Kong Fringe Festival primarily feature major cutting-edge artists. This model is tightly curated and works well for agencies and communities with budgetary constraints. However, its appeal is restricted to a specialist audience.

55 An attractive model for organising a festival is a broad-based framework that features a broad range of programmes with a mix of conservative to progressive fare, lasting two to four weeks in duration. It includes non- performing arts fare such as visual arts programmes, literary events and numerous large-scale outdoor events. Similar international festivals include the Singapore Arts Festival, the Hong Kong Arts Festival, the Adelaide Festival of Arts, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the New Zealand International Arts Festival, the Kunsten Festival des Arts in Brussels and the Lincoln Centre Festival in New York – all featuring a range of programmes from classical to contemporary works with a different emphasis in each festival. In some cases, a separate independent fringe festival develops in the shadow of the main festival, for example Adelaide Fringe, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, City Festival (Hong Kong) and Avignon Off. This model, on some level, aims to offer something for everyone and its effective presentation is dependent on a budget that is able to support a range of audience interests.

The hypermarket of festivals or mega festival is an extension of the broad- based model in which the principal festival sits alongside an agglomeration of other festivals, all drawn together in a single branding sweep to saturate the entire city into festival fever. The world's two oldest festivals, the Edinburgh and Avignon festivals, undertake this approach. In Edinburgh, known as the ‘festival city', other events such as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, International Book Festival, Jazz and Blues Festival, and Military Tattoo add buzz to the city. The Festival d' Avignon in France is another major international festival in which a fringe festival and outdoor street events transform the whole city. Both cities attract significant regional and global audience.

56 Within these programming models, the challenge for a director is to create a series of programmes that not only have artistic merit but is congruent with the organiser's mission and serves the needs of the community, while at the same time constructing audiences and generating intellectual and emotional vibrancy. Hence, the scope of a festival to balance artistic and creative endeavours with risk in creativity and experimentation is often a difficult one. No matter which framework, the imperative for efficient and strategic project management can sometimes affect creativity. For example, directors may have to resort to identifying programmes that fit the requirements of performance spaces, or the urge to increase revenue and audience numbers. This may result in skewing programming choices to presentations of blockbusters such as ballets and orchestral works. Festivals today are faced with the conundrum of reducing risk or reaping the potential benefits of risk-taking.

In identifying their unique position in the global community, arts festivals function effectively through multilateral agencies and associations to develop and promote artistic enterprise. For example, the European Festivals Association, founded in 1952, represents the common interests of over one hundred festivals and eleven festival associations in thirty-eight European and non-European countries, totalling more than five-hundred member festivals. The British Arts Festival Association represents over one hundred festivals in the United Kingdom while France Festivals, a federation set up in 1959, has eighty-eight major festivals under its umbrella. These agencies focus on festivals that develop, present and programme work that champion the arts and the artistic community they represent; and, help promote the festivals’ artistic identities and their socio- cultural-economic contributions nationally and internationally. In the same vein, the Association of Asian Performing Arts Festivals founded in 2004 promotes the recognition of arts festivals in the Asian region. But unlike the

57 European model, its current members of thirteen festivals in countries including China, Singapore, Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, Macau and Hong Kong take advantage of a regional network in co-sharing, commissioning, touring works and participating in joint marketing efforts.

I would emphasise that while these agencies and networks facilitate a global exchange of arts and ideas, they do not interfere in the direction of individual festivals, nor are they necessarily critical to the life of a festival. Instead, their value is in facilitating the sharing of skills and knowledge, as well as creation and touring of artistic programmes outside of their place of origin. This has a bearing on audiences. Whether or not audiences are local, regional or international, today they engage with productions as de- contextualised tourists (Fricker, 2003: 81) removed from the origin of its creation. These networks serve as a distribution channel for a new generation of artistic programmes which are highly desirable in amongst festival organisers. For example, the works of theatre directors Robert Lepage (Canada), Heiner Goebbels (Germany), Ong Keng Sen (Singapore), and Robert Wilson (USA) are globally commissioned, exchanged and performed and they significantly contribute to an arts festival’s global or regional positioning.

Festivals are also businesses. While it is understood that it is challenging to create wealth through the sale of experiences, people have done so with the arts. The economic dimension of the arts is a significant feature of cultural production managed and controlled by a few ‘aesthetic capitalists' (e.g. Cameron Mackintosh). As a consumptive base is crucial to the existence of a festival, many veer towards mass culture where the circulation of mainstream and conventional tastes reigns paramount. Still, the unpredictability of the market response to individual performances, productions and artists makes it difficult to assess market sentiment in

58 advance. Furthermore, this is compounded by the fact that the triumvirate act of production-circulation-consumption of the arts is done simultaneously at a precise moment at a venue. That is, the artist produces work (say, a piece of music) and presents it to an audience who consumes it at the same time. Unlike common mass-produced goods and services, which may be viewed or sampled beforehand, then purchased and consumed at a later date, no two performances are alike, and a consumer pays on good faith, in advance, that the experience will be value-for-money. Hence, arts festivals leverage on their reputation, programming and uniqueness to generate revenue through ticketing, sponsorship and public subsidy.

The benefits of an arts festival to a community are self-evident. First, they provide an opportunity for the investment in and display of artistic innovation and make visible under-represented communities and their cultures through commissions and public display. In doing so, the festival allows for an exchange of social and cultural experiences between people. Second, festivals are programmed around an intense concoction of new and contemporary works, historicising the traditional, engaging the community and fostering experimentation. This provokes various publics (audiences, media, government, sponsors) to broaden their horizons to appreciate and engage with the morphing nature of the arts. Third, festivals by sheer scale and volume of audiences stimulate economic development and urban vibrancy.

In addition to identifying benefits, I share the challenges that an arts festival brings with it. Criticism of festivals has increased over the years as their development parallels growing global tourism and trade. First, the focus on the quantitative (e.g. size of outreach) and fiscal (e.g. sponsorship) nature of the festival, seems to detract from the real intent of a festival which is qualitative (e.g. artistic) and communitarian (people focussed). Critics argue

59 that the process of blending productions, artists and audiences in a festival is akin to a pejorative sensibility of a marketplace where ideas and people are trudged through a nexus of finance and tourism. As Karen Fricker (2003) aptly notes,

…contemporary festivals are caught in a contradictory moment as sites of commercial and more intangible exchanges. Together, festivals form a global network for the circulation of cultural goods; individually they position themselves as purveyors of unique and excellent artistic experiences outside the commercial rabble. Feeding on the touristic desire for novelty, festivals require a constant flow of new artistic products for the spectators’ consumption (79-80).

Second, festivals driven by pressurising agenda to appeal to the masses and increasing investment often, rather than open the minds of audiences, reaffirm commonplace sensibilities, thereby commoditising and trivialising cultures and communities (Allain and Harvie, 2006). It is not uncommon today to think that a festival programme is a large-scale, branded blockbuster spectacle. This leads to the danger of a homogeneous set of programmes that cut linguistic and socio-cultural borders to travel to various festivals. These travel fare, by default, internationalise aesthetic standards. The Indonesian gamelan music as a representation of Southeast Asia is a

60 case in point where the performance and showcase of gamelan music in symbolic centres such as arts festivals, essentialise the cultural specificities of a very complex society and reduces them to simple metaphors.

Third, festivals foster elitism. With increasing engagement with the critical principles of art-making, contemporary productions are exhibiting complex ideas and practices that bypass the sensibilities of the average audience member. Festival productions can intuitively taper their appeal to a highly intelligent and narrow group of enthusiasts thereby alienating others. Elitism, on another front, is cultivated through the pricing of shows. As touring shows are expensive (made worse by the inclusion of a star artist), they command high-end pricing, which makes it beyond the reach of young audiences or could be a deterrent to the uninitiated enthusiast. In another instance, time-tested and institutionalised classical art forms such as symphonic orchestras and operas are seen to foster social elitism. Undeniably, while these limitations persist, festivals remain spirited, engaging and moving. They provide vital sustenance to diverse communities and ensure continued building of cultural and artistic legacies.

In summary, "arts festivals exist for artistic reasons," providing a platform for excellence in creativity, aesthetic deliberations and facilitate artists to reach their widest possible audience (De Greef cited in Quinn, 2010). While arts festivals can be read through cultural-anthropological, tourism or events management perspectives, their existence is driven by adherence to artistic objectives and a deep appreciation of social, cultural and economic conditions that shape them. Their strength is in their ability to harness the energies of various communities and not merely succumb to the vagaries of the demands of commercial tourism.

61 1.6 Chapter Outline

This thesis is in two parts.

Part One, Singapore: Cultural Context, sets Singapore’s cultural milieu in context. Here Chapters Two and Three draw out the historical contexts and conditions that have led to the government’s investment in the arts. The literature on the arts has positioned the arts as an extension of nationalism (Birch, 1997; Peterson, 2001; Lo, 2005; Chong, 2010) located primarily within the fields of multiculturalism (Purushotam, 2000) and in this thesis, I co-locate the arts as a parallel stream of development within the cultural polity of Singapore to establish the critical role of the arts in the development of the nation’s identity. Chapter Two takes a critically examines the cultural policies that have shaped postcolonial Singapore since the 1950s. It articulates policy drivers such as multiculturalism, Asian Values and shared community values. Chapter Three studies the development of a city-state into a renaissance city for the arts from the 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium. This sets the backdrop for the study of the Arts Festival.

Part Two, The Singapore Arts Festival and Production of Culture, undertakes a detailed study of the history of the Singapore Arts Festival and the ways and means it contributes to the production of culture in Singapore. It demonstrates how the Arts Festival, as an instrument of governmentality, functions to fulfil the desire of the city-state. Chapter Four looks at the emerging years from the 1950s to 1980s. Chapter Five is dedicated to studying the Arts Festival of the 1990s through the proposition that Singapore aims to be a global city in Asia. The transformation of the global city into a renaissance city is the concern of Chapter Six, bringing the study to 2012 when the NAC paused the Arts Festival for a year to review its

62 place and purpose. Chapter Seven looks at the Arts Festival as an enterprise being active in mobilising various agencies from sponsors to the media in fulfilling larger cultural policy initiatives. Chapter Eight concludes by summarising the thesis proposition and its findings.

63 PART ONE

SINGAPORE: CULTURAL CONTEXT

64 Chapter Two

DESIGNING CULTURE AND POLICY FOR A GLOBAL CITY

2.1 Introduction

Singapore is a global city. Situated at the confluence of the northern and southern hemispheres, and at the nodal point between South and Southeast Asia, it is a city that has enabled global trade and commerce between civilisations and continents for centuries. With a population of 5.6 million people (Department of Statistic Singapore, 2016), of which one-fifth are expatriates, it is a strategic site of global capitalism (finance, consumerism and people) with its success penned on the maintenance of excellent air, land and port infrastructure. It is a modern city represented by pragmatic, no-nonsense efficiency, speed and economic transparency. In keeping with the challenges of the globalising world, the city-state works hard at being at the top of the competition by benchmarking itself against other developed cities such as New York, London, Tokyo and Paris (ERC Report 2003). The city-state, in this instance, is a product of capitalism, valued for its ability to generate a financial nexus between cultures. Its investment in arts and cultural excitement, glitz and attraction is to maintain its critical edge as the financial centre in Asia.

While theorists of globalisation find global cities plagued with problems involving cultural homogenisation (Schiller, 1976; Buell, 1994), governance of a migrant population (Rose, 2000, Colliers, 2014; Sassen, 2014), loyalty amongst people (Turner, 1997; Connor, 2007), communal and self-identity (Harvey, 1989), global consumerism (Appadurai, 1986, Urry, 2000) and sovereignty of nation-states (Sassen, 2001; Clark, 2016), I posit that the

65 concept of global city is only one key element in the study of globalisation. I have undertaken to frame globalisation as a process of imperialism of capitalism through the promotion of homogenous ideas, values and beliefs (Schiller, 1976, 1995; Pieterse, 2004). In tapering my focus on Singapore as a global city, I join Sassen (1991, 2000, 2004) in seeing global cities, as centres of international trade, multi-national investment and global headquarters operation (Barker, 2003: 357). On the other hand, global cities are also centres for de-territorialised people and become strategic sites for the play between global and local identities (Savage, Gaynor and Longhurst, 2004). The government of Singapore has always been aware of this tension and has sought to balance global economics, local politics and national identity.

In this and the following chapter, I will first draw out the conceptual and structural approaches to the manner in which culture has been ‘designed' in Singapore. My aim in doing so is to articulate the architecture within which the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival resides and how it serves as an instrument of imagining a nation. I argue that much of the literature on the culture of Singapore has positioned it as the product of an act of ‘imagining', be it psychic or otherwise (Ban, Pakir and Tong 1992), located within the visionary zeal of post-independence leaders such as Lee Kuan Yew, Goh Keng Swee and S. Rajaratnam. This implies a critical imagination on the part of these leaders and also draws on an assumption (obliquely and tangentially) of Singapore as a tabula rasa (Koolhaas, 1995). I move away from this imagining as literature on Singapore for decades have privileged this positionality, valourising post-independence leaders as originary to modern Singapore. Instead, I strategically use the term ‘design’ as a means to contextualise and appropriately structure the understanding of culture.

66 Regarding cultural policy in Singapore, I take design to be a considered action of conceiving and producing a plan or drawing of something before it is made;4 in this instance, the design of Singapore as a cultural formation is located within the process of British decolonisation of Southeast Asia. As scholarly works by historians T. N. Harper (1999) and Karl Hack (2001) have shown on the principles of multiculturalism, the implementation of language policies and the use of social campaigns as strategies for the building of a national culture have shaped Singapore even before its post- 1965 independence. While historians have adequately established the presence of ancient empires in Southeast Asia, I agree with cultural theorists Chua Beng-Huat (1995, 1999); Wee Wan-Ling (2000, 2004); and, Selvaraj Velayutham (2007) that modern Singapore is only conceivable through prescriptive principles of neocolonialism and modernity. These principles have led to a process of constant invention and re-invention of a national culture through precepts such as multiculturalism, Asian Values and Shared Values. Second, I examine the location of culture within the economy, as outlined by cultural policies in the 1990s, and forecast the advent of a creative economy as it transforms work, art and social life to make Singapore a renaissance city of Asia. I reflect on the precarious nature of this ‘Faustian bargain' and how it undermines the formation of a national culture as cultural policies seek to broaden the definition of art to embrace both high art and commodity culture. This chapter lays a foundation for understanding a culture and its development in Singapore, which informs the remaining chapters of this thesis.

4 The Oxford Dictionary of English (revised edition). Ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford University Press, 2005.

67 2.2 Understanding Culture

The importance of being a global city is a leitmotif that recurs throughout the history of Singapore. Singapore, a swamp-riddled piracy haven, was formally identified and transformed into a free entrepot and a modern cosmopolis in 1819 by the British East India Company which attempted to balance Dutch power in Southeast Asia in the 1800s (Turnbull, 1989; Hack, 2001). Its centrality and potential became the envy of major empires operating in the region of Asia. To support its new economic function, the British populated the island with migrants particularly from China and India to set up the economic and physical infrastructure of the city. From ancient times until today, Singapore’s natural port facilities have enabled shipping from Europe and the Middle East into Asia. More importantly, as a site of colonialist expression of political and economic might, Singapore, I would argue, was a natural recipient of modernity5 as it arrived into this small fishing village "awakened by contact; transported through commerce; administered by empires, bearing colonial inscriptions; propelled by nationalism; and now increasingly steered by global media, migration, and capital" (Goankar, 2001). Singapore was an attractive site for, both, the entrepreneur and the pirate, the traveller and the prisoner. It served as a socio-economic vortex for the British empire where received traditions of Western (education, law and civil service) and Eastern traditions (philosophy, myth and Asian Values) co-mingle and coalesce in the gaze of the empire.

The concept of culture in Singapore has also varied over time influenced by global trends concerning economics. Let me broadly frame the global

5 I refer to modernity as characterising "growth and strengthening of a specific set of social practices and ways of doing things, associated with capitalism and notions of the new and progress" (Faulkner, 1990).

68 theorisation of culture to help locate developments in Singapore and how they resonate with global trends.

To begin with, in classical anthropology, culture is associated with a repertoire of a people and their defining and distinctive characteristics. Sociologist Emile Durkheim (1964) sees culture within a social consideration, "as a collective phenomenon that constraints and organises social behaviours and can be studied without reference to individual psychology" (Friedman, 1994: 67). Ferdinand Saussure (1959) locates culture within linguistic frameworks celebrating the primacy of the ‘sign', while Clifford Geertz (1988) renders culture as a publicly accessible text of a people, a symbolic programme in time and space of social life and their true essence.

The German concept of Kultur, as an ideal of perfection that a society aspires to as it climbs from a state of barbarism and primitivism to refinement, is also critical to the understanding of the formulation of culture in Singapore and elsewhere. This concept was central to the development of German idealism as shaped and developed by German philosophers, notably Kant, Schiller and Goethe, who signalled the material and technical progress of humanity was leading it to become an ecumenical society (Beneton, 1975).6 British thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries including Lord Shaftesbury, David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke and Matthew Arnold were critical to the formulation of an ethical code in this vein of Kultur (Jusdanis, 2001: 46) preferring to invest in an order of society that

6 However, philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) whose philosophy influenced many including Nietzsche and J. S. Mills, rejected this totalising approach to Kultur. He emphasised that difference in culture is expressly evident in society and the path to enlightenment was not necessarily the purview of western civilisation (Jusdanis, 2001: 45).

69 bound people together. For Mathew Arnold, culture represents a familiarity with a body of knowledge - be it philosophy, literature, music, painting - of the highest quality. In Culture and Anarchy (1869), Arnold laments that culture as a process of humanisation becomes conflated with the products through which humanisation is achieved (Giles and Middleton, 1999: 12). Edmund Burke (1910) crystallises this: "There ought to be a system of manners in every nation, which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. They make us love our country; our country ought to be loved" (Burke cited in Jusdanis, 2001). For both the German and British philosophers, culture imposed uniformity on society ensuring its compliance with definitive laws and procedures.

In his 1958 treatise on culture in Culture and Society: 1780 - 1950, Raymond Williams foregrounds the value of culture in the production, circulation and consumption of meanings in different social constituencies and relations. Williams' definition of culture as "a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development…a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in general…the works and practices of intellectual and artistic activity" (1976: 90) is instructive in highlighting the overlaps that may occur and also, how governments and the intellectual polity may choose to focus on a particular point with this definition (du Gay et. al, 1997: 2). This emphasis on particular aspects of culture may make one less tolerant and, in the search for perfection (say, a national culture), individual beliefs may blind people from differences in views; in extreme cases, even lead to the suppression or denial of opinion. In stressing this, Williams was able to move culture from fixed representations in elitism and high culture to artistic creations emerging from the working class thus locating culture in an assemblage of all particularities of society: from culture as a state of habit of mind to a whole way of living. In Williams' world, culture is a chronicle of change and

70 development reacting (power struggle) to political, economic and industrial transformations. It is also an outcome of its own where the individual's self- representation is a representation of society (Slack and Whitt, 1992 cited in Jusdanis, 2001). Building on Williams' theory, cultural studies scholars invest heavily in the study of various cultural formations as a way of life (mass, popular, high-brow, low-brow, bucolic, contemporary) to investigate areas of identity formation, selfhood, sexuality and gender, class, nationality. This study is to unpack culture as an ideology, drilling into hidden value structures to unravel a colourful and complex world (Hall, Hobson, Lowe and Willis, 2005). They also study culture as a “range of cultural practices: artistic forms, texts, canons, architecture, mass-produced commodities” (Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler, 1992: 5) to seek the underlying signifying practices that quietly speak of a way of life.

However, in today's contemporaneous world, the concept of culture as a way of life is highly problematic. There is an underlying assumption in Williams' definition of locating culture within flexible, yet identifiable boundaries of a place. With globalisation locating culture within a space/place continuum is disorienting, yet rich in its possibilities of new formations and identities. Another underlying assumption in Williams' concept is a degree of ‘stability' of culture rooted in tradition. Williams' reading of culture (1976) suggests a link with the act of cultivation of crops (cultura in Latin), hence an elliptical connection to a historical ‘tradition’. Tradition is the ritualised recurrence of activities that purport to define homogenous identities, social mores and values for a community - crystallised in mythological and everyday practices and administered through education, religion, government and media (Curran, 1982). Postcolonial and globalisation theorists have called into question this investment in historical tradition. As economies and people criss-cross over international time zones and borders in the shortest span of time leading to

71 the development of chaotic hybrid identities rather than homogenous national or ethnic identities (Bhabha, 1994) “culture is not best understood in terms of location and roots but more as hybrid and creolised cultural roots in global space” (Barker and Jane, 2016: 41). This is not to undermine the value of locating culture in a particular space and time. In fact, the location of culture within localised contexts bearing their inscriptions or track marks of global travel seems to be the appropriate means to contend with identity formation for individuals today.

I have taken this rather brief sojourn into broad areas of definitions and locations of culture as they, in different critical formulations, shape Singapore and it will become evident as this chapter unfolds.

2.3 Designing Culture for a Global City

[M]any people are somewhat critical of the Singapore government’s preoccupation with the need to create a Malayan culture.7 We are

7 Singapore was to be part of the Malayan Confederation established by the British in the 1950s. It included the peninsula of West Malaysia and East Malaysia (Sabah and Sarawak located in the island of Borneo, now known as Kalimantan). The then government of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew pushed for a common Malayan culture as a national culture that would balance the power between the indigenous Malays and the large Chinese and relatively sizable Indian migrant communities. This was to prevent racial and social discrimination. This was not accepted by the Malays who sought to protect their indigenous rights. Singapore was ‘thrown out' of the Confederation in 1965 (thus gaining independence), but the Singaporean government continued with the idea of a national culture built around multiculturalism and crystallised it in its constitution.

72 told that all efforts to create a Malayan culture deliberately are optimistic and a waste of time. A culture, we are told, needs hundreds and possibly thousands of years to evolve. You cannot force the pace, as one critic put it, to create a Malayan culture artificially. Incidentally, culture is artificial, in the sense that it is a creation of man. Culture, as sociologists will tell you, is the environment of beliefs and attitudes created by man to free himself from the limitations of his natural environment.

It is true that we are trying to create a Malayan culture deliberately and in the shortest possible time. A Ministry of Culture was set up in the belief that the shaping of Malayan culture should be a conscious, deliberate and organised effort. There is nothing foolish in a people wanting to plan their cultural evolution (S Rajaratnam,8 Minister of Culture, 1957-1963 in Petir, Vol. 3, No. 15, 7 September 1960).

8 S. Rajaratnam’s speeches and articles were published collectively in The Prophetic and The Political: Selected Speeches and Writings of S. Rajaratnam. Edited by Chan Heng Chee and Obaid ul Haq. New York: St. Martins Press, 1987. While the thesis refers to specific dates of the speeches and articles, they can be found in this book.

73 The concept of culture in Singapore is a product of its making. Etymologically, the word culture is a combination of two Latin word or idea formations: cultura (cultivated land) and civilis (of the citizens) (Williams, 1976; DeJean, 1997; Jusdanis, 2001). Both ideas are problematic in serving as a discursive principle for the study of culture in Singapore. The city-state of Singapore is invariably too small to sustain a community of people through its natural resources such as water and agriculture as stressed by years of urban and political discourse in land and resource-scarce Singapore; and second, the implied need for civilis or ‘of the citizens’ is problematic as the formation of Singapore itself is invested in diaspora and trans-border migration. As such, the concept of a nation or culture as a priori to the conception of modern Singapore is not feasible.9 Trapped between the twin worlds of capitalism and a collection centre for diasporic people, culture and identity will always be contextual, contingent and beholden to globalisation. A society primarily designed with immigrants who brought along their cultural values and aspirations, Singapore has had a difficult time in fostering a notion of national culture because of these social and cultural differences. Scholars have abundantly written of the formation of national identity in post-independent Singapore under the rule of Lee, and a general conclusion is that it is a mix of identities.

Culture in Singapore, as a matter of "practical politics" (Rajaratnam, 7 September 1960), has been designed around global economic trends, race and ethnicity and aspirational ‘high culture' representing a move from a sense of primitivism to refinement in the late 20th century. Singapore's pre- independence state as a part of a holistic Malayan Federation in the early

9 Herder (1877) implores that primeval form of humanity was located in culture and language and not the State and that the State grew out of the Volk (people, nation or race) rather than created through the structure of politics, politicians and their institutions (Jusdanis, 2001:45).

74 1950s was envisioned to be the jewel of Southeast Asia, the New York of the East in trade and culture (Lee, 1998) building on the British aim to ensure Singapore's economic centrality in a fast decolonising Southeast Asia (Hack, 2001). This aspiration was soldered into the visions of early post- independence political leaders especially in the vision of S. Rajaratnam who served as minister for culture in the 1960s and foreign affairs in the early 1970s.

A founding member of post-independent Singapore and the author of Singapore’s national pledge, Rajaratnam espoused a vision for Singapore as a global city in a now classic 1972 speech to the Singapore Press Club (Rajaratnam, 6 February 1972 cited in Chan and ul Haq, 1987. Subsequent quotes refer to this note). Drawing from economic historian Arnold Toynbee’s concept of a global city (1970) where it is a city that serves as a transitory, yet sufficiently rooted settlement embracing the world, Rajaratnam argues, “if we view Singapore’s future as a Global City, then the smallness of Singapore, the absence of a hinterland, or raw materials and a large domestic market are not fatal or insurmountable handicaps…for a Global City, the world is its hinterland.” Rajaratnam prefers to call Singapore an Ecumenopolis – the world-embracing city. In his view, this city is unlike earlier models, which saw cities as centres of civilisations and regional empires. For him, these centres as “cities of prestige, holy cities, city states or even capitals of convenience” were parochial with limited influence. Singapore’s success is in its global positioning. Rajaratnam adds,

…[T]he Global City is the child of modern technology. It is the city that electronic communications, supersonic planes, giant

75 tankers and modern economic and industrial organisations have made inevitable.…Whether the Global City would be a happier place.…will depend on how wisely and boldly we shape its directions. (Rajaratnam, 6 February 1972 cited in Chan and ul Haq, 1987).

Rajaratnam’s foresight finds resonance in socio-economic theories such as Wallerstein’s ‘world-systems theory’ (1974), Luhmann’s ‘world society’ (1984), Friedman’s ‘hierarchy of world cities’ (1986) and Levitt's ‘global marketplace' (1983) who saw the growth and development of a world system inevitable with rapid industrialisation in third world countries through telecommunication and transportation. All these theories extend and acknowledge the problem of cultural homogeneity amidst a rapid supply of various consumer products from first-world.

Rajaratnam's vision identifies two central issues. First, a fundamental imperative for Singapore's survival is the need to be internationally and technological connected. This model of survival is a global trend even for societies with their abundant resources and hinterland (Castell, 1989). Rajaratnam adds, "Global cities, unlike earlier cities, are linked intimately with one another.…because they are more alike they reach out to one another through the tentacles of technology.…form[ing].…a world-wide system of economies" (1972: 5). Scholars of urban studies and globalisation (Castell, 1989; Sassen, 1991; Urry, 2000; King, 2016) have developed this idea extensively, and it would be appropriate to acknowledge that it is not exclusive to Singapore. Ho (1975) argues that this idealisation and the

76 dependence on other similar economies leave the city-state at the mercy of the industrially advanced cities. He points out that Singapore lacks the cultural, intellectual and scientific achievements to lead the way and will be directed by the other economies making Singapore vulnerable to global trends. On the other hand, Singapore by being interconnected to other cities is on the pulse of global changes and will remain current, relevant and ahead of others in Southeast Asia and this may inevitably slow the process of developing a Singaporean culture since interconnectedness opens the floodgates of information (110).

A second issue that is symbolically central yet structurally marginal in his 1972 speech is the concept of a ‘national culture’ for Singapore. As culture minister from 1959-1965, Rajaratnam was key in developing and articulating a cultural formation that is syncretic of Singaporean multicultural migrant roots and the new global challenges that faced the immediate society. In his speeches throughout his tenure as culture minister (see Chan and ul Haq, 1987), he championed a multicultural positioning of a Singaporean society in the hope of developing this new culture. This multicultural positioning is crucial in a society of migrants where unceasing differentiation is evidenced in the division of labour and formation of class structures: Growing social complexity was beginning to exhibit classic symptoms of modernity: alienation, dissolution of localised cultural communities and the formation of social and class communities. A national culture, Rajaratnam envisions, is a crucial social adhesive to a disparate and disparaging lot of economic migrants.

Koh Tai Ann, in her 1989 seminal essay, ‘Culture and the Arts’ problematises this framing by locating the definition of culture in Singapore within a narrow bandwidth, that is, as a way of life as presented by Williams. However, the context of its use varies in Singapore, as she argues,

77 that in the first use culture is seen as something already pre-existing, “to be preserved and protected because it serves to identify a particular ethnic community” which includes its ‘roots’ (or cultural heritage) and ‘traditions’ (or cultural values), and; in the second, which embraces the first, locates itself within the implication of a ‘national culture’ “that is in the process of being created, still to be achieved, but which will eventually serve to identify Singapore as a nation” (710). She stresses that the definition of culture in Singapore has identifiable features and attributes which the user of the term implicitly endorses. Ultimately, she claims that this endorsement leads to a “colouring of culture as a way of life that is idealised or that will be the culmination of an ideal” (711). The assessment of culture by the observers above point to Singaporean culture as an essentialist entity – total, hermetic and unwavering – seeking to foster over the years, a national culture out of grubby immigrants “meticulously scrubbed and shaped into neat, orderly and law-abiding citizens” (The Straits Times, 25 May 2003). Underlying this precept is the erroneous assumption that immigrants (from major civilisations such as China and India) carry atavistic and primitive cultural and social genealogies and need to be transformed and constituted into one ecumenical society, as the German philosophers attempted, negating and celebrating expressions of difference as mentioned earlier in this chapter. The government has developed a model of ‘en-culturing’ Singaporeans into accepting principles of pragmatism, multiculturalism and Asian Values through the use of history, rituals and mythology in campaigns, thereby legitimating its own power, and has given “Singapore the reputation of being a society that comes closest to being a social laboratory” (Lian and Tong, 2002: 3).

This social laboratory has been facilitated by more than 200 campaigns with an average of ten campaigns per year in the 1980s and 1990s alone (Sunday Times, 25 May 2003). Singaporeans can be forgiven if they believe

78 campaigns are an essential feature of everyday life in Singapore to guide them in becoming ‘cultured’. Campaigns ranging from health (cancer awareness-1965, anti-smoking-1983/1986, don’t eat cockles raw-1987, AIDS awareness-1992), family structures (birth control-1972, national family week-1985, grandparents’ day-2002), habit (use your hands campaign-1983, anti-littering campaign-1968, be punctual-1981, anti- spitting campaign-1984) to social grace (courtesy campaign-1979, speak Mandarin-1979, speak good English-2001), have shaped and have been internalised by Singaporeans as being necessary to their lifestyles. From 1974-1986, campaigns were aimed at “forging a nation and a sense of ownership among a migrant people, who were racially and emotionally divided” (The Sunday Times. 25 May 2003) and the campaigns were enforced through the infamous imposition of fines; the instrumental whip in aligning uncouth migrants to become socially responsible citizens. The government, in the 1980s, became the largest advertising spender on campaigns, centralised at the prime minister's office (Yao, 2007). Lee Kuan Yew thus notes:

.…[P]art of human behaviour is learned. Part is instinctive. Courtesy is learned, not instinctive….through sustained effort, with a campaign every year we can thus influence that of our children for the better. By 1990, we can file down the rough ragged corners of our social behaviour that can grate on each other (Lee cited in Sunday Times, 25 May 2003).

Lee Kuan Yew’s successor Goh Chok Tong extrapolated Rajaratnam’s foresight:

As we advance to become a developed economy, our people will want similar progress in the social and cultural fields….Now what is a cultivated society? By a cultivated society I mean a society of well- read, well-informed citizens, a refined and gracious people, a thoughtful people, a society of sparkling ideas, a place where art, literature and music flourish. It is not a materialistic, consumerist society where wealth is flaunted and money spent thoughtlessly, in short a parvenu society (Goh cited in Koh, 1989: 713).

Implied in Goh's comment is that culture is a collective and shared expression of the society and that it bears the marking of an ethical and moral (Arnoldian) code designed around gentility, moderation, tolerance and civility. This aesthetic fashioning of social conduct as integral to a national culture was masterfully orchestrated through the use of public campaigns in the 1970s to the implementation of the main cultural policies in the 1990s to articulate and shape a Singaporean culture. These policies play a significant role as a technology of social engineering in constructing

80 neo-liberal subjects out of the lived experiences of Singaporeans. The pervasiveness of social engineering in everyday life (well-documented by sociologists in Singapore) was inseparable from regulatory laws as the government sought its legitimacy through its definition and use of history, rituals, and mythology and for that matter, the arts and the everyday. From dictating the length of hair for men to the role of women in society to incentivising graduate women to have more children (Heng and Devan, 1992), the government, by overtly taking over all spheres of Singaporean life - public, physical and personal - created a culture complicit in its own social and personal conditions and set the culture on an ideal of material and economic gain. The Singaporean obsession for 5Cs – career, cash, credit card, car, and condominium – has been primarily driven by the economic. The government’s endorsement of it cannot be more evident than when deputy prime minister Tony Tan, in an interview on the arts, reflected that “one would not achieve the 5Cs if they choose the arts. But if they are successful, it will follow suit” (Straits Times, Life! 31 May 1996). Goh takes it further,

In one generation, we have moved from attap- and zinc-roofed wooden huts in kampongs to four- and five-room HDB [public housing] flats in new towns....But some Singaporeans still behave as if they were in the stone age….Let us now complement our economic achievements with social, cultural and spiritual developments. Then by, the 21st century, Singapore will be a truly successful, mature country with a developed economy and a

81 gracious society (Goh cited in Peterson, 2001: 14).

The use of public campaigns as a mechanism to shape culture was idealistic and, at times, frustrated the government as Goh opines. However, the campaigns were useful instruments to sustain national policies and social strategies. In the above quotes by Lee and Goh, there is a presumption of ‘common sense’ in the approach to shaping culture. It is not dissimilar to the Gramscian philosophy that people reflect and through common sense inculcated by campaigns, organise their lives and experiences. But Gramsci argues that common sense is not necessarily ‘good sense’ and this is a crucial site of ideological10 struggle over ideas, meanings and practices because these campaigns are instrumental and practical acts of consciousness (practical politics as Rajaratnam would say) that guide the actions of the everyday in Singapore.

A 2002 Straits Times article titled, “Campaigns Breed a Nation of Bystanders” asserts that the government used campaigns to ensure that Singapore is a well-run, efficient and gracious society and that the "authority's desire for a good society, unfortunately, caused them to prescribe certain behaviours to the people of Singapore" (28 January 2002). This draws on the assumption that "Singaporeans are incapable of becoming efficient, gracious and considerate on their own" and that "there is a lack of

10 Within Gramscian philosophy, ideology is understood in terms of ideas, meanings and practices located in practical activities of life. They presuppose universality in truth and are often management tools of powerful social blocs. Ideology provides rules and guides for everyday living (See Gramsci, 1971; Fiske, 1991).

82 independent inclination to be such". Furthermore, there is another deeply entrenched assumption: "that there is no need to take the initiative to be gracious and aware of one's surroundings. One just needs to wait for the authorities to tell them [Singaporeans] what to do" hence fostering a "culture of passivity" (28 January 2002). A Singaporean blogger, La Idler posts a vitriolic, yet humorous take on campaigns in Singapore as an extension of everyday life.

For tourists in Singapore, the “Singapore is a Fine City” t-shirt is a must-have souvenir. But t-shirt makers should probably change this slogan to ‘Singapore is a Campaign City’…It is as if every problem, from SARS to the unhealthy economy warrants a public campaign to build ‘awareness’ and create ‘public discussion.’ ….However, it seems like it’s beginning to be a handicap in a way that that is the only solution we can come up with whenever we encounter a problem, minor (as compared to other more bread and butter issues) as they may be. (www.idledays.net, 17 June 2003).

Well into the 21st century, a cult-like obsession with campaigns remains a bedrock of social engineering in Singapore. Its impact on the cultural consciousness of Singaporeans remains understudied. I argue that humour

83 and fear continue to linger as conditions of engagement amongst the public as government agencies such as the National Environment Agency would proudly display their campaigns on their websites, thereby normalising the instrument of governmentality. In 2013, the National Library Board of Singapore hosted an exhibition specifically to look at campaigns as Singapore's post-independence heritage. The curator of Campaign City, Alan Oei, says: "It's great that we can begin to talk about these campaigns which are potentially quite painful to remember. We've been inundated with so many campaigns every day, every second, that we almost tend to block it out naturally. But I think these campaigns have all touched us in one way or another. They are very much both a national psyche as well as on the individual level that affected us" (CNA, 17 Feb 2013). Campaigns have become the normative governmental tool for cajoling, organising, and disciplining the population into a particular practice of culture.

The next three sections, dedicated to the study of multiculturalism, Asian Values and Shared Values examines how they are fundamental to shaping Singaporean culture. The section demonstrates the government’s construction of its citizenry through these values-based systems. The instrumental nature of the tightly managed system through education, culture and policy prevents the fostering and emergence of concrete alternative value-based systems from necessary emerging or informing mainstream condition. Research did not reveal the emergence of such formal ideas other than those that were critiques of existing ideas. In actual fact, the historical sequencing of these values, in the following section, demonstrates how the introduction of an idea is not only a mere response to an existing system but fundamentally a co-optation of alternatives into the mainstream.

2.3.1 Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is articulated against prejudice, invisibility and exclusion….It addresses the question of the survival of particular cultures within advanced commercial media cultures and under hyper- powerful governments, and not simply the question of the right of different cultures to free expression and acknowledgement unconstrained by official indifferent or efforts at repression by mono-culturalists and racists.…In this situation active state intervention may be required (During, 2005: 157).

Culture in Singapore has always privileged tradition and ethnicity drawn from geographical and cultural representations of China, India and Malaya. The city-state is a multicultural community comprising a resident population of 74.3 per cent Chinese, 13.4 per cent Malays, 9.1 per cent Indians and 3.2 per cent constituting other ethnic groups not falling within the first three categories (Department of Statistics, 2016). It resists a ‘melting pot’ or a mono-cultural approach to cultural representation and is an “agglomerate formed of the separate Chinese, Malay, Indian and European traditions” unchanged and unmerged with each other (Benjamin,

85 1976: 120). From formal academic discourse to tourism brochures, to public signage to radio and television, culture in Singapore is ever present only in the structural form of multiculturalism: espousing harmony amongst diverse communities crystallised. The rights of the minority communities is privileged and protected in the constitution of the country on par with the majoritarian Chinese community as founding communities of the nation. The modern city-state exists only in this political form resonating with the influence of modernity where all modern states are inevitably multicultural in some shape or form primarily engineered by commerce, tourism and migration (Anderson, 1991; Hannerz, 1992).

To affirm a governmental approach to difference, this agglomerate form of multiculturalism11 is rationalised through a series of strategies of social discipline through language policies (Purushotam, 2000), secular-religious practices (Tong, 1989), media airtime and broadsheet allocation (Wong, 2001).

Sharon Siddique (1989) and Chua Beng Huat (1998), in their systematic study of culture in Singapore, find deep anomalies and contradictions that have structural effects on politics and society. Foremost in the principle of multiculturalism, race is accrued to a patriarchal descent and culture is defined and sustained through language and geographical location. This political strategy of ascriptive ethnicity, adopted from the British colonialists (Hack: 2001) and used as a privileged signifier of the ruling PAP’s ideology (Lian and Tong, 2002: 12), was aimed at unifying a highly

11 Sociologists refer to multiracialism as a priori to multiculturalism. This is exemplified in all the literature cited above. This thesis does not plan to expand on the discourse of multiracialism except with the view to contextualise identity formation in Singapore. As such, I have taken the broader defining terminology multiculturalism to be inclusive of multiracialism, multiethnicity and multireligiosity.

86 fractious immigrant population. Singapore-style multiculturalism reduces cultural variances, differences, subtleties between races, languages and cultures by essentialising them into neat cultural compartments identified as Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others (CMIO) and in so doing, celebrates notions of sameness (Benjamin 1976). For example, till today the Mandarin language is promoted as lingua franca for the Chinese population, which comprises many dialects and cultures. Language differences of various Southeast Asian Malays, Javanese and Arabs are reduced to the Malay language and Indian languages are melted down to the Tamil language. Through compulsory education in ascribed mother tongues (Mandarin, Malay, Tamil); media segregation along racial lines; and, social organisation through religious centres, the government effectively engineered a culture for Singapore.

While, on the one hand, multicultural policies serve to fuse differences into a common core serving a political ideology, this approach negates diversity in identities and the social and economic status of the various strata of these communities. According to sociologists, this has led to low communal self- worth, manifested in high rates of school dropouts, teenage pregnancies and drug and substance use. This has resulted in a contrarian approach to governmental management of multiculturalism through the setting up of four ethnic self-help community groups. Yayasan MENDAKI, which stands for the Council for the Development of Singapore Muslim Community, was the first such group to be started in 1982 to serve the Malay community. The Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC) to serve the Chinese community and the Singapore Indian Development Association (SINDA) and the Eurasian Association soon followed suit a decade later. All the groups primarily focus on educational assistance (funding and training) and counselling (professional, personal and emotional) for less privileged families. The Eurasian Association has an added focus on developing a

87 communitarian ethos amongst the Eurasian community who have been fading out of the Singapore cultural landscape through inter-marriage and migration. These groups are funded by Singaporeans through monthly deduction ranging from S$1-$8 per month determined by income brackets. Deductions are automatic unless one chooses to opt out. Political leadership represented on the boards of these agencies bear oversight of ensuring and deliberately nurturing them to reflect corporatist ethnic policies to maintain the status quo (Lian and Rajah, 2002: 240).

Chua persists that the establishment of these agencies to manage social problems within their specific communities is both unnecessary and costly, and has driven the divide further between the races with unequal distribution of assistance amongst the similarly needy with the ‘Indian’ race being least able to serve its constituency (Chua, 1998: 192; Rahim, 1994). According to Chua, the relegation of social and economic problems to ‘self- help’ groups leaves the government unencumbered with the administration of the citizen’s welfare. This brand of multiculturalism is reductionist at best and cultures and peoples are essentialised to be centrally managed through the panopticon of the media (Rahim, 1998: 29). In essentialising cultures, the government successfully, though not completely, manages and contains differences in race, traditions and histories.

In Singapore-style multiculturalism, equality amongst races is constitutionalised. In engineering essentialised races and formalising it within the constitution, the government is “able to see itself ideologically as an equal and disinterested protector of the rights of each group, within the boundaries of the ‘national’ interests” (Chua, 1998: 191). This licenses the government to manage racial unease. A case in point was evident in the 1990s. Singaporeans from minority communities claimed that Chinese- owned businesses (the majority of Singaporean businesses are Chinese-

88 owned) advertised and preferred to only employ ethnic Chinese for jobs that were not language specific. The Ministry of Labour clamped this. Chua stresses that "the government's racial neutrality formally suppresses the possibility of any Chinese chauvinistic attempt to transform their ‘racialised majority’ interests into ‘national’ interests” (Chua, 1998: 191). Chua is emphatic that the government’s multicultural policy does not allow for the Singapore government to be reduced to a Chinese government. Rather the government has been misunderstood in its promotion of Mandarin amongst the Chinese as an attempt to sinicise Singaporean society since the removal of ‘formal equality’ undermines the government’s instrument of social control. This stringent policing of the inter-racial boundaries has prevented racial conflicts since 1964 (Chua, 1998: 192). Furthermore, the English language has served as a cultural vessel to contain multiculturalism. Its integrative function lies in its neutrality from all other languages: that it was the language of international capitalism prompted the government to strategically work towards removing language-centred schools to English language schools (Tremewan, 1994).

As the development of a multicultural Singapore is not a result of nationalistic interpellation but rather a socio-political strategy, two problems arise: First, the cultural make-up of value systems such as Confucian- Chinese, Islamic-Malay, Hindu-Indian and Christian-Anglo Saxon remains emotional signifiers and do little to develop the unique national identity as scholars have demonstrated (Benjamin, 1976; Koh, 1980; Clammer, 1985; Siddique, 1989; Mutalib, 1992; Olds and Yeung, 2004). Rather these value systems suppress the celebration of diversity as the idealised concept of cultural roots to China, India, Indonesia help project the destinies of immigrant Singaporeans through distinction from each other and fantasy for the exotic past and in doing so, lead to an internalised marginalisation of the ‘self’ (Huntington, 1998). Second, the process in which the government

89 manages the overall policing of inter-racial relations, Chua (1998) asserts, has over time force individuals and groups to internalise and interpolate into the notion of racialised problems. For example, the Malays statistically being the second largest racial grouping with a high rate of drug addiction. Interpellation has forced this issue from being a general problem to being a specific Malay problem and the Malay community is mobilised to actively seek solutions (Chua, 1998: 192; The Straits Times, 6 Dec 1994; The Sunday Star, 15 Aug 1993).12 Chua concedes that the government does not acknowledge that drug addiction is not so much of a Malay community problem but rather a problem amongst lesser-educated and lower income individuals. The high representation of Malays could be due to their over- representation in the lesser-educated bracket of society. Economically, the Malays have been less successful than the majority Chinese. They are exhorted not to compare but appreciate their present circumstance to their past and that the enlistment of self-help strategies would be advantageous. Chua believes that this sort of internalisation of economic disadvantage was encouraged by the government to avoid potential conflicts if minority races compared themselves to the majority.

At a glance, this principle of maintaining difference within multiculturalism seems democratic in allowing a variety of cultural traditions to co-exist and coalesce with none dominating and becoming an ‘official culture’. Contiguous with this principle of celebrating diversity is the public’s participation in the production and preservation of culture through free expression and consultation in issues concerning life in society. As Koh (1989), Benjamin (1976), Chua and Kwok (2001) and others argue, the celebration of difference in Singapore is prescriptive. They see a danger in

12 The Malaysian newspaper, The Sunday Star on 15 August 1993 commented that about fifty per cent of drug addicts in Singapore were Malays.

90 such essentialised clustering of ethnic identities and practices and perpetuating the notion that Singaporean or ‘national’ culture can only be realised upon fulfilling certain definitional conditions. The danger of this definition is lived out as everyday practice of language, media, public holidays and cultural ghettoisation through public housing schemes (Benjamin, 1976; Chua, 1996; Koh, 1989; Purushotam, 2000; Goh, Gabrielpillai, et al., 2009; Vasu 2012). Norman Vasu (2012), in looking at multiculturalism in relation to defence and safety, observes that Singaporean bureaucrats “are very keen to point out that [multiculturalism] is a resounding success - though often with the qualification that the harmony enjoyed today can unravel very quickly if it is not continually nurtured" (735). This constant management of the fragility of the agglomeration of cultures is done in a corporatist manner and essentialised through communitarian events such as Racial Harmony Day held on 21st July of each year. This essentialising, Vasu argues, enables an elite group to manage racial and religious fractions in Singapore.

John Clammer (1985) reads culture in Singapore as an unstable structure constantly under influence or threat by changes of modernisation and Westernisation (162) and this ties in with my earlier comment on the use of vulnerability and crisis as metaphors in Singapore. The ordinary Singaporean is a chief target of this instability; hence a need to be cultured or essentialised (Vasu, 2012) through multicultural language policies and principles of Asian Values. Simon During (2005) locates multiculturalism as a consequence of globalisation serving as a tool to manage cultural differences and even manage racism (156) even though it does present itself with a particular set of problems notably its lack of tolerance for hybrid and syncretic potential leading to the encouragement of essentialisms. Essentialism can become serious breeding grounds for hatred and parochialism. Furthermore, multiculturalism, During identifies, tends to

91 exhibit tolerance rather than promote difference. Built around the discourse of global communitarianism for tolerance and love for one another, multiculturalism is a multi-million dollar industry, which During calls the ‘Benetton effect’.

Slavoj Zizek’s (1997) reading of multiculturalism as an ideology of global capitalism, which draws from a coloniser/colonised dialectic, illuminates Singapore’s use of multiculturalism as a tool of social management. He says, “the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the coloniser treats colonised people – as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’” (44). In doing so, the promoters of multiculturalism promulgate a form of racism: “a racism with a distance – it ‘respects’ the identity of the Other, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community” (44). The promoters take on a distanced approach to this framing by assuming a globally privileged position. Zizek emphasises that the multiculturalists ‘respect’ for the Other’s culture is “the very form of asserting one’s own superiority”.

The above theorists rightly locate the problems of multiculturalism in the global setting and they are critical of the definition of the multicultural polity in Singapore. Multiculturalism is a tool of active citizenry where the citizen is required to formally share his/her culture and belief systems to the national fabric of Singapore. However, the formal sharing is not participatory; that is, there is no formal exchange of culture. In its place, one can locate formal tolerance to a citizen's culture through institutionalised public holidays, media and social practice in schools. It is not my intention to embark further on a critique of Singaporean multicultural and multiracial policies has it as been adequately covered by scholars in Singapore and elsewhere. However, I emphasise that the culture in Singapore is about

92 preservation and management of ethnic and religious practices within an essentialised totality defined by the government. This naturally feeds into the idea of common Asian Values.

2.3.2 Asian Values

From the late 1980s to mid-1990s, Singapore was a furtive site for the discussion and debate over the concept of Asian Values. Championed by Lee Kuan Yew, the concept garnered tremendous interest and discursive output from scholars and politicians East and West of the globe primarily located around scholarship in political theory, political economy and cultural theory ((Kim, 1994; Lingle, 1994; Mahbubani, 1998; Chua, 1995, 1999; Emmerson, 1995; Robison, 1996; Rodan, 1996; Jayasuriya, 1998; Thompson, 2001, 2004; Dallymer, 2002; Langguth, 2003; Jenco, 2013). The discourse on Asian Values was designed around the booming Asian Tiger economies and the dramatic withdrawal of the last vestiges of the British and Portuguese colonial empires from Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau in 1999. The sea-change in Asia required that cultural traditions be viewed differently from the West and that Asia should be judged by its own cultural standards. Jayasuriya (1998) calls it an "ideological hybrid of reaction and modernity" (77). The use of the term emerged sporadically in the mid-1980s in Southeast Asia but gained momentum in the mid-1990s capturing the imagination of scholars and politicians seeking to usher in a new ‘Asian Renaissance' (Anwar, 1996) and crystallising the flourishing economic and cultural development in Asia.

As a term, Asian Values is highly problematic. On the one hand, it refers to an essentialist manifesto that seeks to “integrate Asian societies with weak internal cohesion” attempting to “create a pan-Asian identity as a

93 counterpart to the identity of the ‘West’” (Langguth, 2003:1) while on the other hand, it is a value system designed around Confucianist teachings, with Buddhist and Taoist legacies primarily aiming to unify an East Asian market (Dallymer, 2002). Singapore scholars propose that the discourse on Asian Values is a historical rather than cultural emergence promoted in Southeast Asia. It is faulty in that it reproduces the ideals of Western bourgeoisie culture of activism, rational innovativeness and self-discipline with a differentiating principle of collectivism. In this instance, it posits Confucianist values as being the moral equivalent to Max Weber’s Protestant spirit (Chua, 1999: 573). Wee (2002) colourfully articulates it as an “Orientalist conception of ‘Asia’ reversed and married to the modern” (141).

The ideology of Singapore-style Asian Values has its genesis in the principles of Confucianism. Confucian ethics, as a "code of personal conduct for modern Singapore" (Goh Keng Swee cited in Kuo, 1993: 7) was promoted throughout the early 1980s to preserve the notion of the family "through concepts of filial piety to guard the largely Chinese population, against the less desirable aspects of western culture" (Goh Chok Tong cited in Kuo, 1993: 6). As a secular form of study, Confucianism was incorporated to appeal to the Chinese sector of the population that was not inclined to religion (Kuo, 1992: 5). Largely promoted through public campaigns in the media, the deepest penetration into the social psyche was through the introduction of secular Confucian ethics as a component of Religious Knowledge studies. It was sitting alongside other components such as Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and World Religion. Detractors found the promotion of Confucian ethics in societies such as Singapore a politicisation of morality and a "conspiracy (of the ruling party, PAP) in political socialisation and ideological indoctrination to legitimise an authoritarian regime.” (Kuo, 1993: 1) Within a period of five to seven years,

94 a reversal of governmental policy saw the rapid phasing out of the Religious Knowledge module out of school curriculum by 1990.

One of the critical features of Asian Values is that it positions Western liberalism as the ‘other’ of Asian Values and conveniently essentialises the ‘West' as evil. Peterson (2001) opines that Western urban society is an easy target of criticism "given the astronomical crime rates compared to those of Asian cities, the decaying inner-city neighbourhoods, the alcohol- and drug- related problems, the out-of-wedlock births and the racial tensions" (21). He adds that Singaporean observers target social policies such as "state welfarism, liberalism and most-of-all faulty values that place too much emphasis on individual action and rights at the expense of the group" (21). In Singapore, the infamous ban on the public sale of chewing gum in 1992; the circumscription of fashion magazine Cosmopolitan; and, the caning of an American teenager, Michael Fay for vandalising cars in 1994 (Yao 2007), help locate the discourse of Asian Values and the prevention of ‘cultural rot’ (the evil West) within this essentialised framework (Emmerson, 1995).

The promotion of individualism or “hyper-subjectivity at the expense of community with others,” implies that Singaporeans are unwilling to make self-sacrifice for the social good (Chua, 1995: 26). This false belief by the government, Chua argues, runs contrary to the government practice in the 1970s and 1980s. He cites the then prime minister Lee’s lauding of Singaporeans as individual achievers who came as immigrants and developed a keen self-centredness, which motivated them to survive (Straits Times, 1 May 1981 cited in Chua 1995). In 1972, the then finance minister Goh Keng Swee lamented that extended families could thwart the zeal of the individual. Both examples reveal that individualism was a central engine of meritocracy to bring out the best in each person. Throughout the 1980s,

95 the belief in individualism was maligned primarily because of politicians’ interpretation of people’s behaviour as excessive. Chua cites two key examples: rampant job-hopping amongst Singaporeans during economic boom was read as being symptomatic of a lack of loyalty and a strain on productivity, and; second, young professionals keen on purchasing their own apartments in the public housing cooperative were seen to harbour a lack of filial piety playing a role in the premature break-up of the family as a unit (Chua, 1995: 118; Ho, 1989). Hence, the ills of capitalism manifesting in individuals were accrued, in a broad sweep to the ‘Westernisation of Singaporeans’ and a mammoth task of revitalisation of Asian Values got underway (Ho: 1989). Through public campaigns promoting family values, instituting policies to advantage three-tiered families in public housing, the teaching of mother tongues as second language and the introduction of moral education in schools, communitarianism was mobilised (Chua, 1995: 28, 119) in tandem with a disparaging campaign against the West (Langguth, 2003: 32). Chua reads the invention of Asian Values to be a discourse in socialism with an Asian pivot preventing people from drawing upon their own cultural resources to formulate their ‘social' (Chua, 1999: 589).

Gerd Langguth (2003), in an extended study of the campaign against the West, expresses concern that in pitting Asia and the West through this new doctrine, the champions, former prime ministers Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore) and Mahathir Mohamed (Malaysia), had chosen to focus on the social phenomena such as delinquency, drugs, gambling, and hedonism that were perceived to be negative while choosing to embrace Western-style capitalism (32). Ironically in 2005, in complete contrast to Lee Kuan Yew’s views, prime minister Lee HL advocated the importance of having not one but two casinos (West’s excess) to be built in Singapore to rejuvenate the economy (Straits Times, 20 April 2005). Critics from the West expound that

96 the values proposed in Asia were not exclusive but universal in their spirit of defining economic and communal enterprise and that there is much in common between the West and Asia. de Bary (1998) views with suspicion the attempt to formulate a consolidated presence in Asia: “Pan-Asian has mostly been adjunct to modern nationalism and instrumentally subservient to it, rather than constituting anything like an Asian people’s cultural bedrock.…such being the case, one naturally suspects that the expression Asian Values.…is meant to suit other ideological purposes”, for example, to resist Western domination of popular culture and capitalism (2).

Kim Dae Jung (1994) former South Korean president, finds Lee’s advocacy of Asian Values to be self-serving and that the “family centred societies of East Asia had long since begun moving towards a self-centred individualism as an inevitable result of industrialisation. Moral decline in Asia was not rooted in shortcomings of Western cultures but were the working of the industrial society as a system” (Kim, 1994: 73 cited in Langguth, 2003: 35). While political theorists Francis Fukuyama (1992) and Daniel Bell (1991) trenchantly argue that the close link between the industrial society and social change in relativising culture and tradition, Chua claims that "critics of the so-called Asian Values discourse are inclined to read the discourse as the privileging of essentially traditional Asian Values to justify authoritarianism” and in so doing, veil “corruption and nepotism” (1999: 588).

David Birch (1998) sees the Asianisation process as it manifests in Singapore and elsewhere in Southeast Asia “not so much a response to the nasty West but to the development of modernity, where modernity is considered as traditionally ‘owned' by the West" (186), a syllogism made throughout Asia that "modernisation means the West, and the West understood itself through the idea that the greater its material achievement,

97 the more modern it becomes - and the more modern it becomes, based on material achievements the more civilised it becomes” (Birch, 1998: 186-187 citing Michael Adas, 1989). Going by this paradigm many Asian societies fall short. Rather than be trapped within essentialised readings of cultures and values, it might be prudent to analyse localised/collective expressions of the social against the destructive function of capitalism; otherwise, the value of the social will remain in absentia (Chua, 1999).

Molly Elgin (2010) asserts that the “Asian Values thesis is grounded in the idea that there is a set of Asian Values that instils standards such as hard work and discipline, and that these social structures transfer to political structures” (137) but statistical research undertaken by Russell Dalton and Nhu-Ngoc Ong (2005) reveals that there is “no distinguishable difference between the East and West on deference towards authority” (Dalton and Ong cited in Elgin, 2010: 139). So Young Kim (2010) in his study of Asian Values through multi-level models and factor analysis concludes that East Asians "exhibit strong work-related values….[and] commitment to familial values and authoritarian orientations are actually lower". While his study reveals that "strong leadership and parental duty do form distinct sets of attitudes among South and Southeast Asian nations” but do not establish a clear value system amongst people (327-329).

Following increasing global scepticism around ideas of Asian Values (Sen, 1997; Chan, 1998; Thompson, 2001, Barr, 2002) and waning prosperity of the Asian tigers in the aftermath of the 1997-1998 financial crisis, the government downplayed the emphasis on Asian Values and embraced an idea around commonly shared values. In revisiting Asian Values and its wane, political scientist Leigh Jenco (2013) lays out the thesis that “Asian Values is really just part of an ideology of modernisation engineered by the developmental state” (252). Citing Thompson (2001), she brings to light the

98 Asian Values thesis as one that is motivated by economic and political interests rather than one of national identity, pre-eminence of a rising Asia (particular East Asia) and/or a counterpoint to Western ideals thereby weakening the “credibility of Asian Values as an authentic basis for political argument” (252) Moreover, she asserts that the Asian Values thesis “usually excludes direct mention of Hindu or Buddhist values” (253) even though ideas contained in them embody those generally found in Eastern cultures. This sets the stage for the evolution of Shared Values in multicultural Singapore.

2.3.3 Shared Values

Throughout the 1990s, Asian Values were celebrated as a philosophical underpinning of a new Asian renaissance through its promotion of regional solidarity and cultural diversity. The champions and agents of this discourse demonised Western cultural values while holding onto hard core Western capitalism. In realising the deeper political problems this dialectic posed and in light of the financial crisis in 1991, the government designed a new approach to cultural structuration by introducing a national ideology called Shared Values. The development of a Shared Values White Paper (1991) was led and developed by then minister for trade and industry, Lee Hsien Loong who set out to incorporate Chinese, Islamic, Indian cultural heritage and the attendant attitudes and values that had guaranteed the success of Singapore in the past (Chua, 1999: 575).

The Shared Values ideology was introduced in the mid-1990s and it aimed to unify a society that was increasingly sceptical of Confucian ethics and Asian Values. Singaporeans were asked to value “nation before community and society before self; family as the basic unit of society; regard and

99 community support for the individual; consensus instead contention; and racial and religious harmony” (White Paper, 1991). The government hoped to promote racial and religious tolerance to create harmony amongst the races through this policy.

Chua (1991), Kuo (1992), Clammer (1993) and Peterson (2001) argue that Shared Values poses peculiar problems for a multicultural Singapore where collectivism could legitimate authoritarianism since it requires minimal consensus and is prone to economic and political abuses privileging self- interest. Clammer notes that while the proposition is a response to sociological and cultural shifts in society (aging population, disenfranchised middle-class) and globalisation, it would be difficult to rally the public to support such values because, unlike similar ideologies in Indonesia (Pancasila) and Malaysia (Rukun Negara), Shared Values as an ideology is not driven by any call for nationalism or nationalistic interpellation. Rather, these values are universal and not peculiar to Singapore or for that matter, Asia and dangerously veer, yet again, towards essentialising Asia and the West in categorical terms. Other inherent problems include the legitimating of authoritarianism (soft or hard, whichever form it takes) by relinquishing responsibility to the government embodied in the characterisation of ‘nation before community and society before self’. The individual self is erased as an entity and relegated to a non-gratia status entrusting the government with powers to shape and manage everyday life in Singapore.

Shared Values emphasise collectivism (familial and communal bonding) and the identification of common values. For Singaporeans these values function to protect against the liberal West, which promulgates individualism and individual rights as principles of liberal democracy. Collectivism, built on Asian traditions, promote strong family ties, create inter-generational living environments and espouse filial piety. This

100 particularly targets the Chinese population in Singapore, which politicians felt was becoming too Westernised. In the mid-1990s, the government crystallised Shared Values through a series of incentives such as preferential treatment for public housing to extended inter-generational families. For Chua (1999) the concept of collectivism was flawed. As championed by Lee HL, collectivism refers to allegiance and duty to friends and family and is structurally integral to the success of Singaporean society. However, it is vulnerable to nepotism and cronyism, disguised as familial, which subsequently became a contributing cause for the Asian financial crisis.

Peterson (2001) finds the definition of the concept of family problematic in Shared Values. The ideology, he argues, privileges a clinical and biological family unit composite of children, parents and grandparents. Single parents, single people, gays and lesbians are ignored as this is seen as a social ill of Western society. Single persons represent individuals as defined by Western ideology. To curb the increase in single persons, the government designed public policies that were detrimental to singles. Before 2004, a single citizen aged thirty-five and above could only buy a three-room or smaller resale public housing flat from the Housing and Development Board (HDB). This was justified as a single person was not considered a family unit and that public housing was penned on the promotion of the concept of family and its multi-tiered networks. The single person was marginalised within the social polity.

In the 21st century, this anti-singles policy gets a dramatic overhaul in response to the realisation that the single person has a high net worth and solid purchasing power. Second, the value placed by multinational corporations in providing equal opportunities to all employable constituencies including single and non-traditional families who may be gays or lesbians requiring equal socio-economic support (Time, 7 July 2003)

101 forced the government to rethink its policy. Gavin Jones (2012) in his critical study of Singaporean population patterns, presents an aging population and an increasingly large number of singles or unmarried people forming a core demographic base (324). In September 2004, the government lifted restrictions and allowed singles to buy any resale HDB flat from the open market on their own. The new policy came about during the aftermath of the economic crisis when family units were downgrading to smaller units and property prices were plummeting at record speed and public housing loans were unpaid as unemployment rose. HDB notes that this is to “provide singles with more housing choices and to meet their aspirations of owning bigger homes” (www.hdb.gov.sg). While this could have been seen as government liberalising its views on public housing ownership; I argue that liberalisation is a tacit acknowledgement that families are downgrading to smaller units to deal with the high cost of maintaining a family in Singapore and that the single person long marginalised by the government is far more cash rich and recession-proof than the family unit.

Other concerns arise. The value of ‘consensus instead of contention' raises issues close to Singaporeans involved in politics and the arts. The issue at hand is to articulate the degree of contention tolerable by the government. The Singapore government, known for its history of dramatic authoritarianism, clearly was sensitive to the level of public participation in governmentality as seen in the public incarceration of novelist Catherine Lim in 1994 for her comment that the government had lost touch with the public and that the old authoritarian values were surfacing in the consultative governance of Goh (The Straits Times, 3 September 1994; Peterson, 2001: 28). Lim posits a theory of affect that penetrates the core of governmentality in Singapore. Referring to the PAP’s style of governance as efficient yet “deficient in human sensitivity and feeling” she stresses that the absence of this affective dimension alienated the people from their

102 leaders. She claims that disaffection "remains largely coffee-house and cocktail party rhetoric" proffering that Singaporeans prefer the “cover of anonymity” in fear of being victimised and pushing negative feelings underground which surfaces at pre-election rallies in support of rambunctious opposition members. As she accurately describes, the government efficiently and instantly responded with a salvo to Lim to enter politics. This heavy-handedness towards Lim did not go down well with the public.

The principles of Shared Values were mapped in tandem with a parallel cultural development: the need to globalise Singapore and Singaporeans as they were showing signs of disenchantment with the routine of life. An instrumentalist approach to social governance and unhealthy investment in material needs as a means of lived experience needed to be addressed. Lim’s incarceration brought to life her theory of affect. In recent years, the discussions around Shared Values have dissipated, and replaced by a strong emphasis on family values; an aging population; and, a work-ready population. The National Family Council set up in 2006 (later renamed Families for Life) professed to "establish resilient families" (msf.gov.sg). Not dissimilar to a military mobilisation, the government agency under the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) encourages marriage, adoption, family services (e.g. welfare and family violence) to encounter the low fertility rate; the rise in anti-migrant sentiments which limits the number of migrants becoming citizens and an increasing base of unmarried people (Jones, 2012). The establishment of such agencies reveals that an ideological approach around values are limited but a corporatist/economic method of engagement through incentives (baby bonus schemes) would be the way to go for the future of the city-state.

103 In the discussion above, I have shown that cultural identities are secondary phenomena to either economic or political developments; that is, they are a product of external developments. This is wrought with problems, as the continuous attempt at designing a national culture has been viewed, by critics, as a means of legitimating state authority.

2.4 Conclusion

This chapter has outlined the manner in which culture has been designed in Singapore through policies such as multiculturalism, Asian Values and Shared Values. It has shown that campaigns continue to function as effective instruments of governmentality. Rajaratnam’s idealisation of culture - to transform a migrant community into a gracious society - permeates into late 20th century Singapore and finds its instrumental realisation in prime minister Goh Chok Tong’s vision for a vibrant global city into the 21st century locked within the folds of economic policies (Strategic Economic Plan 1991, Economic Review Committee 2003).

The promotion of culture, as the next chapter reveals, is couched within the possibilities of obvious benefits of culture such as employment, reducing art and culture to their functional outcomes namely economic value and social organisation rather than their transformative potential for the human spirit.

104 Chapter Three

CULTURE AND POLICY IN A RENAISSANCE CITY

3.1 Introduction

It is culture that animates cities. Culture captures the soul and zeitgeist of people. As our population becomes more affluent and as our society matures, culture and the arts will become more important if we are to succeed in developing Singapore into a world-class home for Singaporeans (Renaissance City Report, 2000: 27).

Chapter Two highlighted the management of a migrant, industrial and urban workforce through multiculturalism, Asian Values, and Shared Values. Singapore as a capitalist city-state reveals a capacity to shape and guide cultural consumption in accordance to global capitalism. As a global city, Singapore is relevant insofar as it is connected to global capitalism. This is its existential condition. As shown in Chapter One, the government enlisted the arts and culture to become anchors of economic innovation and growth to sustain this connection. The arts and culture are of value because of their economic nexus, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between culture and economy. In this chapter, I will analyse the city-state’s cultural

105 policies, which draw from economic policies designed to enshrine Singapore’s competitive position as a global city in the midst of the globalisation of Asia. Cultural policies have been entwined with the decolonisation of Singapore (Hack, 2001) and its subsequent independence as shown in Chapter Two. Language, identity and nation-building were the main themes through the 1960s to the 1980s (Bereson, 2003) shaped by ideals of multiculturalism, multiethnicity, and multireligiousity. In the following section, I will examine, in particular, two cultural policies, The Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (1989) and The Renaissance City Report (2000) and foreground ways in which they map cultural practice in Singapore from 1990-2012. This study is critical as it not only informs the programming direction of the Singapore Arts Festival but also seeks to establish Singapore as a global city for the arts thereby making the city-state attractive to global investment, a major financial centre and a liveable city for both locals and expatriates.

Before I embark on this, it is prudent to frame the principles of cultural policy within international theoretical and cultural practice so as to help contextualise the development of the cultural policies I analyse in Singapore.

3.2 Understanding Cultural Policy

Cultural policy, as a mode of inquiry, crosses two axes: the bureaucratic and the creative (Bakhshi and Cunningham, 2016). The bureaucratic axis (public or private agencies) maps the way people’s lives are grounded be it in language, religion, or social practice through educational institutions and

106 cultural industries13 thereby nurturing a sense of belonging (Lewis and Miller, 2003: 2) to a value, community or a nation. The creative axis (creative practice and discourse) engages in principles of developing and preserving new and existing ideas and practices of culture to develop social and personal identities, and to also resist cultural globalisation, that is the transmission or diffusion of cultures, media and the arts by large and wealthy economies (Crane, 2002). As such, cultural policy is often considered within the purview of arts and culture. Paul DiMaggio (1987) suggests that cultural policy should be considered across different fields including both government and private policy in the arts, communications policy, education and areas of cultural production and reception. This is because cultural policy affects decisions about the value of cultural goods and how best to distribute or allocate them.

A scan of cultural policies from different countries available on Internet databanks (e.g. culturelink.org; culturalpolicy.org), reveals that policies tend to be structured within broad frameworks such as the need to preserve and safeguard history and artefacts; grants dissemination for the production of the arts; audience outreach; arts research; education and training for artists and arts administrators; education and job creation, facilities development; and law and regulations (copyright, licensing, censorship). These policies are specific to a country and function as political gatekeepers of content entering and leaving the community even though this has been significantly diminished by revolutions in satellite and Internet communications and international trade de-regulation and privatisation between countries (Crane, 2002: 12). According to Crane (2002), despite the changing dynamics of

13 I draw the definition of cultural industries from the Frankfurt School to be activities, which are concerned with symbolic goods whose primary economic value is derived from their cultural value (Adorno, 1991). I will expand on the definition later in the chapter.

107 global communication, cultural policies are critical to preserving, protecting and enhancing cultural resources.

The globalised world has ushered in capitalism, represented through popular goods and services to every corner of the world. National and local cultures in growing and emerging economies are facing the flood of global popular culture - from McDonalds Restaurants, BBC World Service, to Hollywood, IKEA and Adidas - which are cultural achievements of their respective countries. Traditional and classical forms are faced with diminishing social value (falling audienceship) while still maintaining high symbolic value to a nation and its people. The urgency to protect cultural heritage and cultural memory drive many cultural policies, and this has led to a practice of resistance to global culture (Crane, 2002: 14) through protectionism (import quotas, content quotas and censorship). Lindsay (2002) shows how governments in Southeast Asia are working with various artist collectives to fund and support minority and traditional dance forms that would, otherwise, be ill-served by contemporary demands for mass entertainment. While the above examples suggest that there is a purposiveness to these resistive strategies in recent times, the world has seen a rise in nationalism, protectionism and a lower threshold for cultural diversity. Countries have started to revitalise their traditions. For example, in 2015 India launched a campaign to reclaim yoga as its cultural heritage and wrest it away from crude global commercialism. Yoga - which is being taught in Indian schools, corporate organisations, civil service, and, community and religious centres - has become a tool of cultural policy that espouses right-wing Hindu values (Pratap, 2015: 60). While protectionism has its limitation as trade agreements between countries often bargain for concessionary terms for the flow of cultural capital, it is nevertheless an important facet of maintaining global visibility.

108 Cultural policies primarily deal with three types of (re) generation: the economic, the city, and the individual. In most cities, cultural policies are aimed at fostering new economic development or, in older societies, regeneration (Bianchini, 1993: 200). In promoting this, cultural policies are designed with incentive schemes and tax benefits for the import and export of culture. In reading the cultural economy of France, Scott (2000) purports that the government penetrates every aspect of culture through business organisations, syndicates and federations to enable the realisation of economic and cultural goals (576). This, he argues, is not conceived as a top-down practice but rather a consequence of rising economic competition from foreign countries (570). America’s Cultural Capital (2001) delineates economic well-being as a critical facet of US cultural policy in light of globalisation and the rise of the knowledge-based economy. Cultural contribution to the US economy is substantive with copyright industries (film, video, music, publishing, and software) generating nearly $450 billion in annual revenues or approximately five per cent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product. These industries employ about 7.6 million Americans and contribute about $79 billion in global sales (America’s Cultural Capital, 2001:2). Australia's first-ever cultural policy document, Creative Nation (1994), frames the nation’s cultural well-being with the economic. It asserts, “this cultural policy is also an economic policy. Culture creates wealth. Broadly defined, our cultural industries generate AUS$13 billion dollars a year. Culture employs. Around 336,000 Australians are employed in culture-related industries….the level of our creativity substantially determines our ability to adapt to new economic imperatives” (Creative Nation, 1994). By 2013, the creative industries grew by a steady 2.8 per cent year on year from 2006-2011 with an employment base of 531,000 people representing 5.3 per cent of the national workforce (Creative Industries and Innovation Report, 2013). In the United Kingdom, the Creative Industries Mapping Document (1998, 2001) revealed that close to

109 1.4 million people were generating £60 billion in 1988 in the creative industries (Caust, 2003: 54). Fast forwarding to 2016, according to United Kingdom’s Creative Industries Economic Statistics, the creative industries contributed £84.1 billion or approximately 5.2 per cent to the economy in 2014. The report noted the creative industries as a fast growing sector and a key contributor to the economy with six per cent year on year increase from 1997 to 2014 (GOV.UK). I will return to discuss the creative industries in Chapter Three.

One of the fundamental values of arts and culture is the ability to produce what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977) calls symbolic goods. That is outputs that serve, at least in part, "the purposes of personal edification, entertainment, adornment and decoration, self-affirmation and so on" (Scott, 2000: 568). With the lure of the potential for the growth in economic sector the symbolic value of arts, culture and creativity gets displaced by its economic value.

Cultural policies play a major role in creating cultural and artistic spaces that aid the urban regeneration of a city (Bianchini, 1993; Evans, 2001; Pratt 2002; Miles and Paddison, 2005). This seems a simple objective. However, the need to fund and provide cultural and artistic spaces for production of arts and culture is often stressed by the need to fund cultural centres (the construction of arts centres and preservation of monuments and museums) that support cultural tourism. Major events such as arts festivals (Edinburgh Fringe, Venice Biennale) mobilise the way in which the city is used and interpreted by the cultural tourist (one who after business seeks to enjoy the finer things in life). Major arts centres such as Sydney Opera House in Sydney in Australia, the Kennedy Centre in New York, the Louvre in Paris and the Esplanade -Theatres on the Bay in Singapore help orient a country to its visitors, promote their cultural wares and generate revenue. In this

110 regard, the arts and culture have revitalised many cities in Europe. The European City of Culture award was introduced in 1985 to provide cities opportunity to brand and compete so as to give them access to global visibility for tourism and trade. The literature on the city and its renaissance is abundant. Bianchini opines that these kinds of promotion push cultural production and genuine artistic endeavours to the margins of the community developing a centre-peripheral communitarianism (Bianchini, 1993: 201- 202). Cultural policies have to balance goals of tourism and cultural production. If a balance is not struck, traditional art forms will be diluted to appeal to tourists or the city ‘disneyfied' as a utopian theme park (Zukin, 1998; Crane, 2002).

In trying to actualise these facets of cultural policy, key policy instruments are enacted. First, funding. Public funding of the arts through grants and awards and private funding through corporate sponsorship and philanthropic practices are the most popular modes of fund disbursement. Often rigorous criteria are set before artists, and arts groups can access these resources. Second, job creation. Governments work to develop various sectors to increase the employability of artists and citizens in general. Third, the development and maintenance of cultural facilities (libraries, museums, theatres, galleries, artist studios) are built to provide public access to the arts and culture and artist to embark on cultural production. Fourth, provide services to the arts and artists to enable them to continue to make art by subsidising costs associated with production, marketing, education and training. Fifth, guidelines to manage the arts are vital tools of cultural policy. In this regard, censorship and regulatory guidelines, taxation policies, intellectual property and copyright protection, are key to the industry's establishment and function. In all these instances, governments often reserve their right to withhold support from artistic activities that do not align with national policies. This act is tantamount to censorship.

111

The symbolic value of the arts and culture is critical to the formation of the individual. As such, the development/empowerment of the individual as a cultural citizen is crucial to all forms of cultural policy discourse. On one level, this is seen in the protection accorded to artists and their intellectual property. Policies are designed and laws implemented to safeguard artist rights through international agreements. On another level, cultural policies deal with the development of the citizen, as to how they are to be governed and how to empower or develop them. Foucault (1979) sees this as a fundamental question in the social management of people. In this management, During (1999) notes that cultural policies may create docile citizens while Miller and Yudice (2002) see the formation of cultural citizenship and Bennett (1995) sees cultural policies contributing to the distinction of society by transforming its citizens into sophisticated and culturally-aware citizens.

Toby Miller and George Yudice, in their seminal book, Cultural Policy (2002) assert that cultural policies help "governments, trade unions, colleges, social movements, community groups, foundations and businesses aid, fund, control, promote, teach and evaluate creative persons" and in fact, "often decide and implement the very criteria that make possible the use of the word, ‘creative'" (1). Contexts and conditions propel the nature of cultural policies. The appropriate timing of their implementations, Miller and Yudice argue is “frequently made ‘on the run’ in response to unpredictable pressures” and is characterised by "performativity, rather than constativity” (2). Accepting this nature of production, cultural policies have traditionally resided within the purview of orthodox policy studies and political science. This has its roots in the theory of governmentality and political theory of Marx (McGuigan, 1996) and it is not surprising that agencies of political governance such as the United Nations, UNESCO and

112 academic and research think-tanks are custodians of cultural policy analysis. More importantly, these agencies tend to locate cultural policy within notions of “social production, with governments as primary loci of power, authorisation, and responsibility" (Miller and Yudice, 2002: 3). This implies that national cultural policies become the technological arm of hegemony reconciling different and contestatory identities towards an essentialist ideal of the nation (Miller and Yudice, 2002: 8). This gives birth to the idea of policing citizens through cultural policies. 14 McGuigan (2004) opines that in societies where this manifest, oppression is not far.

However, contemporary theorists (McGuigan, 1996; Bennett, 1998; Cunningham, 2003) provide cultural studies as another pier to engage with the analysis of cultural policy. Cultural studies allow the reading of cultural policy as “activity of social changes, with social movements as primary loci of power, authorisation, and responsibility", thus providing an opportunity to look at the transformative potential of cultural policy rather than its instrumentalist/functional potential (Miller and Yudice, 2002: 3). In this instance, theoretical and discursive questions peculiar to cultural studies (e.g. identity, authenticity, authorial genius, orientalism, postcolonialism and the state) become useful tools to understand society's transformation (Miller and Yudice, 2002: 33). In viewing cultural policy through this lens, the questions posed by Michel Foucault, in his classical essay, ‘Governmentality' (Foucault, original 1979; republished 1994) remains poignant: “How to govern oneself, how to be governed, how to govern others, by whom the people will accept being governed, how to become the best possible governor?” (1994: 202). While Foucault’s concerns were

14 Jim McGuigan (2002) shows that cultural policy has close etymological connection with policing culture; hence perpetuating a worldview that culture should be treated “as though it were a dangerous lawbreaker or, perhaps, a lost child” (24).

113 drawn from 16th century Europe where crises of lineage, moral authority and transcendence were imminent, his thesis reveals the need to manage and organise individuals within the community. At the root of Foucault's questions lie the way people within a community need to be managed, empowered and enabled. As I mentioned earlier, Simon During (1993) sees Foucault's theorisation of governmentality as a "means to producing conforming or ‘docile' citizens" (4). Lewis and Miller (2003), on the other hand, see an empowering potential in cultural policies through the development of cultural citizenship. As a response to growing consumerism and commodification of the individual, governments develop cultural lineage through an arms length engagement with education, custom, language and religion. They assert that this does not mean that the government "absents itself – rather, it plays the role of a police officer patrolling the precincts of property, deciding who owns what" (4) hence, setting the stage for a politics of resistance and struggle (Grossberg, 1992: 143).

However, there are two dangers. First, cultural policy with its deep roots in modern political theory is decidedly Eurocentric in its structure. While the bureaucratic language of policy studies may seem non-partisan, it is a tool of political and cultural hegemony effected through capitalism and the global economy (Appadurai, 2002). Cultural policies designed and implemented in various countries mirror that of other societies with long established practice as Miller and Yudice evidence through a comparative study of cultural policies in postcolonial societies from Europe, Latin America to Asia (2002, 107-145).

The second danger is with cultural studies. While the transformative potential of cultural policies is realisable through the lens of cultural studies, there is a risk of reducing any reading of cultural policy to merely a

114 criticism or resistance to governmentality, especially to issues relating to censorship and funding. By this, I mean that there is an inherent convenience to see cultural policy as a ‘top-down' (e.g. museums defining aesthetics and arts councils funding the arts) rather than a ‘bottom-up' (e.g. artist collectives, alternative media) initiative (Bennett, 1998). Cultural studies have a historical toolbox, which sees culture as discrete systems of signifying practices and discourses that deal with social communities and their lived and living experiences. While cultural policies negate these subjectivities and neutralise them into techniques of self-formation for individuals, these experiences are marked by "questions of pleasure, corporeality, fantasy, identification, affect, desire, critique, transgression" (During, 1993: 17). Cultural studies do overtly invest in notions of critique and resistance to all forms of governmentality. But the divide between culture and policy need not be present. Cultural theorist, Theodor Adorno in his now classic essay, ‘Culture and Administration' (1991) clearly asserts that while they can sit in opposing camps, as they always do, culture and its administration are "systematically entangled up with one another in historically specific patterns of interaction that there is no escape….culture cannot but be administered, but it cannot help but suffer as a consequence" (Bennett, 2001). Bennett finds it unfortunate that intellectuals and scholars, rather than seeing the two as a whole, seek to sit in opposing camps creating a polarity. Nicholas Garnham (1993) finds cultural studies gestural and seeks to invest in political economy as a methodology of analysis for cultural policy. In doing so, he seeks to shift the analysis of cultural policy to cultural production15 rather than public consumption or reception (493). Lawrence Grossberg (1998), on the other hand, finds this recommendation problematic as this has the potential to reinvent the classical divide between

15 In his book Culture: Key Ideas (1993), Chris Jenks provides a rigorous reading of the historical, critical and sociological approaches to cultural production.

115 capital and labour. Tom O'Regan (1992) contends that "cultural policy and criticism are different forms of life, but they often need each other, they use each other's discourse, borrowing them shamelessly and redisposing them" (418). While issues of class, oppression and persistence inform the design of policies, they, in turn, develop strategies of social and cultural management. While cultural studies theorists Morris (1992), O'Regan (1992), During (1993) and Bennett (1998), call for a nuanced and balanced approach to this debate, I would assert that the cultural studies discussion does not adequately address two key areas in cultural policy: The first being the role of global economics in the design of cultural policy and; second, the rise of cultural policy discourse in Asia. Both are primarily located within a growing field of study called cultural economics.

Cultural economics is the “application of economics to the production, distribution and consumption of all cultural goods and services” (Towse, 2003: 1). It readily covers the creative and performing arts, heritage and cultural industries. In A Handbook of Cultural Economics (2003), Ruth Towse states that cultural economics is concerned whether "the allocation of resources via the price mechanism can produce the socially desirable output of cultural goods and services" (2). She argues that this cannot be achieved because cultural goods are ‘experience goods' as such, they will be toyed by governments to either provide it directly to the public, subsidise it or control its production or distribution through regulation or for the matter, censorship. As the public appreciation of the cultural good is never fully formed until the experience, the public/consumer will not be able to assert his/her preferences adequately. Furthermore, in the balance between demand and supply, cultural policies tend to emphasise the supply side of cultural production providing goods for consumption. The building of cultural facilities or the presence of an arts festival is aimed precisely at providing the consuming public. The exception to this is arts education,

116 which seeks to shape and develop student/consumer tastes (Towse, 2003:3- 4). While there is attendant fear that the marketplace will proliferate ‘bad art’, there is adequate evidence of the market supporting quality works in festivals and biennales (Frey, 2003). Cultural economics brings cultural policy and the ‘finance of culture’ to a meeting point: To negotiate and argue for the presentation of ideas on moral, social and financial grounds.

The development of cultural policy has its roots in European political enterprise, and postcolonial societies have been a benefactor of this endeavour. However, development and analysis of cultural policies in Asia, in the instrumentalist form, as I have outlined above, are still in their infancy. The Asian region, particularly, China, India and Japan, have years of cultural co-operation between their ally countries. Cultural co-operation, however, has always been tied to strategic political or economic goals. Multilateral organisations such as Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) serve to build on bilateral relationships to create networks for artists and practitioners and dialogue between policymakers.16 Much of the discussion is documented as working papers and remains located in official archives, which are increasingly accessible through websites. Cultural co-operation through individual governments and their educational and cultural arms such as the British Council, Alliance Française, the Japan Foundation, and the Goethe Institut have significant presence in Asia to foster promotion of culture through the study of languages and cultural exchanges. Again, discussions are primarily located within economic policy and political discourse and in the growing field of Asian cultural studies and remain relatively uncharted. Having said

16 In 2002, ASEF organised a seminar on cultural development in Asia and Europe. Called ‘Development Strategies of Local Cultural Industries in Asia and Europe’ it documented policymakers’ discussion issues of cultural policy, intellectual property and economic growth (IEEM, 2003).

117 that, theorisation about globalisation has provided opportunities for theorists, human and cultural geographers, and policymakers to formally document and publish much of this literature and commence a critical scan of the situation. Scholarly publications such as Global Culture: Media, Arts Policy and Globalization (Crane, 2002); Creative Economies, Creative Nations: Asian-European Perspectives (Kong and O’Connor, 2009) and Cultural Policy in East Asia: Contemporary Trends and Practices (Lim, 2014) are such platforms to foreground and examine the methods and approaches to cultural policy in Asia.

There is growing literature on post-second world war Japan17 and its international cultural policy, which is driven by popular culture (Sony, Hello Kitty, Manga-anime, sushi, Nintendo, etc.) and its global consumption. Koichi Iwabuchi in his book, Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (2002), demonstrates a Japanese alternative to Western practice of globalisation and transnationalism through the dissemination of popular culture in East and Southeast Asia. Japan’s strategy was one of localising and repackaging Western pop culture for Asian consumption.18 For Singapore, Japan developed, financed and marketed Singaporean artists: Dick Lee’s musical, Nagraland (1992), a musical on Asia, which was produced and staged successfully in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan; Ong Keng Sen's Lear (1996), an intercultural theatrical production commissioned and presented by the Japanese to a tune of US$1 million; and Asia Bagus, a star-search

17 Kuniyuki Tomooka, et. al (2002) demonstrates the presence of Japanese cultural policies since the Meiji Era (1868 to 1911) to give “distinction to Japanese society by creating cultural symbols that contributed to national prestige” (49). 18 The Japanese also bought over numerous American institutions: Sony purchased Columbia Pictures, Matsushita purchased MC/Universal, and Mazda Motors purchased Ford Motors.

118 programme created by Fuji Television in 1992 for young talents in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea and Japan, catapulted Singaporean artist Najip Ali (host of the show) into a household name in East and Southeast Asia. These investments were aimed at developing an Asian identity through Japanese wealth, and these artists remain household names in Japan.

But the nature of cultural policies in Southeast Asia represents the changing socio-political context within which the arts and culture exist. Jennifer Lindsay (2002) in her analysis of cultural policies and its effect on traditional performing arts in Southeast Asia calls for a nuanced reading of the symbiotic relationship between cultural contexts and cultural policies. The rise of postcolonial nationalism in Southeast Asia in the middle of the 20th century prompted new governments to enlist the arts and culture as tools of national identity. Traditional arts were promoted and funded as governments took on the role of patron and employer (68). But as the countries matured through industrialisation its citizens gained international exposure and confidence through education. The traditional arts were promoted less if only to appear at events, launches and festivals as cultural reminders and signposts (e.g. lion dancers welcoming dignitaries and tourists in Singapore). According to her, scholars of arts in Southeast Asia, charge governments for effectively “altering and destroying traditional performing arts, through either heavy-handed intervention, misguided policies, or neglect” (64). Lindsay's reading of cultural policies locates them within the fold of education and the importance of building a new generation of citizens through cultural memory. However, she is quick to identify that the promotion of culture in Southeast Asia, negates the artist. Many performing artists freelance while holding onto other full-time employment balancing socio-economic mobility with the need to maintain tradition and heritage. In some countries such as Thailand, Indonesia and

119 Vietnam, artists who commit themselves to a life-time of artistic practice are reduced to ‘seasonal salaries' and honoraria. This has forced artists to align themselves with "government institutions, venues, government-supported celebrations, projects, festivals, and competitions. In doing so, they are forced to comply with government-determined standards" (69). Lindsay laments that the traditional arts in Southeast Asia are threatened. However, she is unable to identify strategies to address the threat. Rather she foretells that change is inevitable and that both the arts and government have to change (75). Within Southeast Asia, Singapore is an oddity. Lindsay notes that the "performing arts are treated in a traditional Singaporean manner, namely the same was as any other marketable commodity imported or assembled for sale" (68).

The above discussion on cultural policy is aimed at locating the critical framing of cultural policy in Singapore within an international context and how its design is a neocolonialist enterprise borrowing and benchmarking against the policy outcomes of countries such as the Australia, France, United Kingdom and the United States. While the design and publication of cultural policies were pronounced in the 1990s, it does not mean that there were no such significant policies before this period as Terence Chong (2003) contents. For example, T.N. Harper (1999) highlights the role of British cultural policy to help with the decolonisation of Singapore in the 1950s. Ruth Bereson (2003) maps the design and management of cultural policies in Singapore in her article "Renaissance or Regurgitation? Arts Policy in Singapore, 1957-2003" demonstrating that cultural policies in Singapore were contingent and contiguous with the needs and demands of the socio-political climate of the time. More importantly, the cultural policies continue to speak to the design of culture that Chapter Two outlines. In the next section, I have chosen the year 1989 as a turning point for arts development in Singapore with a release of a major policy report

120 that framed the arts within a cultural and creative ecosystem.

3.3 Buildings as Culture: The ACCA Report, 1989

1989 was a watershed year for the arts in Singapore, with the release of the Report by the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (ACCA Report). This cultural policy, outlined strategies that would make Singapore a ‘global city for the arts' by 2000. Its release marked a clear consciousness of the co- relationship between art, commerce and national identity (Koh, 1989; Chang, 2000; Kong, 2000; Kwok and Low 2003; Yue, 2006; Ooi, 2010; Chong 2016). Moreover, it revealed the government's use of the arts as a tool to flag its status as a developed country while simultaneously reinforcing the centrality of economic imperatives within artistic discourse. It was a first-ever policy to have positioned the arts as a major government focus in light of the change in political leadership. The political agenda was premised on the need to build a cultural soul for Singapore and pursuance of the arts as a cultural and economic asset (Chang, 2000).

The ACCA Report agilely drew its reference from a less known Economic Committee Report (1986). In 1984, Goh – then deputy prime minister - set the target of Singapore attaining the status of a developed country by 1999. This was benchmarked against Swiss society’s 1984 per capita GNP (Strategic Economic Plan, 1991: 40). This target formed the key engine for all major policies during the tenure of Goh where he identified economic dynamism, national identity, quality of life and the configuration of a global city to be central to the achieving his vision. This vision included the development of a cultivated society comprising “well-informed, refined, gracious and thoughtful” individuals where ideas, art, literature and music flourish (43). His plan was to ensure Singapore sets to “match the quality of

121 life of the best cities in the world if it is to retain its most talented people. By reaching for, and attaining, a high quality of life, Singapore can in turn attract talent.…to achieve economic growth” (43). This economic imperative planted the embryonic development of a culture industry.19 The industry’s function was to be two-fold: first, to keep Singapore internationally relevant as a site of corporate investment and second, to encourage Singaporeans to take greater ownership of their cultural and social life and to imagine a sense of community.

The ACCA Report, developed through rigorous public sector consultation, made recommendations that would make Singapore a global city for the arts through the creation of a cultural industry by 2000. It outlined three areas of development to ensure that Singapore was a culturally vibrant society by 1999. These included the need to cultivate a well-informed, creative, sensitive and gracious society; to promote excellence in multilingual, multicultural collective art forms that would make Singapore unique; and to make Singapore an international centre for world-class performing arts and exhibitions marketplace (5). These objectives were to be realised through a set of strategies focussing on first, audience development. Singaporeans were encouraged to develop an interest in arts and culture to improve their aesthetic sense and enhance their quality of life. Second, the policy of

19 First formulated by the Frankfurt School social scientists, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their book The Cultural Industry (1974), the term found potency in the 1980s United Kingdom. The concept served as a device to encompass cultural activities outside the public funding remit. These included mass and commercial cultural goods and objects (e.g. television, radio, film, music, books, advertisements, concerts, etc.) See Nicholas Garnham, ‘Public Policy and the Cultural Industries’ in Capitalism and Communication – Global Culture and the Economics of Information. London: Sage, 1990.

122 communitarian participation encouraged Singaporeans to partake in the cultural activities as amateurs, hobbyists or professionals. Singaporeans had access to these through provisions such as extra-curricular activities at the workplace and at community centres, factories, social clubs, trade unions, clan associations and religious institutions. The aim, in true socialist practice, was to infiltrate all layers of society to encourage participation. Third, the policy championed the professionalisation of the arts by building a strong pool of cultural workers (artists, arts administrators and arts entrepreneurs) to form an ecosystem. To achieve this swiftly, the ACCA Report suggested attracting foreign talent to help nurture professional groups. Fourth, the policy emphasised the need to improve the infrastructure of existing venues and build new facilities. This mainly focussed on performing arts theatres, museums and libraries. Fifth, the policy recommended an increase in the number of cultural activities to provide Singaporeans with the opportunity to view and experience performances, exhibitions and art in public places. This cultural consumption was further widened to incorporate the preservation of historical buildings with architectural and heritage value for all to enjoy. Finally, the Report sought to develop a repertoire of Singaporean works that reflected multicultural traditions and artistic endeavours (25-26).

The recommendation included appointing a cabinet minister to champion the arts through the formation of a Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA, later re-acronymised MICA or ministry of information, communication and the arts). The ministry was tasked to oversee the establishment of the National Arts Council (NAC). NAC's remit was to nurture the growth of the arts and artists, build a performing arts centre, spearhead the formation of professional arts companies and provide subsidised housing for arts groups. The ministry was also tasked to form the National Heritage Board (NHB) to oversee the development of Singaporean

123 heritage and museum collections and construct world-class museums in the civic district of Singapore (ACCA Report, 1989). The global city premise was to make Singapore an investment base and a leading arts and entertainment destination for foreign talents and visitors (Evans, 2001: 227) fulfilling the larger vision of becoming "one of Asia's leading Renaissance cities in the 21st century" (Sunday Times, 18 May 1997).

Goh's appointment of ideologue-politician brigadier-general George Yeo to spearhead arts development in Singapore was apt. Yeo, in his nine-year tenure at the ministry, was known for his impassioned speeches on the arts and hard-line positions on sensitive issues such as censorship. He worked with military precision to realise the policy document with the "hope to do for the arts what [the government] had done for banking, finance, manufacturing and commerce, and help create new ideas, opportunities and wealth" (George Yeo cited in Kwok and Low, 2002: 152). He adopted the dictum "to help inform, educate and entertain, as part of the national goal to make Singapore a hub city of the world and to build a society that is economically dynamic, socially cohesive and culturally vibrant" for the ministry thereby propelling its economic imperative to the forefront (Kwok and Low, 2002: 150). He further held a second portfolio in the foreign affairs ministry, which allowed for a greater synergy to realise local activities within the global scheme of things. Singapore was hallmarked by massive government investment in the arts, technology, educational reforms and relaxation of censorship: the purpose of developing these cultural institutions was to promote Singapore brand of ‘New Asia' overseas (Peterson, 2001; Yue, 2006). This was crystallised by a joint publication by the MICA and the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) entitled Singapore: The Global City for the Arts (1992).

124 The formation of the NAC in 1991 was critical to the success of the government's vision. With a mission to nurture the arts, the NAC was given autonomy to appoint appropriate persons to champion and develop the arts, fund artists and arts initiatives, create subsidised arts housing schemes through annual funding from the government (NAC Website). Yeo appointed Professor Tommy Koh - a career diplomat and long serving Singapore ambassador to the USA - as chairman of the NAC. Koh with his soft-spoken demeanour, diplomatic suaveness, and fine public relations skills, was able to balance the passion of artists, the demands of the market economy and expectations of the government. More importantly, the NAC was a central whip for the arts serving to demarcate, tame and frame the arts and artists as evidenced in the circumscription of performance art in 1993.

The ACCA Report focussed on developing the city's cultural hardware or arts infrastructure to support urban redevelopment (Kwok and Low, 2003). Performance spaces such as the Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay, new museums (namely the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore History Museum and Singapore Philatelic Museum) and highly technologised public libraries (increasing from fifteen in 1994 to seventy in 2003) in major shopping malls peppered the civic district. Educational institutions such as the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and Lasalle College of the Arts were given special funding to train and develop artists, and dilapidated warehouses and vacated old schools were spruced up and converted into subsidised housing for arts companies and societies. On a practical level, these facilities remain, to date, an important part of economic life in Singapore attracting visitors and keeping the socially and financial well-placed rooted to Singapore.

Adding to this, the STB spearheaded an initiative to create capital out of traditional ethnic centres such as Chinatown, Little India, Malay Village and

125 Orchard Road (Leong, 1997). Each was, and continues to be so today, brightly and colourfully lit during traditional Asian festivities such as Chinese Lunar New Year, Deepavali, Hari Raya Puasa and Christmas, respectively. This was in line with the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s (URA) lighting plan for the civic and cultural districts to transform and make vibrant the cityscape. Kwok and Low (2002) argue that this was “aimed to provide Singapore with a visible core that leads the unsuspecting tourist through a series of cultural commodities, ready for consumption – raising the question of whether a process of disneyfication is at work, a process with wide-ranging implications" (158). They lament that this presented a false image of Singapore, as the visual transformation of the city was antithetical to the authoritarian Singapore the world was familiar.

Singaporean scholars of human and urban geography, T.C. Chang, Lily Kong and Brenda Yeoh have been making significant inroads in critically evaluating the inter-relationship between cultural policies and urban planning. Their study continues to emphasise the pre-eminence of the economic in infrastructural development eloquently re-fashioned as destination marketing (Chang and Yeoh, 1999) and placemaking (Chang and Lee, 2003). Chang and Lim (2004), drawing from David Harvey’s geographical imaginations (1973), argue that the rapid infrastructural development proposes Singapore as “New Asia" primarily through government planning and private sector initiatives (2004: 170). The speed of development and promotion, in particular by the STB, leads to “geographies of (con)fusion” without allegiance to the larger vision of the cultural policies. This may “hinder rather than aid in identity construction” (170). In an economic city such as Singapore, the scholars’ quantitative research methods (e.g. demographic patterns, economic systems, space use, etc.) give prominence and a platform to issues surrounding aesthetics and the unfamiliar; taste and consumption; audience feedback and interest; and

126 public and private creative space. This provides a new and palatable language for the government to appreciate the design and management of culture through the nation’s geography, infrastructural development and its economics.20

A key outcome of the ACCA Report was the construction of the Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay (its pre-development name being the Singapore Arts Centre): A S$600 million performing arts complex emblematic of the government’s vision for a global arts city (Kwok and Low, 2002: 150). The Esplanade was also a social aspiration to “evoke a sense of belonging” amongst Singaporeans (Lee, 2004: 284). Opened in 2002, the honeycombed round-shaped buildings, haughtily called durians (named after a fierce looking, sharp and pointy tropical fruit with an aromatic constitution that does not suit many), comprises a proscenium-arch theatre (2000 seats), a concert hall (1600 seats), a recital studio (250 seats) and theatre studio (200 seats). At the core of the arts centre is a civic space designed around commerce incorporating food and beverage outlets, art shops, bars, pubs and convenience stores (Bereson, 2003: 11). Visitors to the Esplanade, if they are not attending performances, generally bypass the theatres (often oblivious to their presence) and arrive at the commercial core. The economic marginality of the arts cannot gather a greater visual presence than this.

20 This interest by scholars of geography and urban communities is widespread. Cho, Liu and Ho (2016) in a study of fifteen years of research literature around the cultural and creative industries – using the main paths methodology which involves tracking of citations and areas of research interests – prove that the field of geography is second to business and economics in the study of the cultural and creative industries across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Europe and even Asia. Asia remains under-contextualised compared the Western countries where the industry was mapped and shaped.

127 Built to represent the arrival of the arts in Singapore, the Esplanade's construction united Singaporeans and artists to comment and criticise government on the arts centre’s design, composition and funding. Funded by lottery and horse-racing money, the complex was to house two smaller theatres: a 750-seat medium theatre and a 400-seat adaptable theatre. In 1994, to the displeasure of the arts community, the construction of both the smaller venues was phased-out mid-point of the planning for reasons of high costs. It is interesting that cost was cited, since the project was funded by gambling money and not by taxpayers and secondly, in pragmatic Singapore it is a known fact that the cost of building projects in phases, just like anywhere else would cost more in the long-run. The arts community read this as a negation of local arts development in favour of internationally touring musicals (Art vs. Art, 1993) and the government was accused of spending valuable funds (lottery or otherwise) on hardware (infrastructure) and not on necessary software development (productions, artists and education).

The appointment of Benson Puah as chief executive of the Esplanade stressed the government's emphasis on business ensuring that the balance between art and economics is managed and that the former does not outweigh the latter. Puah came from the hospitality and tourism sector. He was tasked to ensure the financial viability of the centre, and he aimed to develop a customer-oriented culture for the arts centre that "offers five-star hospitality services to artists, partners and audiences" (Bereson, 2003: 23). Today, the Esplanade fronts most of STB’s print and media collaterals promoting or representing Singapore and has become a vibrant cultural icon and cultural destination for the 21st century similar to the STB-designed Merlion in the 1970s. As an icon, the Esplanade served to make Singapore a global city of the arts (Kwok and Low, 2001, Chang and Lee, 2003), thereby partaking in a "cultural renaissance" (Lee, 2004: 284). Wee (2003)

128 argues that the Esplanade, at best is a "statist attempt to create a commercial ‘Cult of the Beautiful' for the Singaporean community comprising mainly visitors and expatriate business executives, and few locals, desiring ‘high culture' while residing, often temporarily, in Singapore" (87). The Esplanade is a semiotic landmark of the cultural commodification of Singapore.

While buildings dedicated to the arts sprouted across the island, the arrival of major musicals in the early 1990s earmarked the venture into the world of arts business. New York’s Broadway musicals and London’s West-End plays, alongside Singaporean musicals, performed to packed Singaporean and regional audiences. Arts businesses such as auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's; and events planners and producers such as Cirque du Soleil, Really Useful Co. and Cameron Macintosh Co. convened and flourished in Singapore through lucrative tax incentives arranged by the Economic Development Board (EDB) as discussed in Chapter One. Arts activities (exhibitions and performances) rose from 5,303 in 1995 to 19,095 in 2004; and a 2001 consumer trend survey revealed that twenty-seven per cent of Singaporeans had attended an arts performance or exhibition compared to eleven per cent in 1996 (NAC Statistics: 2005). Corporate and government investments in cultural festivals tripled. Annual festivals such as the Singapore Arts Festival, WOMAD Festivals, Singapore Buskers Festival, Singapore Street Festival, Singapore Writers Festival to name a few, became calendar markers for Singaporeans and tourists alike. These festivals courted and presented the world’s best art and artists.

There was growing obsession within the government and its agencies, particularly the NAC and STB, to increase and measure cultural vibrancy. As evidenced in the annual statistical reports presented by the NAC on its website, facts and figures became key deciding factors for the allocation of

129 funds in the 1990s. Artists and arts groups were required to show evidence of audience numbers, sponsorship targets and marketing plans to receive public funding.

Amidst this obsession, arts and cultural investments of more than S$1 billion were creating a quiet cultural economy of their own – as journalist Jaime Ee calls it “Singapore Arts Inc” (Business Times, 12 Mar 1999). An STB survey revealed that the economic impact of the arts and entertainment industry contributed S$56 million with a spin-off effect of S$155 million regarding activities such as shopping, transport, food and accommodation (Dollars and Sensibility, 1999). Toward the end of the 1990s, the vision of a global city was morphing into Singapore as a ‘Renaissance City for the Arts’. For prime minister Goh, Time magazine’s accolade in a 1999 feature article “Singapore Loosens Up”, oft quoted by politicians and the media, was a realisatory moment of his achievements.

…can this be Singapore? ‘The nanny government’ that has banned the sale of chewing gum and racy magazines? The country that liked to regulate how often you flushed your toilet? Without a lot of fanfare, Asia’s small corner of conservatism is loosening up, transforming society in ways that until recently seemed impossible (Time, 19 July 1999: 19).

130 According to Kwok and Low (2002), the Singapore government was seeking to institutionalise ‘fun’ as a serious endeavour through cultural policies signalling a “new way of imagining the nation-state in the new era of globalisation” (150). Yao (2007), on the other hand, grimly notes that “modern states in varying degrees make delivery of ‘enjoyment’ one of their priorities” (118). This “national enjoyment” - composite of security of life and property, education and even events such as the annual National Day Parade - keeps in check and within bounds an allegiance to a “national cause” and that which is “good for the nation” (118-119).

Other minor cultural policies were produced as tactical plans to support this imagining. Policies such as Creative Singapore: A Renaissance Nation in the Knowledge Age (1998), Vision of an Intelligent Island: IT 2000 Report (1992), and Library 2000 (1994), clearly demarcated various sectors in society to address the swift waves of globalisation. On the one hand, while this proliferation of cultural policies helped shape a social network between the government and community; on the contrary, it helped realise the full potential of the cultural industry as a viable economic sector and to make Singapore a vibrant city (Kong, 2000; Chang, 2000).

The ACCA Report privileged infrastructural development over arts development (i.e. artists, arts communities and arts discourse). However, it did formalise the latter's existence thus giving arts development a leverage with the corporate world and the media. Bereson (2003) argues that this formalisation was clearly outlined through the strong views of the incumbent arts minister George Yeo, who clearly stated that “the major function of the arts was to serve what he termed a ‘Darwinian imperative', that is, the social strength of the ‘Singaporean species' or to put it, in other words, a commodification of the arts, which were supported if they clearly demonstrated a competitive edge in the market" (Bereson, 2003: 5).

131

This commodification of Singapore through the construction of cultural ‘meccas’ gave rise to an unusual politico-cultural phenomenon: the conflation of culture and the arts. By design or coincidence, the conflation is so strong that in everyday use and even in governmental discourse they are often substituted for one another despite the fact that the arts are only one manifestation of culture. This is not peculiar to Singapore. Let me elaborate.

The association between arts and culture locates itself within a backdrop of British Victorianism, which identifies culture with the process of artistic and intellectual cultivation (Williams, 1986). For Williams, culture is fundamentally of something, that is a community, as opposed to being discrete, free-standing entity in itself. However, Boogarts (1990) stresses that in contemporary cultural and economic development plans, culture and arts are mere “containers into which all manner of activities ranging from heritage, entertainment, leisure and tourism are thrown” (Boogarts cited in Lim, 1993: 589). Drawing from Williams’ definition of culture as a way of life, Barker (2003) opines that this invites the “pragmatic consequence of splitting off the concept [culture] from the arts”. He adds that this spilt helps “legitimate popular culture and open television, newspapers, dancing, football and other everyday artefacts and practices to critical and but sympathetic analysis” (60).

The definition of arts and culture is muddled in political parlance in both the government and cultural sectors in Singapore. In many an instance, arts refer to culture and vice versa. I argue that the conflation of culture and the arts serves to conveniently mask and soften the hard economic expectations of the arts. There is no serious compulsion to know about the arts or work with its ideological and philosophical apparatuses as they are seen to be a means to an economic end. It was George Yeo who established this

132 principle at the Cultural Medallion Awards ceremony that recognises the works of artists and their works. He says:

As our economy becomes more advanced, the arts become more important. We should see the arts not as luxury or mere consumption but as investment in people and the environment. We need a strong development of the arts to help make Singapore one of the major hub cities of the world. To begin with, we need the arts to help us attract talented individuals to come, work and live here, and maybe to settle here. Why do five-star hotels spend so much money on beautiful gardens, sculptures and art objects? It is to enable them to compete for five-star guests. We have to compete for talent in the same way.

We also need the arts to help us produce goods and services, which are competitive in the world market. We need an artistic culture. It is not enough to just to have expensive works of art. That will be vulgar. We also need taste. We only need money to buy objects. We need much more than money to have taste. We need training, sometimes of a lifetime, and a supportive social environment. Without the taste, the objects however, expensive, will be in

133 the wrong places, and will somehow look wrong. With taste, even objects of modest value can be made to look very attractive. With taste, we will be able to produce goods and services of far greater value (George Yeo, 25 March 1991).

This conflation can be seen in the naming of the lead ministry charged with transforming Singapore into a global city: Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA). The ministry was responsible for arts, heritage, library, media and public communications. Culture as a centralising social concept was not used in bannering the ministry’s purpose as it was in the 1970s as ministry of culture. This disappearance of ‘culture' in the 1990s is significant. Even before the establishment of MICA, the grand Ministry of Culture was reduced to the cultural affairs division located in the ministry of community development in the 1980s. There it was, smaller but a free-standing division. Perhaps moving culture away from a developmental function of being a third-world (as in Rajaratnam's Ministry of Culture), the contemporised narrowing of culture into compartments of information, communication and the arts are expressly global, technological and instrumental. Renaming continued well into the 1990s: For example, the renaming of the Singapore Arts Centre (national, third-world) into the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (global, first-world). Similarly, the Empress Place Museum (colonial, third-world) was renamed the Asian Civilisations Museum (postcolonial, new Asia). It re-affirmed the political desire to move Singapore from a third-world to first-world nation and this characterised political discourse in the 1990s. In taking the MICA into a symbolic arena of globalisation, the government negated the local, the

134 everyday and humanity of culture evinced by the public criticism of the construction of the Esplanade as a centre for international touring groups and not the local arts scene (Art vs. Art, 1995). Second, culture was consigned to the field of political ideology, hence it was mapped through political discourses and articulated through all government departments particularly the ministry for trade and industry (which had oversight of tourism and the cultural economy) as demonstrated in the 2003 Economic Review Committee's Report. MICA's formation, was not to drive the development of culture, but enable the arts to be a technology of governmentality in creating a vibrant city. By virtue of this role, the arts became symbolically central in the shaping of culture.

This period marked a new relationship and dynamic between culture and economy. Balancing human creativity and the productive base of capitalism the problem for Singapore was one of language. The imposition of words such as economic spin-offs, multiplier effects, business viability and arts for business created an alienating effect between artists and government. At a landmark conference, Art vs. Art: Conflict and Convergence (1993) held at The Substation, artists, academics, art theorists and historians criticised the government for its lack of interest in the arts and for not adequately addressing core issues of artistic deregulation, freedom and funding. The arts community was of the view that the government’s emphasis on essentialist cultural policy (ACCA Report) and practice (construction of infrastructure) ignored engagement with people and the arts that serves them. The conference was a critical success in forging a dialogue with the government and in the process functioned as a site of counter-discourse for its interrogation of governmentality. It was arguably the first and foremost platform for both civil servants and cultural workers to discuss, elaborate and satiate their inquiry on the value of the arts in Singaporean society. A central consideration of the conference was that the culture of representation

135 in Singapore was not located within individual subjectivity but rather in the politicised collective.

The strategies of the ACCA Report yielded tangible benefits. The city saw firm development of institutions (NAC, NHB) and infrastructures (museums and theatre venues). The arts were introduced into the educational system as an essential feature to deepen student enthusiasm and appreciation for the arts. In 1993, the Arts Education Programme (AEP) was launched by the NAC reaching out to some 200,000 students or forty-four per cent of the student population in 1998. More than fifty-six arts organisations were giving subsidised housing and over S$3 million of grants and awards were given to the arts (RC Report, 2000). Audienceship was on the rise and artists were making a foray onto the international stage. The ACCA Report also provided a platform for the production and circulation of countercultural discourse with a quiet endorsement of non-traditional and non- conventional art forms such as experimental art. Since colonial times, the government has had very low tolerance for differing ideas and censorship was a means to regulate art and artists. A censorship review was conducted in 1992 and 2002 (Censorship Committee Report, 1992; 2002). Asserting Singapore was a conservative society, the policies introduced a rating system for films, which was modified for the arts. While the distinction between the arbitrariness of censorship and the legality of regulation was evaded in the reports, the government held on to the view that the core principles of multiculturalism - race, religion and politics - were areas not allowed for greater liberalisation. The contentious debate around censorship did not stop the government from pursuing its goal to build on the success of the ACCA Report and work towards making Singapore a renaissance city.

136 3.4 The Renaissance Nation: The Renaissance City Report, 2000

What we are witnessing is an economic and cultural renaissance of a scale never before experience in human history. Like the renaissance in Europe a few centuries ago, this East Asian renaissance will change the way man looks at himself, at human society and at the arts. The rise of cultural life in Singapore is part of an oceanic tidal flow that will wash onto every shore in the Pacific (Yeo 1992 cited in Bereson: 6).

An oblique repositioning of the cultural policy of building a global city came about in 1999 at the tail end of the economic mayhem that plagued Asia. The economic plans of the 1980s assumed that the vision of charting Singapore into a global city with Swiss living standards would go unchallenged by conditions that may arise out of a range of natural and human calamities including economic recession. Calamities did surface. This coupled with public criticism of the government's allocation of funds on infrastructure at public platforms such as the Art vs. Art conferences, revealed a growing dissatisfaction with government’s inertia to the needs of arts and artist development. Building on the need to connect with disenfranchised Singaporeans, at a communal level, and the need to emphatically flag Singapore as a centre for a new renaissance to global investors (Wee, 2003) in the wake of the Asian economic meltdown, the

137 government developed and issued the Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (2000) (hereafter RC Report) with the sole “intention to chart Singapore cultural development into the 21st century” (Lee T, 2004: 289).

The use of the term ‘renaissance’ to frame Singapore's aspiration for cultural and economic development is not exclusive to the 21st century. Rather the first instance of its use can be traced to the last years of colonial rule (the 1940s to 1960s) at a time when the British who deemed Malaya (which Singapore was part of) a ‘cultural desert' sought to create a ‘cultural renaissance' through British patronage of arts and culture. T. N. Harper in his 1999 The End of Empire and Making of Malayan Culture shows that the investment of the British in culture was an explicit promotion of citizenship, a civilising mission of late colonialism to enrich Southeast Asia with a colonial legacy and provide ideological resistance to rising communism in Asia. From the establishment of a national museum and an arts council to research and publish the history and geography of the region, to blatant promotion of tourism by the Singapore Public Relations Office, “Europeans took the lead in condemning the cultural starvation they felt in insular expatriate communities and the materialism of cities such as Singapore (Harper, 1999: 276). They went further. The formulation of a particular type of colloquial English was promoted through theatre and film while renowned academic I.A Richard and civil servant Victor Purcell worked to entrench the English language as the first language of the postcolonial elite (276). However, this colonial cultural policy was halted by "an upsurge of explorations in ethnic and religious identity that emanated from networks within vibrant popular cultures in the towns" (275). It was a period of cultural vibrancy with urban and artistic cultures sprouting around movie theatres built by the Shaw Brothers (Malay Film Production Ltd, 1947) and businessman Loke Wan Tho (Cathay-Keris Productions, 1952), and

138 amusement parks such as The Great World and The Gay World, which were family and communitarian leisure centres (283). These cultural developments balanced artistic and entertainment endeavours with common aspirations for a social identity. Furthermore, the British supported these developments, as they were part of the process of decolonisation.

In the 21st century Singapore, the concept of a cultural renaissance city is driven by two trajectories. First, as a remnant of the Asian Tiger economies of the 1990s, pundits predicted the upward rise of these economies would naturally lead to a re-visioning of culture. This was fervently developed and championed by arts minister George Yeo in Singapore and deposed deputy prime minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim in the latter’s 1998 critical collection of writings and speeches titled Asian Renaissance. Yao Souchou (2000) argues, “the cultural resurgence in Southeast Asia is primarily a state project that celebrates the moral and utilitarian qualities of the ‘Asian tradition’ of which the contemporary states and their peoples are the proud inheritors” (18). Its rise, he asserts, cannot purely be accrued to state dominations alone but needs to take into account the “active participation and tacit complicity of political subjects” (18). Furthermore, the government saw the arts and culture as a viable economic sector as seen in first world cities such as Venice, London, New York, Paris and Milan, which had thriving economic and cultural sectors known as creative industries. The Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts (MICA) website tacitly acknowledges this:

Worldwide, the creative cluster (arts and culture, design and media) has been observed to be among the fastest growing sectors of

139 developed economies such as the UK and the US. Creative industries not only contribute towards the economy directly, they also have a powerful, indirect impact on the rest of the economy -- by adding style, aesthetics and freshness to differentiate our products and services. To succeed and thrive, Singapore must tap on the creative cluster (arts and culture, design, media) and recognise them as one of the vanguards of economic growth (www.mica.gov.sg).

Second, just like the colonialists, the government invested in the arts and culture to mobilise and harness a citizenry that was increasingly disenfranchised with government rhetoric and inaction with rising unemployment. The citizenry was also desirous of greater social and civic space for socio-political discourse and the arts and culture were adequate distractions. I will return to a considered discussion of the creative industries in the later half of this paper.

The RC Report had twin aims. First, it strived to establish Singapore as a global arts city that would be ideal to live in, to work and play for both Singaporeans and expatriates. It would be conducive for a creative and knowledge-based economy. Second, provide cultural ballast to Singaporeans to strengthen their sense of national identity and more importantly, provide a sense of belonging. In order to fulfil these aims, the government pledged S$50 million over a period of five years for the ‘software' development of the arts, to transmogrify the harsh physical

140 infrastructures into incubators for the arts (Chang and Lee, 2003: 133). Through this investment, the government hoped to "strengthen the Singapore Heartbeat through the creation and sharing of Singapore stories, be it in film, theatre, dance, music, literature or the visual arts" (RC Report, 4). Terence Lee (2004), in his critique of this policy, purports that this investment is a "tacit admission of Singapore's ‘cultural lack' marked by Singaporeans' inability to understand or appreciate the fullness of the arts, as well as an attempt to further shore up the economic potential of the arts" (289-290).

The RC Report admitted that Singapore while having done economically well, fell short in cultural development and cultural indicators (talent pool, facilities, activities, audiences and arts funding). To spur this, the Report recommended Singapore benchmark itself to Hong Kong, Glasgow and Melbourne in the short and medium term (five to ten years) and the long term against London and New York (RC Report, 4). This benchmarking was necessary to support government’s avowed aspiration to propel Singapore into the league of first-world nations and be competitive in the global economy. In this regard, six key strategies were proposed:

[a] Develop a Strong Arts and Cultural Base through arts education which had been long marginalised as an extra-curricular activity. The proposal was a systematic inclusion of arts education as a critical component of primary, secondary and college curriculum; setting up of tertiary programmes specialising in Singapore studies (people, society, heritage and culture); and allocating S$500,000 to the NAC to support research and documentation projects in culture.

141 [b] Develop Flagship and Major Arts Companies to build a Singapore repertory. The NAC was allocated S$5 million per annum over five years to identify and develop professional arts companies through two-year cycle funding schemes instead of annual funding. Additional funding was set aside to develop a body of technical and arts managers.

[c] Recognise and Groom Talent through scholarships; funding for promising projects by young talents; greater recognition for artists; and develop major youth events and festivals to groom young practitioners.

[d] Provide Good Infrastructure and Facilities to enable artists and groups and to create and work in cultural belts; for excellent film- making and post-production work and upgrade and improve existing cultural facilities.

[e] Go International to showcase Singaporean talents and contemporary Singaporean repertoire overseas; to strengthen cultural relations with other countries and facilitate international co- productions and collaborations.

[f] Develop an Arts and Cultural ‘Renaissance’ Economy through the creation of high-profile cultural activities; cultural tourism for international audiences and art investors; support for corporate sponsorship of the arts and the promotion of Singapore as a mega- arts events centre.

142 While these strategies espouse cultural development and communitarian participation, central to the policy's intent is the economic impact of the arts on society or what Lily Kong (2000) calls the ‘hegemony of the economic'. The RC Report concludes "good facilities and amenities help attract talented people and create a congenial environment for investors and businesses" (RC Report, 12). The RC Report does not shy away but lays the ground for economic determinism by citing the success of cities such as New York and London in creating wealth through the arts.

The allocation of S$50 million to arts groups and companies to develop artistic excellence and professionalism saw increased funding to amateur arts groups such as TheatreWorks, The Necessary Stage, Singapore Dance Theatre, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and Singapore Chinese Orchestra and encouraged them to plunge into becoming professional businesses. This professionalisation was aimed at producing an exportable local culture. Substantial investment in international visual arts biennales and performing arts festivals were the order of the day. In 2004 alone, Singapore was represented in four major biennales, placing a Singaporean art on the international map. The international strategy veered away from traditional and multicultural expressions of art to more cutting-edge and contemporary expressions that showcased Singaporean artists being on par with the international art scene (Newsweek, 25 Oct 2004).

The media became a new platform to present new content and communicate issues in the arts. Government-funded print, radio, television media dedicated to the arts (Passion 99.5FM, Symphony 92.4FM; Arts Central, The Arts Magazine, The Arts, Commentary, FOCAS) and umpteen Internet websites sprouted and flourished. However, government support for these content providers was half-hearted leading to all but one to survive today. Three reasons surface. First, the government would have to be seen to be

143 endorsing, hence, accountable for the content (controversial or otherwise) presented to the public. While the government had a history of shaping public opinion, it became a victim of conservative public views. Second, the government held on to certain social precepts such as race, religion and politics sacrosanct and outside the purview of discussion by the people. In this regard, censorship became vague and ever-changing. Singapore-style censorship was delivered through a notional principle drawn from golf: out- of-bound markers or OB Markers. That is, the government does not dictate, but keeps it ambiguous enough to delimit the lines of what would be allowable in Singapore (Koh, 1980; Straits Times, 19 May 1998). Through a show of reticence towards the arts media, the government managed its expectations. For example, in 2003 FOCAS: Forum of Culture, Arts and Society, a publication committed to critical and cultural criticism, published an article critical of the 2002 Censorship Report. The NAC, who funded the printing of previous issues, withdrew funding citing a lack of funds (FOCAS, 2004). This delayed the journal's publication which was subsequently printed by funds raised by the arts community (FOCAS, 2004). Third, arts media was high maintenance and a financial drain. Weak support from commercial advertisers, who did not find the arts having a significant market share, led to the closure of The Arts Magazine, in 2002. The Arts Magazine was the only English language magazine dedicated to the arts in Southeast Asia. Around the same time, the NAC’s radio station Passion 99.5FM ceased in 2003. The government did not see the need to subsidise these media on par with arts groups as these media operated within the frameworks of their respective media industries and not within the frameworks of the arts industry. However, I contend that they were not adequately supported to compete effectively even in their respective industrial sector reinforcing the government’s reluctance to support these in the first place.

144 In the 1990s, a creative services department was set up under the Economic Development Board (EDB) (this was later moved to the tourism board) to explore global art businesses and to court them to establish themselves in Singapore. The key intent was to seed the development of an arts market by parachuting global arts business to build local capacity but more importantly, to proposition Singapore as a global city for the arts. Drawing from Kellner (1990), I would argue that Singapore as a political economy draws attention to the fact that the production and distribution of culture operate within a particular economic system, constituted by relations between the government and economy and governed by the laws of the market. The imperatives of the system require some regulation of culture by the government. The question of how many activities should be governed by the imperatives of the market, or economics alone, and how much government regulation or intervention is desirable to ensure broad and diverse reach to the multicultural communities, is key to cultural management in Singapore.

The RC Report, being a policy document, in an unprecedented show of humility, accepted the reality that most commentators of Singapore "cannot resist taking a few pot-shots at the alleged cultural sterility" (RC Report, 33), and this had become a critical driver of the country's decade-long (1989 to 1999) obsession to create a ‘buzz' to enhance Singapore's image. The purpose of this design was to give that "extra dimension of attractiveness" (RC Report, 33). In a 1998 survey conducted among expatriates by MICA to determine the value of vibrancy to them in helping them decide to relocate, seventy-two per cent found it to be essential to determine relocation while eighty-three per cent felt that cultural vibrancy was necessary to assess their satisfaction to stay in Singapore. The RC Report admitted that vibrancy was not quantifiable but a portfolio of image- branding, word-of-mouth endorsements, and other informal social channels that help create vibrancy and position a city as such. Furthermore, the

145 ‘Renaissance Singaporean', cultured, self-confident, entrepreneurial with delicate aesthetic sensibility (RC Report, 38-39), would be located in a ‘Renaissance Singapore', a nexus for global flow and exchange of commerce, capital and aesthetics (RC Report, 40).

The vision to be a buzzing renaissance city invites social and spatial consequences that have an indubitable impact on the pace of life in Singapore. Kwok and Low (2002) observe that the imperative to be a modern nation-state and traditional Asian society leaves Singapore a cultural/geographic schizophrenic. The preservation of heritage sites, cosmetic gentrification of architectural facades and sparkling new skyscrapers led to a spectacularity, which the famous architect Rem Koolhaas calls a “Promethean enterprise” (1995: 1031).

Another central theme of the RC Report is the design of a Renaissance Singaporean. Drawing from renaissance Europe, the RC Report envisioned the Renaissance Singaporean to be one imbued with an adventurous spirit, creative mind and risk-taking ability; and, global in outlook yet rooted in Asia and their nation. This ideal person would have the capacity to make sacrifices for the greater good and, in doing so, become "a co-writer of the Singapore Story". This authorship, done with graciousness, underpinned a subtle sense of aesthetics (RC Report, 38-39). This distinctive mapping of the ‘self' seems to be a Singaporean answer to the Foucauldian dilemma of how to govern oneself or to be governed.

Terence Lee (2004) observes that this ideal Singaporean "who is empowered to tell the Singapore story is one who vindicates, both figuratively and literally, the political and economic meanings inherent in the Singaporean discourse of cultural policy" (290). That is, the Singaporean is indubitably caught in this web of political economy. The policy seeks to

146 expound adventure, creativity and active citizenry as key values for the Singaporean, and it also dictates the terms of these values. That is, they can be expressed only within a context of ‘greater good' and rooted in the values of multiculturalism and Asian Values. This context, as I have shown in the earlier sections, is the social glue for a government-designed Singaporean identity. Lee (2004) expresses cynicism that the RC Report had “unwittingly led cultural policy to fulfil…. notions of a ‘state culture’; it is, as mentioned, ‘stately’ as witnessed in the grand promise and purpose of the Esplanade along with newly refurbished museums and other cultural hardware” (290). I would posit that when viewed within the context of the development of culture in Singapore, the RC Report furthers the economic project of Singapore more so than the political or social as demonstrated earlier.

In concluding this section, I note that the RC Report yielded benefits just as the ACCA Report. Increased audienceship and international export of Singaporean productions provided artists and arts groups considerable global presence in major arts festivals and biennales. However, the hallmark of the decade-long process of cultural development was the monumental opening of the Esplanade performing arts complex in October 2002. The official opening was compellingly monumental: The Singapore Symphony Orchestra with its blend of Asian composers with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; the Singapore Dance Theatre’s world premiere of Indonesia’s choreographic darling, Boi Sakti’s multi-million dollar contemporary work, Reminiscing the Moon; and the Singapore Repertory Theatre’s new musical by songwriter-composer, Dick Lee’s Forbidden City: Portrait of An Empress starring Hong Kong-Taiwan pop-star, Kit Chan (Singapore-born artist). Singaporeans and visitors were awestruck by sophisticated fireworks corralling the Singapore skyline shouting out the arrival of Singapore into the new millennium. Wee (2003) opines this monumentality is suitable for

147 the cultural monument the government wanted the Esplanade to be. I join Wee in considering the prophecy of cultural critic Janadas Devan in 1993 at the Art vs. Art: Conflict and Convergence conference organised by the Substation. Devan says:

….[T]he arts centre is designed as a monument. By definition, monuments commemorate the dead. And there is a kind of reciprocal structure at work here when you stand before a monument, you not only commemorate the dead, you are struck dumb, silenced. Monuments are designed that way – they can't help it. They are designed to speak on your behalf; and in doing so, they require your symbolic death….and yet….you cannot do without an Arts Centre – or something that answers to that name: a centre. You cannot not want to be in the centre (Devan,1995: 54).

The chilling aptness of his metaphor cannot go unnoticed. The Esplanade’s main entrance is fronted tangentially to the Fort Canning Park, which was a burial site for sultans of ancient Singapore. The commemorative headstone of the soldiers of the Japanese wartime, which sits in the Esplanade Park, greets the front entrance of the Esplanade. The poignancy of the prophecy is apt as Singaporeans, and the world is silenced (as tourists freeze for a photo opportunity) in awe as the Esplanade marks the renaissance nation. Building

148 on this, the government invested in developing culture for export. In 2005, the NAC organised Singapore Season in London - a cultural festival celebrating all things Singaporean - with plans to introduce more such festivals in Beijing, New York and New Delhi in the future. The government admitted that while "Singapore has prospered through an investment-led economic strategy focused on traditional manufacturing and services industries….the driving force in the next phase of development will be investment in the creative industries where "imagination, creativity and knowledge to generate new ideas and create new value" will be paramount and the "new currency of success" (MICA Website). This spells out the future of arts and artists only within the ambit of the creative economy.

3.5 The Creative Economy

In the next decade, we need to think and act like revolutionaries. We have to innovate, not merely imitate.…We need a mindset change to succeed in the New Economy (Goh Chok Tong, National Day Rally Speech, 2000 cited in Kwok, 2001: 23).

United Nations agencies UNCTAD and UNDP’s 2008 Creative Economy Report, and UNESCO’s Framework for Cultural Statistics (2009) reveal that a creative economy provides a valuable interface between “creativity,

149 culture, economics and technology” facilitating “the ability to create and circulate intellectual capital” thereby, having the “potential to generate income, jobs and export earnings while at the same time promoting social inclusion, cultural diversity and human development” (UNCTAD, 2008 cited in Cunningham, 2009). Emerging nation-states view this positive overture of blending economic growth and social inclusion compelling as there is clear evidence in advanced economies such as France, United Kingdom and the United States (Flew, 2013). With its perpetual penchant for re-invention, the Singapore government, in response to global economic changes, invested in creativity, ingenuity and the imagination of Singaporeans as its next phase of development.

This investment in the people was to develop a connected society expressed through tangible links with their emotional and social capital. Just as the 1989 ACCA Report found its ignition in the 1985 Strategic Economic Plan, the 2000 RC Report found its engine in the 2003 Report of the Economic Review Committee (ERC). While the 1985 report marked the social, political, economic and cultural development that Singaporeans could anticipate when Goh Chok Tong’s assumed the premiership; this 2003 report marked the masterplan of Lee Hsien Loong who was succeeding Goh as prime minister in 2004. The shift from Goh's intention to build ‘heartware' through the soft side of the arts and culture was rapidly being replaced by the hard sciences of the economy. The ERC Report was published as a manifesto rather than a government policy paper and carried the title New Challenges, Fresh Goals: Towards a Dynamic Global City alongside the single image of the Esplanade on its cover page. The document, like its predecessors, was primarily centred on trade and economy but embedded within its folds were critical developments that would determine the shape of culture for 21st century Singapore.

150 The ERC Report sketched 21st century Singapore as a hub for creativity, innovation and entrepreneurialism. It foregrounded the importance of creativity and the need to build cultural capital as a way forward. In doing so, it aimed to build a "creative and innovative society, always eager to try out new ideas and change for the better, with a culture that respects achievements in the sciences and the arts" (ERC, 5). Second, it called for a review of Singaporeans’ dependence on the government and an increased focus on those in need: "An individual's success must depend on his efforts and abilities, rather than on hand-outs from the State" (ERC, 11). Often described as the paternalistic nanny-state (Devan and Heng, 1992) for its blatant interference into the social lives of Singaporeans, this political position, surprisingly located within an economic review, reinforces the contention, thus far, that the economy drives the cultural, social and political conditions of the city-state. Third, the report argued for a strong research culture amongst young Singaporeans to provide opportunities for innovation and experimentation.

The ERC Report noted that the growth of the creative industries was at fourteen per cent per annum in 2001, outstripping the previous overall economic growth of 10.5 per cent per annum from 1956-2000. The creative industries accounted for 3.2 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product and providing 3.8 per cent employment (MICA, 2003). With the potential to garner financial gain from the creative industries, MICA was tasked to build a creative economy under the watchful eye of MICA's permanent secretary, Dr Tan Chin Nam, who held previous portfolios in the EDB and STB. His starting point was the setting up of a Creative Industry Singapore, a statutory board under MICA and the development of three attendant policies to the ERC Report: The Renaissance City Report 2.0, Design Singapore and Media 21.

151 Before I embark further on this critical development, I would like to pause to consider the creative industries as it is globally mapped. This is to help elucidate the Singaporean approach to the creative industries, as scholarly work addressing this phenomenon within the context of Singapore is in its nascent stage (Lee, 2004; Yue, 2006). As this section unfolds, I will demonstrate, that the representative qualities of the creative industries are drawn from the policy practices of the United Kingdom, in line with Singapore's neocolonial lineage. This will inevitably pose problems, as cultural, social and economic realities are far from similar to enable the rise of the creative industries with the same energy as elsewhere. For example, concepts of intellectual property and censorship are interpreted and discharged differently in Asia from the West. This has been a bone of contention for decades but has been made acute by the explicit embrace of copyright and censorship as fundamental cornerstones of the creative industries by agencies in the UNESCO, United Kingdom and United States. As such, the rise of the creative industries, through globalisation, is part and parcel of a larger capitalist enterprise, which will succumb new economies to the monopolistic appetite of a controlling few.

3.5.1 Understanding the Creative Industries

The genesis of the use of the term creative industries can be traced to the United Kingdom's Department for Media, Culture and Sports' (DCMS) 1998 Creative Industries Mapping Document, which defined it as “those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property” (DCMS, 1998). According to the UNCTAD Creative Economy Report 2008, this kind of production and exploitation accounted for US$424.2 billion of business in

152 2005 as compared to US$227.5 billion in 1996 and giving creative services a growth of 8.8 per cent annually between 1996 and 2005. The United States remains the world’s leader in cultural imports valued at US$60 billion. A sampling of international export trade of printed matter and literature stood at US$26 billion, music at US$48 billion and visual arts at US$10 billion (1998 UNESCO figures). This enforces the creative industries as a legitimate economic concern warranting further study for market penetration and capitalisation.

The term creative industries is an inclusive term that encompasses creative practices located within what is traditionally called cultural industries and arts industries (Oakley and O’Connor, 2015).21 The definition of cultural industries in itself is contentious and has been studied by theorists in varying social and economic frameworks. I have taken cultural industries, from the critical lineage of the Frankfurt School, to be activities, which are concerned with “symbolic goods whose primary economic value is derived from their cultural value” (Adorno, 1991). This includes, what scholars collectively agree to as ‘classical’ cultural industries (broadcast media, film, publishing, recorded music, design, architecture, new media); the ‘arts industries’ (visual arts, crafts, theatre, music theatre, concerts and performance, literature, museums and galleries) and all those activities which have been eligible for public funding as ‘art’ (Myerscough, 1988; O’Connor, 1999; Evans, 2001; Healy, 2002; Flew, 2011; Oakley and O’Connor, 2015). This list is by no means closed. New activities (e.g. community arts, social activities such as, horticultural design and culinary

21The term creative industries, cultural industries and arts industries are used interchangeably in literature. For this thesis, I have used the term creative industries. Where authors or reports refer to the cultural industries, I have re-assigned them to be termed creative industries unless the reference is located within a quotation or it emphasises the traditional definition of the cultural and arts industries.

153 arts) that take on increasingly aesthetic and symbolic values and imbued with cultural meanings can be co-opted into the cultural industries.

UNESCO’s Department of Statistics’ (Report, 1982) attempt to frame the creative industries was largely formalistic becoming a definitive guide to emerging economies of the potential of the cultural and creative industries (Kong and O’ Connor, 2009). The study does three things: first, it formalises and brings into the sector both subsidised (performing arts, visual arts, literary arts, heritage, and, etc.) and economically viable creative practices (film, television, design, publications, and, etc.); second, it sanitises creative practices off their symbolic and aesthetic values in order to pare them down to quantifiable matrixes; and, third, it remains silent on the porous and interdisciplinary nature of the arts. Such a formulation lends itself to quantifiable and measurable outputs. The symbolic and intangible value of culture is subjected to degrees of success evidenced by income generation, employment, evaluation of intellectual property, and global trading.

Building on this, the DCMS definition casts a wider net to include all of the above and new fields such as advertising, architecture, art and antique business, crafts, design, designer fashion, interactive leisure software, publishing, software and computer services and television and radio. In proposing an all-inclusive definition, the creative industries are at once seen to be heterogeneous, complex and challenging. To manage this, the DCMS organises creative practices into broad deterministic clusters known as non- profit (subsidised) and profit (non-subsidised) activities for greater identification for purposes of funding, nurturing, development and investment potential. O’Connor (1999) sees the problem of defining the creative industries to be a conceptual one rather than one of categorisation. He argues that the structure, dynamic and interplay between creative

154 practices - their production, commonalities and distinctiveness - need to be addressed before any form of constructive intent to develop the creative industries. Each creative practice (genre/art form) located within the creative industries brings along with it a rich rubric of complex ideas and principles with long socio-cultural history of practice. The danger of such categorisation is the assumption that all creative endeavours generate and communicate cultural values and meanings. For example, a fascinatingly designed chair, fruit juicer or building, may carry symbolic value to its user or its locale, but to assume that it would necessarily push new ways of reasoning and interpreting life is false at best. As such, O'Connor advocates a focus on the production of cultural goods and services that foster creativity and creates value for all sectors of society. In creating this discussion, he aims to bring into consideration the interplay between the creator, creative production, and infrastructure for the production and distribution of the creative product.

Hesmondhalgh and Pratt (2005) find the cultural industries rife with complex inter-relationships that raise “questions about shifting boundaries between culture and economics, and between art and commerce” (1). They foreground several reasons for the shift from ‘cultural’ to ‘creative’ industries: It arose when politicians in the United Kingdom wanted to distance themselves from left-wing ideology which located itself in all things cultural; to fully exploit intellectual property (Garnham, 1990); and, to encapsulate other economically viable fields of practice such as film and television that were not being considered within the ambit of the subsidised arts and heritage sectors. All these, amidst a period (Western Europe in the 1980s) fuelled by greater consumer awareness and prosperity. The peculiar rise of the creative industries in the United Kingdom, and particularly London saw a nascent link between culture and economic, culture and urban culture. Bianchini and Parkinson’s 1993 book Cultural Policy and Urban

155 Regeneration, in providing case studies of the emerging sector, inspired a swathe of research from this period onwards. Hesmondhalgh and Pratt argue that with this rise of awareness at the governmental and policy level, very little policy was developed (4). Much of the cultural and sectorial developments remained localised and rejuvenated by urban gentrification; local businesses; and, civic-minded artists and creatives. But they also turn to the danger of the creative industries overarching all sectors of life from software to cafes to clubs thereby leading to "inflated commentary" about the wealth of the creative industries (8). While this may seem a democratic and inclusionary platform, it is at the risk of not engaging with anything deeply. Hesmondhalgh and Pratt are optimistic and agree with Bennett (1998) that issues such as aesthetics and knowledge that are deeply human will remain and not be lost to quantifiable growth and a proliferation of activities within the creative industries.

Hasan Bakhshi and Stuart Cunningham (2016), in a provocation published in the United Kingdom’s NESTA Report, categorically suggest that “the conflation of culture with creative industries since 1997 has harmed both cultural policy and creative industries policy in the UK.” They recommend that it would be useful to bring about a new and official definition of the cultural sector and a new approach to the production of its statistics “to revisit the scope and nature of cultural policy” (3). They argue for a separation in accounting for the contributions of the cultural and creative industries since the cultural sector benefits from its conflation with the creative industries also comprising "IT, software and computer services" which contribute to forty-four per cent of the £84.1 billion generated in 2002 (6). This conflation has led to insufficient attention being paid to either sector in economic policy especially that which is deemed public or symbolic goods. A precise accounting would allow governments to facilitate a greater engagement with the relationship between culture and creative

156 activity; cultural and creative employability, and impact on policy through the creation of new platforms for debate and discourse.

While the United Kingdom itself is rethinking its more than a twenty-year- old approach, the DCMS' approach to organising the creative industries continues to inspire and guide many countries to structure their creative industries. That the broadness of the DCMS list purports a celebration of diversity and creative potential by blurring the lines between art, lifestyle and business remain a compelling economic narrative. This type of approach, which justifies co-opting into the creative industries types of activities such as, art and antique business (which deal with reproductions) or computer software development on the grounds of economic capital is of concern to cultural theorists and purists. This is because the creative industries become complicit to the dilution of the value of art and culture in the face of economic determinism. Ely (2006) sees this as a reflection of the politicisation of art and creativity; where those who wish to retain the means of production oppose those who seek to exploit intellectual property (37). But the focus on embracing the commercial and subsidised arts into the fold of the creative industries is also due to the question of public access. Cultural products (popular music, photography, commercial film, Broadway musicals, etc.), designed and produced for the mass market, readily prove their relevance to the cultural life of the consumer (Lewis, 1990: 89). The limitation of a large number of subsidised creative practices (built on the credo of ‘art for art's sake') is that they find it hard to expand their audience base due to a variety of reasons ranging from heightened esotericism and elitism in the creative practice to increased competition from popular culture (film, television, sports, etc.) for the consumer's leisure dollar; hence, falling or stagnant audienceship has resulted in falling financial support. Hence, there is a growing willingness amongst artists working in the subsidised

157 sector to be included into the creative industries to ensure survival and social consecration (Flew, 2002: 10).

Critical awareness of the potential of the creative industries came about in cities that were experiencing decline and competition in their traditional sectors (Evans, 2001) as seen in Singapore during the economic crisis of the late 1990s. This was further propelled by the rise of the new economy in the 1990s, which invested in global interconnectivity through technology and investment in creative thinking (intellectual capital) as a means to innovation (Castells, 2000; Healy, 2002). Cultural economy theorists (Leadbeater, 1999; Rifkin, 2000; Throsby, 2001; Evans, 2001) see the development of the creative industries having significant transformative impact on society. On the one hand, this new economy is "increasingly global, increasingly about intangibles such as knowledge, information, images and fantasies; and increasingly decentralised and characterised by networks and flexibility", which leads to a multi-layering of society with significant implications for social and economic policies (Shorthose and Strange, 2004: 43). On the other hand, du Gay and Pryke (2002) detect a “cultural turn” in economics. This is defined as the ‘cultural’ increasingly having an effect on the economy where corporations and their systems such as organisational structures are seen as sites of cultural practice alongside economic practice. Evans (2001) and Scott (2000) stake that cities and organisations generate high levels of economic and cultural innovation and growth in this turn.

Castells (2000), Howkins (2001), Caves (2002), Flew (2002), Cunningham (2004), Banks and O’ Conner (2009), Bakhshi and Cunningham (2016) see the rise of the creative industries being linked to the concept of a knowledge-based economy, which is boosted by information, media, technology, knowledge and a global network. This growth in a global

158 technological network (the internet, satellite communication, television) implores creative industries to be less national and more global in their outlook with “micro-firm to small to medium-sized enterprise (SMEs) relating to large established distribution/circulation organisations” (Cunningham, 2004: 6). In the knowledge-based economy these elements are key cultural influencers of individuals and the communities that they live in; as such, the creative industries seek to height the permeation of “design and signification…. upon all aspects of everyday life, particularly those related to the consumption of commodities” (Flew, 2002: 2). In “Beyond Ad Hocery: Defining the Creative Industries” Flew, citing Featherstone (1991) and Lash and Urry (1994), argues that the creative industries are “connected to a growing reflexivity in consumption, or a process whereby consumers increasingly use commodities to construct a personal identity….hence, there is an intended blurring of lines between art, aesthetics and popular culture” (2-3).

From the viewpoint of business, Bernd Schmitt and Alex Simonson, in their book, Marketing Aesthetics: The Strategic Management of Brands, Identity and Image (1997), show that aesthetics is a prime mover behind the success of many brands such as Coca-cola, Absolut Vodka, Nike, Starbucks and Ralph Lauren. They argue that the multinational companies that manage these brands understand the basic function of aesthetics to the branding and market positioning of products. Aesthetics, not promotion or pricing, develop brand loyalty within a social network, allows for premium pricing of goods, and cuts through the information and competitor clutter. A good design applied to daily life and consumables will do much to enhance the quality of life of the consumer than the best works hidden in museums, libraries and concert halls.

159 The creative industries are marked by three characteristics: First, the protection of intellectual property (IP) through copyrights,22 trademarks and patents (Garnham, 1990). The idea of ‘packaging’ content and ideas into symbolic goods is led by the United States with its copyright for books, films, music, TV programmes and other products. In 1997 alone, copyright products raked in close to US$414 billion for the US economy (Howkins cited in Flew, 2002: 4). This kind of figure is desirable to emerging and growing economies, which are experiencing a slowdown in traditional sectors such as electronics and manufacturing, to want to consider venturing into the creative industries. This high financial output would also reveal why an economy, such as the United States, would want to protect its intellectual property through legal (anti-piracy laws) and political means (free trade agreements). In Singapore, the setting up of the Intellectual Property of Singapore (IPOS), an industry benchmarking and legal advisory body, was aimed in this direction.

John Howkins, in The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas (2001) claims that the universal adherence to respect intellectual property is challenging in the cultural economy. He says, "intellectual property exists only insofar as a government or law court says it does. No law, no property" (Howkins 2001, 24). This is particularly challenging to enforce in Asia where culture and tradition locate knowledge within the domain of the shared community (Swinyard, et.al, 1990) rather than in the omnipotence of the individual as a self-defining entity. China has been to date the United States’ biggest threat to pirated software, music, and books

22 Copyright has different legal meaning internationally, but it generally refers to “a property right in an original work of authorship (such as literary, musical, artistic, photographic, or film work) fixed in a tangible medium of expression, giving the holder the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform and display the work” (Black’s Law Dictionary 337, 7th ed. 1999).

160 and that in 1996, "the International Intellectual Property Alliance reported that the US suffered a trading loss of US$2.3 billion. While this number decreased to US$1.5 billion in 2001, piracy rates are still astronomically high with the piracy levels of major goods over ninety per cent” (Chynoweth, 2003). The 2006 UNESCO report on Copyright, Piracy and Cultural Industries stipulates:

[T]hat a well-functioning system of copyright laws and their rigorous international application are essential elements to build strong creative industries and ensure cultural diversity. Intellectual property rights such as copyright and neighbouring rights, enable law enforcement bodies to take legal action against those who copy and distribute creative content without the permission of the companies that invested in producing it. Without these legal rights, artists have no way to protect their work and companies have little incentive to invest in cultural industries (UNESCO, 2006).

161 The diversity of cultures, languages, and practices in Asia makes the appreciation of intellectual property a challenge.23 Moreover, I would argue that the concept of intellectual property does not place the artist (the creative maker) or the creative good/service at the centre of the rights but seeks to protect the rights of the producers/investors since “copyright creates incentives for companies to take investment risks by giving them the exclusive right to control the exploitation of the goods and services they produce and supply” (UNESCO, 2006). The UNESCO report bears a bias towards the long-established producers of copyright products even though as an international governing authority it seeks to highlight the economic and moral loss in the battle against piracy:

According to a recent estimate, piracy causes an estimated 120,000 job losses a year in the United States and 100,000 in the European Union. In developing countries, the figures are likely to be even higher and the cost regarding lost development equally significant. The countries where piracy flourishes lose

23 Film piracy is rampant in Asia. According to Motion Pictures Association (MPA), piracy rates were established in 2002 at an all-time high: China (ninety-one per cent), Indonesia (ninety per cent), Pakistan (ninety-five per cent), Philippines (eighty per cent) and Malaysia (seventy-five per cent). Singapore has an eight per cent piracy rate, but according to the MPA, it is a transit centre for pirated DVDs produced in Indonesia and Malaysia. About thirteen per cent of counterfeit seizures in the United Kingdom in 2002 were shipped from Singapore. (Source: Motion Picture Association & C|Net, 6 Mar 2003).

162 their creative assets and are culturally impoverished as a consequence. In the countries suffering the highest rates of piracy the development of local cultural industries has been decimated (UNESCO Report).

The second characteristic of the creative industries is linked to the first. As a supplier of goods and services that contain artistic, cultural or entertainment value, the creative industries place a high premium on the economic value of its goods and services. Harvard political economist, Richard Caves in his book, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Arts and Commerce (2002) comments that the economic value of a good or service is tempered by the volatility of the consumer's experience and taste (3). That is, the economic potential of a good or service is kept at bay until encountered by the consumer who determines its future. This leaves the creative industries open to unpredictability. Businesses in the creative industries often invest on minimising risk by removing unpredictability. In seeking to eliminate the unpredictable, experiential and aesthetic potential of industries, businesses increase focus on mundane aspects of the service such as product marketing and poor product differentiation (that is, variations in price, quality and experience) without appropriate literature on differentiation may lead to consumer confusion (7-8). He fears that all these may lead to user fatigue. Flew observes, that Caves' argument highlights risk and uncertainty of the economic outcome of the creative industries hence, despite the commercial possibilities of the industry some activities may still have to be subsidised by the government (2002: 7).

163 A third characteristic of the creative industries is located in what Richard Florida calls the creative class. In The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), Florida speaks of the rise of a class of new occupations held by a ‘super- creative core' of "people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music, and entertainment.... [whose] job is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content" (69). Besides these occupations, the creative class also co-opts non-traditional industries ranging from business and finance to law and healthcare. It sees them as creative beings able to engage in “complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of education or human capital” (8). Florida argues that the creative class is now ascendant in all types of economic practice. This position has been revisited by Florida himself in the Flight of the Creative Class (2005) as emerging nation-states clamour for global talents to infuse creativity to enhance their global positioning. Gill and Pratt (2008), Cunningham and Higgs (2009), Banks and Hesmondhalgh (2009) and Banks (2017) have questioned the idealisation and romanticisation of Florida’s creative class, which has given rise to concerns around precariousness around creative work as non- mainstream, fluid and seasonal thereby being short on justice in terms of regular remuneration and working conditions, health insurance and safety and liabilities.

However, these three characteristics have become critical anchors from which cities such as Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Singapore articulate and shape their creative industries. This fosters a cookie-cutter approach to policy and planning thereby enabling a politics of sameness (similar festivals, artists and events) across cities. Cultural policy scholars Mark Banks and Justin O'Connor (2009) view that the conceptual and policy frameworks around cultural industries have held themselves to academic scrutiny and testing, however, this is less so in the field of creative

164 industries. They view the rise of the creative industries, as a both discourse and instrument of governmentality, led to the "intensive commodification of artistic activity and the purposeful integrating of creativity into a variety of economic and social policy initiatives" (365). There is a degree of naivety in nation-states seeking to engage the creative industries to keep up with global changes and challenges and "to do so is a way that appeared to articulate a progressive and inclusive role for individual creativity and collective form of symbolic expression" (365).

The all out good of the creative industries to society and economy is compelling as an increasing number of nation-states from the United Kingdom to Singapore demonstrates (Banks and O’Connor, 2006: 366). Banks and O'Connor contend that issues and scepticism remain and they coalesce around the following: [1] appreciating the complex construction of the definition of the creative industries around structural classification that responds to national needs and provides sufficient global parity; [2] the lack of strategic or domestic policies for the creative industries – one that is relevant to domestic and regional policies and interests; [3] the need to question and debate the “globalist” or “imperialist” projection of the creative industries narrative emerging from the United Kingdom; the need to challenge the “utopianisation of ‘creative’ labour” as a free and fluid creative form, as Florida suggests, to one that is highly “precarious”; and, [4] ability to conceptually tease out the supposedly “contradiction-free” relationship between ‘culture’ and ‘economics’ which is at the heart of the creative industries.

Banks and O’Connor (2006) are of the view that it is critical to ensure the “correct articulation between these two ‘moments’ of contemporary cultural production” are presented and constituted both by scholars and policymakers. Moreover, this moment prescribes that any transactional element

165 involving people can be deemed creative. This is a fundamental problem as the creative industries can encapsulate all things broadly within a group, community or nation-state. I would agree with Banks and O'Connor that in studying the complex relationship between culture and economics, it is important not to flounder on the primacy of one over the other. Within any serious ambit of cultural philosophy, economics would be an important transactional dimension of culture and the community that embodies it. Banks and O'Connor stretch the view that creative industries would benefit much if there exists a symbolic distinction between everything economic and things expressive or of symbolic value. This would articulate the distinctiveness of the creative industries and help better engage policymakers.

Through processes of modernity, postmodernity and globalisation, Asia has been a recipient of global cultural flows embodied in the movement of people (through multinational trade), information (through telecommunication) and culture (through travel and tourism) (Tomlinson, 1999, Velayutham, 2007). The rapid influx of information in the global superhighway has meant that people and governments are unable to remain autonomous bodies but have to stay exposed to vagaries of the global flow and, in some instances, leading to western cultural saturation of Asia (Birch, et. al. 2001: 57). Be it MTV, Hollywood, Internet or McDonald’s, and governments have little control or regulatory scope to deal with the flow. New and emerging economies which build their national identity through symbolic culture, language, ritual and practices find themselves grappling with a reality that their ‘local’ culture could be substituted by a homogenising globalised western culture (Birch, et. al. 2001: 63). Hence, the concept of creative industries has to be seen as an Anglo/Eurocentric endeavour built on a tradition of promoting cultural goods and services (e.g. Shakespeare, Western classical music, iPods, etc.) through colonialism,

166 capitalism and globalisation. Any representation of the creative industries as being authentic to the place and space of society must be held suspect and neo-orientalist at best. The illustrious works of Howkins (2001) and Florida (2002, 2005), as enticing as they may seem to be used as legitimating tools for the implementation of creative industries in aspiring economies,24 must be questioned for their lack of engagement with the developmental nature of communities in these economies. This is compounded by a lack of data and analysis of creative industries in Asia making any concerted study challenging since much of the research is localised within community-based experiences expressed through social, political, and economic, policy or legal frameworks.

The dearth of consolidated research on the cultural and creative industries in Asia prompted UNESCO’s Culture Unit to convene in 2005 the Asia- Pacific Creative Communities: A Strategy for the 21st Century symposium with various developmental agencies such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Artists, economists, business leaders and public sector decision-makers from Asia met to define a comprehensive policy framework for cultural development as a strategy for poverty reduction and social emancipation in less developed economies in the Asia-Pacific. Observers note that this symposium was significant in that global economic and cultural players like the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and the UNESCO see the support of the cultural and creative industries as an investment in development. It enables traditional cultural sectors (e.g. arts and craft, cottage industries) to new economic potential through the creative

24 John Howkins, the author of The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas (2001) is a businessman in the creative sector and works as a consultant to governments seeking to develop their creative industries, manage and turn turn creativity into money. Howkins was the keynote speaker at Beyond Creativity 2005 Conference in Singapore, which was organised by the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts.

167 industries. In this argument, the creative industries become an important source of employment and sustainable income generation for these societies. However, while the creative industries in the West grow with tremendous economic returns, the creative industries "need to be seen as more than economic; they are at root social and cultural. As such the conservation and promotion of culture and the arts and national and local identities are essential to individual, communal and social development, and policy should reflect the multiple benefit nature of cultural industries" (The Hindu, 18 Dec 2005). There is also a danger that this kind of approach may further exaggerate the developmental or third-world syndrome preventing many of these aspiring economies from competing at the global marketplace.

3.5.2 Creative Singapore

In keeping its eye on both international developments in the creative industries and the downward spiral of the Asian economies, from 2000 onwards the government engaged its “citizens to apply imagination, creativity and knowledge to generate new ideas and create new economic value. Multi-dimensional creativity, that is, artistic creativity, business entrepreneurship and technological innovation became the new currency of success” (MICA Website). Furthermore, MICA asserted that the creative industries had an “indirect impact on the economy - by adding style, aesthetics and freshness to differentiate products and services” (MICA Website). This engagement with creativity became the new determinant of culture for the first decade of the 21st century. However, what made this policy different from past policies was the acceptance of the consumer as an all-knowing and self-determining entity who could be mobilised to propel the cultural capital of Singapore.

168 The 2003 Economic Review Committee Report (ERC) remains critical in mapping the way culture was to be framed and managed in Singapore. In the beginning of the new decade, arts and culture – their identitarian and symbolic values – had to be renegotiated through the muslin of creative industries for the 21st century as illustrated by policymakers who espoused the values of investing in the creative industries. IN 2002, the MICA minister David Lim emphasised the strength of the Singaporean social network and the people’s ingenuity as cultural capital of Singapore which would give Singapore its competitive strategy. He said that "the money and hard work that we have put into developing the Arts should, therefore, be seen as an investment in our future competitiveness" (MICA Press Release: 25 Jan 2002). Reinforcing this, deputy prime minister, Dr Tony Tan added that the arts could help "build wealth and create jobs through growth in creative industries and occupations….industries that will give us a cutting- edge and fulfil the twin function of becoming an engine of growth for our economy" (MICA Press Release: 10 April 2002). Then permanent secretary for MICA, Dr Tan Chin Nam noted that as "Singapore matures into a more advanced economy, art should no longer be viewed as a luxury, but as a strategic investment tool that contributes towards both the economic competitiveness and social well-being of our nation" (MICA Press Release: May 2002). These overtures on investment for the future of Singapore sutured the arts to the economy.

A creative industries working group, which reported to the ERC Subcommittee on Services Industries, recommended government invest in the creative sector. In its report entitled Creative Industries Development Strategy 2002 (CIDS), the working group recognised the potential of the creative industries as a "propeller of national competitiveness" (CIDS, Sept 2002) and to make a significant contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP). Dr Tony Tan, who was also the chairman of the working group

169 stressed that the creative industries would enable Singapore to "leapfrog our competitors by offering innovative lifestyle, entertainment and consumer goods experiences that leverage on the convergence of arts, business and technology" thereby generate economic spin-offs and attract global talent to Singapore (CIDS, Sept 2002).

The working group clustered the creative industries into arts and culture, design and media, and worked towards defining the characteristics of these through extensive deliberations with arts, design and media communities, think-tanks and design-centric business sectors in Singapore. International study missions were undertaken. Termed ‘cultural capital study mission' and ‘design study mission', visits to Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom and United States throughout 2002 were followed by consultations with international experts such as Professor Anthony Jones (School of Art Institute of Chicago), Professor Lo-King-man (Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts), Professor Ken Robinson (Senior Advisor to the President of the J. Paul Getty Trust), and Mr. Raymond Chow (Gold Harvest Films, Hong Kong) and many more (MTI Website). The gravity of the government's intention to seek appropriate guidance to make a practical decision in investing in the creative industries is underscored by these consultations.

Central to the CIDS working group’s discussion of the characteristics of the creative industries was its attempt to define cultural capital. The term cultural capital has its roots in the work of French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. His writings influenced critical observations and studies of culture and cultural practices throughout the Western world. Bourdieu, in his key texts, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) and The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (1993) foregrounds cultural capital as a form of knowledge, an internalised

170 code or a cognitive acquisition which equips the individual or community (which he calls social agent) with core competency or appreciation in deciphering cultural relations and cultural artefacts (Bourdieu, 1993: 7). A cultural good or service has meaning or value only for someone who possesses the cultural competence to unlock its meaning or value. The possession of this competence or cultural capital is accumulated through a long process of acquisition or inculcation through formal and informal education gained through family or group structures, interaction with educated members of the social formation and social institutions with formal educational structures (Bourdieu, 1993: 7).

Cultural capital, just as economic capital, is unequally distributed in society and “it serves to identify class interest and to promote and naturalise class differences” (Fiske, 1987: 18). Cultural capital creates an environment where culture and class/social structures are interlinked suggesting that there is a determining agent (e.g. government, museum or an academic), possibly with social power, that categorises cultural goods as ‘high' or ‘low' art. This interlink provides for the development of social networks with common causes, beliefs and values. Embedded in Bourdieu's cultural capital is the belief that culture is equally available to all in society. But in reality culture is not readily accessible (financially, aesthetically and intellectually) to all in society. There are inherent disparities between the socially well placed and those who are not. Fiske (1987) foretells that there is a dominant polity that tries to shape culture by determining aesthetics, anointing cultural artefacts as cultural capital and organising culture into high and low culture. Fiske's reading is awkward because he locates culture within the nexus of a power struggle between the dominant in society and the subordinated and that any form of capital, developed through popular pleasure and play by the subordinated, is often co-opted into the mainstream (Fiske, 1987). He assumes that the formation of cultural capital is always a

171 top-down practice negating the hordes of cultural capital that has arisen from the ground up and have remained outside the mainstream. The subordinated maintains and defends a discursive space of its own: It is in this space where notions of resistance and creativity co-exist.

For Bourdieu economic capital does not override culture capital or for that matter, other forms of capital. Unlike economic capital, which is measured and celebrated by financial outcomes, cultural capital is measured by its ‘symbolic power' that is, authority derived through consecration, prestige and recognition by various social and peer networks and social, cultural and educational institutions. The cultural field is an "economic world reversed" where possession of cultural capital is not a guarantee of economic capital since the economic success may ring the death knell to symbolic power (Johnson in Bourdieu, 1993: 7). That is, a commercially successful author may not be critically/aesthetically successful in having his/her work to be studied at university. To partake in cultural practice, one must enter a ‘field' with the requisite knowledge, skill, and talent to play with it to derive maximum benefit (e.g. profit). A field is a series of fluid and dynamic set of interactive practices between "institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations, appointments and titles which constitute an objective hierarchy, and which produces and authorise certain discourses and activities" (Webb, et. al, 2002: 21-22). The opportunity to carve capital and watch the symbolic deaths of cultural artefacts is a significant ritual in the field.

The Singaporean definition of cultural capital is enshrined in a relatively unknown MICA Green Paper titled, ImagiNation: A New Agenda for a Creative and Connected Nation. Investing in Singapore’s Cultural Capital (2002). The Green Paper, which served as a discussion document for the CIDS working group, puts forth a strategy for a creative and connected

172 Singapore to harness the collective energy, the cultural capital of the citizenry, to transit from an investment and manufacturing economy to an innovative economy (1). This document obliquely draws25 from Bourdieu’s working definition and defines cultural capital to be an “accumulated sum of our nation’s creative capacity and our emotional and social bonds to the country and communities, and our deep knowledge of economy, society and world affairs” (3). It goes on to say,

Cultural capital is a critical strategic national resource. In the New Economy where ideas, creativity, entrepreneurship, technology and knowledge converge and connect, cultural capital shapes the content, the tools and the environment with and in which people create new value and form new industries. Cultural Capital is, therefore, the driving force and the measure of society's ingenuity and creativity. It is also an important support for building an environment that fosters multidisciplinary learning and innovation among the workforce and helps bind together communities and the nation. Understood as such, cultural capital is therefore at the heart of our new vision of

25 The Green Paper, though drawing from the work of Bourdieu, does not acknowledge his work in theorising cultural capital anywhere in the document.

173 a Creative and Connected Singapore (ImagiNation, 2002: 3)

This approach mixes Bourdieu’s cultural capital (forms of knowledge and skills that provide a competitive advantage), social capital (strength by group dynamics, networks of influence), and economic capital to institutionalise people and their creativity. With the aim to catapult Singapore into the brave new world of creativity and connectivity, the Green Paper proposed three areas of interlocking development.

[a] Development of a Creative Cluster. A composite of multiple economic sectors unified by creativity where “enterprises and individuals engaged in the fields of advertising, digital media, design, fashion design and architecture” are examples of this component. The Green Paper noted that the creative cluster, estimated at 0.4 per cent (S$608 million) of total GDP in 1998, deserved national attention and investment and that it had the potential to unleash Singapore's brand of ‘New Asia' culture akin to the ‘J-pop' culture of Japan. This New Asia (drawn from the STB's branding for Singapore as a gateway to an energised and interconnected Asia, [Yue, 2006]) was embedded in consumerist cultural exports such as eateries (Coriander Leaf, Siam Supper Club); fashion (Song + Kelly 21); music (Dick Lee, Kit Chan, Singapore Symphony Orchestra) (ImagiNation, 16). The development of a creative cluster was to become a heterogeneous site for cultural and creative production of new ideas through the

174 cross-fertilisation of arts, science and technology. It was to be site for the grooming of new inventors and designers who would engage with augmented design products and new media.

[b] Development of Creative People, Creative Workforce. The Green Paper acknowledged that for Singapore to take advantage of its cultural capital it needed to increase the number of players. These players would be high-profile entrepreneurs not be afraid to undertake risk for new growth and value creation. To inculcate creativity, the Green Paper proposed the implementation of a national arts education programme in primary schools and the mounting of a nationwide education programme to make the arts accessible.

[c] Development of a Connected Nation. The Green Paper saw the investment in cultural capital as a means to connecting Singaporean at home and overseas through technology. This was aimed at strengthening the social bond amongst the citizenry and other countries to sharpen Singapore's competitive edge. It recommended building on library and archival provisions in Singapore; enlisted the most advanced information communication technology to connect Singaporeans and developed a marketing strategy for Singapore to deepen social and emotional ties.

To embark on realising the strategies, MICA established a creative industries division within its bureaucracy. This division functioned as a cultural architect for the development and promotion of Singapore's creative industries through the facilitation of national collaborations “between the private, people and public sectors to grow arts, design and media fields”

175 (Cunningham, 2009: 278). In this regard, two strategic initiatives were convened. First, Creative Community Singapore (CCS) a community outreach arm of the creative industries was launched in 2005 with a seed funding of S$400,000 “to empower individuals, teams and organisations to initiate and pilot cutting-edge projects that will unleash individual and community creativity, nurture creative ideas and build demand and capabilities for the Creative Industries” (www.creativecommunity.com.sg). Second, Crea©tive – Reinvent Your Future, a platform for the organisation of high profile creative events was developed to celebrate and position Singapore as a site of international creative engagement and business. Key events such as Beyond 2005: The Global Summit for Creative Industries, Singapore Design Festival, Asia Media Festival and Creative Youth Xchange @ Gallery Hotel became showcase hubs for Singaporean talents and enterprises.

The challenge with a document such as the Green Paper is that it is flawed in its theoretical compass from the onset. First, the Green Paper alludes to a definition of cultural capital by not staking an ideological claim on its definition. The primacy of the economic argument is ever-present without progressing discussion on the symbolic power and value of cultural capital. In fact, it negates it. Second, the document rehashes old ideas such as STB’s New Asia, NAC’s Arts Education Programmes and InfoComm Development Authority’s Connected Singapore within a framework of cultural capital. These concepts have been fleshed out and exercised throughout the 1990s with some success. It seemed a weak attempt by MICA to bring under a strategic fold all its key businesses to justify its larger enterprise in cultural development in Singapore. Third, and more importantly, the Green Paper defined creative enterprise within a narrow bandwidth of arts and culture, design and media. It presupposed that creativity and creative practices are realisable only within this bandwidth

176 and that Singaporeans will remain uncreative unless they enter this field. This undermines any genuine attempt to develop the cultural capital of Singapore. Fourth, the Green Paper was silent on the precarious nature of the creative industries by not seeking to outline the real and legitimate concerns established by scholars and experts around areas of pay, health and safety and working conditions. Tan (2016) argues that Singapore policymakers, while aware of Florida’s articulation of the creative industries and the need for global talent, “scored poorly on diversity and tolerance” (235) despite relaxing “repressing government policies previously enforced in the name of social stability” (Elegant, 2003 cited in Tan, 2016).

While the Green Paper's recommendation was further fine-tuned and redesigned into the CIDS Report, the residues of its assertions on cultural capital and creative industries remain hauntingly real. In this section, I have outlined the policy dimension undertaken by the government to establish the creative sector. Scholars Chang (2000), Chong (2005), Kong (2014), Ooi (2011) and Lim (2014), as discussed in the section on cultural policy, highlight the challenges of an overtly instrumentalised approach to mapping the creative industries. While it has secured global talents, made urban Singapore vibrant and contributed to economic growth it remains managed and manicured – silent on the potential of the arts in empowering the citizenry. The next section continues to outline the fields of creative practice.

3.5.3 Fields for Creative Practice

The CIDS working group’s vision for Singapore by 2012 is three-fold: First, “to develop the creative industries into a significant growth engine” increasing its GDP contribution from three per cent (2000) to six per cent by

177 2012 comparable to the United States and the United Kingdom. Second, to develop a Singapore into a “New Asia Creative Hub” – a creative ecosystem which offers ample opportunities to creative people to fulfil their diverse aspirations. Third, to "propel Singapore closer to the league of creative cities such as San Francisco, London and New York, which are abuzz with ideas, experimentation and entrepreneurial energy" (CDIS Sept 2002). To achieve this, the working group put forth critical blueprints for three fields of creative practice: The Renaissance City 2.0 Report, extrapolates on the strategies articulated in the 2000 Renaissance City Report and aspires to catalyse arts-business partnerships, Singapore’s talent and audience pool and create new arts investment opportunities to develop a distinctive global city for the arts. The Design Singapore Report aims to develop Singapore into a hub for design to lead the shaping of products of deep symbolic value, meaning and experience. The Media 21 Report aims to “transform Singapore into a global media city where media services and projects are created, developed and marketed to the international market” (M 21).

These fields resonate with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal work on culture (1984, 1993) where he provides fields - a space within which people and communities operate - within which ‘agents’ of culture and society function, interact within their habitus assigning social position, hierarchy to produce and circulate social, economic and cultural capital. The habitus, as both lived environment and aspiring imagining, provides a milieu a social and cultural world can be created through external input and influence. The habitus does become a site of world-making where social (networks), cultural (talent), and symbolic (prestige) and economic capital (wealth) are generated. Today, these policies remain the representative fields of creative practice within which discourse on culture and creativity is to be produced, circulated and managed by the government. Let me elaborate on these blueprints.

178

The Renaissance City 2.0 Report (RC 2.0): The 2000 RC report was bold in its expression for cultural ballast 21st century Singapore. However, it needed to articulate a strategy for embracing economics as a binary to arts and culture. It conveyed a clear business and arts partnership as part of the creative industries development. RC 2.0 aimed to "integrate arts and cultural development more deeply and pervasively into the economic landscape of Singapore" (RC 2.0: 14). By harnessing existing and new arts infrastructure the government aimed to develop cultural software (creative goods and services) and build bridges with the business sector. The RC 2.0 report was blunt that the government was less interested in the arts for its cultural and discursive value and significance. It starkly stated: "MICA agencies (NAC, NHB, MDA, etc.) must shift away from the ‘arts for arts' sake mindset, to look at the development of arts from a holistic perspective, to contribute to the development of the creative industries as well as our nation's social development" (RC 2.0: 14). To imply that artists who work in isolation of the daily grind of society were not contributing to the development of society is superficial as it assumed that art in its aesthetic and philosophical form was not viable or credible towards a nation's social development. It negated historical evidence of artists' contribution to the cultural capital of their society. Policymakers, in their urgency to fulfil economic goals, and possibly justify additional public funding for the arts, seem to have side-stepped the very culture that was feeding the creative industries.

The RC 2.0 proposed three strategies to make Singapore a distinctive global city for the arts. First, the creative capabilities of Singaporeans be harnessed through art and design education embedded in all levels of education in Singapore. The educational system with its primary emphasis on

179 mathematics, science and languages (English and mother-tongue) relegated the arts as extra-curricular. The report acknowledged the difficulty in changing this policy, which sat within the purview of the Ministry of Education, and proposed that the arts be used as pedagogical instruments to fulfil the goals of learning mathematics, science and languages; for example, drama to teach languages. The report emphasised that Singapore needed passionate teachers “skillful in weaving in arts, design and media into the education curriculum to help their students’ learning and think more broadly and creatively” (RC 2.0: 15). Arts, design and media education was to be further enhanced at the tertiary level with a portfolio of offerings by a new school established by local universities. The quality of the programmes to be assured through partnerships with internationally renowned art institutes such as the Royal College of the Arts, London. This partnership would allow Singapore to ride on the brand equity (cultural capital) of these international institutes and height another objective of the Economic Review Committee; that is to make Singapore a Global Schoolhouse attracting more than 100,000 international students per annum (ERC, 2003).

The second strategy was to develop aesthetic environments to stimulate sophisticated demand for the arts and culture amongst Singaporeans. This was to be achieved through art and design interventions into everyday life represented through artworks in public spaces, landscape and architecture. The report proposed government adopt a percent-for-the-arts scheme, where one percent of all public construction budgets would be allocated for the commissioning and procurement of visual arts (sculptures, paintings, murals, etc.) to be located in publicly accessible spaces as evidenced in similarly successful schemes in countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia. In Singapore, the Northeast Mass Rapid Transit (subway line) and the One-North research city practised a version of this scheme with limited success. Public constructions in Singapore, including interior

180 design, generally do not take art into serious consideration. Once a new building is completed it is often common in Singapore to look for art to embellish interiors. Even the iconic Esplanade's budget for visual art acquisition during the initial stages of its construction was virtually non- existent. In developing lung spaces for culture and knowledge, the report proposed developing public libraries as lifestyle or ‘fusion' spaces that integrate arts, business, and technology. The plan was to also extend this development into the suburbs through the development of ‘creative towns', which would celebrate localised communitarian activities. Visual arts development was to be further enhanced through the development of a virtual museum network, the development of a Singapore Biennale (a festival dedicated to the contemporary visual arts) and the construction of a new museum for modern and contemporary art. This museum development was to strengthen global city positioning, and the report opined that museum development had the “potential to replicate” the economic and tourism successes of the Tate Modern in London and the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain (RC 2.0: 19). The success of visual art in marrying art and business is a well-documented fact. With successful museum icons, as mentioned above, and brand name art businesses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the visual arts industry has demonstrated that it can be a key engine to the creative industries in its ability to generate a multi-million revenue industry. Furthermore, visual arts education is readily accessible to all from children, hobbyists to serious enthusiasts. This is also another large income generator for the industry. Visual arts are easily visual and can be affordably incorporated into the cultural life of Singaporeans. Its ability to heighten the city's visibility prompted the government to invest in a multi- million event, the Singapore Biennale in 2006. This event was funded by the finance ministry to coincide with the International Monetary Fund meeting held in Singapore in 2006.

181 The third strategy emphasised the development of the creative industries through arts and cultural entrepreneurialism. Arts and cultural agencies such as the NAC, NHB and National Library Board (NLB) were structured to broaden their scope of enhancement and investment in both subsidised and non-subsidised arts and the development of business consultancies in heritage, conservation and research services. The National Library Board (NLB) was to develop an ‘information as business’ cluster providing knowledge services at a price.

The strategies of RC 2.0 were realised through enhanced positioning of state-of-the-arts facilities such as the Esplanade -Theatres on the Bay, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, and the conversion of the Singapore Parliament House into an Arts House. Singaporean artists (as cultural capital) were widely promoted on the world stage next to the world's best through international collaboration and presentations at prestigious events such as Ars Electronica, Documenta XI, the Zuercher Spektakel and Boston's Tanglewood Music Mountain Festival. Singapore's participation in the Venice Biennale since 2002 has been raved as an arrival into the global cultural market. International arts events such as the Asian Arts Mart (2002), the International Congress of the International Society for the Performing Arts (2003) and the World Summit on the Arts and Culture (2004) brought arts managers, policy makers, artists and academics together to meet and build cultural discourse in Singapore. In 2002, funding for the arts increased twenty-four per cent to S$529 million, much of which was allocated to infrastructural development such as libraries and museums. However, monies allocated to arts groups and companies for the production of art shrank ten per cent to S$35.5 million (Straits Times, 16 April 2003) and the government cited the recession as grounds for the cut. Education in the arts, gained a significant boost with the announcement that MICA would be establishing a School of the Arts (outside the purview of the

182 Ministry of Education) for youths aged thirteen to eighteen years, to provide both an academic and arts curriculum to develop and nurture young talents.

Design Singapore. Having built a history and tradition of pragmatic design solutions for Singapore’s development (public housing, transport system, landscape), to see the field of design as an inalienable part of everyday life was a relatively new concept to Singapore. Design to MICA meant “material and conceptual innovation, realised through integration of arts, culture, business and technology and experience as beauty, value and meaning” (DS Report: 21) leading to a consciousness that permeated all aspects of life. The Singaporean terminology of design includes two- dimensional planes (graphics, illustrations, advertising, signage, multimedia and communications); three-dimensional objects (fashion, crafts, jewellery, ceramics, equipment, devices, appliances, and machinery); three- dimensional space (architecture, interiors, lighting, and landscape); four- dimensional movement (transport and mobility, distribution systems, people movers, and virtual simulations); and x-dimensional futures (convergent technologies, new paradigms and new media) (DS Report: 21). Underlying all these design clusters were successful businesses (from Saatchi and Saatchi’s advertising to I.M. Pei’s architecture) that built a reputation capitalising on, what marketing parlance would term as ‘USPs’ or unique selling proposition.

The report identified four outcomes with the intent to develop a holistic design ecosystem for Singapore. First, to develop Singapore into a leading hub for contemporary design in Asia by providing design education and a launch pad for “innovative designs into Asia”. Second, to evolve a distinctive Singapore design and brand associated with equities such as high quality, integrity, creativity and excellence. The game plan was to develop “killer applications” (28) such as IKEA (Sweden), SONY (Japan) or BMW

183 (Germany) to help brand the country. Third, to provide a competitive advantage for local enterprises through the introduction of awards dedicated to excellence in design; and, finally, to foster a pervasive design culture amongst the public through the incorporation of a design sensibility into public buildings, amenities and spaces. Central for the development of design was the establishment of the Singapore Design Council in 2003 to build and sustain a design economy. Just like the RC 2.0, this report proposed embedding design education as a teaching and learning tool within the educational system and this was to be supported by a proposal to develop design education at tertiary level through the setting up of a School of Art and Design at the Nanyang Technological University, enhancing design education at polytechnics and specialised art institutions such as Lasalle College of the Arts and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, and establish media labs for hot-housing and research design concepts.

Companies today no longer compete on price alone in a global marketplace. Design quality is vital to the consumer's desire to cut through the clutter of products and services, and good design provides a visual allure to a product. As one of the fastest growing sectors in Singapore, the design cluster contributed approximately two per cent of Singapore’s GDP growth in 2001 and employed closed to 25,000 individuals (Design Singapore website). To steer the development of this sector, MICA and the Design Council inaugurated numerous new initiatives throughout 2003-2006 including the International Design Festival in 2005; participating in the Venice Biennale 9th International Architecture Exhibition, and the launch of Singapore Fashion Week in 2000 attracting regional and international designers. The intent in organising these was to spotlight Singapore as a centre for design and encourage Singaporeans to embrace and imbibe design as culture.

184 Media 21. The Media Development Authority (MDA) was formed in 2003 through the merger of three regulatory bodies: Singapore Broadcasting Authority, Film and Publications Department and the Singapore Film Commission. With this new formation, MDA oversaw the development of a media production and research and development; and develop Made-in- Singapore content for export. Media in Singapore covered a “full range of media industries, from print, broadcasting, film and publishing to new areas of convergent media such as digital and online media. Within each industry were a cluster of activities ranging from content production (pre-production, production, post-production) to distribution (packaging, marketing and distribution)” (M21: 1) providing a full value cycle for producers. The Media 21 report set out to make Singapore a global media city to enable it to tap on the growing media spending in the Asia-Pacific. Estimated at US$215 billion in 2000, media spend was expected to grow by 5.3 per annum. The report projected an increase in GDP contribution from 1.6 per cent in 2000 to 3.5 per cent by 2012 and an “increase total export value from S$908 million in 2000 to S$4.5 billion and grow three local media companies with offshore revenues exceeding S$250 million” (M21).

To realise these objectives a series of initiatives ranging from establishing Singapore as a media exchange, creating made-in-Singapore content for the international market, investing in the growing field of digital media, internationalising Singapore media companies, augmenting education to spawn content development and the development of best practices in regulation to foster a conducive environment were implemented. I would like to focus on two of the more significant initiatives: The development of a media ecosystem and the made-in-Singapore content as they play a critical role in the architecture of the creative industries.

185 Singapore was to become a favourable media centre and ecosystem for media business whereby brand-name media companies would set up base in Singapore. To support these media companies, MDA launched Singapore Media Fusion (www.singaporemediafusion.com), a web-portal to serve as a one-stop business centre for the media industry. The portal aimed to provide consistent information on media industry in Singapore and provide Singapore content developers with a platform to showcase their successful works globally. The drive to capitalise on this potential saw the government court branded media companies. Through financial incentives, prestigious awards and intellectual property management tools companies such as AXN, BBC World, CNBC Asia, Discovery Asia, HBO Asia, MTV Asia, Nickelodeon, Walt Disney Television and Lucasfilm Animation were encouraged to set up base in Singapore (MDA Website). Singapore's efficient infrastructure, fluency in English language, tax incentives, skilled workforce, networking potential with the rest of the Asia and a growing sensitivity to intellectual property makes it an attractive site for media operations. The purpose of attracting these brand names, while serving to generate jobs and ideas within Singapore, is to position Singapore as a regional arbiter of content and an information gateway to the rest of Asia.

The theme of Singapore as a gateway to Asia has been branded ‘New Asia' throughout the 1990s in tourism literature (Yue, 2006). It serves as a means to attract tourists to locate themselves in Singapore to transit to and from other parts of Asia. This notion of transit is now re-anchored to attract and establish business. Media-watcher Cherian George, in an article in the national daily, Straits Times (9 August 2003), questioned Singapore’s self- assumed role as a gateway to Asia especially when Asian cities were on their economic ascendance: “the best brains in Asia do not need Singaporean go-betweens to build linguistic or managerial bridges with the West” (George cited in Kwok, 2004: 13). According to cultural activist, Lee

186 Weng Choy, by offering the “paradigm of ‘New Asia’, Singapore stakes a claim as part of the avant-garde of the next stage of global capitalism….as the telos of capitalism” (Broadsheet, 2002: 12). The volatility of politics, natural calamities (tsunami), corruption, diversity of languages, lack of protection for intellectual property and terrorism works to the advantage of Singapore (utilitarian, English speaking) to position itself as a safe environment compared to the disparate development that was characterising Southeast Asia. This type of regionality has a homogenising function (Yue, 2003) through the control of new media, new technology and popular culture that purvey a self-orientalising and neocolonial spectre furthering capitalist and modernist enterprise.

The purveyance of capitalist and modernist enterprise is crystallised in a second initiative to develop made-in-Singapore content that would be exportable internationally. This initiative, which acknowledges copyright industries as an anchor of the creative industries, is realised through co- productions with international production houses, governments and industry organisations and funding schemes to support content development. MDA identified content development to include digital animation, documentaries, business and education as having strong international success. MDA brokered the development of a range of international co-productions such as, the two-part tele-movie, House of Harmony (2004), a Germany- Singapore co-production which premiered on ZDF. Others include a German public broadcast station and a documentary Kylie Kwong: Heart and Soul on celebrity Australian chef, Kylie Kwong, a co-production between FremantleMedia Enterprises (Australia), Sitting in Pictures (Singapore) and MDA. To increase co-production deals between local firms and international players, MDA invested S$496,000 into a special branding campaign for Singapore productions at Mipcom (International Media Trade Mart) in 2006 (Straits Times, 31 Oct 2006). MDA injected close to

187 S$500,000 on average into co-production deals in return for a thirty per cent stake in the final product. It was involved in thirty such deals. For example, in 2006-2007, Mega Media (Singapore) signed a US$20 million (S$31 million) deal with Rainbow Media (USA) to co-develop a slate of high- definition TV programmes for US broadcast; while iV Lab, a subsidiary of Singapore Technologies Engineering, co-produced a six-part animation series based on the Bible with the United States and New Zealand. The entire deal was said to be worth US$25 million. Scrawl Studios (Singapore) with its Canadian and Hong Kong partners produced a science-fiction series called Gizmo (Straits Times 31, Oct 2006).

In the last decade, Singapore-made films and filmmakers saw an upsurge in financial support. From Eric Khoo’s Be With Me (2004), Djinn’s Perth (2005) to Royston Tan’s 15 (2003), not only did MDA provide financial support but it also pushed and promoted these films to the international festival and competition circuit to increase brand awareness of Singaporean creative output.

A key player in the Singaporean film industry was MediaCorp’s Raintree Pictures. Raintree Pictures was established in 1998 to produce pan-Asian and Singaporean movies for the international film market (Raintree Website). With MDA support Raintree Pictures’ films have gone on to become financial successes. Its notable films include The Last Dance (2006), I Do I Do (2005) The Maid (2005), Homerun (2003), I Not Stupid (2002) and The Truth About Jane and Sam (1999). As Raintree Pictures sets itself out to produce themes and stories about Asian lives, many of its movies are co-productions with other international production houses with a strong focus on the East Asian film market. Michael Curtin (2007) demonstrates that the Raintree Pictures’ strategy of working with East Asian film markets is cultural brokering built around free-trade agreements

188 and memorandum of understanding between countries such as China– Singapore, and Singapore-Hong Kong. This strategy enabled Singapore to access the lucrative media market and, at the same time, Singaporean content and talent could access the Chinese language market. Its productions were convergences of regional specialists in film production. For example, The Truth About Jane and Sam (1999), was a Singapore-Hong Kong co-production, directed by Hong Kong’s Derek Yee with the male lead played by Taiwanese singer Peter Ho Yun Tung and the female lead played by Singaporean small screen queen, Fann Wong. This pan-Asian formula is repeated in most, if not all of Raintree Pictures’ works. Raintree Pictures is owned and managed by MediaCorp News Pte Ltd, a television news arm of MediaCorp Pte Ltd, Singapore’s largest broadcaster with a “complete range of media businesses spanning TV, Radio, Entertainment Productions, Movie Productions, Newspapers, Magazines, Electronic Media and other broadcasting services” (MediaCorp Website). MediaCorp was government run until its corporatisation in the 1990s. However, MDA does yield considerable influence over the media through its regulatory policies.

Just as Raintree Pictures catered to the Asian film market, Channel NewsAsia (CNA), another business of MediaCorp, was established in 1999 to provide news and information on global developments with Asian perspectives. Reporting from the major Asian and key Western cities, including New York, Washington D.C, London and Moscow, CNA remains pan-Asian in coverage appealing to business professionals. In 2000, CNA broadened its network to cover the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia to Australia, thereby extending its viewership across more than twenty territories across Asia (CNA Website). Its ratings have been good. A 2000 AC Nielsen Media Index Report shows that CNA had a news viewership of forty-two per cent compared to 8.5 per cent for CNN and 7.5 per cent for the BBC (AC Neilsen cited in Yue, 2006: 26). On an

189 economic level, the healthy growth in viewership was welcome given the competition CNA faced from big media conglomerates such as CNN, BBC and CNBC Asia and localised media of the respective countries.

CNA thrives today, but on a socio-cultural level, it conceals three hegemonic dangers. Yue (2006) finds CNA produces a "New Asian class" constructed by programming of "English language news as a commodity culture" (26). The hegemonic power of Singapore is identified through the priority given to regional news concerning Singapore and world news. Yue notes that "other regional cities are only featured under the ‘Knowing Asia' and ‘gateway Asia' belts" and CNA is complicit in promoting news as a site of capital and consumption, thereby presenting news about other Asian regions as images and notations for lifestyle consumption (26) rather than information. The second danger is that CNA functions as an instrument of homogenisation trying to unify Asia into a homologous form - an ‘imagined community’ foretold by Benedict Anderson (1983). Asian perspectives are transmitted through the lens of lifestyle programming and the profusion of the English language negating Asia’s heterogeneous cultures and backgrounds. In a sense, CNA is antithetical to the “chaotic criss-crossing of global flows” (Ang, 2000: 35) between peoples and their technologies, ideas, languages and practices. Appadurai (1990) is optimistic that these homogenising forces will be absorbed into local political and cultural economies and heterogenised through processes of indigenisation (cited in Ang, 2000) or nationalistic practices of promoting cultural capital. A third danger is inevitable. Cultural imperialism, which is the imposition of one particular country's "beliefs, values, knowledges, behavioural norms and style of life" (Crane, 2002: 3) on other nations. It pits strong and weak societies in the race for fulfilling economic control and the safeguarding of political interests of the dominant country. CNA is in a particular place to imbue values systems (positive or negative) to the rest of Asia as it has the

190 power to shape regional media in the eyes of the affluent and educated young Asians or the global citizen.

As regulatory custodian of content as well as policies for industry practices MDA yields considerable authority on content. It ensures that information is communicated to the consuming public in Singapore through a wide range of channels while supposedly safeguarding the young from materials considered undesirable or against the socio-political ethos of the country. Critics have noted that the government has liberalised regulation since the 1990s compared to the heavy-handed approach of the 1970s and 1980s (Seow, 1998). To this end, MDA states on its website that it "maintains a light-touch approach towards regulation" working through consultations with the industry and public to take a stake in social responsibility. Specific guidelines for industry practices such, arts entertainment, audio text, Internet, film, radio, television, video, videogames and publications have been developed and are used for monitoring content.

Of central interest to this thesis are the guidelines for arts and entertainment that regulate its production and dissemination. For an aspiring global media city, MDA's regulation of arts and entertainment remain within archaic practices of morality, discipline and censorship. To paraphrase MDA, all plays, musical and dance performances, art exhibitions, variety shows and pop/rock concerts, performed indoor or outdoor to members of the public, are subjected to licensing. The issuance of a permit is determined upon assessment based on the synopses, scripts and programmes submitted by arts groups and event organisers. Upon determining the status of the application, MDA will either request appropriate advisory be placed to inform members of the public on the general theme/nature of the arts performances or not issue a license. MDA encourages arts groups and event organisers to provide sufficient consumer advisories on the content of their

191 performances. The Arts Consultative Panel, comprising members of the arts community, education and general public, advises on the appropriate action on more controversial performances. Arts groups and event organisers are allowed to appeal against MDA's decisions to the minister for MICA, whose verdict is final. Another committee, The Arts Appeal Advisory Committee advises the minister on appeal in arts entertainment. Three categories of classification are currently in effect, namely: [1] General (suitable for all ages), [2] Allowed with Advisory (e.g. to inform audiences that the performance contains adult themes or coarse language, or is appropriate for those sixteen years and above, etc.), and [3] RA18 (Restricted Artistic for only those eighteen years and above). According to MDA, "these classifications are designed to allow greater choice of arts entertainment for adults while protecting the young and preserving the artistic integrity of such performances" (MDA Website). Some types of arts entertainment events/activities are exempted from arts licensing such as 'getai' (Chinese street performances), individual events at hotels and shopping centres, traditional Chinese lion or dragon dances, community centre activities and busking. Some agencies enjoy exemption with conditions. These include venue managers in government-owned spaces who organise regular events, such as the Kreta Ayer People's Theatre, the Esplanade and the Arts House. Communitarian events such as live-band music provided at weddings and funerals and any arts entertainment provided at any local soccer matches (MDA Website).

The success of Singapore as global media city and a distinctive global city for the arts is determined not only by financial returns but also by its ability to tolerate and promote cultural and social differences. That Singapore is purportedly an Asian and conservative society with strong anti-Western and moralistic views has, to a large degree, hampered its drive to garner credibility in the arena of content development. Its management of culture

192 through modes of censorship primarily drives this hampering. David Birch (1996) in his assessment of censorship in his article, ‘Film and Cinema in Singapore: Cultural Policy as Control' notes that Singapore has grown from a period of making blazon cuts and prohibitions to materials "deemed contrary to the public interest" to enforcement through regulatory rating systems, erasure (ban of materials) and self-censorship: The latter being the hardest to change having entrenched Singaporeans in a culture of authoritarianism for decades (189-190).

In 1992, the Censorship Review Committee’s Report (CRC 92) proposed some liberalisation. But the principles of censorship were determined by a public sensibility survey, which, “showed that Singaporeans [were] deeply influenced by their religious beliefs and moral principles” (CRC 92: 11). This principle saw the implementation of stringent censorship for the mass media, particularly television and ban on content that compromised national interests (multiracial and multireligious) and Singaporean values, such as homosexuality. The intent to develop Singapore as a media hub saw the introduction of film classification (Rated Artistic 21 (RA21) for viewers above twenty-one years of age; NC15 – for viewers above fifteen years old; PG – parental guidance advised; and G – for general viewership) while the artists were compelled to have their scripts vetted by the NAC before the issuance of a public entertainment license by the police Public Entertainment Licensing Unit (PELU). The government plays the role of moral police injecting fear of moral decrepitude seeping into the seams of society. It attempts to create a sanitised society through ignorance and obliviousness to the various possibilities of the world. Birch cites Singaporean novelist Gopal Baratham's article ‘The Right to Decide' to the Straits Times (17 April 1991) that the “two principle justifications for censorship in Singapore, majority wishes and the protection of Asian Values, are misconceptions….They are cultural smokescreens for the real

193 political agenda of control through participation and feedback by keeping the ‘silent majority on the edge of their seats” (Birch, 1996: 197).

Debates around censorship are age-old and yet, current. Singaporean critics of censorship see it as a barrier to access information. It is a subjective exercise in morality and a leftover practice of governmentality from the authoritarian era of Lee Kuan Yew. Those who support censorship see it as a regulatory mechanism that ensures that information is tailored to the needs of a communitarian ideology reflecting the social mores of society. Singaporean poet and playwright Alfian bin Sa'at, in his essay, ‘A Censorship Manifesto' (2001) considers censorship in Singapore as an "act of violence" that perpetuates a "victim-aggressor" polarisation in society (211). In considering censorship in the arts he finds that there is lack of transparency in the manner in which censorship is exercised by the two main coordinating bodies, NAC and PELU. NAC vets and approves the content while PELU licenses the staging. There have been instances where one approves, and the other does not. In that instance, PELU is the final arbiter. He allegorises:

Two knives: unlike a double-barrelled shotgun, which merely increases the firepower of the aggressor, the two knives not only symbolise a doubling of the arsenal but also the possibility of contingency. If one knife proves to be blunt, there is another to inflict a wound. It is also useful to imagine the edges of the two knives constantly scrapping against each other in an act of mutual sharpening (Sa’at, 2001: 211).

194 The artist is left out by the duality of the censor-aggressor when a work is censored upon submission of a script. For example, in 2000 the play Talaq (Divorce) by a Tamil language theatre company Agni Koothu, was licensed by PELU but NAC took upon itself to identify issues that may be problematic on the grounds of social morality.26 The play on marital violence and rape of women in the Indian-Muslim community in Singapore was staged in the Tamil language in 1998. However, its English and Malay language productions were disallowed in 2000 following complaints from so-called religious sectors of the community. The NAC invited religious and social groups to a preview of the play before deciding on its approval. PELU (the police) finally withdrew the license on the advice of the NAC and the Islamic Council of Singapore (Chong, 2004; Liew, 2001; Sa’at, 2001). In another instance, the Mandarin play VaginaLOGUE (2000) by Dramabox was approved by PELU but the NAC, upon a preview of the play, threatened to withdraw funding if the theatre company did not remove an image of a vagina projected on screen. The theatre company refused and staged the play without NAC funding (Sa’at, 2001). Sa’at demonstrates that wherever PELU fails to identify censorable elements, the “NAC reads between the lines and swoops in for the kill” (212). Liew (2001) sees NAC taking on the custodial role of ensuring “socially responsible art” (176), which is out of character of a national agency focused on the development of aesthetic and critical aspects of art. This exercise revealed two things: first, the immaturity of the NAC in balancing its role in nurturing and administration of the arts and second, reveals the tribulations of a government trying to shed an image of authoritarianism to one of renaissance. In the end, the world in the 1990s saw Singapore as having a “repressive political climate” (New York Times, 28 October 1999). The

26 For a documentation of this play and its controversial censorship see Liew Kai Khiun. ‘Between Sensationalism and Information: Talaq and the Media’ in FOCAS. Singapore, 2001.

195 subsequent chapters will also deal with the way the arts community dealt with censorship.

Ten years after, with growing technological change (the Internet and new media) and the government's investment in the creative industries, a review of censorship in 2003 was activated. The Censorship Review Committee's Report (CRC 03) pushed for greater liberalisation through a nuanced use of language in its report so as to not ruffle the feathers of conservatives and, at the same time, fulfil the aspiring needs of the global Singaporean. The report maintained the need to be sensitive to the ethnic and religious sensibilities legitimating censorship as a means to keep at bay "content that may denigrate race and religion, harm the young, prejudice public order and erode the community's moral norms" (CRC 03: 11). The report recommended an arm's length approach to censorship while acknowledging the growth of the Internet as a new source of information traffic that was both a boon and bane for securing national and social interests. With an arm's length approach to Internet censorship, Internet service providers such as Singtel, Pacific Internet, and Starhub were to have their self-regulating system, through monitoring and content labelling/advisories, to keep harmful content inaccessible to the public or risk indictment. Furthermore, MDA sanctioned a symbolic ban of one hundred harmful websites especially those that harboured content such as paedophilia and child pornography (CRC 03: 15) as a means of restoring government oversight and presence in an otherwise self-regulating space marketplace. The space for the non-denigrative discussion and representation of race, religion and sexuality (homosexuality) was broadened with a flexible and contextual approach to content management. Just like the Internet industry, industry players for film, publication and the arts were encouraged to use consumer advisories to guide consumers' decision. The report made film distributors responsible for classifying their films, and any censorship was to be

196 undertaken by them. Here censorship was exercised through the rationale of business. That is, a film distributor preferring to reach to a large viewership needed to make a business consideration as to whether an objectionable scene should be removed. For example, the maintenance of a risqué scene in a film may receive an R21 rating, which may circumscribe viewership. The removal of the scene may result in an NC16 rating, which may widen the viewer base. While the CRC Report called for a nuanced liberalisation, the approach to censorship in Singapore remained instructive, conservative and shy of engaging in the critical issues such as freedom of access and expression in the arts, especially in the nascent creative industries.

Audrey Wong (2012)27 observes that during this period, many artists saw a “social and political role for themselves” through links and collaboration (48). This was a direct, though at times, spontaneous response to a lack of counterpoints to the grand narrative of a global city that the government agencies were rapidly adhering to. As a response to growing concern regarding censorship as “the arbitrary exercise of power to silence expression” (Straits Times, 22 Jan 2003), the arts community mobilised itself to draw up a counter proposal for the consideration of the Censorship Review Committee before the latter completed its report (Davis, 2004: 295- 308; Tan, 2017). Helmed by theatre company TheatreWorks’ associate artistic director/playwright and journalist Tan Tarn How and signed off by approximately 250 artists, arts managers, academics and enthusiasts, the

27 As mentioned earlier, this thesis is specifically focused in the period of its study which is 1959 to 2012. Having said that, Audrey Wong’s article “Artists’ Advocacy in Singapore: A Changing Drama” (2012) shows that while the landscape between the government and artist communities continue to remain undulating and grainy, opportunities for artists for their voices to be heard have been established through collectives such as Arts Engage; selection of a nominated Member of Parliament specifically for the Arts; and numerous social media platforms. All these are in place and remain robust today in 2017.

197 Arts Community Proposal on Censorship, 2002 (Proposal hereafter) propositioned that government replace censorship with regulation: Regulation through the law of the land (Tan, 2017). Director of Theatre Training and Research Programme, T. Sasitharan, admonished any attempt to deliberate or articulate rules and guidelines that were “irrational and unnecessary, not to mention ineffective in this day and age. We don't need censorship. We need regulation, we need education, and we need informed, responsible dialogue and discussion" (Straits Times, 12 October 2002).

The Proposal was strategic in that it invoked national precepts such as Asian Values and renaissance city to critique and offer a counter proposal. It was a passionate plea for an open and enabling environment free from the shackles of restrictive rules that undermine Singapore's goal to be a renaissance city. The Proposal stressed that its purpose was consistent with Asian Values and its suggestions were no different from those found in global Asian cities such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. At a press briefing to introduce the Proposal, Alvin Tan, Artistic Director of The Necessary Stage, said that the briefing and the Proposal gave "government a chance to acknowledge a concrete expression of active citizenry" (Straits Times, 12 October 2002); a grassroots initiative.

Building on the prevailing censorship guidelines, the Proposal outlined the following:

[1] Diversity and tolerance. The Proposal called for space for celebration of diversity and the free expression of diversity and the tolerance of multiple views, opinions, expressions and vantage points.

198 [2] Regulation by rating, zoning and belting. Using the CRC's approach to categorise and organise content according to ratings, zoning and belting, the Proposal recommended that nothing be banned but everything be regulated, zoned and belted. For example, materials not suitable for general consumption be allowed and zoned into geographic, cultural precincts and for mass media belted at different time sections of the day.

[3] Advertising and promotion. Access to materials be regulated through strict advertising and promotion guidelines whereby materials deemed sensitive ‘brown-bagged' and sold at cultural precincts or city zones, restricted to certain areas of a bookstore and not readily visible to those who do not wish to come across these materials.

[4] Avenues for recourse and complaint. With regards to freedom of expression the Proposal did not see this as a matter of concern as Singaporeans have, over the years, demonstrated maturity in engaging with sensitive issues. The Proposal underscore this and stressed that government should "stop assuming that Singaporeans are unable to handle conflict through debate and argument". Furthermore, the Proposal suggested that people aggrieved by artists or arts groups should have means to respond through different avenues rather than resort to requesting a ban.

[5] Engagement with audience. The proposal called for a greater understanding of the nature of works such as forum theatre, performance art and street or site-specific works involving the audience as part of the process of art making. Rather than prescribe

199 such works, the Proposal requested for an appreciation of unpredictability as being an essential part of the artistic practice.

[6] Approvals. All arts events and productions require a public entertainment license. A denial of a license is tantamount to censorship. The Proposal appealed for its removal and that artists and arts groups be required to notify the authorities of the intent to stage/present works. This was intended at removing unnecessary paperwork but also shift the social responsibility to artists and arts groups.

[7] Protection of minors. The Proposal calls for the protection of minors from harmful materials through the imposition of age limits and that stricter regulation be placed on ratings of violence for film and television.

There was a degree of earnestness in the Proposal. That is, it sought to redress the harsh authoritarian approach by embracing values deeply close to the government. The value of the Proposal is in its suggestion that artists and the society have to self-regulate and be responsible for their artistic output and the communities they engage. But the means to self-regulation is significantly encumbered by the limits of freedom of expression in a culture that is driven by the economic, rather than creative, possibilities of the city and its people. While well-intentioned, the Proposal was largely ignored by the government.

In response to this development, Ooi (2010), drawing from Francis Fukuyama’s framework of cultural shifts in East Asia, terms Singapore a "soft authoritarian state" which has "found a way to reconcile market economics with a kind of paternalistic authoritarianism that persuades rather

200 than coerces" (Fukuyama, 1992 cited in Ooi, 2010: 403). Ooi sketches a critique of authoritarianism found in Singapore from censorship of films on politics to resistance to decriminalise homosexuality. He observes that this happens despite a vibrant and economically resilient creative community which continues to engage with these complex issues. Hence, his thesis bifurcates: that it is true that the Singapore arts and cultural scene is dynamic and engaged as recorded by international media and critics. On the other hand, the arts and culture are not developing with the openness to embrace artists who actively engage in social and political commentary and, failing to do so, the growth of the arts will remain "hampered in some quarters" (414). Clearly, "some quarters" will remain unfulfilled. However, the opportunity for critical engagement and commentary especially through social media as becoming a possibility today while the many other quarters of the arts continue to partake in the opportunities that pragmatism provides.

While the government invested in infrastructural development, content development, regional and international development, it continued to ensure that core values of multiculturalism, Asian Values and Shared Values remain quietly critical to their endeavour. Infrastructural (museums and theatres) and content development facilitate multicultural participation, and that content (e.g. local theatre or film) remain relevant to the common and Shared Values. Government investment may be deemed superficial and no different from tourism which brands Singapore, but it supported the economic imperatives to make Singapore globally attractive. With this kind of policy climate, the possibilities of the creative industries in Singapore remain an academic question measured purely by one mode of assessment: the quantifiable dollars and cents as an end in itself. As such, the Singaporean notion of culture built on a communitarian ideology of multiculturalism and Asian Values was effectively being replaced by fancy

201 mobile phones, Banyan Tree Resorts and Tiger Balm – institutionalised, formalised and commodified within the rubric of Lily Kong's (2000) ‘hegemony of the economic'. Culture in 21st century Singapore is markedly gluttonous, and any form of existence seems to be acknowledged only through the deterministic processes of consumption (Yue, 2006: 19), ‘disneyfication' (Kwok and Low, 2002) or ‘renaissancification'. As should be clear by now, this thesis is not an apologist for the economic, although this chapter has demonstrated that the economic deeply shapes and legitimates the existence of culture. Rather, I seek to admonish the cultural economy's tacit commitment to lifestyle and consumption as the main mode of negotiation of culture negating social histories and cultural specificities. As Yue (2006) eloquently surmises, "the good consumer is a good citizen" (23). As such, this thesis is committed to exploring new, alternative vantage points to the shaping of culture, the development of identities and cultural citizenship in the subsequent chapters.

Sociologist Kwok Kian-Woon, in an article, ‘The Bonsai and the Rainforest: Reflections on Culture and Cultural Policy in Singapore' (2004), draws upon an apt metaphor of a bonsai tree. This bonsai is culturally debilitated through an arrest of its development to exude a structural aesthetic. The bonsai self-regulates itself to remain muted, yet beautiful. Cultural development in Singapore is moving along this aesthetic path. Kwok argues that the larger concern is less the economic but the depletion of Singaporean cultural capital (through the modes of regulation), which "cannot be regenerated without cultural depth" (2004: 17). Cultural depth is achievable through the spirit of free enterprise (freedom of expression, clear funding policies and self-regulation), which is displaced by the superficial excitations of the creative industries. Kwok calls on cultural policy-makers and arts administrators to recognise the inimitable qualities in artists and arts groups and foster and support their endeavour to deepen the aesthetic

202 environment, which in turn engenders all kinds of creative effort (Kwok, 2004: 17). However, a critical question remains: what kind of arts does this culture of design in this global city produce? The answer perhaps lies in looking at Selves.

In 2002, the NAC published Selves: State of the Arts in Singapore to celebrate the new millennium and the NAC’s tenth anniversary. Edited by Kwok Kian Woon (sociologist), Arun Mahizhnan (policy analyst) and T. Sasitharan (actor, theatre critic), Selves served as a report card to the 1989 ACCA Report and Goh’s vision. The foreword by then information and arts minister, Lee Yock Suan stoically iterated the government’s commitment to transform Singapore into a global city for the arts. However, the book is interesting on another level. Designed as a scrapbook of visuals and ideas, the book is difficult to manage with 268 pages of A3 leaves ring-bound interlaced with cloth, glossed photographs, matt papers, nets, cut outs, and small book located and bound within the larger book. The cover is metallic silver mirroring and reflecting the word ‘selves’ inscribed in Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil proportionate to population size and political influence. The fonts within the text are erratic and the different languages interplay with the various ethnic art forms with each page designed and dissected differently. It is a challenging book to read not regarding content but the manner in which we physically read through the book. The complex postmodern design reflects the complex nature of the arts in Singapore. As an NAC publication, it seeks to present social histories of the arts within the frames of celebratory overtures. However, arts development is far from being merely celebratory, and the design through its sheer physicality prods the reader to engage with the difficult task of thinking and to critique the text at hand.

203 In the editorial of Selves entitled ‘Visions’ T. Sasitharan critiques the vision for a global city for the arts by unpacking the problematic of defining arts and culture in Singapore. His essay is instructional to artists and the government. He argues that culture as fiction is "conditional, contextual and contingent" (Kwok et. al, 2002: 23) and it is hard to insist art practitioners be framed as producers of culture since their practices which, while circulating within economic, social and political realms, reside in the world of aesthetics where principles of autonomy, pleasure and elevation (Said, 1994) reign supreme. He stresses that artists need to realise the twin role of the aesthetic and the industry in cultural formulation (the latter place where they circulate their ideas) or risk becoming irrelevant. Quoting Ernest Renan's formulation of the nation, Sasitharan questions the principles of hermetic ideals that on the one hand protect and enhance nationhood and on the other, commit crimes on people to maintain the ideal especially in the wake of globalisation where a borderless world presents itself as a panacea to cultural roots. He says:

…what would Renan have made of contemporary Singapore – a reluctant nation in a globalised world, a people whose roots in an ever-changing land never had the time to reach deeper into a common well of humanity, whose historical amnesia is but an unsatisfactory shortcut to a superficial nationalism, and whose quest for “culture” is perhaps more a response to the demands of the global marketplace than to the dilemmas of modernity? And if nationhood is too important to be left to politicians, what role can be played by artists? Indeed, is there

204 any connection at all between nation-making and art- making? (Sasitharan, 2002: 25)

Sasitharan’s critique seems to have been assiduously missed the editorial scissors of the NAC administrators, for it is a critique that the principle of a global city for Singapore is misguided.

Wee (2003) pushes the envelope further. He says, “some leading politicos had discovered that to become a serious global city capable of attracting and retaining ‘foreign talent’ of senior business executives who could further ‘globalise’ the city-government, we needed Western metropolitan-style cultural infra- and superstructures that would enable Singapore to become a sort of ‘London of the East’.” He loathes the "overall instrumentalist attitude", and the "social-engineering imperative and paradigm" that was adopted for the policies, which he believes gave rise to a “central tension between the professed wish for a dynamic creativity and the existing instrumental-rational mental set”. Wee fears that this approach to the arts will have two fallouts: an aesthetic sensibility that locates arts and culture within the “Cult of the Beautiful” as embodied in the physical architecture of the Esplanade; and that, the arts may be compromised and categorised with what he terms as “globalised high culture.”

3.6 Conclusion

This chapter has introduced the emergence of the Singaporean cultural and creative industries through the introduction of critical cultural policies which embody the government's vision for the arts as a key contributor to

205 economic growth. Through the close study of the cultural policies, this chapter has revealed that cultural policies draw from economic policies designed to enshrine Singapore's competitive position as a global city in Asia. It has noted through, a scrutiny of the theoretical field of culture that, it is complex and contingent upon government’s desire to build cultural capital. The chapter has shown that the evolution of the cultural industries into the creative industries enshrines economic imperatives over artistic and cultural value. This is evidenced by the discussion on censorship and the need to provide ventilation space for art and artists as the heavy hand of government asserts itself. This heavy hand imprints itself into the Singapore Arts Festival as Part Two reveals.

In sum, Part One laid the architecture within which the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival will be situated. Chapter Two outlined the way in which multiculturalism, Asian Values and Shared Values were lynchpins to designing culture in Singapore, while Chapter Three demonstrated the establishment of cultural policies to develop cultural and creative industries for Singapore and position it as a global city for the arts. The issues and themes outlined will reverberate through the subsequent chapters on the Singapore Arts Festival.

206 PART TWO

The Singapore Arts Festival and the Production of Culture

207 Chapter Four

THE EMERGING YEARS: 1950s to 1980s

4.1 Introduction

This chapter maps the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival from 1959 to 1989. This broad swathe is to show how the development of the Arts Festival was tied to decolonisation and independence. This chapter studies the cultural milieu of the 1950s and 1960s, which was imbued with purpose to make sense of a nation-in-the-making fostered by rapid decolonisation by the British. This moment produced two significant arts festivals: the 1959 Singapore Arts Festival and the 1963 Southeast Asia Cultural Festival. Little is known about both these festivals, and this chapter brings to light their form and function and how they responded to the political exigencies of that time. The chapter studies the manner in which the arts served, as a matter of "practical politics" (Rajaratnam, 1960), as a social gel for a diasporic community in the 1950s and 1960s.

In the 1970s, the arts rallied an industrialising country behind nation- building. This chapter will also reveal how the arts, in post-independent Singapore, functions as a means to form a national identity around multiculturalism. As Chapter Two underscored, multiculturalism as a political instrument of social structuring, is unstable and vulnerable (Clammer, 1985). The Singapore model of multiculturalism erased ethnic and communal diversity and engineered a didactic form of multiculturalism (Siddique, 1989, Olds and Yeung, 2004). The chapter demonstrates the Arts Festival echoed this form in its aspiration and programming and helped further the government’s agenda.

208

The chapter will discuss the re-emergence of the Arts Festival, after a fifteen-year absence, in 1977 as private, public and people initiative and how its seeds the aspirations of the arts community into cultural policy. The 1980s Arts Festivals were engaged with discovery as the city-state was slowly building its financial resources to become more self-sustaining. It brought the world of arts to Singapore to expose and educate its citizens about the world around them but also to bring international attention to the social existence of a nation. This chapter will demonstrate how the 1980s were a fertile period when artists worked towards shaping a linguistic, cultural and symbolic language, borne out of their multicultural co- existence, to represent the soul of Singapore or as Koh Tai Ann (1989) emphasises “serve to identify Singapore as a nation”. The Arts Festival was a reflection of the milieu of an emerging nation waiting to come of age. This chapter sets the stage for Chapter Five when the government becomes the primary driver of the Arts Festival to make Singapore a global city for the arts.

4.2 Arts in a Newly Emerging Nation: 1950s and 1960s

The Singapore Arts Festival has begun auspiciously. There is every reason to hope that not only will it become a major event in the cultural life of the island, but also that it will mark the beginning of a new role for Singapore in Southeast Asia.

209 Michael Sullivan, Chairman, Singapore Arts Council (1959)

I begin in the 1950s when Singapore was working towards self-governance. As a process of decolonisation of Southeast Asia, the British aspired to introduce a common national culture to foster social cohesion. Not dissimilar to their approach in India (Purohit, 1988), the colonial cultural policy for Singapore promoted the widespread use of the English language, the introduction of arts in school curriculum, the establishment of University of Malaya Art Museum and art societies, and the formation of a quasi-formal arts council. This policy gave the expatriate community the impetus to organise numerous activities to reach out to various levels of the society (Koh, 1989). The arts became a tool to communicate with broadly diverse and illiterate migrant communities and the idea of multiculturalism - as a cornerstone of an emerging Malayan national culture – was a key instrument of British decolonisation in Southeast Asia (Hack 2001). The success of multiculturalism was critical to ensure a harmonious living environment in an extremely culturally and ideologically diverse Southeast Asia. Harper (1999) contends that while this seeded neocolonialism, it was counteracted by a rich and varied production of ethnic, religious and community events and activities that were emerging in different parts of Singapore and Malaya. One such event was the Arts Festival.

The 1950s Southeast Asia was invariably colourful and vibrant against a backdrop looming large with a cultural revolution in China. In Malaya and Singapore, the introduction of cinema and its attendant production houses added to the vibrancy signalling a newfound nationalistic fervour. Many schools and individuals working in the arts integrated localised themes into

210 the weave of multiculturalism, as seen in the many school productions of the time; for example, The Kampong Story by the Chinese High School (1953), community cultural festivals (e.g. Aneka Ragam), and the art of the famous Chinese- and European-trained artists, Georgette Chen, Liu Kang, Chen Chong Swee, Chen Wen Hsi, and Cheong Soo Pieng. The natural osmosis between ethnic communities was most pronounced in this period as the population of migrants was stumbling to find its way in dealing with life in a new territory. Colonialism favoured a multiethnic federation for Singapore and Malaya (Hack, 2001) and it was most elegantly lived out in the film credits of Malay language films produced by the Shaw Brothers and the Malayan Film Unit in Malaya and Singapore in the 1950s, which recorded a strong multicultural production team (Uhde and Ng, 2009). This vibrancy inevitably gave the Singapore Arts Council, a quasi-formal association formed in 1955 comprising performing and visual arts societies, the confidence to consider an Arts Festival.

4.2.1 Singapore Arts Festival 1959

Festival paraphernalia, archival materials and interviews with Professor Bernard Tan, chairman of a number of Arts Festival steering committees, revealed that the idea for an Arts Festival could be traced to a meeting in 1956 held by the Singapore Arts Council. The idea was mooted by the permanent secretary of then education ministry, Lee Siow Meng, and was funded at the cost of S$20,000 by the government. Espousing the colonial cultural policy of bringing the arts to the masses, celebrating their difference through multiculturalism, developing new works to speak for an emerging society and establish Singapore as a centre for Southeast Asia. Michael

211 Sullivan,28 then chair of the Singapore Arts Council, in his message for the festival programme book in 1959, laid the aims of the Arts Festival as a simple but significant enterprise for Singapore: to bring the arts of Singapore to the people of Singapore; to stimulate new ventures in the arts; and to lay the foundation for making Singapore an international cultural centre for Southeast Asia.

Sullivan elaborated that for the arts to reach the people, it needed to be barrier-free. He argued that pricing and ticketing should not encumber the community from engaging with the arts. In this regard, the Council kept the ticket prices low with a nominal S$1 for indoor shows and no cost for outdoor events. Second, the stimulation of new works was on the premise that "the most original and daring experiments; for it is such experiments, and not merely by the performance of old works – however well done – [will ensure] that new life is put into the arts. We hope that, as the Festival establishes itself as an annual event, it will stimulate our creative artists to produce new works especially for performance at the Festival. If they take up this challenge, no one need ever say again that Singapore is a ‘cultural desert'" (3). That an emerging nation required its narratives and artistic practices unique to its condition, rather than mimic received classics, was significant in this aim. The underwriting of new commissions by the organisers was significant in acknowledging that new and experimental works would not have the opportunity to compete with established works and that it would encourage artists to produce art without the fear of financial ruin in a relatively emerging country at that time. The more

28 Professor Michael Sullivan (1916-2013) was a world leading scholar of Chinese art at Oxford University. From 1954-1960, he worked as an art historian at the University of Malaya and became the founding curator of the University of Malaya Art Museum located in Singapore. He worked and lived in China and Southeast Asia. His life-long art collection now resides at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford University.

212 important question that remained unanswered during this period was what kinds of art would be allowed to find its way to audiences. The final aim laid out by Sullivan was to make Singapore an international cultural centre. He acceded that it would take longer to achieve this goal but was optimistic. He said that he saw,

….no reason why this city, which for one hundred and fifty years has been the trading centre of Southeast Asia, should not become its cultural centre as well. It is ideally situated and, moreover, could from its own resources produce performances representative of four major cultures – and where else in the world is this possible? As the Festival develops, it should attract not only local talent, but also drama and ballet companies, orchestras and international art exhibitions from all over the world. (4)

This emphasis to be a cultural centre is significant as it enshrined Singapore’s destiny as a trading port and a cultural emporium. It highlights Singapore's imperative to have its own distinct voice within the Federation of Malaya. This aspiration transforms into Lee Kuan Yew’s metropolis, Goh Chok Tong’s global city and Lee Hsien Loong’s renaissance city thereby becoming a leitmotif of the Singapore story over the decades.

The Singapore Arts Festival was staged from 1 to 8 April 1959. Opened by Singapore last British governor, Sir William Goode, it celebrated the

213 multicultural fabric of Singapore and Southeast Asia and was held at numerous public venues such as Victoria Theatre, Victoria Memorial Hall (today’s Victoria Concert Hall), Drama Centre at Fort Canning, the Padang and Hong Lim Green. The Arts Festival comprised a mélange of programmes by community groups such as I-Lien Dramatic Society, Bhaskar’s Academy of Dance, Indian Fine Arts Society, Singapore Musical Society, Singapore Stage Club, Perkumpulan Seni, and Singapore Ballet. Schools were given an opportunity to present a variety of cultural concerts and performances, and the Photographic Society of Singapore presented an exhibition of photographs, while the Singapore Arts Council and the United States Information Services sponsored an exhibition entitled ‘20th Century Highlights of American Painting’, featuring the works of young and emerging artists such as Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollack, Georgia O’Keefe, Thomas Eakins, and John Sloan. The Singapore Film Society curated three award-winning films, Wayang Kulit and Timeless Temiar (Malayan Film Unit), and Rekava (Sri Lanka). Embassies and consulates from Southeast Asia contributed ethnic performances.

The function of this Arts Festival was to find common ground for a nation comprised of a diasporic generation seeking to locate and produce its own culture. Importantly, as shown in Chapter Two, culture in Singapore is linguistically and culturally diverse, and it is at once Asian, postcolonial, multiethnic and multicultural. From Chinese Opera to Malay Opera (Bangsawan), Indian classical dance (Bharatanatyam) to intercultural theatre, Indonesian gamelan to jazz, and from Chinese calligraphy to performance art, the range is enormous, representing the globalised dimension of Singapore. The peculiarities of multiple languages (Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, English and others) in shaping the production of art in their classical and contemporary forms required more than a mere working knowledge of these languages. This broad and rich cultural canvas informed

214 and directed the manner in which the arts were to be viewed and supported in Singapore over the past fifty years. It also underscored the tone and complexion of the 1959 Arts Festival.

The Arts Festival began with the intention to be an annual event encouraging the production of new works, multicultural works and those that were not financially viable. It did not see a second season. Though the reasons remain unclear, one could surmise that the political climate of the time – Singapore was on a path to independence – may have dictated a shift in priorities. For the Arts Festival occurred at a time of cultural activism in Singapore, inspired by internal political self-governance and growing nationalist energy, leading to independence in 1965. Lee Kuan Yew came to power in 1959 with a nation-building masterplan to obtain independence for Singapore through a merger with Malaya, to ride on a rapid industrialisation project for Singapore, which was identified by the British as a key engine of decolonisation (Harper, 1999) and to develop a new nation out of the colossal colonial enterprise. But the type of multiculturalism that the Arts Festival espoused was clearly aligned with the colonial/political strategy of that time. It coordinated the performances to speak of simplistic representational cultures (Chinese, Malay, India, European) as an organising principle understood by the British as opposed to pitching a new multiculturalism - introducing and celebrating diversity of an emergent nation. This agglomeration of diversity in a Singapore model of multiculturalism as Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others (CMIO) was seeded and celebrated. This seeding had far-reaching implications as it became entrenched as the defining model of Singaporean multiculturalism.

A ministry of culture was set up with S. Rajaratnam, a journalist, as its first minister in 1959. Building on the British cultural policy of decolonisation, the ministry developed a cultural policy to engineer social and cultural

215 integration with broadcasting and telecasting services designed to “battle for the hearts and minds of the people for a united Malaysian nation, an undivided loyalty and a sense of belonging” (Southeast Asia Cultural Festival programme guide, 1963). Besides this, programmes such as writers’ conferences and over one 150 stagings of Aneka Ragam Ra’ayat (people’s cultural concerts) from 1959 to 1963, as well as public campaigns such as National Loyalty Week, Mass X-Ray campaign and Save Water campaign, were rolled out with swift efficiency as a means of national communication. The one key fruition of this cultural policy was the acceptance of the Malay language as the national language of Singapore. It was a demonstration of single-mindedness for a collective identity underscoring Singapore’s umbilical link to Malaya and its future in Southeast Asia cradled by Malaysia and Indonesia.

Singapore in the 1960s was a hotbed of cultural activism inspired by many things but influenced by the cultural revolution in China, which injected Chinese nationalist fever to the political climate of Singapore. Several key moments were located in this period, all of which documented the social environment for a migrant population. Literary works by Lim Chor Pee, Goh Poh Seng, Kuo Pao Kun and Stella Kon critically explored themes of identity in a new nation. Composer Leong Yoon Pin attempted to rework traditional folk songs into symphonic arrangements for orchestras to give a sense of pride to artists and citizens. The theatre of Bani Buang explored social malaise in the Malay community in a nation partitioned from its hinterland while the poetry of Edwin Thumboo celebrated independence and multiracialism. The paintings of a group of China-born Western-trained artists (Nanyang artists) visualised Southeast Asia as a new frontier for migrant communities, peoples and cultures.

216 The formation of the People's Association in 1960 – a government community wing that looks at social and cultural activities as tools for nation-building - marked an ethnicity-based social agenda otherwise known as multiracialism (i.e., CMIO - Chinese, Malay, Indians, and Others) that was to become a determinant of cultural production in Singapore. Koh (1989) notes that the spirit of this period was fuelled by the excitement of the time in itself, which was confronted with the end of colonialism, questions of national identity, and the relationship between the individual and the government (53).

If buildings are vital to the formation of institutions that anchor a nation- state, the site of Fort Canning Hill was developed into a civic and cultural hub for Singaporean to gravitate towards learning and expressing themselves. The National Library was completed and opened in 1960 at the foot of Fort Canning Hill alongside the newly constructed 3,420-seat National Theatre (1963) in King George V Park, complementing the Van Cleef Aquarium and the Cultural Centre at Canning Rise. Built at the cost of S$2 million through donations by the public, the National Theatre came to be an iconic symbol of a communitarian “ideal of a harmonious development of a diversity of cultures within the framework of national unity” (SEAsian Festival programme guide, 1963). The National Theatre hallmarked the cultural ballast of a group of immigrants calling themselves one people.

4.2.2 The Southeast Asia Cultural Festival, 1963

Coinciding with the opening of the National Theatre, the ministry of culture appointed the National Theatre Trust (which was formed in 1959 to manage the National Theatre and spearhead cultural activities), to organise the first

217 Southeast Asia Cultural Festival from 8 to 15 August 1963. This festival was welcomed as it filled the vacuum that the Singapore Arts Festival left after 1959. It was to serve as a platform for nation-building through self- expression in multicultural Singapore, to celebrate the opening of the National Theatre and to build goodwill amongst Southeast Asian countries. Approximately 1,500 artists from twelve neighbouring countries participated in a pageantry of Asian culture, which then Yang di-Pertuan (head of state) Yusof Ishak called a “Southeast Asian cultural renaissance” (Southeast Asia Cultural Festival programme guide, 1963: 187).

The planning started two years ahead of its execution in 1961 by a festival committee chaired by Lee Khoon Choy, permanent secretary of the culture ministry, and supported by pillars of the Singapore arts scene, notably composer Zubir Said (composer of Singapore’s national anthem), journalist Wee Kim Wee (who later became the President of Singapore, 1985-93), music educator Paul Abisheganaden and Indian classical dance expert K.P. Bhaskar. Eight sub-committees focusing on logistics, programmes, and artist liaison were whipped into action to support what Paul Abisheganaden calls the “mother of all festivals” (2005: 245). The Arts Festival was primarily programmed with a communitarian ethos celebrating the traditional cultures of Southeast Asia and popular culture of East Asia as represented by Hong Kong film actors present at the festival. It was an apt event for a country seeking to find a voice within a diverse and diversifying Asia. However, it embraced diversity as a key determinant of national identity. In this regard, the formation of the People’s Association in 1960 – a government community wing that looked at ethnicity-based social and cultural activities as tools of nation-building.

In sum, the 1950s and 1960s hallmarked the cultural aspiration of a group of immigrants calling themselves ‘one people’. A significant enterprise of the

218 1960s was the commencement of the Music for Everyone series by the culture ministry in 1968. Aimed at presenting affordable concerts by local and international artists to inspire a new generation of artists, the series reached out to a considerable generation of Singaporeans through the educational system well into the 1980s. Its focus on content made it “break down the visible and invisible barriers surrounding ‘concert-going’” and brought people into formal venues in informal ways (Abisheganaden, 2005: 187). It was this spirit of ‘breaking down’, fuelled by the excitement of the time itself, which was confronted with the end of colonialism that questioned cultural and national identities and the relationship between the individual and the government (Koh, 1989: 53).

4.3 Arts in an Independent Singapore: 1970s

Singapore gained independence in 1965. The young city-state was seeking to build its economic and social infrastructure against a tide of sectarianism, communism, poverty and a rapidly industrialising world. Scholars and observers of Singaporean culture agree that, while the arts played an instrumentalist role in political participation, the arts for its intrinsic value was not a national priority in the 1960s and 1970s (Chong, 2010: 132). Chong (2010) cites a proclamation in 1966 by then minister of state for culture, Lee Khoon Choy that “the days of art for art’s sake are over. Artists should play an integral part in our effort to build a multiracial, multilingual, and multireligious society where every citizen has a place under the sun” (Lee, 1966 cited in Chong 2010). In 1967, deputy prime minister Goh Keng Swee provided instructions to theatre-makers at a show at the Victoria Theatre. He said, "themes of the plays should be in keeping with the realistic life in Singapore and its multiracial, multicultural, and multireligious spirit. Second, they must discard the crazy, sensual,

219 ridiculous, boisterous, and over-materialistic style of the West. In the same way, the feudalistic, superstitious, ignorant, and pessimistic ideas of the East are also undesirable….and provide noble, healthy, and proper cultural entertainment for the people” (Goh, 1967 cited in Chong 2010). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an emerging politico-cultural landscape of a young nation was defined by such proclamations by politicians in public. It commenced a discourse of framing the West as decadent and that Singaporean youths should be kept away from the yellow culture (Kong, 2000).

The arts came to be framed within this state apparatus of multiculturalism as a means of managing racial and social harmony and projecting a unified face to the sceptical world. In the 1970s, the People's Association created the National Dance Company, which hallmarked itself as an influential voice of Singapore to the rest of the world. The unity of the new nation was at the heart of its programming. For example, the company's ephemeral dance work, Unity in Rhythm, choreographed by Madhavi Krishnan, Som Said and Lee Shu Fen in 1972, was a vessel of diverse dance styles brought together by drums and similar rhythmic structures. This style of performance brought to a natural conclusion the concept of ‘New Malaya Culture' and the emergence of a new Singaporean Singapore by presenting ethnic relations in a highly precise and aesthetically probable manner, removing all social and political tensions as improbable. That is, the dance form primarily took movements and gestures that were readily identifiable by the multiethnic public to form its core structure. Rhythmic structures were complementary to each culture, and the sounds grew louder as the performance came to a natural build-up and conclusion. This style of dance was quietly laughed at for its reductive approach to culture but was hugely popular regionally and locally, to the extent that it popularised mass circulation of pale imitations throughout community centres and in schools

220 throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The arts served a socio-political function in this period.

With a Gramsci-like hegemonic environment that the government was creating for itself in the late 1970s, one would have expected the arts to have withered by this juncture. Ironically, the arts saw a pronounced increase in the government’s patronage of the arts. Two reasons account for this. First, political overtones found in the arts were seen to be fractious of a new nation needed to be addressed; and second, the value of culture as social glue was gaining slow but ready acceptance at the government level. In this regard, the years between 1977 and 1979 stood out for several significant initiatives in the arts. First, the ministry of culture under its affable minister, Ong Teng Cheong (who later became President of Singapore, 1993-99), established specialist committees to promote dance, visual arts, literature, music and drama in the four official languages of Singapore. The ministry invested in an assistance scheme for the production of plays and inaugurated the Drama Festival that year with the aim to generate greater interest amongst the public in traditional and contemporary drama and theatre. English language theatre, in particular, thrived in forums such as the NUS-Shell Short Play Competition and the Drama Festival (1978-1989), which were wholly sponsored by multinational company Shell (Oon, 2001: 82-84). Through the competition and festival, a new generation of young thinkers and writers began to express national identity through their plays. Second, the idea for a symphonic orchestra was mooted by then deputy prime minister Goh Keng Swee to build upon the increasing confidence of the young nation. A group of classical music enthusiasts and supporters swiftly took advantage of this the following year in 1978: The Singapore Symphony Orchestra inaugurated its first concert under the baton of maestro Choo Hoey in 1979. In the same year, the Cultural Medallion was introduced by minister Ong recognising the contribution of artists and

221 cultural promoters in the young city-state (Purushothaman, 2001). Conferred by the culture minister, the award was highly-regarded by the arts community as it was seen as government’s recognition of their work, primarily acknowledged their work and commitment to the arts. Today, the Cultural Medallion has transformed into Singapore’s highest arts honours, conferred by the President of Singapore, recognising the local and global achievements of Singaporean artists. Thirdly, Ong mooted the establishment of the Singapore Cultural Foundation to be the fundraising and arts funding arm. It also served to promote the arts through an arts calendar and was instrumental in showcasing Singapore theatre in Edinburgh in the 1980s. The final landmark initiative under Ong’s directive in 1978 was a proposal to build a performing arts centre, which was realised as the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay in 2002. This staked the government's claim in shaping and investing in the arts. These events became important threads of artist and artistic development in Singapore for years to come.

4.3.1 Arts Festivals as Private, Public and People Enterprise

Amidst these developments in the late 1970s, a private initiative was quietly brewing between arts enthusiasts familiar with the 1959 and 1963 festivals and a corporate sponsor. A group of music enthusiasts and music education inspectors of public schools, who were working with one of the Ministry of Education’s extra-curricular arms known as the Young Musicians’ Society, approached a multinational corporation, Mobil Oil Singapore Pte Ltd, to sponsor a concert in 1975. Hallmarking grassroots driven private, public and people enterprise, Mobil Oil’s public relations manager, John K. B. Lim, welcomed the idea and counter-proposed an arts festival, run along the lines of the international Llangollen Eistedd to enhance the local cultural scene. Seizing the opportunity, members of the society, including Charles Lazaroo,

222 Alex Abisheganaden, Teo Lay Nah, David Lim Kim San, and Goh Say Meng, drew up a masterplan for the Arts Festival with programmes and budgets for Mobil Oil. The company, with its long history of supporting social and cultural initiatives, particularly in the United States, enhanced the proposal with the inclusion of Asian arts to reflect multiracial Singapore. One of its executives Arun Mahizhnan, who subsequently became chairman of the Arts Festival’s Steering Committee from 2004-2006 opined,

Up to the 1970s, neither the government nor the corporates saw much value in the arts in Singapore. Even when the public sector finally decided to pay more attention to the arts, the private sector was rather reluctant to plunge in as it was seen as an elitist activity with limited audience appeal. Mobil Oil pioneered arts sponsorship in Singapore bringing its long tradition of supporting the arts in the United States, its home base. It had an opportunity to plant its philanthropic flag on the arts. It is this kind of enlightened self- interest that motivates many a corporate sponsor to play a leading role in uncharted territories (Arun Mahizhnan cited in Purushothaman, 2007).

223 In October 1976, the Arts Festival was launched with a press conference to share with the public the prime objective that was to encourage, improve and create awareness of the arts in Singapore. The Arts Festival was conceived as a people’s festival – a celebration of the arts for the people by the people, continuing with themes of social cohesion and self-identity as a nation which began post-independence. The Arts Festival’s total cost of S$120,000 was fully underwritten by Mobil Oil. It was held from 24 to 30 April 1977, with competition as its core activity. A total of seventy-five entries were received and judged. In all, 1,300 participants and seventy- seven groups performed in seven nights of sold-out shows. The success of this single event fuelled an appetite in the arts community to continue the Arts Festival and it became the primordial source for the present Arts Festival.

The success of the private, public and people enterprise, saw the culture ministry taking the lead to organise the Arts Festival together with the education ministry and media corporation, Radio and Television Singapore (Ong, 1978: 1). This shift was significant. Under British colonial office, the arts were part of the education department's remit. Education was focussed on socialising a diverse population of migrants into disciplined citizens (Harper, 1999). However, archival material reveals that the idea for an arts festival was not alien to the culture ministry as the plan for a large-scale festival was mooted and its feasibility explored as far back as 1974. The education ministry remained involved, albeit in a marginal role until 1980. A sign of its diminishing role could be symbolically felt with the closing of the department of music at the University of Singapore in 1977. The department of art history met with a similar fate. The University, alongside other education providers, became teaching institutions to train the appropriate workforce in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects to support an industrialising society.

224

Continuing with the energy of the 1977 event, the 1978 Arts Festival immediately followed suit and was organised at the cost of S$150,000. Held from 11 to 17 December at the Victoria Theatre, involving more than 2,000 participants and one hundred groups, this Arts Festival embraced the need to "encourage the development of the performing and visual arts in Singapore" by presenting a kaleidoscope of performances and artists (Ong, 1978: 1). A significant milestone for the arts in Singapore was the announcement on the opening night that a Singapore Cultural Foundation was to be set up to fund arts development in Singapore. The Arts Festival showcased the inaugural performance by the Singapore Festival Orchestra and Chorus (SFOC) conducted by maestro Choo Hoey. Unlike the latter-day Singapore Festival Orchestra, formed in 2007 with professional musicians from various orchestras and freelancers in Singapore, the SFOC comprised the combined strength of the Asian Youth Orchestra, the Singapore Teachers Choir and the Singapore Youth Choir (Abisheganaden, 2005: 179-180). For the SFOC's performance, Leong Yoon Pin, one of Singapore's well-known composers, was commissioned to write a choral work set to the English translation of four poems by Chinese poet Tu Mu by A. C. Graham. The Arts Festival also saw performances by established groups such as the National Dance Company, Ping Hsieh Peking Opera Troupe, Singapore Ballet Academy, Singapore University Madrigal Singers, Kampong Glam Community Centre Li Hwei Dance Group, Singapore Indian Fine Arts Society, and a visiting troupe from the Philippines programmed alongside winners of the competition. The competition aspect of the Arts Festival continued to provide local groups with an opportunity to up their quality of performance, but these competitions were in danger of anointing a particular aesthetic sensibility in a very young society critically engaging with the arts. For the first time in its history, the Arts Festival introduced a visual arts

225 thread to its programming, featuring artists from member countries of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asia Nations).

No specific reasons were found for the absence of an Arts Festival in 1979. However, as the Arts Festival grew in scale and size the organisational challenges (project management, programming, marketing and sponsorship) were equally daunting for the civil servants who stretched their time amongst a range of activities besides the Arts Festival. This dilemma provides a glimpse as to why the Arts Festival was positioned as a bi-annual event at the start of the 1980s.

4.4 The People’s Festival: 1980s

The arts in the 1980s were marked by the need to find a Singaporean language and voice for a multicultural citizenry. Multilingual explorations, particularly in the English language theatre, were taking hold and Singaporeans at once felt at home as it resonated with a patois that blended English, Malay, Chinese and Indian languages. This contributed to a growing confidence with the arts amongst Singaporeans who mobilised themselves around artistic practices and ideologies espoused by artists- mentors who explored language and the social fabric of Singaporean society. In this regard, initiatives such as in visual arts – The Artists Village (1989); theatre – ACT 3 (1984), TheatreWorks (1985), and The Necessary Stage (1986); and dance – Singapore Dance Theatre (1987) brought artists into the world of arts as professional practice.

Several individuals were carving a niche for themselves as artist-mentors and champions of the arts. Kuo Pao Kun who was incarcerated in the late 1970s “broke the mould of single-language theatre and created plays (e.g.

226 Mama Looking for Her Cat [1988]) that encompassed a range of languages spoken in Singapore" (Wee, 2003). Quietly influential as Kuo was visual/performance artist Tang Da Wu, who returned in 1979 to Singapore after twenty years in London. He led the founding of The Artists Village in 1989, which was committed to organising the energies of young artists around contemporary art practice exploring the fast industrialising and urbanising Singapore and its negative impact on society (Wee, 2003). The third individual was a De La Salle brother, Brother Joseph McNally, an artist/educator who started a private arts institution dedicated to contemporary art practice and education called St. Patrick’s Arts Centre (later renamed Lasalle College of the Arts) in 1984. The College was to serve as an alternative aesthetic voice from the renowned Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1938, which had a strong Chinese aesthetic running through its bilingual curriculum and the design-focussed Baharuddin Vocational Institute, which was formed in 1969. Today, the latter is known as Temasek Polytechnic Design School. These institutions provided a much needed source of training for aspiring artists in an emerging nation.

The need to organise and expend creative and ideological energies through a professional company was motivated by the need to find a Singaporean language and voice that was inalienable from the social and cultural context of the people (Jit, 1993: 22). For example, multilingual explorations, particularly in the English language theatre, were taking hold. The Drama Festival mentioned earlier was gaining momentum as a site for developing a body of Singaporean works, actors and directors. According to theatre director Krishen Jit (2000), the quest had begun with the staging of productions such as playwright/director Kuo Pao Kun's The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole (1985) and Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill (1985) directed by Max Le Blond. Both productions thrilled Singaporean audiences

227 for their verve in engaging with theatre, text and Singaporeanness as lived and spoken in local patois. They went on to be staged overseas: Emily in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Coffin in Malaysia and Hong Kong. The newfound international respect for these directors' works gained them places in the Arts Festival, which was beginning to trigger a Singaporean voice onto the world stage.

Continuing the efforts of the 1970s, cultural activities in 1980s coalesced around nation-building. Nation-building was premised on the belief that the cultural activities expressed the cultural ballast of a young third-world nation aiming to be a first-world nation (Koh, 1989). Contrarian views were held with deep suspicion. While arts activities contributed significantly to nation-building, they were viewed with a degree of suspicion for their ability to flare activism as seen in the detention of theatre playwright/director Kuo Pao Kun in 1976 for espousing leftist ideology. Kuo was “the major enabling personality” for the arts; who was detained without trial from 1976-1980 for alleged communist activities. Upon release, Kuo bounced back into prominence "with plays that examined the destruction of culture and cultural memory in the wake of a statist modernity with totalising impulses, and the possibility of trans-ethnic understanding (Wee, 2003). Kuo's role in the arts development is significant. He championed the support for young artists in all art forms, in particular, theatre and visual arts, and was key in developing a contemporary art scene through his administration of a new arts space, The Substation. The system that incarcerated him awarded Kuo the Cultural Medallion in 1989 for his contributions to the arts.

If the concept of Singapore is to be a space for internationalism as discussed in chapter Two, it was in the 1980s that the Arts Festival sowed the seeds of internationalisation in the arts by bringing the world to Singaporeans. There

228 was ‘something for everyone', and this was a means to justify public funding for the arts and continued expression of nation-building. The Arts Festival ensured Singaporeans were exposed to the world through the arts and that the celebrations were at the same time nationalistic in flavour. On another level, this approach also saw the incorporation of different art forms such as film, literature, and visual arts into the Arts Festival and the development of a credible home-grown arts scene.

4.4.1 Internationalism and Bringing the World to Singapore

The 1980s kicked off with the Arts Festival bearing an international flavour with the participation of the University of Adelaide Ensemble (Australia), the Vienna Boys' Choir (Austria), Shiratori Ballet Company (Japan), National Korean Dance Company (Korea), Musica Sveciae Chamber Orchestra (Sweden) and Circle Repertory Company of New York (USA). The ten-day 1980 Arts Festival was organised at the cost of S$290,000. The competition approach as a way of organising or encouraging Singaporean participation in the Arts Festival had been waning, as different approaches to enabling and empowering Singaporean artists and arts groups were needed. This Arts Festival saw the final year of the competitive component. Furthermore, theatre was introduced as a thread of programming. The first two festivals featured music and dance, with a strong focus on the former primarily driven by the interests of the members of the Young Musicians' Society. With the event coming under the auspices of the ministry of culture, the programming presented other art forms to appeal to a broad range of audiences.

The full realisation of the Arts Festival as an international and professional entity came about in the 1982 Arts Festival. This is a valuable proposition to

229 the cultural life of Singapore. The Arts Festival represented the government's endeavour to develop Singapore into a cultural centre for the world. Not far Michael Sullivan's vision in the late 1950s, this time it aligned with economic development and a need for faster progression in education, socialisation and investment as the nation-state was approaching the new millennium. Held from 10 to 19 December costing S$1.7 million, the Arts Festival’s budget grew with new corporate sponsors such as Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Tourist Promotion Board (now the Singapore Tourism Board) facilitating to internationalise the Arts Festival as a platform for cultural consumption. In his message in the Arts Festival's programme guide, minister for culture, S. Dhanabalan, articulated the objectives of the Arts Festival: first, to "feature some of the best talents from Asia and the West…[as] an excellent opportunity for Singaporeans to widen their horizons and enjoy some of the best artists in the world" and second, "by bringing internationally renowned choreographers, musicians and theatre directors, local artists have a yardstick by which to measure their own work, gain inspiration and acquire new techniques" (1982: 5). To realise this vision, Arun Mahizhnan, then public relations advisor of Mobil Oil, recommended to Lee Wai Kok, director of the cultural affairs division in the culture ministry and chairman of the steering committee, the appointment of an artistic director for the Arts Festival to give it greater scope and depth to its programming and positioning. More significantly, it was an opportunity for civil servants turned arts administrators to learn from an expert in festival programming, directing and management.

This led to the appointment of Australian Anthony Steele, former artistic director of the Adelaide Festival, as consultant to the Arts Festival. Steele's objectives were clear. First, to broaden public appeal. He programmed a cultural mix of products to ensure audiences had an opportunity to savour the world arts. This was advertised with a tagline, ‘It's your show. Be in it!'

230 Arts Festival workers dressed in T-shirts bearing the slogan walked the streets of Singapore to invite the public to participate in the Arts Festival. Furthermore, in a broad-based appeal, film was introduced as the Festival Film Week.

Second, another notable achievement of this Arts Festival was its broadening of public access to the arts by staging productions in multiple theatre venues. Eight venues were used, and these included the Victoria Theatre, Victoria Memorial Hall, National Theatre, World Trade Centre Auditorium, Drama Centre, Singapore Conference Hall, DBS Auditorium, and the National Museum, making it accessible for audiences to reach the arts.

Third, to build and inject as high as possible a level of professionalism in Singaporean productions, Steele and the Arts Festival invited renowned practitioners from elsewhere to work with Singaporeans to build capacity and to present top class productions with Singaporean talents. This saw choreographer Padma Subramanyam (India), director John Tasker (Australia), and playwright David Henry Hwang (USA) working with Singaporean artists and arts groups in hugely successeful productions such as Valli Kalyanam (Indian), The Samseng and the Chettiar’s Daughter and FOB (English), respectively. Other collaborative projects by ethnic theatre and arts companies led to the production of The Little White Sailing Boat involving thirteen Chinese groups, Puncak involving four Malay groups and Kalaa Sandhya comprising four Indian groups, all in 1982. This act of bringing groups together to perform at the Arts Festival was indeed significant: it forced fractious arts groups to work with one another, provided funding for small and fledgling groups, and encouraged large established groups to be inclusive of others. On one level, while this brokered the development of artists' capabilities, on another it resonated

231 with the government's push to bring about social cohesion amongst a disparate group of individuals and mould them into a community, a nation. Mahizhnan shares that this approach worked to bridge partnerships and relationships between rival arts groups (Purushothaman, 2007). It ensured that within each ethnic group "no single club or society was solely responsible for a production, but that the best available performers have been selected in that the Arts Festival can give Singaporean artists the chance to give their best in the context of a festival of international standard" (Steele, 1982: 13). Some Singaporean productions were successful while others failed in this experimentation. However, by presenting these types of works the Arts Festival "had committed itself to boosting the arts scene by generating local works" (de Souza, 1988: 15).

While on the one hand raising the level of professionalism in the arts was paramount, the field of arts and festival management was also in dire need of professional skillsets and arts managers. Liew Chin Choy, programme director of the Arts Festival from 1992-1999, reflects, "From the very beginning, the Festival was very much a civil service-driven project operating under the stifling civil service rules and procedures of the Instruction Manuals. Bureaucrats posted to the Ministry of Culture were assigned the task of organising the Arts Festival as part of their civil service duties, and many of us took on the pioneering task of assembling a whole plethora of cultural activities without any arts background or formal training in arts management" (Purushothaman, 2007).

Lee Wai Kok, chairman of the Arts Festival's steering committee until 1988, reflects that the civil servants and volunteers involved in the Arts Festival were extremely passionate and driven by their commitment to seeing the arts succeed (Purushothaman, 2007). He notes that the early festival years were marked by a developing country focusing on economics and finance as

232 its key engines for survival; as such most of the senior ministers were less enthusiastic about the arts or the Arts Festival unlike many of the younger ministers today. Echoing Liew, he adds that while the civil servants and volunteers had enthusiasm, they lacked skills and professional expertise especially in marketing, which were rendered by the marketing and communications staff of Mobil Oil, such as Arun Mahizhnan. The enthusiasm amongst the civil servants who organised the Arts Festival prompted them to moot the idea of a secretariat to handle the growing Arts Festival. In 1983, a permanent secretariat was formed under the culture ministry, which later sat under the cultural affairs division of the ministry of community development (Chong, 2010). Steele came back to consult for the Arts Festival and work with the secretariat. The setting up of the secretariat also highlighted the pressing need to focus on the Arts Festival as an important event in the cultural and social life of Singapore.

The 1984 Arts Festival coincided with the twenty-fifth year of self- government. At this crucial milestone, the government proclaimed to make Singapore a "culturally vibrant society by 1999" and for the "first time the government unequivocally placed the arts and culture on the national agenda, feeling politically and economically secure enough to turn its attention to the ‘softer' areas of national development" (Goh, 2012: 176). To celebrate and support the aspiration, the Arts Festival funded at S$1.8 million featured forty-nine performances and increased its provision of outdoor activities. Moreover, to capture a larger audience base, the Arts Festival was moved from the traditional month of December to June. This immediately recorded a ninety-four per cent attendance, reaching out to 88,000 people. A song entitled ‘The Finer Side of Life', written by Mary Tan was introduced to promote the Arts Festival, and it was performed by the National University of Singapore Choir at an open-air event on the opening day. The practice of organising local groups into a single

233 production, which started in 1982, continued with The Oolah World (Chinese) directed by Kuo Pao Kun, Han Lao Da and Hua Liang, and Ramanatakam (Indian) choreographed by the Dhananjayans. For the first time, the Arts Festival introduced a Peranakan (Straits Chinese) play, Pileh Menantu, and drew record audiences. Bumboat!, an English language musical directed by American Tzi Ma, and Singaporean Lim Siauw Chong presented vignettes of contemporary Singaporean life in a series of stories conceived by a group of writers – Michael Chiang, Catherine Lim, Jacintha Abisheganaden, Rebecca Aquilla, and Kate James – and the cast. Dick Lee was the composer and musical director.

This Arts Festival boasted two other firsts: the introduction of a computerised ticketing system and the introduction of a festival fringe. The first-ever computerised system was the brainchild of Robert Iau, chairman of the Arts Festival programming committee. With his interest in computers and representation in various computer and technology-related bodies such as the Institute of System Science, he encouraged the computerisation of the ticketing system as a way forward for the Arts Festival as early as 1980. Lim Mee Lian, who had worked at the Arts Festival for at least two decades, remembers that after preparing for months to get the computers ready for selling tickets, they failed on the first day of public sales. As the queue snaked around Victoria Memorial Hall during a torrential downpour, traditional methods of ticket sales had to be embraced (Purushothaman, 2007). Today, the sophisticated ticketing systems such as SISTIC and online web-based credit card purchasing systems may be highly convenient but perhaps have diminished the vibrancy an otherwise long queue might provide.

The fringe programme, the second major initiative of the 1984 Arts Festival, began cautiously with a mix of community and amateur group

234 performances, open rehearsals and workshops by companies performing at the Arts Festival. It had a modest budget and featured twelve groups in thirty-four performances at thirteen venues including housing estates. As the fringe programme grew in subsequent years, its primary aims came to be articulated as these: to create greater awareness of the Arts Festival; to add colour and vibrancy to the Arts Festival; to promote and encourage more participation from Singaporeans; to bring the Arts Festival to people in the suburbs; and to showcase original and experimental new works by Singaporean artists (Leo and Elangovan, 1988: 136-137). I will discuss the fringe in greater detail at the conclusion of this section.

As discussed earlier, in 1986, the ministry of culture disappeared. As a formal self-standing entity, it represented all things social and cultural and saw the arts as a valuable means to weave the fabric of society. The ministry and its activities were absorbed into the folds of the new ministry of community development, which oversaw the arts alongside sports, recreation and community service, thus framing the arts within the ideals of community and community development. The significance of this was to link community development with cultural affairs. S. Dhanabalan, the minister- in-charge, announced a five-year plan for cultural promotion that married the emphases on highbrow and community arts (Koh, 1989: 714). The Arts Festival came under the auspices of the cultural affairs division of the ministry and Robert Liew, a Singaporean, was lured back from the USA and appointed artistic director of the Arts Festival, ending two terms of Anthony Steele’s tenure as festival consultant.

Organised at the cost of S$2.3 million under a new artistic director, the 1986 Arts Festival featured twenty-eight productions, the inaugural Writers’ Week and a growing fringe. A key feature was its ability to look outward and display a tighter aesthetic programming, which showcased the likes of

235 Merce Cunningham Dance Company (USA), Houston Ballet (USA), Ellis Marsalis Jazz Quartet (USA), and the Beijing People’s Art Theatre (China). On the Singaporean front, twenty-three Chinese theatre groups collaborated in Kopi Tiam, directed by Kuo Pao Kun and Lim Kim Hiong

1986 marked the formalisation of fringe activities (Festival Fringe) that complemented the main stage events and promoted the Arts Festival. Organised at a very meagre cost of S$15,000, Festival Fringe was a nascent platform for new and particularly amateur works. While Kuo Pao Kun directed Kopi Tiam, his Practice Performing Arts School staged his then controversial play, No Parking on Odd Days. Known for its critique of Singapore officialdom, the play was warmly received by Singaporean audiences. With this and other Singaporean works, Festival Fringe was no longer a tepid introduction to the arts but a serious and important platform for new Singaporean works.

The Arts Festival introduced Writers' Week to foster literary activity in Singapore. Writers from around the globe, including Timothy Mo (UK), Paul Engle (USA), Raja Rao (India), Lee Kok Liang (Malaysia), Earle Birney (Canada), and Albert Wendt (South Pacific), saw large audiences as they presented readings and participated in literary fora. This literary programme remained under the Festival until 1990 and functioned as an incubator for the Singapore Writers' Festival, launched later as a separate event in 1991.

The year 1988 marked the tenth anniversary of the Arts Festival, which opened with City Celebrations, a visual spectacle of colour and movement in the Marina centre and harbour area encompassing fireworks, processions, sculptures and hundreds of performers, from artists to skydivers, and mountain climbers to water skiers, as well as a parade of lit sailboats. In the

236 name of getting bigger and better by the year (in budget and number of days and productions), programmes over five weeks were organised at the cost of S$3.7 million with forty-two international and local productions. The programming was eclectic. It featured numerous international groups and artists such as the Pilobolus Dance Theatre (USA), Sardono Kusumo (Indonesia), Kathak Kendra with choreographer Birju Maharaj (India), Georgian State Dance Company (USSR), the Academy of St. Martin-in-the- Fields (UK), Rumillajta (Bolivia), Grammy-award winner Cleo Laine (UK) performing with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and Marcel Marceau (France), to name a few.

Added to this, the Arts Festival Fringe was organised at the cost of S$0.5 million with 280 performances at ninety venues involving 4,200 artists, warranting its own programme guidebook. The Arts Festival saw its Fringe Festival infiltrating public spaces from the public zoo to shopping malls, from public parks to community town centres, from night markets to offshore islands (Sentosa), and from lunchtime concerts in the central business district (Shenton Way) to the central commercial district (Orchard Road), enlivening the city with a loud echo of cultural pride. Presenting live events in informal, accessible and inexpensive environments, the Fringe strove to break down traditional boundaries between art and audiences, encouraging open exchange between artists, art and the public. Viewers were invited to experience the work of established artists alongside that of emerging artists in a vibrant and exciting Arts Festival atmosphere. The Fringe Festival reached out to all including children with the introduction of a mini-fringe for children in the ages of one to fifteen years organised by theatre company ACT 3.

On the local front, the Arts Festival presented the inaugural performance by Singapore’s first professional ballet company, the Singapore Dance Theatre,

237 which was formed by Goh Soo Khim and Anthony Then in 1987. The Singapore Dance Theatre performed works by internationally acclaimed choreographers Goh Choo San (Singapore/USA), Graeme Murphy (Australia) and Gener Caringal (the Philippines). Theatre was themed around social matters. Experimental Theatre Club’s Two’s Company or Peter’s Passionate Pursuit directed by Max Le Blond, Arwah (The Man Who Was), a Malay play directed by Lut Ali, Nirangal Marukindrana (Colours Do Change), a Tamil play directed by E. S. J. Chandran, Kapai- Kapai (The Moths), a play performed by fifteen Chinese drama groups and co-ordinated by Feng Naiyao, Xie Zhixuan and Kuo Pao Kun, and finally a musical comedy, Beauty World, commissioned for the Arts Festival and presented by TheatreWorks, all engaged with issues and themes that were pertinent to Singaporean audiences.

The 1980s were indeed a time of dynamic growth and investment in the concept of a festival. With no substantive funding systems in place, except the availability of support through production grants, the Arts Festival was coming of age, and the experimentation and play with the possibilities made visible the invaluable place of the arts in everyday life and the sensibility of Singapore. The growth of the Arts Festival revealed a government setting out cultural policies to integrate the arts into the social and economic fabric of a young nation. It is worthwhile taking a step back to study the underlining cultural policy of that time.

The signal for developing the arts as part of community development and nation-building came with the establishment of a cultural development committee in 1980 to realise the government’s election manifesto of that time to make Singapore a ‘city of excellence’. The agenda was to “take Singapore beyond being a developed society in the economic sense; it is also to be a society culturally excellent” (Koh, 1989: 713). Ruth Bereson

238 (2003), in her analysis of Singaporean cultural policy in the 1980s, argues that the focus on the arts and its ability to add to the cultural and economic vibrancy of the city-state were rooted in the public statements of political leaders. She identifies the emergence of the concept of a ‘renaissance’ as a discursive principle to organise all subsequent ideas about arts and culture in Singapore. She notes that at the opening of the 1980 Arts Festival, the minister for finance Hon Sui Sen,

posited the notion that once a society has succeeded economically, it could then be allowed to indulge in artistic expression, stating that ‘an arts festival takes shape finally when a society is mature and ready for one'. In this speech, he also recognised that what he termed ‘supporting services' such as ‘media, cultural facilities, transportation' would enhance the artistic register. Into that mix, he also poured patronage, which at that stage was seen to be an entirely private responsibility whether that be from ‘a well- endowed company or institution, or from wealthy individuals'. Furthermore, he embellished upon the concept of ‘renaissance'…by stating that ‘they were assisting a birth or renaissance from the marriage of rich cultures making up Singapore's multi-faceted society' (2).

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Subsequent ministerial statements incorporated the development of a renaissance. In 1984, S. Dhanabalan, minister for foreign affairs and culture, called on the value of patronage in the realisation of artistic works and the existence of artists, while in 1987, Wong Kan Seng as second minister for foreign affairs and minister for community development, propounded the value of the arts and artists in nation-building and the creation of a national identity. More importantly, Wong expressed the need to develop a culturally vibrant society through an integrated process of government, artists, artistic communities and business (Bereson, 2003: 3).

One vector of integration was the provision of housing for the fast professionalising industry. In 1985, the government commenced study to subsidised arts housing for artists and groups to build capacity and professionalise arts organisations. By providing highly subsidised rentals, the government’s second agenda was to revitalise and give added value to forgotten precincts through the arts (Chang, 2014). Through strategic site planning, pre-war or old buildings such as disused warehouses and old shophouses in Waterloo Street, Chinatown and Little India have become hives of artistic activities. According to the NAC, today thirty-four properties comprising of twenty-eight single-tenanted buildings, four multi- tenanted arts centres and two co-located facilities in Marine Parade and Ulu Pandan community Buildings support the arts (NAC Website).

The process of acknowledging the growing cultural capital of artists, the need to organise the resources of highly fractious and splintered community arts groups, and the promotion of the professional arts company in the 1980s laid the ground for the government to evince an emphatic approach to developing Singapore not only into a culturally vibrant city (social cause)

240 but a site of a global arts economy (economic cause) as outlined in its cultural policy, the ACCA Report released in 1989. I will discuss this in detail in the next chapter.

Before I conclude this chapter, I want to return to the Fringe Festival.

The 1980s Arts Festivals introduced a countercultural discourse through the establishment of a Fringe Festival. The original intent was to broaden audience base through a diversity of available art forms, but it gained significant momentum in the 1990s providing a new way of experiencing the arts questioning conventional sensibilities. The first fringe represented a strong contingent of community performances to foster communitarian spirit and public access to the arts. This can be accrued to a naïve belief amongst civil servants, exposed to street festival and events, that the fringe festival is an extension of the mainstream – affordable, fun and simply accessible. Its real ideological underpinnings as anti-establishment, anti- discursive, experimental and innovation and often abstract did not come to the fore.

From 1988 the fringe started to demonstrate signs of an ideological position as an alternative to the main Arts Festival. In “Keeping it Warm: Where is the Fringe in Singaporean Arts” (1998), I foreground the centrality of the fringe providing the Arts Festival fresh new ideas and new avenues of public access. Its relationship to core festival events, which are staged and ticketed, is essentially oppositional and confrontational, political and apolitical, difficult yet bemusing. Fringe – on the edge – is a category of which a different way of seeing and experiencing the arts is proposed. Unadulterated by the need to entertain, unless the idea of entertainment is in itself politicised, participation in the fringe allows an artist to look from inside out and outside in. It proposes a difference from the centre through

241 processes of destabilising convention and authority of art forms, people and places. The fringe is a prickly conscience of the mainstream seeking to represent a plethora of expressions – from the undecipherable, uncanny, ridiculous, funny, absurd, and esoteric, to the unpolished – demanding intellectual rigour from both artists and audience. In experimenting with conventions and canons, the fringe arts call into question the social construction of arts and its consumable aesthetic. In essence, the fringe and core define and exist through the gaze of each other. The fringe serves as a productive launch pad for amateur and upcoming arts groups into the mainstream. It is also an essential drummer of excitement in a city as seen in the major festivals around the world in Edinburgh, Melbourne and Hong Kong.

The Arts Festival through its fringe was instrumental in introducing performance art into Singapore to the general public. The return of Tang Da Wu in 1979 to Singapore earmarked an international flow of aesthetic sensibilities that sought to explore the organic and performative dimensions of visual art-making and to work through art as a medium of research. This was to explore issues in society-at-large that was primarily missing in the quaint representational and abstract works that existed at the time. In 1982, in his work entitled Five Performances, Tang Da Wu presented a series of performance art and earthworks at the National Museum Art Gallery. This marked the beginning of performance art in Singapore. Performances such as Tang’s In Case of Howard Lui (1988 Fringe) at the old St. Joseph’s Institution building; Step on Art by Lim Poh Teck (1988) at various pathways alongside Orchard Road to Stamford Road; Improvisations by Lindsay John, UK (1990) on Orchard Road; Hiroshi Mikami’s Work In #18 (Japan), a twenty-four hour non-stop performance of breaking a painted marble rock and creating words at Fort Canning Park; Come to the Last Forest before it is Cut Down (1990) by Peter Chin (Canada) on the main

242 road of Orchard; Serious Conversations (1990) by Tang Da Wu with Vincent Leow and Lee Wen at the open area above Raffles Place MRT station provided Singaporeans with a rare insight into the humour in social criticism blended in performance. In 1992, the NAC and The Artists Village (founded by Da Wu in 1988) co-organised a visual arts event as part of the Arts Festival at an old warehouse that was awaiting demolition. At the Hong Bee Warehouse, a new generation of artists that emerged to the public and the international art world – Amanda Heng, Zai Kuning, Vincent Leow, Matthew Ngui, to name a few – celebrated conceptually rigorous pieces of works that captured critical attention.

Building on their participation in the fringe in the early 1990s, The Artist’s Village and Fifth Passage Artists Ltd, both artist collectives, organised the annual Artist General Assembly (AGA) -- a week of performance art, poetry reading, music, videos, and forums which were held in 1993 and 1994. These events became discursive centres in foregrounding conceptual and performance art in the Singaporean arts scene. The controversy was an inherent part of these practices, and many of art practices shocked public sensibilities and shook institutional concepts of what art is, leading to both politicisation and institutionalisation of artistic practices in Singapore. In 1993, artist Vincent Leow in his performance, Coffee Talk allegedly drank his urine in performance to much media disdain. In 1994, Josef Ng in his performance Brother Cane snipped his pubic hair as a critique of police and media persecution of gay men. Ng's commentary and criticism of government's stand on homosexuality drew offence, and Ng was charged with public indecency (Lee WC, 1996: 59-68; Ong, 1996, 7-19). Wide coverage by the media, led to the NAC and government officials to condemn the act as “vulgar and completely distasteful” (New Paper, 5 January 1994). The government reacted noting the potential dangers performance art and forum theatre with its devised scripts and spontaneous

243 audience participation, to public order, security and morality. That performance art and forum theatre contained the potential to propagate deviant messages and be a means of political and social subversion led to the arrest of the artists and circumscription of performance art and forum theatre in 1994 (Krishnan et.al, 1996).

While government censorship bruised artists, the investment in the arts left the government open to criticism revealing sensitivities in areas of political governance, race relations and religious harmony in Singapore with which artists were engaging. Many felt that the government sought a hardline approach to the arts. Furthermore, with the proliferation of artistic practices, the terms of permissibility were etched even more deeply in the topography of culture. Sexuality, religion and politics remain out of reach of Singaporeans, as outlined in the Report of the Censorship Review Committee (1992). Artistic provocations made good media in the early 1990s and politicians began to confront issues directly with the public. Both government and artists shocked the public with their polemics, but artists, scholars, and policymakers recognised the need to move beyond debates over artistic freedom and funding toward new issues facing a global cultural sector.

As the Arts Festival evolved over the years, concomitant with global trends, so did the Fringe Festival. The principles and values of the Fringe Festival were increasingly challenged. Civil servants read up on complex art forms such as forum theatre, performance art, and partook in theoretical and critical engagement with artists. The fringe slowly vacated its place as the underbelly of the arts in Singapore, giving way to outreach activities where community arts and mass public entertainment took precedence. However, since 2000, it found a quiet presence on the mainstream stage.

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4.5 Conclusion

This chapter has shown how the development of the Arts Festival was tied to decolonisation and independence. The nation-state was evolving, and the Arts Festival was very much a private, public and people initiative throughout the 1970s. It introduced a Singaporean model of multiculturalism that became entrenched as the basis for social and community organisation for the next forty years. The 1980s was a period of discovery and bringing the world to Singapore, thereby bringing international attention to the cultural existence of a nation. The event was a reflection of the milieu of an emerging nation waiting to come of age. The ACCA Report, discussed in Chapter Two, was released in 1989. It remains a critical cultural policy committing government to re-shaping the nation- state's arts and culture into a cultural and creative economy. The next chapter will further expound on the 1989 report demonstrating the instrumental muscles of government flexing to shape the nature of the Arts Festival. The next chapter’s focus on the 1990s, reveals a greater degree of control over the arts by the government in this period. It will show the speed of development for the Arts Festival as it aligns more closely with economic drivers to make Singapore a global city for the arts.

245 Chapter Five

THE ARTS FESTIVAL IN A GLOBAL CITY: 1990s

5.1 Introduction

If cultural vibrancy is the last and significant index of a civilised nation, Singapore, judging by its arts development…can claim a certain ‘arrival’. In this young but fiercely progressive government where nationalist ideology drives the realm of culture, the playground has become organised, institutionalised and monitored….

The rhetoric behind such a culture factory is image-driven: Singapore to helm frontiers in Southeast Asia; to be the Gateway to Asia; and a millennial Global City. In complicity with nation-building and identity- construction, the performing arts has to, and will, continue the task of muscling the ‘Singaporean’ meat while eking a sensibility towards a global outlook and market consumption (Deng Fuquan in The Arts Magazine, May-June 1999).

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The Arts Festivals of the 1990s began with the release of a report by the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (ACCA Report) which outlined strategies to make Singapore a global city for the arts by 2000. As discussed earlier, its release marked a clear co-relationship between art, commerce and national identity (Foley and Gayle, 2006). It also revealed the firm hand of government in driving arts infrastructural development not only to be concerned with matters of identity, which the 1980s, were but to harness them to become economic drivers for the future of the economy. For this to happen, public sector agencies were established to oversee and rapidly develop the arts, heritage and museum sectors. The Arts Festival officially came under the auspices of a newly created National Arts Council (NAC). This significant development had an impact in the manner in which the Arts Festival was to be organised and how its programming aligned to fulfil the core requirements of an emerging global city. But it was not any global city but one that showcased the wealth and vibrancy of a rapidly developing nation-state.

This chapter undertakes a detailed study of arts development in the 1990s and locates the Arts Festival within this burgeoning context. It shows how the Arts Festival contributed to a vibrant global city. The 1990s was the period when Asian Values and Shared Values emerged to characterise the national identity of Singapore. These highly problematic models of socio- cultural ideologies, discussed in Chapter Two, enforced a “pan-Asian identity” (Langguth, 2003) to propel Singapore as a nation-state of significance: a global city. Asian Values professed ideals of community, nation and family against ideals of liberalism and individualism deemed as western values. Shared Values, which emerged as a response to an over- driven campaign for Asian Values, urged Singaporeans to value “nation before community and society before self; family as a basic unit of society;

247 regard and community support for the individual; consensus instead of contention; and racial and religious harmony” (White Paper, 1991). As Chapter Two revealed, critics have riled over this as a means to legitimate collectivism and its attendant behaviour authoritarianism to be privileged and empower the government over the citizenry (Chua, 1991, Peterson, 2001). This chapter demonstrates how they were intrinsically weaved into the Arts Festival as articulated in the development of the Festival of Asian Performing Arts and extensive public participation programmes such as street parades and children's festivals.

5.2 Arts in a Global City

The 1990s began with a political promise to make Singapore a global city for the arts by 1999 and this aspiration was supported by hegemonic principles of economic pragmatism and nationalism, embedded in an imagining based on multiculturalism and Asian Values (Kong, 2012). Under the leadership of prime minister Goh Chok Tong, the government's ambitious roadmap for the arts was crystallised in the ACCA Report. It was a natural progression from the expressions of cultural promotion in the mid- 1980s. The ACCA Report measured growth through three paradigms: a creative and gracious society; excellence in unique multilingual, multicultural collective art forms; and the creation of an international centre for the arts. The global city vision to make Singapore "one of Asia's leading renaissance cities in the 21st century" (The Sunday Times, 18 May 1997) was to be realised through a portfolio of economic, financial and cultural investments friendly to global corporations, foreign talents and visitors.

To summarily reiterate, several trends characterised the period: strong government desire in ensuring the arts fulfilled the larger economic

248 imperatives of the country; internationalisation of the arts; an unprecedented proliferation of artists and arts companies; and the emergence of avant- garde and post-modern formations as a core expression of the arts. The ACCA Report established a set of strategies focusing first on audience development. Singaporeans were encouraged to develop an interest in the arts and culture to improve their aesthetic sense and enhance their quality of life. Second, the policy of community participation through the allocation of more leisure time made it conducive for Singaporeans to partake in cultural activities as amateurs or professionals. They were encouraged to take part in extra-curricular activities at the workplace, community centres, factories, social clubs, trade unions, clan associations and religious institutions. The aim, in real socialist practice, was to infiltrate layers of the society to encourage participation. Third, the policy was designed to invest in the professionalisation of the arts by building a strong pool of cultural workers (artists, arts administrators, arts entrepreneurs). To achieve this swiftly, the ACCA Report suggested attracting foreign talents to help nurture professional groups. Fourth, the policy emphasised the need to improve the infrastructure of existing venues and build new ones. Infrastructural development focussed particularly on creating world-class performing arts theatres, museums and libraries. Fifth, the policy recommended the increase in cultural activities providing Singaporeans with opportunities to view and experience performances, exhibitions and art in public places. This cultural consumption was further widened to incorporate the preservation of historical buildings with architectural and heritage value for all to enjoy. Finally, the Report articulated a need to develop a body of Singaporean works reflecting multicultural traditions and artistic endeavours (25-26). All these framed the arts within the world of high culture and aesthetics, and I argue, continuing with the postcolonial enterprise that began in 1959 of transforming a population of philistines into cultural connoisseurs.

249 New government agencies were mobilised to realise this global city vision: The NAC for arts and artist development and NHB for heritage development and museum collections. Unlike arts councils around the world that focus on funding and development support of artists and art forms, the NAC, besides overseeing arts development, became the single largest arts programmer, impresario and venue manager in Singapore and the region. NAC became the largest arts venue manager in Southeast Asia driving a strong emphasis on new infrastructural development in the arts to support urban rejuvenation. This underscored the government's penchant for making Singapore attractive to foreign investments.

The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) became a key ally of the arts in its drive to create a global city through strategic initiatives that sought to make Singapore the centre for arts tourism, particularly for high art (fine arts and auctions) and commercially viable entertainment. The STB created a branding image of Singapore as a gateway to a ‘New Asia’ to indirectly attract investors who would see Singapore as the “gateway to a large market of about three billion people in Asia with a seven-hour flight radius” (GCA, 2000: 10). This venture into the world of arts business welcomed major commercial Broadway and West End musicals (e.g. Les Miserables, Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Chicago, Evita, Miss Saigon) to be presented alongside Singaporean musicals (e.g. Beauty World, Chang & Eng) to packed Singaporean and regional audiences. International impresarios and producers convened and flourished in Singapore through lucrative tax incentives arranged by the Economic Development Board. These producers including UK-based Cameron Mackintosh Ltd, International Management Group (IMG), The Really Useful Company and Cirque du Soleil headquartered their Asian operations in Singapore and produced record- breaking ticket sales and audiences in Singapore history. For example, the S$12 million production of the Phantom of the Opera in 1995 by The

250 Really Useful Company was one of the most expensive musicals to be staged in Singapore and grossed S$18.5 million in revenues (GCA, 2000: 47). Riding on the rise of Asia in the early 1990s, these companies were critical to the economic well-being of the arts as the government saw this as a gauge to fund and support the arts. On the visual arts front, fine arts businesses such as auction houses Sotheby's and Christie's, and commercial galleries such as ArtFolio, Wetterling-Teo Gallery, Plum Blossoms, Gajah Gallery, Art-2 and Art Forum became centres for collectors of Chinese, Malaysian, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese and Cambodian art. The fledgling wholesale of antiques, art and handicrafts saw an increase in turnover of S$94.5 million by 1997 (GCA, 2000: 21). STB played a critical role in positioning the Arts Festival as a must-see event for arts and non-arts tourists. In 1996 alone, STB contributed approximately S$1 million towards the Arts Festival to fulfil its newfound objective of arts tourism and support a conduit of its ‘New Asia’ campaign (Chang and Yeoh, 1999; Johnson, 2009).

The formalisation of the arts as a tool of governmentality was furthered by greater investments in festivals (e.g. Singapore Arts Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, Singapore Chinese Cultural Festival, Singapore International Comedy Festival) that sought to make Singapore a vibrant city. These investments were primarily measured by quantitative gauges such as the number of activities, number of arts societies and companies, audiences and total receipts (money spent by Singaporeans and tourists on the arts and related activities). According to figures from NAC, the total number of arts activities (performances and exhibitions) rose from a decent 5,303 in 1995 to 19,285 in 2005. The number of non-profit arts companies and societies increased from 181 in 1994 to 288 in 2005. Ticketed audience for non-entertainment performing arts activities grew from 860,000 (1994) to 1.23 million (1999). Total receipts rose dramatically from S$22 million

251 (1993) to S$90 million in 1997 (GCA, 2000: 37) while NAC’s statistics show sponsorship of the arts increased from S$8.7 million (1993) to S$24.5 million (1995) to S$32.7 million (2005). This vibrant events calendar was augmented by fine arts businesses and the fledgling wholesale of antiques, art and handicrafts saw an increase in turnover of S$94.5 million by 1997 (GCA, 2000).

In 1998, the STB commissioned a study to evaluate the economic impact of the arts and entertainment industry on the economy. The report titled, Dollars & Sensibilities evidenced an overall growth of the economy through heightened value of experience and multiplier effects providing indirect benefits, that is “a competitive edge to a city, region or country, attracting business executives and their economic activities (Dollars & Sensibilities, 1998: 10). While the report admitted that the measurement of quality of cultural life is difficult to measure, it reported that in 1995 alone, the arts and entertainment industry contributed S$56 million to the national income. Furthermore, the study projected an "income multiplier of 2.8 for arts and entertainment, [which] would mean that for every [dollar] spent on the arts and entertainment, S$1.80 is income generated elsewhere [such as, meals prior to a show, travelling to a venue, buying merchandise, etc.] and an employment multiplier of 1.6 would indicate that for every 10 people directly employed, another six jobs would be created relating to the activity" (9). Reinforcing this idea and extrapolating it into a larger frame of the Keynesian multiplier effect of direct and indirect employment and wealth creation, former deputy prime minister Tony Tan in 2002 noted, "The arts can help build wealth and create jobs through growth in creative industries and occupations. We can no longer rely solely on traditional industries. We need to move on to creative industries that are intensive in knowledge and intellectual capital; industries that will give us a cutting-edge and fulfil the twin function of becoming an engine of growth for our economy and raise

252 our quality of life" (The Straits Times, 10 April 2002). The projections in the 1990s, of course, did not anticipate the Asian economic meltdown. However, an econometric study of the arts would provide a useful sense of the use and exchange value of the arts, especially the Arts Festival, and its economic potential besides the mere consumption of tickets.

The Arts Festival was a major ignition for the formation of professional arts companies by providing them with opportunities to collaborate and exchange creative expressions with Singaporean and international artists and to showcase works at the Arts Festival. The Arts Festival's organiser, the NAC, was and continues to aggressively build the capacities of arts companies to help them professionalise – through funding, scholarships and infrastructure – so that companies can develop their capabilities in managing and running their artistic enterprise. The NAC opened its global networks and partnerships with international festivals and arts councils to Singaporean arts companies to facilitate cross-cultural exchanges, skills development and the promotion of Singaporean arts.

The 1990s was a period of internationalisation for theatre, particularly English language theatre in Singapore. Playwright/director Kuo Pao Kun, argued through his practice and later crystallised in an essay entitled ‘Contemplating an Open Culture' (1998) that "History has proved that there is no way [Singaporeans] could reconnect to their parent cultures per se. However, having lost their own – cut loose and therefore set free – they have thus become natural heirs to all the cultures of the world" (cited in Wee, 2003: 25). Kuo was not far from the government's tangent for a globalised Singapore and soon became Singapore's critical cultural export. Kuo had his plays translated into several languages which were staged to critical acclaim all over the world including Austria, China, Indonesia, Japan and the Middle East. In 2000, the Tokyo Asian Art Festival paid

253 tribute to his works by staging a retrospective where “three of his plays were directed and performed by companies from Indonesia (The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole directed by Putu Wijaya and performed by Teater Mandiri), India (Lao Jiu – The Ninth Born directed by Anuradha Kapur and performed by Dishantar) and Japan (The Silly Little Girl and the Funny Old Tree directed by Makoto Sato and performed by the Black Tent Theatre)” (Peterson, 2009). Kuo was honoured with the Excellence in Singapore Award in 2002 (The Straits Times, 3 August 2002).

Kuo trained a significant number of theatre practitioners in the 1980s and 1990s: His protégés include Ong Keng Sen (TheatreWorks), Alvin Tan (The Necessary Stage), Ekachai Uekrongtham (Action Theatre), Ivan Heng (Wild Rice Theatre), William Teo (Asia-in-Theatre Research Circus) and independent theatre-makers Lim Jen Erh and Verena Tay (Kuo, 2000: 394- 397). They formed a committed base of practitioners seeking to build a new critical undertaking; produce deeply engaging social theatre; unpack the Singaporean psyche; and venture into pan-Asian theatre that presented a Asian sensibility, which rejected an Orientalist view of Asia. TheatreWorks, under the artistic directorship of Ong Keng Sen, ushered in a new Asian theatre that was characterised by collaboration between traditional and contemporary Southeast Asian artists. TheatreWorks' The Flying Circus Project (1996, 1998, 2000) drew on the cultural repositories of Southeast Asia to re-excavate and ‘re-member' histories and cultures fast losing ground in rapid globalisation. The project resulted in major intercultural productions such as Lear (1997) and Desdemona (2000) that drew international attention and local criticism for its extreme experimentalism in combining Japanese, Indian, Chinese and Western forms (Bharucha, 2001).

Bilingual theatre began to assert itself as a serious form of professional practice. Playwrights and directors Elangovan (Agni Koothu), Goh Boon

254 Teck (Toy Factory Productions) and Kok Heng Leun (Drama Box) became key proponents of theatre, whose works carved a discursive and social niche in the theatre scene. Other theatre companies carved their niche in new contemporary plays and musicals by local dramatists: notably Chang & Eng – The Musical (1997) by Action Theatre, Off Centre (1994) by The Necessary Stage, The Spirits Play (1998) by The Theatre Practice. The Singapore Repertory Theatre invested in importing international Asian performers such as Lea Salonga, Ming-Na Wen and Tsai Chin to perform in classic West End plays and Broadway musicals (GCA, 2000: 42-45).

While theatre flourished, Opera (Chinese and Western) and traditional art forms continued to receive measured support, as their audiences remained small. The Singapore Dance Theatre, Dance Ensemble Singapore, Sriwana, Nrityalaya Aesthetics Society, Singapore Lyric Opera, Chinese Theatre Circle, Chinese Opera Institute and the Singapore Indian Fine Arts Society continued to promote traditional and classical fare. Though perceived to be tame in comparison to English language theatre, these companies internationalised their practices through participation in overseas arts festivals. These companies championed and promoted the traditional art forms as heritage worthy of securing for the future. A younger generation of musicians including Mark Chan, Ghanavenothan Retnam, Ankara, and the Huqin Quartet redefined the parameters of traditional Asian arts to breathe new life through world music. On some level, some succeeded while others failed as redefinitions were too closely aligned with Western music forms and practices so as to appeal to global audiences and enable them to partake in international events and festivals.

During the 1990s, the Singapore Dance Theatre (SDT), a contemporary ballet company, monopolised the dance scene. Its fastidious approach to balletic expressions and neo-classical forms spurred the development of

255 numerous small alternative and experimental contemporary dance companies including ECNAD (1996), Tammy L. Wong Dance Company (1998), The Arts Fission Company (1999) and Odyssey Dance Theatre (2000). With smaller budgets but an agility to work with multiply disciplines, they contributed to a wider programmatic menu for Singaporeans from site-specific to multidisciplinary works. The Arts Festival played a critical role in the growth and development of the SDT. Being the only national company, it was provided with unbridled performance opportunities on the festival stage alongside top international companies. The Arts Festival brokered numerous collaborative opportunities with international choreographers for the SDT to internationalise its repertoire. However, it would not be misplaced to say that dance created less of an impact on the overall arts development than theatre and visual arts. Rather, dance’s significance in Singapore remains in its ability to keep away from the major spotlight to develop a culture of experimentation. For example, the Arts Fission Company, founded by choreographer Angela Liong and performance artist S. Chandrasekaran, rooted its aesthetic in abstraction and conceptual art and was one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary experimentation bringing together different genres (dance, film, music, installation art and multimedia) and promulgating site-specific works (Gan, 2002: 59).

An important development in music culture was the establishment of the Singapore Chinese Orchestra (SCO) in 1996 under the patronage of then deputy prime minister Lee Hsien Loong. The internationally successful SCO, renowned for its groundbreaking performances of new and re- interpreted classical Chinese repertoire, became a symbol of Asian Values. The SCO headhunted strong Chinese conductors (Hu Bing Xu, Tsung Yeh) who would express the vision for a new Asia through the strategic blending of Western and Chinese music cultures (GCA, 2000: 52). Today, the SCO

256 remains a formidable force balancing the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) in its verve to establish itself as a premier voice for contemporary expression in new Asian music (Tan, 2002: 80). Similarly, the SSO's appointment of Lan Shui as its music director/conductor was also strategic in wanting to bridge the East-West divide. Lan Shui straddled his time both in Singapore and Detroit as conductor and brought about a new re-visioning of the ensemble as a serious Asian orchestra through its innovative programming and intent to mould a Southeast Asian sound. Other small- and medium-scale orchestras presented new ways of presenting music to the discerning public. The Philharmonic Chorus, formed in 1994, and the Singapore Youth Choir delved into "the territories of English and Italian madrigal singing as well as the newly evolving choral tradition of ‘Asian acapella' with significant success and winning prizes at international competitions" (30). This obviously essentialist approach to Asian principles fostered an opportunity for Singapore to grow out its colonial past and look to the East for inspiration. But the appointments of the conductors, Lan Shui (SSO) and Hsung Yeh (SCO), excellent as they may be, remains compromised by the fact that both left the East to go to the West to become skilled and virtuosic. In returning to work in Singapore, they became reminders of Singapore's neocolonialist reality that could not be shaken off despite its promotion of Asian Values.

While classical music was anchored by the SSO and SCO, the popular music scene welcomed the likes of Eric Clapton, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, Celine Dion and Michael Jackson, attracting a huge fan base from the Southeast Asian hinterland. East Asian popular music equally impressed the market with Anita Mui, the ‘Heavenly Kings' (Andy Lau, Jacky Cheung, Leon Lai and Aaron Kwok), Faye Wong and Emil Chau charging record ticket prices. Hong Kong’s Andy Lau’s S$1.3 million two-day concerts

257 were consumed by 16,000 fans while Taiwan's A*Mei attracted 35,000 fans (GCA, 2000: 53).

Music critic and ethnomusicologist Tan Shzr Ee observes that fashion- designer/composer/stylist Dick Lee's musicals such as Fried Rice Paradise (1991), Nagraland (1992) and Fantasia (1994), and the release of his Mad Chinaman album (1991) anchored the development of mainstream Singapore pop against the floodgate of international brand names (2002: 34). Engaging with issues of identity (middle-class materialism versus Asian sensibility), these works connected well with the public and at the same resonated with some of the underground bands that were beginning to assert their visibility at public events as an alternative to mainstream Singapore pop (e.g. Humpback Oak) which, Tan argues, dealt with provocative issues such as multiculturalism, urban alienation and social engineering (34).

This period also saw artists venturing out into the international art world participating in biennales and art fairs. Organised by the NAC and NHB, these activities were primarily to export Singapore art to heighten the country's visibility in the global marketplace. Furthermore, the NHB and STB imported blockbuster exhibitions (e.g. Guggenheim Collection; Leonardo Da Vinci: Scientist, Inventor and Artist; Origin of Modern Art in France 1880-1939; Monet to Moore: The Millennium Gift of the Sara Lee Corporation; Land of the Ottoman Sultans: Palace Treasures from Turkey; Botero; Beautiful Dragon: Pierre & Gilles) into newly renovated museums and galleries. The opening of the Asians Civilisations Museum in 2002 at the Empress Place building established Singapore's commitment to high art and the expatriate/tourist market, while the Singapore Art Museum became the world's first museum dedicated to 20th century Southeast Asian visual art. The institutions rapidly became lifestyle centres, with their gift shops

258 and fine-dining restaurants, for various constituencies in Singaporean society (GCA, 2000). By 2005, the NHB's five museums achieved a visitorship of 820,000 - a seventy per cent increase from 2004’s 480,000.

Just like the National Theatre (1963) which served as a symbol of culture, two arts venues, The Substation (1990) and the Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay (2002), were two key anchors of cultural life in Singapore. One came at the start and the other at the end of a vibrant period, symbolising the growth and development of the arts in Singapore. The Substation was a former power substation, which was converted into a centre for the arts as part of larger government plans to provide housing for artists and companies. The Substation, which has a small gallery, a 120-seat black box theatre, some classrooms and dance spaces, and was helmed by Kuo Pao Kun from 1990 to 1995, struggled to meet its finances while the S$600 million Esplanade had top of the line performance venues with a sizeable commercial development. But the Substation, though central to arts development, was seen as a fringe space fostering ideas, new artistic practices and arts activism.

5.2.1 Fringe Acts and Arts Activism

The Substation became emblematic of arts activism and countercultural discourse building on the fringe that began in the 1980s. The Substation was a hive of cultural discourse and a collection centre for ideas and philosophies. The Substation's mission was, and remains, to “support research and innovation in the arts nurturing and challenging Singapore artists, providing them with an open space for artistic experimentation, promoting interaction between diverse artists and audiences, facilitating critical dialogue in the arts, and fostering regional and international arts

259 networks” (Substation Website). It fed a society starved for discussion, critique and the belief that art could be valuable for its own sake. Experimentalism and contemporary expressions were championed while institutionalised art forms were critiqued. The Substation, through its annual New Criteria – a month-long exhibition of installation art; SeptFest; Dance Space; and, Raw Theatre – a festival of works-in-progress, gave birth to a multitude of young artists (Oon, 2001: 148) who were bent on improvising their identities and cultural histories on an island that was hermetically sealing itself into the folds of the economic.

Against this confusingly vibrant, yet suffocating arts environment, artists supported by cultural leaders such as Kuo, confidently engaged with social and aesthetic issues exploring contemporary Asian sensibilities in their works and veered towards activism. This was manifestly a determinant feature of the Substation and other experimental centres and artist collectives such as Fifth Passage, Artist Village, Plastique Kinetic Worms, (PKW), and P-10. They produced and presented art for its own sake. Performance art, site-specific works and intracultural explorations; research- and practice-centred performance groups such as Arts Fission Dance Company, TheatreWorks and Spell#7 Theatre privileged critical and theoretical discourse over audiences. Key publications such as Commentary, FOCAS: Forum on Contemporary Art and Society and essays by arts and cultural critics Lee Weng Choy, T.K Sabapathy, Janadas Devan and Ray Langenbach presented critical interpellation into the aesthetic and attempted to critically appraise art production in Singapore.

At the heart of arts activism belied the need to challenge the status quo and negotiate approaches to identity-formation amidst the helter-skelter of a global city the government was establishing. Censorship, artistic freedom, arts funding, prioritisation for infrastructural development, government

260 foreign policies, arts and cultural policies became polemics built around principles of art practice, artist rights, arts advocacy and arts education. The government, on the other hand, produced policies for the arts, crafted in elegiac phrases such as ‘renaissance city’, ‘global city for the arts’ and ‘cultural capital,’ to understand, frame, demarcate and tame artists and their artistic practice to veer them towards a business rather than ideological approach to art practice. Critics felt that that the government’s interventionist approach to the arts would leave the artist in a precarious situation of being unable to see the production of art outside the frame of governmentality. Sasitharan (1993) argues that “the only way that art is going to develop in Singapore…is if the artist is able to wrench ground away from the state” (58) while Heng (1993) foregrounds that it was near impossible to envision a life outside the government in Singapore as artists and arts groups could not survive on passion (60). Artists did wrench ground from the government, and this resulted in interventions and robust readings of Goh's governmentality in the arts where Singaporeans created, negotiated and improvised subjectivities designed around "emotional indulgence, frothy promises, theatrics and polemics in place of pragmatics" (Lim, 1994).

These interventions were located in several places: First, performance. Artists, especially those working in English language theatre and contemporary expressions of visual and performance art, saw globalisation as an opportunity to empower the Singaporean to leap out of the hermetic seal of governmentality. Through direct interventions to notions of public propriety such as stopping a play towards the climax to ask the audience for a possible ending (this tactic is a principle of forum theatre) and to conduct acts outside the normative codes of social acceptability (performance art) provoking media and public outcry were commonplace.

261 Second, artists’ collectives emerged (Artist Village, Plastique Kinetic Worms, The Flying Circus Project) to organise fora for unpacking issues on artist rights, arts funding, cultural determinism, censorship and education. Groundbreaking conferences such as Art Vs Art (1993), Space, Spaces, Spacing (1995) organised by The Substation, as part of its annual SeptFest series, became cultural markers for the intelligentsia within and without Singapore and for bureaucrats and policymakers to come together to discuss issues both critical and complimentary of emerging initiatives. Another avenue for this crucial engagement was through key publications such as Commentary and FOCAS and online discussion groups such as the ‘arts community e-group'. Public access to these journals and fora were limited as they were primarily confined to the arts community.

Third, the use of sexuality as a front to discuss and comment on things political (Heng and Devan, 1993; Jeyaretnam, 1993; Purushothaman, 2001) was pronounced in theatre for almost all the major theatre companies engaged in this approach to criticism: notably, Lady of Soul and Her ‘S’ Machine by TheatreWorks.

Fourth, humour. Singaporean writers such as Damien Sin (Saints Sinners and Singaporeans, 1998), Russell Lee (Singapore Ghost Stories), directors such as Ivan Heng (Emily of Emerald Hill) and Ekachai Eukrongtham (Corporate Animals) and film-makers Eric Khoo (12 Storeys) and Colin Goh (Talking Cock: The Movie) were making oblique attacks on life and living in Singapore. But the humour was cautious, and the critique measured often taking the form of irony (Time, 19 July 1999) in ensuring that there was a degree of murkiness between commentary and what might offend to the government.

262 The investment in the arts exposed the government to criticism. Historically the government was ultra-sensitive to issues at the core of it is governmentality namely: politics, race and religion and the government asserted a hard-line approach to taming the arts. For example, a ban on forum theatre and performance art in 1993 was imposed because of their ability to provoke audiences to interrogate and question positions (Langenbach, 1996: 132-147). In this instance, one theatre company, The Necessary Stage, was brandished by Singapore’s main daily The Straits Times, for promoting a Marxist ideology by attending a Marxist theatre- expert Augusto Boal workshop in New York and for presenting workshops in public schools that involved Boalean strategies (Peterson, 2001: 44-50). The Necessary Stage,29 in subsequent years, went on to successfully produce deeply engaging social theatre dealing with issues seen as marginal in Singapore. These include matters such as mental health, AIDS awareness, inter-racial relations, rigid educational policies, and LGBT empowerment. Performance artist Josef Ng's critique on the government's stand on homosexuality was not taken lightly by the authorities including the NAC and a prominent writer and novelist, Dr Catherine Lim was taken to task for critiquing the government for its disaffect with the public (Lim, 1994). Talaq (Divorce), a Tamil play translated into English and Malay language, was banned from being staged in 1999 for its critique of the poor treatment of women within the very small and closed Indian-Muslim community in Singapore. The government perceived this to harbour the potential to unsettle race relations in Singapore (Liew, 2001, 173-180). In another scenario, the arts minister George Yeo persuaded MTV to drop an adult cartoon serial, Beavis and Butt-Head. Time magazine surmised that this could have been due to the anti-social roles of the characters as ‘losers’ and

29 Both the artistic director, Alvin Tan and resident playwright Haresh Sharma of the Necessary Stage went on to be conferred Singapore’s highest arts award, the Cultural Medallion in 2014 and 2015, respectively.

263 that they were bad role models (Time, 30 Dec 2002) and against the Shared Values of Singaporeans as hardworking people.

These scenarios set the stage for what Goh called the OB (Out-of-Bounds) markers of society and the censorship guidelines that continued steer the terms of permissibility for Singaporeans. As discussed extensively in the earlier chapters, these two subjective guidelines remain vague, yet convenient governance. Then arts minister George Yeo's strong and melodramatic views in a 1999 interview to Karyawan, a publication of the Association of Muslim Professionals remain in place today that “it is not possible to define everything by law” (Straits Times, 26 May 1999). Sexuality, race, religion and politics remain out of reach of Singaporeans as outlined in the above quote and Yeo was reiterating similar principles described in the Report of the Censorship Review Committee (1992) discussed earlier. Despite these probing participation by politicians in the arts, the government continued to push its agenda of creating a vibrant global city out of Singapore through the arts.

5.2.2 Urban Vibrancy through the Arts Festival

It is against this backdrop that the Arts Festival transformed from being a localised event to an international destination by providing Singaporeans with an opportunity to celebrate the arts, and for the world to acknowledge this. By the 1990s, the Arts Festival, while continuing to being a bi-annual event became "the largest and ‘craziest' single arts event" providing high- quality performances thereby "establishing a base of festival goers and arts enthusiasts" (Goh, 2012: 177).

264 For the 1990 Arts Festival, Tisa Ng, today the executive director of the Hong Kong Arts Festival, was appointed artistic coordinator, and from 1992 to 1999 Liew Chin Choy helmed the Arts Festival as director of programming at the NAC. While the festival secretariat continued, Liew doubled up managing the Arts Festival and other major events in visual and literary arts. The 1990 Arts Festival began with the promise of putting itself on a dangerous path of growing bigger in scale and scope and attempting to outdo previous editions. Programming was populist. This was, in large part, due to its engine of success built around a population hungry for ideas, excitement and entertainment in a rather utilitarian Singapore, and the government's obsession with ‘vibrancy' as a lynchpin for attracting investors to Singapore as a liveable city. In this regard, the Arts Festival began to ‘perform' spectacles with ever-increasing obsession to reach more people. For example, it programmed blockbusters events that were large in impact and often commercially viable to heighten its positioning in the global arena. This was enshrined in the objectives of the Arts Festival just as the newly formed NAC took over as the new cultural impresario of Singapore in 1990. According to Peterson (1996), the NAC sought to

Provide an occasion for Singaporeans to celebrate the arts; create arts events of high standard and visibility to promote widespread interest and awareness of the arts; present mainstream, experimental, and avant-garde works of the highest artistic standards by Singaporean and international artists; aid the development of local talent and encourage new local productions through commissioning working for the festival; facilitate exchange of skills and experience

265 between invited foreign artists and local performers through workshops, master-classes, lectures, and other training activities; increase the knowledge, understanding, and practice of the arts amongst Singaporeans; and, develop Singapore as an international centre for the arts and enhance its attractiveness for both visitors and residents (Peterson, 1996: 113).

The objectives were precise and in alignment with developing the country, that is to harness the people as one nation through access to the arts (mainstream, experimental, community events); to build capability through knowledge transfer (workshops, lectures by international artist and arts groups) and position Singapore as centre for the arts (publicity and access). These objectives did not deviate from Sullivan's 1959 goals in that the concept of Singapore was still in the making.

In the 1990 Arts Festival programme guide, the NAC for the first time published its estimated audiences target of 400,000. To meet this goal and the fact that the Arts Festival coincided with the 25th anniversary of independence, popular programmes where planned. A budget of S$5.6 million in addition to corporate sponsorship built an international palate of who’s who, such as Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (USA), Sankai Juku (Japan), The Houston Symphony (USA) and Boys Choir of Harlem (USA). This noticeably strong American fare started under the tenure of US-trained Robert Liew as artistic director, and it continued primarily because the US arts industry was far more ready and developed to tour productions. The inclusion of the hugely popular Great Moscow Circus as

266 an associated event helped meet the target audience rather than further any artistic experience for the public.

A significant introduction of the 1990 Arts Festival was the New Music Forum to encourage and present new Singaporean Western repertoire. Composers Er Yenn Chwen, Leong Yoon Pin, Joe Peters, Phoon Yew Tien, John Sharpley and Bernard Tan kicked off the series with an ensemble put together for this showcase conducted by maestro Lim Yau. Unfortunately, this series did not attract the expected large audiences and had a relatively short lifespan in the Arts Festival.

The Arts Festival under the tenure of Liew from 1992 to 1999 grew in significance as the event of the year. Increased corporate sponsorship and relentless campaigning by the STB saw the Arts Festival increase in sheer scale and size. According to Peterson (2001), the NAC, through the Arts Festival, supported the growth of tourism and the development of Singapore as a regional arts centre making the city an attractive place to investors, “signalling its emergence as a world-class city” (167). Liew drew up objectives that mapped a festival that was growing in multiple directions. These targets were to provide not only "an occasion for Singaporeans to celebrate the arts" (168) but for artists and international visitors as well. He programmed a range of mainstream, experimental and avant-garde works of high standards to aid development of local talent and encourage new local productions and creative exchange between Singaporean and international artists. Visibility and public awareness of the arts were key drivers of his vision as they served to enhance "the attractiveness of Singapore for both visitors and residents" (168).

But notably, Liew’s objectives were informed by the five national Shared Values the government espoused at that time. These were nation before

267 community and society above self; family as the basic unit of society; community support and respect for the individual; consensus not conflict; and, racial and religious harmony. Liew imprinted his populist programming style by locating the sense of the Arts Festival as a people’s festival with street parades and extravaganzas, invoking multicultural community participation. The 1994 Arts Festival cost S$5.5 million featuring 114 performances over thirty-five days (27 May to 3 July) and 106 groups featured in 295 events. By 1996, over 70,000 spectators alone would gather to view the parades along the central commercial belt, Orchard Road (The Straits Times, 28 May 1996), as Liew contends, “success is measured by attendance” (cited in Peterson, 2001: 176). Family participation was integral to his programming, and he put in place highly targeted activities for children below the age of twelve.

In keeping with the need to make the Arts Festival a national event, commemorative stamps were issued for the first time in the Arts Festival’s history along with large-scale media launches of the event over the Internet and in Malaysia. The 1996 Arts Festival cost S$7.3 million to organise and drew an audience of over 300,000. True to his vision, Liew showcased top- class productions to make visible the arts to the Singaporean public and to spotlight Singapore as a centre for world excellence in the arts. The likes of Tito Puente Latin Jazz All Stars, Royal Ballet of Flanders (1994); Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, Paul Taylor Dance Company, Kronos Quartet, Marcel Marceau (1996); Twyla Tharp, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Shakespeare Company (1998); and Trisha Brown Company, Robert Lepage and Ex Machina (1999) provided an opportunity to set benchmarks for the determination of artistic standards for Singaporean arts groups, shape public perception in the understanding of the arts and help bridge access and aesthetic enterprise. Liew explains that through organised masterclasses between visiting artists and Singaporeans,

268 the Arts Festival hoped to facilitate skills and knowledge transfer for a fledging industry (Purushothaman, 2007).

However, the Arts Festival was not short of critics (Jit and Kuo cited in Peterson, 1996: 114-115) who felt that while the presentation of the programmes was top-class, it was in dire need of artistic vision and direction to set the pace for what truly is Singapore’s Arts Festival. The view was that the supermarket approach to Arts Festival programming (buying products from other festivals and through recommendations of programming and steering committees), though valid in the 1980s, was not an appropriate model of programming for a festival in the 1990s. While it fulfilled NAC objectives, they were obfuscating to the audiences who were left brow beaten and overwhelmed. Peterson (1996), in his study of the 1994 Arts Festival, draws out this question of alienation. He cites the New York- based theatre company Mabou Mines' production of The Bride which was "self-referential rapid-fire bursts of jazz-inflected poetry danced wildly around some of the hippest topics informing the New York performance scene as the three Mabou Mines actors slithered, leapt, and flew across the stage, much to the bewilderment of the audience. Mabou Mines' stalwart Ruth Maleczech admitted that her actors were demoralised by the lack of any significant audience response to their work. Even the reviewer for the Straits Times seemed to regret that he could not reduce this multi-layered and complex work to a simple scenario involving a visit by the tax man" (115).

The perceived lack of quality check and appropriateness in securing programmes for the Arts Festival was fervently questioned. Liew had his challenges. As a civil servant primarily tasked to curate the international Arts Festival, he was limited by the system's ability to allow him to scout for productions overseas and visit other festivals to keep up with trends and

269 negotiate productions. Often he had to rely on an active artist network for recommendations or impinge on his travel to scout for productions. These recommendations have seen some interesting presentations in the Arts Festival including hitherto banned works such as The Red Detachment of Women by the National Ballet of China (1999) and some misses as the Mabou Mines programme demonstrates. He says that elements of experimental art practice and performance were beginning to present themselves in productions in the 1990s. Though this was a direct response to global trends, the Arts Festival was mindful not to alienate audiences, as tastes were not as sophisticated then. Hence, productions were selected assiduously to help shape public taste, and this was in line with the government's vision for a rising quality of life in Singapore. In this regard, Kazuo Ohno's butoh from Japan in which "audiences were sucked into an intellectual black hole" (Phan Ming Yen cited in Peterson, 2001: 177), presented in 1994, was considered the avant-garde of this period and Butoh became a regular feature of Liew's programming. He introduced the Late Night Series in 1994 – a platform to present edgy, experimental new works by young Singaporean artists, fulfilling NAC's commitment to promote audience development and respond to changing audience tastes (Peterson, 2001: 177).

Notably, the S$300,000 production of Macbeth and Medea by Ninagawa Company (Japan) in 1992 remains one of the most talked about productions of the 1990s, which Liew is proud of. Presented in spectacularly grand kabuki fashion, Macbeth, as reviewer Hannah Pandian put it, was “better than Shakespeare” as “the tragedy is played as a whirl of drawing room naturalism, Gothic horror, the contemporary psychological realism of Stanislavski and the two ancient Japanese theatre forms of kabuki and noh. Close your eyes, and haunting strains of Gabriel Faure’s ‘Requiem’ take you to an Edwardian conservatory on a winter’s afternoon” (The Straits

270 Times, 13 June 1992). Liew notes that even today this production is cited as a turning point for both Singaporean artists and audiences.

The Homecoming Series was introduced in the 1990s to celebrate Singaporean artists who had established an international reputation by inviting them to the Arts Festival to perform. It was a demonstration of a maturing society, known for its hard-nosed approach to the arts, to embrace and celebrate Singaporeans who had made it into the international circuit on their own. Piano virtuoso and renowned interpreter of John Cage's music, Margaret Leng Tan, pianist Koh Joo Ann and violinist Seow Lee Chin were brought back home for the inaugural shows of the series in 1992. Subsequent years saw the Arts Festival present artists such as actor/director Glen Goei, violinist Kam Ning, pianist Toh Chee Hung (1994); writer Ho Min Fong, pianist Koh Poh Lin, violinist Lee Huei Min (1996); composer Joyce Koh, pianists Seow Yit Kin and Lim Jing Jing, violinist Jansen Horn- Sin Lam (1999). Besides Glen Goei and Ho Min Fong who were featured in theatre, the rest of the artists were Western classical music specialists. The Homecoming Series, I argue, presented an earnest approach to build capacity in the local scene by acknowledging the achievements of Singaporeans abroad.

Concerns regarding an over-emphasis on Western-oriented artists and productions were raised. Asian art forms, particularly the traditional ethnic arts in Singapore, were seen to being sidelined by the Arts Festival, despite the government's emphasis on Asian and Shared Values. Though it must be registered that while productions from the West were popular with audiences and the media, the Arts Festival programming in the 1990s were tipped towards Asian and Singaporean content accounting for one-third of each Arts Festival (Peterson, 1996: 120). However, Asian productions rarely fared well on ticket sales during this period. This is mainly due to a large

271 appetite for Western programmes created by the government cultural policy to open the cultural and sector to the world to make Singapore a global city. Large-scale Western productions of musicals such as Les Miserable, Cats and Phantom of the Opera and major visual arts exhibitions such as Tresor, were the order of the day in fulfilling this global vision. Fed on this diet, Singaporeans were developing a mild allergy to all things in its backyard and favouring established programmes from other countries. This accounts for the lukewarm response to Singapore-made production such as Scorpion Orchid or the traditional arts.

As discussed in Chapter Two, the 1990s saw the emergence and implementation of Asian Values. With this emerging discourse, and in reaction to the Arts Festival's tepid response to Asian and traditional arts, the NAC launched a bi-annual festival celebrating Asian performing arts in both their antiquated and contemporary forms.

5.2.3 Festival of Asian Performing Arts

If Asian Values needed a visual and performative representation, the Festival of Asian Performing Arts (FAPA) organised in 1993, 1995 and 1997 was the event. Smaller in scale and budget, against the more international facing Arts Festival, it amalgamated other smaller festivals that pre-existed. These included amongst others the Traditional Theatre Festival, the Young People's Festival, the Drama Festival and the Dance Festival. This pan-Asian festival served to counterpoint the heavy Western programmes at the Arts Festival and presented some of Asia's best: Lin Hwai-min's Cloud Gate Dance Theatre (Taiwan), Sabri Brothers (Pakistan), the Yokohama Boat Theater (Japan), Malavika Sarukkai (India), the

272 Sardono Dance Theatre (Indonesia), Ravi Shankar (India) and the Shanghai People's Art Theatre (China).

Local productions were given ample opportunities to showcase their tradition while others branched out into experimentation as seen in Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (1995) written by Kuo Pao Kun and directed by Ong Keng Sen. FAPA gave birth to the Festival Village – a platform to present social and ritualised practices and performances reconnecting urban Asia to its village roots. Accessible and appealing to all, Festival Village became a critical introduction to the ensuing main festival programming. FAPA strategically had a singular branding focus: Asian Arts. Uma Rajan, the chairperson of the 1997 FAPA steering committee, said,

FAPA gave a new national platform for many Asian artists and art forms to refocus and raise the prestige of the Asian art forms on an international platform. Singaporean artists were able to showcase their talents, and avant-garde Asian art forms also found renewal in the classical traditions. FAPA brought to Singapore some of the best and most enchanting Asian works and Asian artists of international repute during its short but vibrant and exhilarating lifespan (Uma Rajan cited in Purushothaman, 2007).

273

FAPA, however, was plagued with poor audienceship. The first festival fared poorly at the box-office, forcing festival director Liew, in an interview with The Straits Times, to admit that Singaporeans had far more discerning tastes when it came to matters of Asian arts (27 November 1993). Audiences were discerning enough to distinguish between an artistic enterprise and a variety show. Adding to this, FAPA suffered a class syndrome and was perceived to be a poorer cousin of the main Arts Festival (Goh, 2012: 173). This and the less than ideal attendances continued to plague the 1995 Festival, and the organisers and the parent ministry were in discussion to discontinue the FAPA after its third season in 1997. This echoed the growing scepticism around Asian Values (Sen, 1997; Barr, 2002) as Singaporean audiences were embracing a more global outlook as the city-state grew in wealth.

The third FAPA (1997) grew in scale and size and saw a new emerging artistic director, Goh Ching Lee, who was then a senior deputy director at the NAC. She resuscitated the last edition and curated the most successful of the three festivals. Under her direction, FAPA started a process of experimentation with diverse and multi-dimensional works to explore a new and contemporary Asia as seen in productions such as Workhorse Afloat by TheatreWorks, Bunga Mawar, a locally written Western opera, and a new theatre company’s, Action Theatre’s, presentation of Chang & Eng – The Musical directed by Ekachai Uekrongtham which became one of Singapore’s most successful musicals. Goh CL introduced the Festival Village, which re-introduced an authentic Asian performance experience (Goh, 2012: 173). This final edition of FAPA saw attendance rise from sixty per cent in 1993 to ninety per cent in 1997. The eventual demise of FAPA took root as the Asian financial crisis beset and principles of Asian

274 Values flailed in the late 1990s. Rather than merge with the Arts Festival, the government increased the latter's Asian content.

The 1998 Arts Festival prescribed a formula of balancing Asian and Western content resulting in forty-seven per cent Asian and fifty-three per cent non-Asian groups participating in the Arts Festival. This prescription failed to integrate effectively into the overall ethos of the Arts Festival which was international in its outlook. This resulted in the Arts Festival strategically partnering the world-renowned music festival WOMAD to open the Arts Festival. WOMAD, presented as a continuation of the Festival Village, raked in unprecedented crowds.

The 1999 Arts Festival was circumspect reflecting the economic climate of that time. It was the first instance of the merged Singapore Festival of Arts and Festival of Asian Performing Arts, as well as the first step of the annualised Arts Festival. It was renamed Singapore Arts Festival with a fresh new logo designed by Batey Ads, creator of SIA's Singapore Girl icon and a television commercial directed by celebrated Singapore filmmaker Eric Khoo. With the global economy in meltdown, the Arts Festival was scaled down, with community extravagances such as the street parade being scrapped and fringe and community arts being shaved down to the bone. The Arts Festival did present some exciting performances by Robert Lepage and Ex Machina, Opera Atelier, Australian Ballet, the National Ballet of China and Trisha Brown Company, and with newly organised categories of community activities such as Arts on the Move and Heartland Concerts, as well as defined opening and closing extravaganzas. James Oseland, writing for American Theatre (1999), notes that the "result was dizzyingly multicultural, the theatrical equivalent of taking a stroll through one of Singapore's infamous hawker centres, where some of the world's most extraordinary cuisines – Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian,

275 Malaysian, Thai, Hokkienese, Fukienese, Shanghainese and South Indian – all available next to each other in orderly stalls" (74). Despite good ticket sales and audience, the spirit of the Arts Festival was at best moody owing in large part to worldwide conditions affecting the global city. The Arts Festival needed to respond to the global dynamics of economic spirals, the deconstruction of Asian Values and an increasingly discerning audience.

Midway through the festival planning of the 1999 season, Liew relinquished his position as director of programming and Goh CL was appointed festival director. She was faced with a scaled-down Arts Festival as the realisation that an annual festival would drain sponsorship and lead to audience fatigue. Amidst all this, the Arts Festival needed an explicit programming vision. Goh CL was tasked with addressing these challenges and taking the Arts Festival into the 21st century

5.3 Conclusion

The tail end of the 20th century saw a battered Singapore caught up in a melee of regional economic problems, but by then the Arts Festival had grown in depth, scale and scope (Goh, 2012: 178) fulfilling the 1980s vision to make Singapore a culturally vibrant society. This chapter has shown that despite its energetic attempt to mirror the culture designed by the government around Asian Values and Shared Values, the Arts Festival's future was tied to global and economic imperatives. This is reflected in the outcome of the short-lived FAPA. It has identified the role of the Singapore Tourism Board in internationalising the Arts Festival; increased confidence in arts companies and artists in engaging with the government in critical discourse and how the Arts Festival was essential for urban vibrancy evidenced through year on year increase in audience participation. As the

276 next chapter shows, this lays the ground for the arts to be included in the economic strategy to make Singapore a cultural and creative hub that would attract investments. This sets the scene for an arts renaissance in Singapore.

277 Chapter Six

NEW INSPIRATION FOR A 21ST CENTURY RENAISSANCE CITY

6.1 Introduction

The fin de siècle of the 20th century left Singapore brow-beaten by a crisis with a population awakening to the realisation that the often well-managed city-state was fallible. The economic plans of the 1980s assumed that the vision of transforming Singapore into a global city, with Swiss-style living standards, would go unchallenged by external and internal conditions. Unfortunately, as discussed earlier in this thesis, challenging conditions did surface in the form of the Asian financial crisis; the collapse of the dot-com industry; the outbreak of avian flu and SARS; acts of terror in 9/11 New York, USA and Bali, Indonesia; and natural disasters such as earthquakes and the 2004 tsunami affecting hundreds of thousands of people across Asia. Asia was becoming a site of economic crisis, disease, terrorism and calamities, quickly displacing the vision for a new Asian renaissance.

However, the continuously forward-planning government was keen to ride the opportunity of an economic and cultural renaissance in Asia. As discussed in Chapter Three, Singaporean cultural policies firmly guided the programming of the Arts Festival to enable Singapore to become a distinctive global city for the arts. Moreover, as the arts featured large in part as an integral sector of an emerging creative economy, Singapore benchmarked itself against first-world cities as articulated in the Renaissance City Report 2000. The policy was clear: "To shift away from the ‘arts for arts’ sake mindset, to look at the development of arts from a holistic perspective, to contribute to the development of the creative

278 industries as well as our nation’s social development.” The arts flourished with investment in content development, the professionalisation of companies, skills and talent enhancement and excellent world-class facilities. This chapter looks at the way the Arts Festival was compelled to refresh itself and take the lead in innovation, collaboration and entrepreneurial risk – values deemed a hallmark of a creative Singapore. With a new festival director armed with a new cultural policy, this chapter will show how the Arts Festival became an instrument of governmentality to position Singapore as a renaissance city and central to the emergent cultural and creative economy.

6.2 The Arts Festival in a New Creative Economy: 2000-2009

The year 2000 was a turning point for the Arts Festival. It saw a leadership change in the artistic programming of the Arts Festival as Liew was forced to pass the baton to Goh CL. This change in leadership was critical for the government. As Singapore emerged out of an economic crisis, the government garnered the creative and imaginative capacity of Singaporeans to generate new ideas to support its vision for a creative Singapore. The financial crisis revealed that Singapore needed new engines of growth. The Creative Industries Development Strategy 2002 and the Renaissance City Report 2000, discussed in Chapter Three, saw the government pursue the cultural and creative industries as a significant engine of economic growth and establish Singapore as a “New Asia Creative Hub” (CIDS Sept 2002). The Arts Festival was at the heart of this development. Professor Bernard Tan, chairman of the Arts Festival’s steering committee in the 1990s, recalls this change to be a “watershed for the Festival” (Purushothaman, 2007) as it charted itself from being a national event into the global arena with a newfound confidence to be a global creative player.

279

The Arts Festival Goh CL envisioned threw the Arts Festival on its head to “inspire, challenge, surprise” (Liu, 2000: 3). It embodied a confident, edgy Asia, entrepreneurial and innovative in spirit. It undertook entrepreneurial risk through international collaborations to develop and produce new artistic practices for the global arts market. The 2000 Arts Festival was themed ‘New Inspiration' with an objective to deliver an international Arts Festival with an Asian flavour. According to Goh CL, this target was mapped out in the late 1990s, but it did not materialise. Hence, the new theme resonated with the belief that the change of festival director was a watershed moment in the history of the Arts Festival. This Arts Festival was indeed significant for breaking away from previous conventions of festival programming. By focussing on concocting collaborations, celebrating interdisciplinarity and presenting world premieres by international artists, it paved the manner in which other new players in the arts such as the Esplanade programmed the arts in their venues. Moreover, the Arts Festival created an urgency to programme innovatively for an increasingly discerning audience. This approach set the tone for all subsequent festivals for the arts in Singapore.

The Arts Festival faced several challenges during Goh CL's tenure. First, a stagnating budget plagued it. An annual budget of S$6-7 million (including programming and marketing costs) remained similar to festival funds of the 1990s. The budget had not corresponded to changing global cost index for presenting productions, as such, the Arts Festival was unable to be effective in being ‘all things to all people’ given the pressure on its limited resources. However, rather than communicate its limitation, the Arts Festival still drove a ‘something for everyone’ philosophy while seeking to articulate a clear identity for its core programming.

280 Second, the cultural milieu had changed drastically compared to prior decades when the Arts Festival was the only event of major significance on the arts calendar. With policy shifts, as shown earlier, a vibrant arts scene had meant that there were new players in the field. New and small-scale festivals based on specific genres and themes sprouted. With a sharp but narrow focus to access new audiences, festivals such as Hua Yi (traditional and contemporary Chinese arts), Kala Utsavam (traditional and contemporary Indian arts), the Singapore Fringe Festival (independent and experimental artists), the Mosaic Music Festival (jazz and world music) and others, provided niche experiences for discerning audiences while emphasising a substantial community engagement platform. As such, the Arts Festival no longer enjoyed the place as the only international festival in Singapore. Furthermore, with the opening of the Esplanade in 2002, audiences had more programme choices throughout the year. While there were overlaps in programming and approach between different arts organisations, the NAC saw it as a healthy trend for various festivals and venues to co-exist and complement one another, signalling the growing maturity of Singapore’s arts scene. The challenge for the Arts Festival was then to remain the only multi-genre, multi-venue international festival of significant scale and scope of a longer duration. With these two challenges, Goh CL had to re-chart the festival map over several years. The Arts Festival "needed an identity and purpose" (Goh, 2012: 180).

Goh CL was trained in music and arts management and had a penchant for contemporary artistic processes involving experimentation, language and history. Her ability to critically engage with artists, festival directors, and policymakers allowed her to broker projects and ideas and, unlike Liew her festivals were unabashedly forward-looking. But more importantly, her festivals responded to three specific recommendations made in the RC

281 Report: groom talent, go international and develop an arts and cultural renaissance economy.

Goh CL's programming unapologetically placed audiences on notice to catch up with global changes in artistic expressions or be left behind. She also placed the Arts Festival on a pathway into creative commissioning and collaboration between Singaporean and international arts groups. Goh CL travelled far and wide to develop collaborative partnerships and commission new programmes with international festivals and artists. The Arts Festival began a new adventure as a cultural entrepreneur by working with world- renowned experimental artists, co-commissioning with other festivals and capitalising on cultural Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) made between the NAC and its counterparts elsewhere in the world. To reflect its new direction, old festival staples such as the Homecoming Series, Festival Village and Festival Fringe were phased out and replaced with events that represented new developments in the arts.

Several programming features stood out during Goh CL’s tenure from 2000 to 2009: present works that innovate and experiment; create works collaborate cross time zones, disciplines and countries; re-imagine tradition and contemporise Asia and give voice to arts from under-represented countries.

In mapping these features, the divide between contemporary/tradition, modern/post-modern and local/global was taken to task, broken down and recast. Investing in cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural encounters, the Arts Festival promoted Singapore's potential to interface with the East and West. Unlike the prior decade, when the Arts Festival had to balance multiethnic and multicultural dimensions against the need to ensure a local/international and Asian/Western content, the globalised new millennium freed the Arts

282 Festival of these politicised divides, and it promoted and celebrated contemporary expressions in whatever form they may take. The Arts Festival developed a mainly Asian and contemporary character (sixty per cent contemporary: forty per cent mainstream; sixty per cent Asian: forty per cent non-Asian). This programming proposition garnered the Arts Festival a strong branding and international profile as a bold and progressive festival.

Let me return to the defining features of the Arts Festival.

First, innovative and experimental works factored prominently in the Arts Festival. These were intended to encourage audiences to re-imagine the new, to re-think the way in which they had to appreciate the arts and seek greater confidence in being critical of their own experiences. Innovation and experimentation are long-drawn processes, which are often costly, time- consuming and result in failures before striking it right. That being the nature of research, the Arts Festival prompted Singapore arts groups such as the Tang Quartet, Toy Factory Productions, TheatreWorks, Singapore Dance Theatre and Singapore Chinese Orchestra to likewise engage with the new and contemporary. Some succeeded, some did not. In 2000, as a tribute to Singapore's foremost playwright, Kuo Pao Kun, the Arts Festival staged a double bill of his seminal plays, The Coffin is Too Big for the Hole (1984) and No Parking on Odd Days (1989). Directed by top Southeast Asian directors, in the four official languages of Singapore, Krishen Jit (English), Lim Jen Erh (Mandarin), Elangovan (Tamil) and Nadiputra (Malay) the Arts Festival commission, enabled Kuo's entry from Chinese to English language theatre (Jit, 2000: 92). Furthermore, it was successful in expanding and providing new cultural perspectives to a single playwright's work.

283 Through the years and even today, the Arts Festival has presented numerous international companies that are at the forefront of innovation. These include D.A.V.E: Digital Amplified Video Engine (Austria), Experimentum Mundi (Italy), H.Art Chaos, (Japan), and Ultima Vez (Belgium), and Akram Khan Company (UK), amongst many. In presenting innovative works, the Arts Festival was able to build a stable platform to court and invite some of the world's best masters of contemporary artistic practice, including Robert Wilson, USA (2000); Philip Glass, USA (2001); Peter Brook, France (2002); Richard Foreman, USA (2002); Michael Nyman, UK (2002); Meredith Monk, USA (2003); Yo-Yo Ma, USA (2004); Robert Lepage, Canada (2005); Jiri Kylian and Nederlands Dans Theater, the Netherlands (2006); Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and Rosas, Belgium (2006); Anne Bogart and SITI Company, USA (2006); Sylvie Guillem, France (2007); and Saburo Teshigawara, Japan (2007), to name a few. This who’s who approach positioned Singapore as an annual site of critical artistic practice for world-renowned artists and an artistic themepark for audiences.

Goh CL invested in works-in-progress (akin to start-ups) and later commissioned them to stage these as world-premieres in Singapore (e.g. Robert Wilson's Hot Water (2002). To facilitate this investment, the Arts Festival introduced an international arts residency programme to acclaimed artists to locate themselves, for a prolonged period, in Singapore to create new works. While they produced works, the Arts Festival identified and groomed artists for the global festival circuit. The Arts Festival commenced confidently to play a pivotal role in global trends as a producer and arbiter of taste. The first residency in 2004 hosted UK choreographer Akram Khan to create a new work, Ma, while in 2005 Wim Vandekeybus of Ultima Vez from Belgium created Puur. Both these dance works premiered at the Arts Festival.

284 Second, in propositioning paths to traverse the highways of globalisation, works and collaborations that cross time zones, disciplines and countries were of interest to the Arts Festival. Goh CL called these “intercontinental world premiere” (Goh, 2012: 184) In doing so, the Arts Festival engaged in creative and aesthetic brokering between artists and their audiences. Works such as Tracking Time (2000) by Australia’s Doppio-Paralleo, an installation performance at Clifford pier, a transit point for immigrants, pilgrims, workers and travellers to and from Singapore, served to provide historical connectivity from the past to a moment in the future, the 21st century. Another work, UROBOS: Project Time (2001), involving four countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria and Singapore, provided an opportunity for artists to explore perceptions of time in different societies in the cusp of the new millennium. Alladeen (2003) by The Builders Association and Moti Roti, from the USA and UK respectively, presented the new world of call centres displacing cultures, peoples and time as workers in Bangalore, India, with their British and American accents servicing customers and consumers around the clock. The highly technologised production revealed the fissures in society and the self that the crossing of time creates.

Play on Earth (2006), a simulcast production was a three-continent collaboration of companies from Singapore, Brazil and UK, which was watched by audiences in three different countries at the same time (regardless of time of day). This unique and highly subscribed production had its performance promoted in these participating countries and brought a new global experience to appreciating simulcast performances. In another production, Play! A Video Game Symphony (2007), performed by the Singapore Festival Orchestra conducted by American music director Arnie Roth, looked at the background sound/music in the virtual world of cyber- video games and their transcendental qualities evoked by a symphonic

285 orchestra. These nascent attempts at presenting works on the concept of time need further investigation and theorisation within the larger field of media studies and cybernetics. However, it is notable that the Arts Festival was a palpable site for practice-based research (investigation through practice and performance new media) and this most aptly supported the creative enterprise that the RC Report recommended.

Third, works that re-imagined tradition and contemporised Asia found a home at the Arts Festival. If Asian Values had to be re-interpreted, under Goh CL’s programming it was contemporised into cutting-edge activity. Goh CL programmed contemporary works from Asia that questioned orientalised readings of Asian identity and their cartographic relationship to post/neocolonial practices. Asia as a mythical construct of the West is a collection of heterogeneous cultures, languages and practices framed within orientalist notions of economic under-development, deeply-rooted traditions, backward practices in human and intellectual rights, and visibly colourful, vibrant and quaint societies as being representative of Asia. The Arts Festival presented works that were, to borrow from cultural theorist Naoki Sakai, "free of the fantasy of colonial relationship" (2001: 228) to foreground a reading of Asia that celebrated the diversity of ideals, richness in expressions and fullness of life. This approach saw the diminishing role of traditional, purist Asian art forms from the Arts Festival programming as they were held suspect, adulterated by orientalised ideals of what Asia should be. Furthermore, these types of art forms, when framed within anthropological renditions of ritual and performance, foster standardisation through repetition; idealisation of the past through memorialisation and a complacent circulation of old truths, aged practices as being signs of culture.

286 In this regard, Southeast Asian ritual and performance forms were fielded to the margins of the core festival programme unlike their centrality in FAPA in the 1990s. In place, syncretic works that explored and problematised identitarian issues such as East vs. West, tradition vs. modern, global vs. local, and works that were circumspect of Western and Asian influences in artistic practice were privileged: Desdemona by TheatreWorks (2000), Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra by US-based Tan Dun (2002), Instant is a Millennium by Tan Swie Hian and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra (2003), Ma by UK’s Akram Khan Company (2004), Amber by National Theatre of China (2005), Quest by Singapore Dance Theatre and Singapore Chinese Orchestra featuring choreographers from Korea, China and Singapore (2006) and The Map & Paper Concerto by Tan Dun with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (2007). The choice of these was deliberate to mark the Arts Festival's emphasis on the new and contemporising Asia. To stress this point, all of these performances opened the Arts Festival as its gala event thereby emphasising its importance to guests such as politicians, arts champions, media and sponsors). A majority of these productions received lukewarm or polite enthusiasm primarily because they did not locate themselves within familiar ‘feel good' sensibilities, conventional theatrics or audience taste. These events, together with many other Singaporean productions such as Phoon Yew Tien's Confucius – A Secular Cantata (2001), Toy Factory’s Spirits (2005), 12 SMS Across the Mountains by The Arts Fission Company and Dance Theatre CcadoO from Korea (2005), The Global Soul – the Buddha Project by TheatreWorks (2003), Mobile by The Necessary Stage (2006), Ghana Sangam by Ghanvenothan Retnam (2006), started a process of artists using their art to present their readings of culture and identity in 21st century Asia.

Finally, another feature of the Arts Festival was its investment in presenting works from under-represented countries. These include artistic works from

287 South America, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Scandinavian countries - places that do not readily factor into the common experience of the Singaporean. This was different from the 1990s approach of bringing the world to Singapore showcasing national cultures as representations of ways of life, as if in a museum. Goh CL’s approach foregrounded the existence of linguistically unique artistic practices from these countries. It aimed to provide Singaporeans and the rest of Asia a glimpse into - not national – but everyday cultures, societies and creative practices. The Arts Festival offered a delectable array of ideas from gypsy music to politically and ideological charged Slovenian theatre to Brazilian feminism to experimentation from Scandinavia. The introduction of unique places reinforced the power of globalisation in making communities accessible. From Reunion Island (Theatre Talipot) to Columbia (Música Ficta), Cuba Cubanismo) to Bulgaria (Two Worlds), Lithuania (Meno Fortas) to Palestine (Al Kasaba Theatre and Cinematheque), Singaporeans were provided a cultural tour-de-force. One may argue that the Arts Festival propounded an orientalising or even occidentalising gaze of the world, but this helped it develop its own uniqueness and point of view.

Beyond showcasing performances, the Arts Festival revved up its energy in generating multilateral networking with other international arts organisations. It hosted the inaugural general meeting of the Association of Asian Performing Arts Festivals (AAPAF); the international gathering of the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) in 2003; and a two- day forum Critically Speaking: Asia & Europe Contemporary Performing Arts Colloquium in 2005. The Arts Festival also served as a backdrop for other international meetings such as the World Dance Alliance, the 10th Annual Conference of the Performance Studies International and the Asian Arts Mart. In 2007, the Arts Festival inked a strategic alliance with an international festival partner, the Edinburgh International Festival, to

288 support mutual touring and co-commissioning. This being similar to the agreements between Singapore film companies and their international partners (Curtin, 2007), provided Singaporean artists access to global markets and the opportunity for Singapore to showcase its talents. The diversity of arts and cultural activities presented under the auspices of the Arts Festival contributed significantly to the vibrancy quotient of Singapore as a global city and a creative hub for the arts.

Vibrancy was an essential part of a socio-economic plan. Sociologist Kwok Kian Woon and arts administrator Low Kee Hong argue that the vibrancy factor was a competitive struggle for a heightened positioning of Singapore in the global network of capitalist cities, as a “world city” (2002: 154). This had led to a re-imagining of the city (or, as mentioned earlier, a process of “disneyfication” as Kwok and Low foreground) through the modernisation of heritage sites, creation of pedestrian malls and public spaces, and the celebration of major cultural, social and religious Arts Festivals to bring people back into the streets to generate the hustle and bustle of city life. The aim was to take the visitor and Singaporean through thematic spatial and temporal zones as if in a Disney theme park (158). The vibrancy the Arts Festival created in the 1980s and 1990s was recast in the new millennium against a backdrop of new civic and urban rejuvenation and the vibrancy thinned and spread across the city and throughout the calendar year.

6.2.1 Taking Risks

If taking risk was a feature of creative Singapore, the Arts Festival with its adventures into new creations was a leader in cultural entrepreneurialism. The Arts Festival invested in commissioning and working with artists to create a body of work for the global marketplace that was made-in-

289 Singapore. Arts Festival commissions came fast and furious, facilitating an unprecedented number of premieres. The Arts Festival became an engine of new intellectual property for the arts and positioned Singapore as a place of artistic creativity. On the other hand, these commissions exposed the Arts Festival to risk: alienating the audience with works still in progress; financial losses; and incomplete or bad art. Notwithstanding these concerns, the commissions became robust talking points for the media and the arts fraternity. Some of these commissions included Hot Water by theatre director Robert Wilson – the first-ever Singaporean commission of an international work, in partnership with Musikfest Bremen; Desdemona by TheatreWorks – co-commissioned with Adelaide Festival; Apocalypso by composer Kelly Tang – performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic; One Hundred Years in Waiting by The Necessary Stage and The Theatre Practice (2001) – three generations of playwrights, Kuo Pao Kun, Haresh Sharma and Chong Tze Chien, worked on a play about the life and times of Sun Yat Sen and Occupation by Huzir Sulaiman, a joint Malaysia/Singapore production on the Japanese Occupation of the 1940s.

These international commissions or co-commissions questioned the common understanding of a ‘world premiere’ in a festival setting. World premieres (first presentations) were traditionally seen as the culmination of a long and arduous process of creation, production and refinement. They were critical in a ‘big’ world that was distant and difficult to access. World premieres took years to reach other parts of the world. For example, the arrival of the musical Cats in 1993 in Singapore was the mark of a new era of international works penetrating the consciousness of local audiences. World premieres are only as good as the fact that they mark a temporal idea of being the first. However, as festival commissions go, a world premiere is insignificant in the sense of ‘the first'. Ideas flow and mix and the presentation of the first is a potent concoction of risk, challenge and the

290 display of a new idea. The investment in risk is cause célèbre. Commissioned programmes are celebrated (critically or otherwise) even if they push the boundaries of failure. Today, world premieres are celebrated for their original yet often incomplete or unpolished ideas. Where there is criticism, it is often fanned unfairly at the organiser and less so at the artist with their creative licences or, for that matter, the audience for their lack of preparedness.

Two productions from the 2000 Arts Festival stand out. American theatre doyen, Robert Wilson’s Hot Water was the Arts Festival’s first international commission. The production explored two realities of time and space, landscape and two scores (musical and visual), weaved through an elaborate multimedia, high technology virtual ‘box’. The central act was a piano solo by Tzimon Barto of a rarely performed Transcendental Etudes by Franz Liszt. Wilson invited the audience to listen with their eyes. Desdemona by intercultural theatre expert Ong Keng Sen was a complex intercultural take on Shakespeare’s, Othello. Presented from a woman's point of view, the play was rewritten (or erased) by Japanese Rio Kishida, and featured music composed by Korea's Jang Jae Hyo and performers from India, Indonesia, Myanmar and Singapore who worked through traditional art forms such as Kathakali, Kudiyattam, Myanmar marionettes and Yogyanese court dance. The audience were plunged into a crucible containing multimedia theatrics, installations and e-mails. He predicted in a preview interview with The Arts Magazine (May-June 2000), “Some people will absolutely hate it. Some people will be shocked and resistant, but through the one and a half hours that stance will change. And the last group will find it refreshing.” Not for the faint-hearted, the production as the gala opening of the Arts Festival became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

291 The production did not go well with audiences. Reviewers and critics jumped on the bandwagon of militant criticism of Goh CL's risky venture with both theatre heavyweights. Some national dailies derided the Arts Festival for wasting public funds on poor investments, that is, in productions that do not make sense. Metaphorically, it underscored a suspicion: That the government's experimentation with globalisation was losing its domestic followers. Nevertheless, the Arts Festival and the NAC did not falter. They continued to recast the imagination of audiences, and many productions continued to push the boundaries of convention engaging with the unspoken, excess and starkness of ordinary lives. Notable productions include Chandralekha's Sloka (2000), The Necessary Stage’s Revelations (2003), Taiwan company Golden Bough Theatre’s Butterflies (2004) and Argentinean choreographer Diana Szeinblum’s Secreto y Malibú (2004). But it was the two productions, Hot Water and Desdemona that signalled the challenging and problematic global terrain the Arts Festival had chosen to tread. A bitter aftertaste of globalisation was imminent.

These risky yet innovative ventures marked the Arts Festival as a trailblazer of globalisation and Singapore drew world attention fulfilling the RC Report recommendations. The Arts Festival branded itself as a global arbiter of taste and featured various themes to frame the Arts Festival with the aim of encouraging and prodding audiences to engage with the Arts Festival. Beginning with ‘New Inspiration' (2000), marketing taglines meant to reflect artistic themes have been created every year since: ‘Fill Your Senses' (2001), ‘Move with the Flow' (2002), ‘Impressions' (2003), ‘A New Season Blossoms' (2004), ‘The Season of Brilliance', ‘One Season. Many Faces' (2006) and ‘Metamorphosis' (2007). These taglines served on another to arouse audience desires to see/experience new things and create a fantasy world of the arts. Falling into the realm of lifestyle marketing, these festival taglines (some more useful than others) were essentially aimed at

292 engineering a consumptive demand for ‘aesthetic goods', that is, the productions. The desire for the arts is a critical element in making audiences migrate from consumptive 'want' to essential 'need'. The imagery of the taglines became signs of lifestyles and preferences signified through advertising campaigns.

If desire is an essential element of lifestyle marketing, then the 2001 campaign titled ‘Fill Your Senses' drew inspiration from items such as food, smell and taste. These elements were present in some of the productions such as Kitchen Katha (India), which was set in a kitchen and lent itself to live cooking of foods in the Jubilee Hall Theatre at the Raffles Hotel, to be served to the audience. However, the marketing campaign for the Arts Festival aimed to build on the sensory perception of the viewer. To achieve this, it framed the campaign visuals on a male human body as a representation of an artistic landscape, focusing on the sensual pouting lips of the model to represent notions of speech, action and performance. The primarily homoerotic sensibility was carried through television and print campaigns, resonating with a growing emphasis on cultivating a mysterious, inviting, experience with the Arts Festival.

The 2003 Arts Festival tagline was ‘Be Bitten by the Arts Bug'. However, this was withdrawn immediately and replaced with ‘Impressions' when Singapore and Asia were severely affected by SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). As SARS ravaged, the Arts Festival placed a comprehensive set of measures to help safeguard the well-being of artists, audiences and festival workers. Artists were supplied with health kits for their personal use and self-monitoring of their temperature. Artists' temperatures were checked before they entered rehearsals and performances, and also assurances for international artists were provided through the purchase of health insurance by NAC to cover the period of

293 their stay in Singapore. All festival staff, theatre and backstage crew were required to submit health and travel declarations to confirm their state of health and to monitor their temperatures daily, while all patrons had to undergo temperature screenings for all indoor performances and were requested to leave behind their particulars for contact tracing. Testing stations and isolation rooms were set up at all venues and refunds were provided to patrons turned away at the screening stations and for those who missed a show because they were unwell. Six international groups pulled out and the Arts Festival lost close to S$0.4 million (The Straits Times, 25 June 2003). Attendance for the remaining seventeen ticketed productions in the Arts Festival's core programme dropped to 74.8 per cent compared to the 2002 Arts Festival’s eighty per cent. However, more than 300,000 Singaporeans gathered to support all the major outdoor events and activities in a show of resilience to a ravaged environment. Despite the SARS outbreak, this was a commendable achievement for the Arts Festival.

From 2000 to 2004, the Arts Festival was tightly curated around interdisciplinary and multimedia works to establish a new festival brand. Post-2004, in addition to this, the Arts Festival created more room for traditional Asian forms. While the Arts Festival had been bold and innovative, it did not negate the demands for greater box office receipts motivated by the need to balance the budget through income and need to widen access to Singaporeans. There was an underlying assumption that to achieve both; the Arts Festival had to have a greater investment in mainstream/conventional and accessible/mass appeal programmes. As such, the Arts Festival did present traditional blockbusters, especially in 2005 when four were included in the programme. This particular year was indeed a testing ground as it brought in expensive productions such as The Philadelphia Orchestra (USA), Swan Lake by The Royal Ballet (UK), Amber by the National Theatre Company of China and Ola Kala by Les

294 Arts Sauts (France). While they were popular and well-received, they compromised the artistic direction of the Arts Festival and ate into the budget. But this backslide was more of an aberration in the planning during Goh CL’s tenure. From 2006 onwards, a rebalancing act ensued to strike a middle path between the extremes of the pre-2005 and 2005 programming.

Concerning wider accessibility, the Arts Festival continued its tradition of creating an extensive outreach programme. But with smaller budgets, it collaborated with a variety of arts, business and community partners to maintain broad reach. Introduced in 2000 was Waterloo Arts Alive! which featured various Singaporean arts groups housed in the restored buildings in the Waterloo Street arts district, with performances and activities by Young Musicians’ Society, Dance Ensemble Singapore, Chinese Opera Society and Chinese Calligraphy Society. Mega-events were co-presented such as the Singapore Street Festival: Street Revolution! (2002), the first youth street festival in partnership with the National Youth Council and the Orchard Road Business Association. Another major initiative, Asian Showcase (2005), was introduced with the intent of bringing back the experience of traditional street performances of the various ethnic communities such as cross-talk, Bangsawan and Indian folk theatre while POPagenda@the Festival in 2006 was a mini-festival of pop music featuring local and regional artists. The Arts Festival partnered the North East and South West community development councils in 2007 for their community arts festivals. These artistic events replaced the more traditional fringe events and spectaculars and complemented a renewed approach to presenting community-based events.

The 2007 Arts Festival marked its thirtieth anniversary according to government who used 1977 as the official start date of the Arts Festival when it came under public sector responsibility (Purushothaman, 2007).

295 The cover of the programme guide featured an anthropomorphic form symbolising a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, that is, representing the transformation of the Arts Festival over the years. While Singaporeans had come to embrace the Arts Festival as an annual celebration of the arts, many were oblivious to its long existence except bureaucrats, festival workers and artists. The programming was designed around a set of works that would confront and bridge different genres and traditions (Sacred Monster by Akram Khan and Sylvie Guillem), re-imagine theatre classics (The Dollhouse by Mabou Mines, Romeo and Juliet by OKT/Vilnius City Theatre) and new visions of music (Tan Dun’s The Map & Paper Concerto, Arnie Roth’s Play! A Video Game Symphony). Twenty-two productions and 496 performances and activities costing S$6.4 million reached out to 718,500 people. Overall, capacity for ticketed curated and commissioned shows edged over eighty-one per cent, outdoing the previous year’s statistics.

The internationalisation of the Arts Festival reached a new dimension with a formal Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with one of the world's oldest and prestigious festivals – the Edinburgh International Festival. The MOU aims to support mutual touring and co-commissioning opportunities between Singapore and Edinburgh and this through Optical Identity – a collaborative music theatre production between the Tang Quartet (Singapore) and the Theatre Cryptic (United Kingdom). This production premiered in Singapore and went on to Edinburgh. This agreement brokers cultural diplomacy between an established institution known for its aesthetic arbitrage over the decades and a younger festival that is fast shaping the scene in the global festival market. It signals the global role of the Arts Festival in brokering new intellectual property in the arts market.

296 On the home front, there was a drive to reach new audiences through outreach and innovative programming. With more than 400 activities and an army of 1,300 artists penetrating suburban neighbourhoods, subway systems and public hospitals and parks, some 688,000 people attended the outreach programmes. From the grand aerial opening Dreams of Flight by La Fura dels Baus (Spain) to Project: Eden, a public installation by visual artist Donna Ong (Singapore), to the phantasmatic closing performance Time Out by antagon theaterAKTion (Germany), the community was encouraged to experience contemporary arts in a fun manner. Family Funfest was introduced to provide educational and engaging arts activities for the entire family. This was further enhanced with a tie-up with two local community arts festivals – the North East Dance Festival and the South West District Arts Festival, which provided the Arts Festival with an important vehicle to reach out to communities that would otherwise not come to the city centre to engage with the arts.

Two new initiatives were designed to signal a way forward. In the field of classical music, the Arts Festival introduced the Singapore Festival Orchestra (SFO) in 2007, comprising some of Singapore’s best professional musicians prepared by music director Chan Tze Law. A form of a festival orchestra momentarily existed in 1977. Conducted by then maestro Choo Hoey, the Festival Orchestra and Chorus provided a platform to showcase the combined efforts of the Asian Youth Orchestra, the Singapore Teachers Choir and the Singapore Youth Choir. However, the new SFO was primarily set up to meet the Arts Festival's need to provide an accompanying or resident orchestra in musical partnership with Singaporean and international ballet, dance and opera companies that were performing at the Arts Festival. The Singapore Symphony Orchestra, is the only major orchestra, had its performance and vacation schedule, which made it difficult to support the growing demand for orchestral accompaniment or

297 ‘pit work'. Furthermore, amateur-based orchestras and ensembles – comprising amateur and semi-professional musicians – were unable to deliver the standards required of international touring productions. In the previous festivals, regional orchestras with good performance standards were hired. According to Goh GL, while these orchestras were affordable, their standards varied. With the SFO formation, the Arts Festival would be able to provide consistent performances of professional standards. Furthermore, with rising costs of presenting international collaborations, a supporting professional orchestra helps allay concerns that international partners may have for their productions, thus contributing to the reduction of production costs (Purushothaman, 2007). Beyond this, the SFO was to support niche concerts that showcase commissions by Singaporean composers and emerging artists with the intent to establish itself as the resident orchestra of the Arts Festival. The SFO inaugurated its existence with the sold-out performances of Play! A Video Game Symphony featuring award-winning music from popular video games conducted by Grammy recipient Arnie Roth from the United States.

Over the decades, the Arts Festival had been a platform for developing and showcasing Singaporean talent just as Singaporean talents have been at the forefront of festival programming. As such, the RC Report’s recommendation to recognise and groom talent fell neatly into the Arts Festival’s strategy. The Arts Festival developed initiatives to groom the next generation of artists in Singapore in the same spirit as the collaboration between amateurs and established directors and choreographers in the 1980s. In 2006, it introduced Forward Moves, a dance platform for emerging Singaporean dance-makers working within and outside of Singapore. This annual event was heavily subscribed, in its inaugural year, when it presented the choreographic works of Aaron Khek, Kuik Swee Boon, Danny Tan and Elysa Wendi. The subsequent year it showcased other

298 emerging choreographers such as Daniel K, Ricky Sim and Jo-anne Lee thereby providing valuable learning experience for these young talents. Along similar lines, the Arts Festival introduced Full Frontal in 2007 for theatre, a platform for young theatre-makers "to explore and confront new dimensions in their practice through theatre directing" (2007 programme guide). For the inaugural production of the new series, Peter Sau and Li Xie revisited Singaporean texts, Machine by Tan Tarn How and A Little White Sailing Boat by Kuo Pao Kun respectively. The Arts Festival appointed dramaturges Robin Loon and Kok Heng Leun to support the directors. In a similar vein, dance critic Tang Fu Kuen supported young choreographers in Forward Moves. Music was given a platform in Festival Fantasia. The inaugural production featured two young, up-and-coming classical musicians, pianist Abigail Sin and violinist Loh Jun Hong, who was accompanied by the SFO. In the visual arts, artist Donna Ong was commission to create an installation. Titled Project: Eden, the installation was a converted forty-foot container greenhouse garden made of brusque plastic trees, shrubs, toilet brush flowers and paper-clip insects that conjured up images of innocence lost in a plastic world. Centrally located at a major public thoroughfare at Raffles City shopping centre, the installation doubled as an informational site for the 2007 Arts Festival, and at the same time, a memorial site with displays of past festival images. In all these projects, the Arts Festival aimed to cultivate a new generation of art-makers and, at the same time, develop a body of Singaporean works. The grooming of emerging artists was seen as a new initiative parallel to preparing established artists for the international stage.

The rapid speed of a renaissance city was taking its toll on Singapore as the environment was beginning to show signs of disenfranchisement between the local and global. This was a period of the US and European financial crisis and disaffect was setting in. The Arts Festival was not immune to it.

299 The 2008 and 2009 were at the extreme ends of a continuum for Goh CL: the former introspective and the latter, extroverted. Her programming for 2008 was artistically more complex and fulfilling for her as an artistic director (Goh, 2012). However, it racked in poor tickets sales drawing the national dailies to call the festival a flop (Goh, 2012: 190). Goh however, turned the tables by programming a more popular, yet critically extroverted fare in 2009, involving innovative performances by Shaolin monks and conceptual ideas drawn from Asian tangram. This surpassed the ninety-two per cent mark for audiences and ticket sales (Goh, 2012: 191). Ending on a high note, Goh concluded her tenure as the festival’s director and resigned.

The ten years of the Arts Festival under Goh - complex and sophisticated as it was - corresponded with an increasingly confident Singapore. As a free port for the arts it accessed ideas far and wide, drawing accolades for its experimentation and innovation. It placed Singapore as a centre for ideas at a global and local level. It rode the vision of the renaissance city high and made content development and talent development for the creative economy a priority.

William Peterson (2009) provides a report card on the Goh CL’s Arts Festival. He foregrounds the premise that Singapore was "poised to become an arts hub" driven by similar economic drivers as finance and transportation and become "a cog in the wheel of economic development" (112-113). Drawing from sociologist George Ritzer's 2007 theoretical idea, he paints the Arts Festival as being ‘grobal'; that is, characterised by a form of neo-imperialistic global growth orientation that produces culture that is "global and accessible but increasingly devoid of content and removed from any concrete or stable cultural, political, or social context" (111). He argues that the Arts Festival "runs the risk of offering a kind of global nothing, a product that is as sleek, recognisable, and international as a lovely Gucci

300 bag, but which offends no one and increasingly elides the particulars of culture, politics and place" (114). Peterson opines that the Arts Festival under Goh CL diminished the “Singaporeanness of Singaporean work” (130) by failing to genuinely engage with Singaporean arts companies thereby not grounded in the lived experience of Singapore (128).

Lorraine Lim (2012) does not veer far from Peterson's thesis but undertakes a study of the Arts Festival's programming through an application of Bourdieu's socio-cultural theoretical concept of habitus, which is, a "product of a particular type of environment" (Bourdieu cited in Lim: 310). She selects three focal traits from the rich and complex concept: that habitus is "manifest as a form of behaviour" where learnt behaviour is constituted through a set of dispositions; that instinctive behavioural improvisation takes place to for individuals or communities to achieve goals; and, finally that in the habitus a set of dispositions sustains itself through time (311).

Lim methodically maps these traits upon Singapore and the Arts Festival in that "a certain type of behaviour is inculcated in the citizenry by the government through schemes, incentives and deterrents"; that these facilitate the evolution of instinctive behaviour which allows for "government-sanctioned behaviour for improvisation to occur"; and, that bureaucratised schemes are discharged over a period to "inculcate a specific type of behaviour" (311). She cites the chairman of the 2000 Arts Festival steering committee, Professor Bernard Tan to reinforce her concept. Tan views that while the Arts Festival should support audience interest, they should also be exposed to things that have not been exposed to as Singapore is a young nation (Tan cited in Lim, 313). Lim opines that Tan’s comment “hints at the fact that the current artistic habitus of Singaporean audiences is not adequate if Singapore wants to be a global city for the arts” (313). Furthermore, she cites chairman of the NAC, Liu Thai Ker who is quoted

301 that the Arts Festival “should aim to become a must-see event for everyone, including visitors to the region” (Liu cited in Lim: 313). Lim extrapolates these comments as worrying as they do not, at least for her, represent the collective interests of what Singaporeans enjoy but a top-down inculcation of what they should see and experience and create a milieu that profiles the city-state as a global city for the arts. Lim goes on, throughout her article citing numerous journalistic writings (perhaps drawing from her past background as a journalist), to reinforce her thesis that the top-down global city positioning privileged foreign performances and productions at the price of local arts development (316). She does not disagree with Peterson (2009) and instead reiterates his views.

There is some validity in this. The Singapore arts sector, I argue, had remained a collection of amateur and part-time hobby communities and through the Arts Festival many of them professionalised. They would be disadvantaged when compared to international touring companies with decades-long professional full-time practice and companies; second, various local dance and theatre companies (Singapore Dance Theatre, TheatreWorks, The Necessary Stage, Theater Ekamatra, Sri Warisan Troupe, etc. were provided with both co-production and commissioned opportunities to present new works. Peterson (2009) does layout the rational of the Arts Festival and its global positioning which is tied to economic imperatives. This thesis has established the Arts Festival’s global positioning but I argue that this was not at the price of the local productions. In actual, many of the companies mentioned above toured as part of international joint festival commissions, thereby fulfilling the government's vision to go global. Peterson shows that the Arts Festival’s founding membership with the Association of Performing Arts Festivals was premised on building touring and organisational opportunities for local companies and productions (112). Peterson (2009) does point out that a fact

302 that during the festival season, theatre companies do not stage independent performances in order to avoid any risk. I agree this remained true for some time until the Arts Festival commissioned local companies to create new works for the festival with an additional budget outside that which they receive from the NAC annually. This incentivised approach did encourage companies to channel their resources into the Arts Festival entirely.

6.3 ACSR Report and Communitarian Ideals: Arts Festival 2010-2012

If policy continues to drive artistic and curatorial practice, then the period 2010-2012 is exemplary of how the Arts Festival becomes a victim of strategic manoeuvres. The Arts and Cultural Strategic Review (ACSR) Report (2012), released by the newly formed Ministry of Culture Community and Youth, propositioned a paradigm for the arts from one that was plugged into a global ecology to one that served national concerns. This cultural policy resonated with the shift in politics. By 2004, Lee Hsien Loong had succeeded Goh Chok Tong as prime minister. Lee, who was instrumental in the design and implementation of the Shared Values principles in the 1990s, rode high on Singapore's success as a financial hub. Despite the Asian financial crisis, he inherited an extremely wealthy nation. With full employment, high growth rates and large expatriate communities, Singapore became an expensive city to work and live. Singapore became an unhappy rich country. The 2011 general elections, saw fierce battles with a growing opposition, a changing demographics and the entry of social media. The ruling PAP government won by a landslide but the substance of the victory dented. The party lost a major constituency – led by George Yeo, the trailing-blazing and well-like arts minister of the 1990s. Subsequent cabinet changes saw long-standing ministers retired from portfolios such as housing, health and transportation. These portfolios contributed to the

303 significant discord amongst the population. The time to heal and bridge with the community was imminent. A communitarian ideology of the 1970s and 1980s, discussed in previous chapters, re-emerged. The arts saw a similar change.

The ACSR Report was released in 2012 with a compelling vision to be achieved by 2025: "A nation of cultured and gracious people, at home with our heritage, proud of our Singaporean identity" (15). The vision weaved Rajaratnam ‘cultured community', Goh Chok Tong's ‘gracious people" to develop an emerging focus on ‘Singaporeanness' which becomes a defining feature of Lee Hsien Loong's tenure. The first direction was to "bring arts and culture to everyone, everywhere, everyday". Through the development of new audiences and promotion of life-long learning the government sought to galvanise a national movement. This was to provide all round access to the arts to the people so as to build a groundswell of support for the arts through the building of national pride. The second direction was to develop capabilities to achieve excellence through the enhancement of cultural institutions, development of professional talent and work with partners to achieve common goals. The Report acknowledged that in bringing the arts, it would be perceived to dumb-down the arts to be accessible (20). The arts community rose in criticism of this especially through online organisations such as ArtsEngage. The imperative was clear and connected to the political concerns of the day: the government needed to connect to its base.

This period saw Benson Puah, the chief executive of the Esplanade double- hatting for the NAC. Under the tenure of this seasoned venue-manager, the NAC moved from a downtown prime arts precinct to a suburban location as part of a placemaking strategy. Symbolically, the NAC was ‘closer' to the ground. Second, the Arts Festival and Singapore's international participation

304 in the Venice Biennale were suspended. Citing falling audiences and costs respectively, the aim it seemed was to re-channel funds to community engagement.

The Arts Festival continued, and NAC appointed Singapore Biennale general manager Low Kee Hong to manage the Arts Festival and organise three editions from 2010-2012. The Arts Festival was bannered a creation and people's festival. It focussed on local and national engagement instead of global positioning. Returning to the communitarian ideologies of multiculturalism found in the 1950s to 1970s, these Arts Festivals titled Between You and Me (2010), I Want to Remember (2011) and Lost Poems (2012) were introspective renditions that seem to take stock of the arts by focussing on artists and their concerns; and, the creation and circulation of their works. It had a conversational mode and through a year-long programme of education, Low sought to engage with audiences who otherwise would not go attend arts events (Interview, 2009-10). The final instalment in 2012, presented fourteen ticketed and sixty-six non-ticketed productions comprising more than 500 artists and groups from Singapore and across the globe. Showcasing local and international acts the Arts Festival sought to take audiences into exciting new venues, pushing the boundaries of traditional performance through productions such as The Flight of the Jade Bird by Mark Chan and Lear Dreaming by TheatreWorks. The three editions were small in scale and focussed on works from Asia. While this may seem to fulfil the intent of ACSR, the three editions continued to be plagued by low audience and poor ticket sales

The 2011 Arts Festival registered an all-time low of forty-eight per cent audienceship. This gave the NAC the necessary impetus to justify suspending the Arts Festival until further review. The suspension of the festival coincided with the landmark 2011 General Election which saw

305 substantive community engagement particularly from the youth (Chong, 2012; Tan, Mahizhnan and Ang, 2016) lending to a major loss of a stronghold constituency for the ruling party. It is difficult correlate the election, youth participation and the festival suspension as interrelated and research thus far does not lend to this. At the tail-end of the 2012 Arts Festival, NAC formed a seventeen member Arts Festival Review Committee “to examine the role of the Festival in today’s context [especially with the large number of festivals on the island] and make recommendations with regards to its programming direction and operating model” (Arts Festival Review Committee Report, 2013).

The review was faced with the question if the Arts Festival was still relevant, given the extreme vibrancy of the arts scene and range of festivals available. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Arts Festival had been the single most important, highly anticipated arts event. Well into the second decade of the 21st century, the public had a wide-range of events and programmes beyond the Arts Festival, many of which were destination- oriented such as those at the Esplanade and various suburban community centres.

I opine that some degree of reflection is warranted. If the Arts Festival were discontinued, it would result in a series of losses. First, Singaporean artists would lose a platform that encourages, funds and showcases their major developmental or experimental works, and they would miss a critical platform to showcase their works internationally. Second, audiences would lose a major opportunity to experience high quality and unique arts performances. Although other avenues may fulfil this function, the Arts Festival presents a sensibility that is cohesive and elaborated––more importantly, one that is unique. Third, international artists and companies would lose a valued and reputable platform on the Asian touring circuit to

306 profile themselves. They would also lose a potential anchor in securing their Asian tour, and in co-commissioning and co-producing. This means that Singapore would be less exciting for the global arts market. Fourth, from a national perspective, Singapore would lose a familiar international arts icon that projects Singapore's image as an international arts city and serves as a creative engine for new Asian and international works. Finally, over the years, the Arts Festival leveraged on its location within the NAC to build a valuable platform for international cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy. This enabled mutual exchanges and international arts networking opportunities. The Arts Festival's discontinuation would result in a shortfall in programming being enriched by cultural diplomacy and networks and a more parochial festival programming may emerge.

With the explosion of arts events in Singapore, a ritualised presentation of cutting-edge, contemporary programming at the Arts Festival may suggest a sense of exhaustion for some but rejuvenation for others. This is not peculiar to Singapore’s Arts Festival. In an article entitled "Still and Again: Wither Arts Festivals?", Frederic Maurin observes this as a syndrome plaguing global arts festivals the world-over. With globalisation seeing a proliferation of festivals competing for artists, funding and audiences, a sense of exhaustion were imminent in the face of socio-economic factors threatening to "blunt the sharpness of artistic policies" as arts festivals become an inalienable part of life and culture. Maurin notes,

[W]hen the festive is swallowed up by the commercial, productions soon degenerate into mere products. Indeed, if Arts Festivals tend to produce shows – or even to recycle the same shows – instead

307 of encouraging experimentation, if they promote the circulation over creation, consecration over discovery, and follow what is being done rather than anticipate want can be done, if they aim to satisfy the hunger for rapid consumption at the expense of the urge towards aesthetic communication and human communion, what remains of their ideals? What is left of the uniqueness of genuine events, the status of rare exceptions in the life of a city, the life of a spectator, the life of theatre? What becomes of their mission to fulfil our collective needs for both creative utopias and alternative modes of being in the world? (2003: 11)

The Arts Festival cannot be accused of recycling shows or not encouraging experimentation. As I have shown in my portrait of the Arts Festival, it has responded to the conditions of the city-state, its global and local policies, and role in the international marketplace. At the same time, there is an audience (the ticket-buying public, sponsors, media, festival workers) who are globally networked, adventuresome and growing with the Arts Festival, paralleling another segment of the audience being weaned off – that is, those who prefer the familiar and reminiscing about the past. The Arts Festival is challenged by its task of creating and growing new audiences that represent a new demographic of young and cosmopolitan sub/urban dwellers. It also has to work with those who seek the familiar for reasons of sentimentalism and entertainment, even though opportunities for these are available year round at various venues and events.

308 How then can the Arts Festival balance these shifts? The nature of the Arts Festival, with its high profile and intensity of engagement with various communities within a short space of time, brings undue spotlight to the festival director. The initial discussion often centres on the coherence of vision in the manner in which programmes are procured, produced and commissioned, presented and circulated. This is made complex by the need to juggle multiple agendas of various constituencies staking a claim in the Arts Festival. Ultimately, the goal of the festival director is to present a holistic and organic event. More importantly, the core issue is not so much about changing the festival director but whether the festival director is up to date with global trends and artistic tendencies, continuing to create new needs in the market, expand its marketplace, and find ways and means to keep audiences. In this regard, Goh CL opines that any radical attempt to steer the Arts Festival away from its current course would put it out of sync with international practices and be in danger of becoming parochial or too broad and amorphous (Goh, 2012).

After extensive consultation, including the public, the Report recommended that the Arts Festival's purpose should be to "inspire diverse audiences through great artistic experiences" characterised by quality, inspiration, aspiration, innovation, engagement, collaborative and distinctiveness. On programming, the committee reiterated prior approaches but emphasised that education and outreach activities should complement programming. The most significant recommendation of the committee was to establish an independent festival company under the auspices of the NAC with its own permanent home in the city-centre so as to build sustainable relationships with the artists and their audiences. The committee also recommended that the company be responsible for its financial sustainability. It is therefore critical to appreciate that the future of the Arts Festival remains carted to the

309 instrumental nature of governmentality and less so with the significant shifts in aesthetic and artistic systems.

The NAC and ministry accepted the recommendations and international avant-garde theatre director Ong Keng Sen was appointed as artistic director of the Arts Festival for three editions commencing 2014 (Purushothaman, 2018). Significant in this appointment is that the NAC, for the first time, appointed an artist to curate the Arts Festival. A bold choice but the former director of the National Museum, Lee Chor Lin, a civil servant, was appointed as the Chief Executive Officer of the Arts Festival Limited company to oversee the Arts Festival. A once energetic festival that mobilised the energies of artists and their communities throughout nation- building of Singapore was bereft of purpose.

6.4 Conclusion

This chapter has shown that the Arts Festival from 2000 to 2009 positioned Singapore as a global city of the arts – connected globally, creating new economic value for Singapore. The Arts Festival was informed by the government’s agenda to create a liveable environment infused with culture - attractive to investors. It provided multiple identities and opportunities for the public to engage with the arts and entrenched itself as a key ally of globalisation. It supported and negotiated the changing dynamics of cultural policy, audience taste and artistic shifts in the global economy. The chapter showed how the Arts Festival was responding to the need to establish Singapore as creative hub for the cultural and creative industries in a renaissance city. From 2010-2012, the Art Festival was repositioned to a community-based event responding to the political climate of that time. Its cautious approach laid the way for the suspension of the Arts Festival in

310 2013 – to be reviewed by a panel on its future and viability. Its sustainability is crucial as the government looks at the event as a business. It is vital to study the business formulation of the Arts Festival as it holds the key to its future. The next chapter looks incisively into the Arts Festival as a business structure.

311 Chapter Seven

THE ARTS FESTIVAL AS BUSINESS

7.1 Introduction

Arts Festivals are global business enterprises. They produce, package, market and circulate the arts as symbolic goods for public consumption across communities, time and space. Today, international arts festivals are part of a multi-billion dollar global creative industries business that invests in the creation and control of artistic content in the form of intellectual property (IP).30 This control is key to enabling a city to position itself effectively against market saturation of mass culture and promote a distinctive quality of life in its midst. In the spirit of public service, arts festivals appeal, cajole and convince people to engage in an aesthetic experience pre-determined through advocacy to purchase a ticket. Arts festivals undertake to respond to market needs by presenting arts products, which deliver a set of experiences contiguous with the audience context, class and aspirations within a given market segment. In providing these, unlike conventional consumer products, arts festivals foreground the intangibility of human experience in the consumption of performance (Hill, et al., 2003: 102-104).

30 In 1997 alone, copyright products raked close to US$414b for the US economy. This kind of capital return is attractive to emerging and growing economies to consider venturing into the creative industries. This high financial output would also reveal why an economy, such as the United States, would want to protect its intellectual property through legal (anti- piracy laws) and political means (free trade agreements). In Singapore, the setting up of the Intellectual Property of Singapore (IPOS), an industry benchmarking and legal advisory body, was aimed in this direction.

312

In this chapter, I will build on these observations and locate the Singapore Arts Festival within the parameters of business as seen through its contribution to the creative economy discussed earlier. By focusing on determining the shape of the festival audience, this section will illuminate some of the critical challenges facing the Arts Festival as a business. These include stagnant budgets, morphing audiences, media relations, corporate sponsorship and donor management against a policy framework that seeks to fulfil socio-economic agendas that are not necessarily funded. This chapter draws from interviews conducted with Arts Festival directors and bureaucrats involved in the organising the event.

7.2 The Business of Managing the Arts Festival

The Singapore Arts Festival of the 21st century acts by following global capitalism through its creation, promotion, and consumption of the arts, and serves as a global exchange of creativity. It is a small but potent business costing approximately S$6-7 million (excluding expenditure by allied industries) annually, appealing to an ever-increasing audience of more than 600,000. It employs a team of more than 200 full-time arts managers, cultural workers and volunteers to execute its operations and realises its long-term investment in a programme-led strategy of curating progressive contemporary works. The Arts Festival mirrors the pragmatic, economy- centrist ideals of Singapore. It cannot distance itself from the key drivers of outcome and performance indicators, which have defined modern Singapore.

The Arts Festival is unique as a major international event in that its programming, planning and execution resides within a government agency –

313 the NAC. The Arts Festival draws on the substantial organisational and governmental resources to support its work.31 Unlike other international festivals where dedicated full-time festival workers administer the event within the structure of a festival society or a non-profit company, the Arts Festival's staff at NAC have responsibilities in other areas of non-festival work as well. For example, the festival directors Liew Chin Choy and Goh Ching Lee both held additional portfolios as director of performing arts development in Singapore and cultural diplomacy. To manage the Festival, an internal operations team is put together to handle ticketing, logistics, public relations, marketing, sponsorship, events and technical management, part-time and volunteer management. Besides drawing on the resources of the NAC, one of the key advantages of this organisational approach is that the NAC strikes a conscious balance between an art-centred approach and a market-centred approach to organising the Arts Festival. Neither the artist nor the audience is privileged over the other, and the NAC with its mission to nurture the arts can ensure the Arts Festival fulfils the larger imperatives of cultural development in Singapore. Over the years, debates around the independence of the Arts Festival – modelled after Hong Kong and Edinburgh – have fallen silent to the heavy hand of governmentality. While the operational efficacy of farming out the Arts Festival to the industry - in order to allow the NAC to focus on grant dispersion and arts sector development and foster a sustainable festival sector - is legitimate and sound, it failed to gain traction both within and without the NAC. With constrained and stretched resources, the Arts Festival was unable to afford time and effort to build and cultivate relationships with sponsors and partners; invest in enriching audience experiences beyond a ticketed festival performance, and explore new areas of development that it may seek to

31 Since 2014, this is no longer the case. While the NAC, still funds and has oversight of the Arts Festival, the operations of the Festival is run by an independent board under the Arts House Ltd.

314 invest. Hence, much of the experiences of one arts festival were not carried through to the next, and much of the issues and concerns snowballed.

Beyond being an exchange for the arts, arts festivals have the propensity to generate business propositions for some allied or related industries spinning off a coterie of festival companies or encourages conventional businesses to focus on the arts as another principle activity of their existing business portfolio. From ticketing agencies, merchandising vendors, staging, sound and lighting professionals to freight and logistics businesses, and food and beverage vendors, they all contribute to the overall constitution of a festival by playing a critical role in the value chain of the customer experience. They form an undocumented and largely ignored festival economy that awaits key observation.

The Arts Festival’s value proposition is in its ability to broker the development of new initiatives and ideas across a borderless world. Growing from a mere seven days of seven productions in 1977, the Arts Festival expanded and stabilised at around twenty-five to thirty days of performances and public events. The two years 1992 and 1994 were particularly exceptional in that they averaged forty days. These years were characterised by extremely dynamic pre-festival fringe events and reflected the robust economy that was driving cultural enterprise at that time. This build-up led to 676 events in the 1998 Arts Festival with growing corporate sponsorship, multi-agency support from government departments and increased networks with community groups and shopping malls engaging with the Arts Festival. It was a period when the Arts Festival became a major propeller of the arts industry in the absence of other significant players. However, in the years to follow, with the Asian economic crisis anchoring itself at the tail end of 1998 and reverberating through to 2002, the Arts Festival saw a large dip in the number of events, sponsorship and

315 revenues. This was further compounded by the shift from a biennial to an annual event making it difficult to sustain corporate support and income on an annualised basis.

The Arts Festival’s approach to bear a range of programmes from a mix of conservative to progressive fare and lasting three to four weeks in duration – projected the Arts Festival to be curatorially tight reflecting its contemporary and Asian character. This was further enhanced through creative networks, dialogues and research amongst international artists and their Singaporean counterparts. While the Arts Festival's budget was channelled towards the exploration of innovation through inter/cross- cultural, interdisciplinary and technology-influenced works, it provided each year special platforms to develop different strands of programming along geographical, genre-based or thematic/issue-based approaches that would facilitate audience education and marketing. Between 2000- 2007, the Arts Festival divested presenting simple classical work of orchestras and ballets as the market environment for these already existed in established venues such as The Esplanade. Furthermore, their highly prohibitive cost of presenting was a significant strain in any given year.

The financial model of the Arts Festival remains designed around a tripartite revenue relationship between government (public subsidy), corporate business (sponsorship) and the public (ticket sales), while its programming model balanced between new investment in commissions and the introduction of existing global products into the Singapore/Southeast Asian market. The correlation between the financial and programming models often sits at odds with each other as revenue generation, and audience development often may not go hand in hand. For example, a complex piece of theatre may be of critical value to audiences, but it may not draw the ticket sale that is envisaged. A reliable and stable working budget – taking

316 into account the vagaries of programming and audiences – is ideal for better planning and organisation. However, increasing production costs and plateauing grants and sponsorships made it difficult to develop a working budget. The Festival proposes a budget and builds the budget through ticketing and sponsorships. Government subsidies kick in to support the shortfall, and this also allows for the calculation of grants per head. The 1998 Arts Festival historically had the highest budget of S$8 million, reflecting the economic and cultural robustness of that time. Subsequent festivals had not seen a similar budget as demands for public and private funds for other arts, and leisure activities started to crowd the scene. As the Singapore economy limped into the 21st century, to support millennial celebrations and to generate greater social enthusiasm, government subsidy rose to S$9.96 per head (2000) and S$11.00 per head (2001). This support was handy as regular corporate sponsors of the arts were awakening to the reality that the Arts Festival had become an annual event and that new players were vying for their dollar, thereby seeking to prioritise corporate giving.

The budget allocation of approximately S$6-7 million, between 2000-2010, was strained as rising production and touring costs were in tandem with the increase in their expense. This budget had remained the same as the Arts Festival ten years prior in 1992, but its value in real terms was less. The Arts Festival, similar to other international festivals, suffered from what Baumol and Bowen (1966) called the "cost disease" of an ever-widening gap between income and expenditure. A key global consideration for revenue for the arts is that the productivity gains realised in other business sectors of society do not work for the arts. Marketing and management gurus Philip Kotler and Joanna Scheff (1997) observe that the productivity of the arts decreases relative to the rest of the economy, which is quickened by new technology. The inherent human labour intensive nature of the arts

317 is the cause. That is, a live performance of a forty-five minute Schubert quartet will take the same three staff-hours to produce as it did in the early 1900s and will continue to do so. But the musician's salaries and cost of living will inevitably rise even if their productivity does not (11). This is compounded by the increase in other administrative and production costs that are driven by the market economy. The Arts Festival could not entirely pass the rise in costs to the public, as it is primarily a public good. Festival director Goh CL believes that at the very least, in order to sustain and grow the Arts Festival's profile in commissioning; to develop new major outdoor and site-specific works; and, to achieve its targets, the budget should ideally be on par with those in other major cities (average S$12-15 million for the Hong Kong and Australian festivals, and S$30 million for the Edinburgh Festival. 2007 figures) (Interview, 2009). During Goh GL’s tenure, the Arts Festival delivered and funded almost one hundred per cent of the core programme and approximately seventy per cent of the outreach. To sustain these levels, she encouraged co-programming with other local and international partners and sought to increase this to continue to maintain a diverse and vibrant programming. Co-programming "allowed the Festival to utilise its limited funding to fine-tune and develop its own distinct identity, while partnership programmes or in conjunction events would provide greater critical mass and buzz during the festival period. However, this model needs to be monitored and calibrated to pre-empt cannibalising the audience and media space, and the potential dilution of the identity of the Festival" (Purushothaman, 2007). She contends that the Arts Festival had to continue discovering new ways to augment earned income to counter the stagnating budget through the deepening of its audience base.

318 7.3 Global Challenges

Globalisation presents several challenges to Arts Festivals. With rising economic power, people as a creative and discerning class travel and savour the finer things in life, and these include the arts and culture. Furthermore, people as audiences are able to access and engage with new contemporary works faster than audiences of a decade ago. This meant that there is a ‘global' audience, one who seeks lifestyle needs. In supporting this search, technology, in particular, the Internet had forced the world to become smaller and far more accessible. Information is at one's fingertips through websites, weblogs, chat rooms and specialist cyber communities. Googling information about the arts is only a click away for a person to make informed choices. Furthermore, with the rise of social media with its archival potential and multi-functional capacity to document everyday life through voice, video and text, technology contributes to the creation of a culture that is open to experimentation and venturing into the new. These technological gizmos and the Internet have enabled people to organise their own lives efficiently, and Singapore was faced with a self-determined set of young, educated and active individuals who are extremely tech-savvy.

The desire for the new in this fast-paced information age had led audiences and the Arts Festival to seek out exciting and inventive works. This has seen the conflation of main stage programmes with fringe and experimental programmes, resulting in the demise of commonly known fringe festivals. Interdisciplinary works by artists such as Robert Lepage (Canada), Michael Nyman (UK) and Ong Keng Sen (Singapore) mapped a particular global pathway by taking centre stage in festivals. These names remain part of the international festival trail today: they produce works for the consumption of festival audiences all over the world similar to art biennales where the repetitions circulation of familiar faces, ideas and aesthetics appear

319 repeatedly. This has had a significant impact on the consumption patterns of those above the forty-five years old and above, who are socially and professionally well-placed but harbour taste patterns of the late 20th century. In Singapore, they were compelled to reckon with the tides of change where traditional and classical art forms were rapidly re-inventing themselves. Contemporary artists such as Akram Khan (UK/Bangladesh) use conventional and classical works not as an end in themselves (e.g. a symphonic concert or opera) but as a means to an end. That is, new contemporary art is designed around principles of conceptualism and ideas, and these works became an engine to realising artistic endeavour.

The Arts Festival and its buzz played a critical role in transforming Singaporean city spaces, known for their highly localised flavours, into sites of internationalism attractive to the global citizen. In turning the city into a festive space, one needs to ask how this intervenes and impacts on the social lives of the inhabitants of a city. The Arts Festival, in managing its tension of presenting cutting-edge works (representing the global cosmopolitan life) and at the same time, serving the interests of the community-at-large (representing their ritualised everyday life), found that it had to be at once both national and international: as a promoter of local artists on domestic and international platforms and as a promoter of international artists on national platforms. One key issue was the need to strike a balance between locating the Arts Festival as a destination and as an event. Both local and global visitors (leisure and business visitors) engage with the Arts Festival as a destination to arrive at, to be savoured at a particular moment in time before returning to their daily lives. On the other hand, the Arts Festival as an event required an invested engagement from the audiences (including festival partners, media, sponsors) to make it a vibrant and organic activity within the social fabric of the community. In engaging with the myriad of activities, audiences have an opportunity to express and experience a shared

320 sense of national pride and citizenship. Despite the overwhelming structures of globalisation, the space in which culture functions is indubitably located within a concept of a nation (Anderson, 1983). In this regard, the critical inquiry remains as to how Singaporean cultures are reproduced and re- constructed through the staging of the Arts Festival and in what formations they emerge. The principle question is: does the audience necessarily see the Arts Festival as a means of cultural expression of the nation, just like the manner in which they would embrace the National Day Parade? The answer to this question would necessarily direct towards how the form and function of the Arts Festival have changed in fulfilling the ideological needs of artists and the audience, as the consumerist requirements of the public are couched within a catechism called entertainment.

The Arts Festival constructs its global/local artists through programming/commissioning and in turn, appeals to audiences while shaping their aesthetic frames. While arts festivals are often seen as meccas of exclusivity, with increased proliferation of new works, one is led to suspect if productions are being created without the audience in mind. This can result in an disengaged public. For example, I am reminded of the Edinburgh festivals: residents/audiences are known to vacate the city as the global festival connoisseurs descend upon the city. This is a social conundrum for policy makers of social governance who seek to promote festivals as a means of social cohesion and means of rejuvenating the city through cultural vibrancy. The privileging of the arts that germinate out of the globalised world may be an elixir of rejuvenation for a city but could be poised to leave an aftertaste for its inhabitants, giving them a false sense of space and art. The Arts Festival continues to engage with the possibility of this conundrum. While the Festival has managed to carve a space for itself on the global platform, its core audience remains Singaporean. As such, it is imperative that it understands its audiences and their taste patterns.

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7.4 Understanding Audiences

Audiences are at the heart of the arts and the festivals that celebrate them. The understanding of audience, their participation and social and national construction has garnered critical and extensive scholarly inquiry in fields ranging from anthropology, ethnography, social science and sociology. Since the advent of mass media, audience studies have specifically focussed on both individual and group behavioural and consumptive patterns; the impact of cultural events and media products on people; and, the manner in which modern day ethnographic communities, that is, corporations and government, shape public taste and further their agendas (Lee, C. et. al., 2004). The work of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School and especially their essay “Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (1972) was seminal in spurring critique and response from the 1970s to 1990s from eminent scholars Stuart Hall, David Morley, Nicholas Garnham, Michael Gurevitch, Neil Postman, etc. and this came to form a backbone of cultural and media studies as field of enquiry. Scholarship viewed audiences as agents of consumptive patterns as both a textual subject (MacCabe, 1986) awaiting to be inscribed and coming into being at the moment of engagement; and, as a social subject (Morley, 1980) with history and purpose participating in the construction and circulation of meaning. Stuart Hall (1981) furthers this by analysing the class structure and how it complicates meaning making. He saw social circumstances and place of an individual helped determine their interpretative place. For example, a socio-economically well-placed person may align better with dominant or governmental ideologies thereby producing similar readings of cultural practices rather than negotiated readings. Negotiated reading has been at the heart of cultural and popular culture studies where power,

322 control and play are continuously deconstructed, reframed and replayed (Fiske, 1989; Storey, 2008).

While the literature around audience has been built around media and popular culture, a study of arts festival audiences remains circumscribed by economic indicators. Audience development (Morrison and Dalgliesh, 1993; McCarthy and Jinnet, 2001) and audience engagement studies (Brooker and Jermyn, 2003; Borwick, 2012; Rosewall, 2014) reveal that this area remains uncategorised, despite a significant number of studies around celebrations and developmental studies in increasing audience participation for the arts. This warrants deeper study. This is because audience development and engagement is a late 20th century development as the arts were organised in the fordist manner of industrial business connecting products in this instance, aesthetic experiences to the customer. As this business model became pervasively entrenched in arts development, it proved that an arts events could be divorced from community needs and expressions thereby engaging with them through the expense of leisure dollars. Audience development and engagement as participatory politics and socio-cultural interpretations have not crossed over to the implementation of the arts as a business from the fields of socio-cultural anthropology and cultural studies. Both fields have crystallised numerous incisive studies by scholars particular to communities (e.g. youth, subcultures, fans, etc.); art forms (e.g. music, television, popular dance, etc.); and cultural practices (e.g. rites, rituals, practices, etc.).

For the Arts Festival, audiences embrace a variety of meanings in the life of an Arts Festival as they are not a singular monolithic entity but a culturally, socially and ethnically heterogeneous in multicultural, multiethnic Singapore. The marketing of the Arts Festival is complex and challenging: It needs to find a market for its programmes; create new needs in the

323 marketplace; expand its marketplace; and find ways and means to keep its audiences. The first decade saw audiences as associates of nation-building: the ticket-buying public, artists, sponsors, media, policy makers, educational institutions together with regional neighbours became audiences who worked to build a sense of Singapore. The focus was less about the purchase of tickets and more about the community and the participatory effects of the festival. The second decade blended this with the development of people as arts appreciating audiences. Ticket sales (and the notion of audience as customers) was becoming an entrenched value in the organisation of the Arts Festival as it was one part of the income model: The other two being corporate sponsorship and government funding. As discussed in the earlier chapters, the Arts Festival in its first incarnation was dependent on government funding and corporate sponsorship. Ticket prices were kept low to encourage the migrant population to engage with the arts and celebrate its heritage. In the new millennium ticket sales were an indicator of an engaged audience willing to pay leisure dollars to for an arts experience.

In the 1990s the Arts Festival sought not only to increase the base of its audience but also broaden the range of its audience through programmes that appealed to different community groups such as the Peranakan (Straits- born) community. Also, the Fringe Festival was introduced and expanded to provide free and public access to the arts. The NAC, working together with educational institutions, offered a large menu of programmes to enthuse a new generation of young audiences into embracing the arts as an important vector to their quality of life. This saw a significant impact on the subsequent decade of the Arts Festival as these new audiences were not only becoming ticket-buying customers but were also becoming discerning as artistic receptors; that is, a sounding board to the production of art. The audience became a critical component to the successful realisation of the creative process. While audience development is still integral to the Arts

324 Festival, the need for deepening audience understanding by stimulating arts discussion and discourse, and building and enlarging a paying audience base, rather than to increase sheer numbers is still much needed in Singapore. Having said that, the Arts Festival continues to widen its reach through innovative marketing and clear messaging, presented in an accessible and straightforward manner, to achieve top-of-mind awareness, a clear brand positioning, sales and audiences. Unlike the early years, where civil servants had to rely on corporate companies (e.g. Mobil Oil) to provide marketing know-how, and the NAC has a professional in-house team that manages, audience development for its events and activities.

With rising media costs and a stagnating marketing budget (approximately twenty-five per cent of the total amount), the Arts Festival, between 2000 and 2010 was strategic with its media spending leading to a campaign built around principles of product and audience segmentation. The challenge of marketing the new and contemporary is that mainstream audiences prefer institutionalised and time-tested programmes that entertain or provide an opportunity to socialise. To develop and prepare audiences, the Arts Festival has had to bundle programmes into categories such as popular (broad access, mainstream), mid-challenge (progressive, extensions of conventional art forms) and challenging (bold and risk-taking which demand audiences to have a sophisticated engagement with the arts). The aim is to use simple and clear strategies to target audiences, revolving around a potent mix of traditional and new media. This is supported by an educational approach to demystifying the Festival and its complexity by providing the public with a flood of accessible information.

Audience segmentation is a standard fare in festival management and arts marketing (Hill, et al., 2003; Kotler and Scheff, 1997). The audience is segmented into first, the converted that comprises regular festival audiences,

325 expatriates, tourists and students. They are targeted through direct mailers, packages, promotions and early bird discounts. Students are encouraged through school briefings offering affordable tickets. However, as the Arts Festival falls during the vacation break of primary and secondary schools, it has had to work at ensuring that these students remember the Arts Festival. The second group is the convertible. This refers to occasional arts goers, pop concert attendees and families who are targeted through special mail drops and partnership programmes with community-based associations and organisations especially those based in the suburbs. The third group comprises the non-convertible or non-arts goers who prefer to expand their leisure dollars on other activities such as sports. But to keep them in the loop of the festivities, the marketing team maintains a mainline advertising strategy to create awareness to free events.

The Arts Festival's reach through ticketed and non-ticketed events in part measures the success of a festival. The early festivals with their mainly standard programming and competition-orientation reached audiences of 6,000 to 20,000. With the formation of a strong marketing focus by the team from Mobil Oil, the Festival of the 1980s was amassing a large and growing audience through fascinating campaigns such as the eight-kilometre Festival Fun Run around performance venues of the 1982 Festival. Since 1999, core audience numbers have decreased from 46,000 to 30,500 (2007) primarily because the number of core productions has also been reduced. The smaller scale festivals of the 21st century had a lower number of ticketed events, hence a lower number of tickets available for purchase. Furthermore, the smaller scale festival, which comprised less mainstream but more contemporary Asian works catered to a more focused bandwidth of audiences. This means that rather than seeing this trend as a contraction in audience numbers, one might say that the yield for the fewer contemporary and cutting-edge works was higher – in other words, the total audience level

326 may be lower, but each show had a higher attendance rate. On the flipside, the decrease could be attributed to a shortage of disposable income spending in the face of the recession and rising unemployment. The SARS outbreak in 2003 also saw a dip in audience numbers to about 28,000.

New challenges in the scene also meant that innovation had to be a central practice in marketing the Arts Festival to compete with other major festivals that are organised throughout the year. In this regard, the development of the Artsfest Club was a key milestone in the Festival's life. Numbering approximately 9,000 members in 2007, the club was primarily set up to bring into the festival fold, through volunteerism, many festival enthusiasts and to promote the early purchase of tickets for shows. Another innovation was the incorporation of PDA downloads, ‘Email a Friend’, calendars, daily updates, news flashes and various other schemes/services on the Festival’s official website, which was created in 2002. In 2006 alone, the website had over a million hits during the lead-up to the Festival.

The Fringe Festival of the past played a central role in achieving audience numbers and increasing the popularity of the festival. The introduction of a fringe component in 1984 created an outreach of approximately 270,000 by 1988. But in the later years, with the Esplanade's outdoor events, the Festival's large-scale opening and closing events, co-presentations of mass street festivals included as part of the outreach programming, as well as partnership programmes with other event organisers, audiences rose to an astronomical 916,700 (2004) and easing to 600,000 to 700,000 in the subsequent years. Even though the margin of error for calculating audiences at outdoor events are often very high and as such, the Festival was putting itself on a dangerous path of always outdoing its annual targets. And this misses the point. A festival is a system of experiences aimed at deepening the social and aesthetic experience. Increasing the annual targets may add to

327 the vibrancy quotidian and justify the expense of public funds, but it does not necessarily add to the quality of life of the public or communicate the intrinsic value of the arts.

In 2006, the NAC conducted a survey to understand the profile and motivation of its audience. Sampling 4,536 attendees across twenty-four ticketed and seven non-ticketed events, the study revealed that the Festival was appealing to a younger generation of the public in the ages of 20-29 (thirty-three per cent) while teenagers comprised a significant percentage (twenty-three per cent) for outdoor performances. Thirty-seven per cent of festival attendees were students. Young people are also often concerned with relaxation, escape and peer socialisation. The large percentage of teenagers for outdoor events could be due to this and their preference to socialise at external events such as dance clubs and mega outdoor events due to a lack of social/personal space in the homes especially for those living in public housing. This leads one to conclude that the years of arts education and development is indeed paying off with the Festival entrenching itself into the lives of these young people.

The 2000 to 2007 festivals were contemporary in focus, and this was well received by audiences. Overall, seventy-one per cent of those surveyed indicated ‘interested’ or ‘very interested’ in contemporary productions although coming in close at sixty-seven per cent were those who indicated the same for classical productions and concerts. Intercultural programmes ranked lower with sixty-one per cent, which shows that any plans to change the Arts Festival’s direction must embody time for public education. The survey revealed that seventy-two per cent of the respondents were satisfied with the variety of programming while sixty-six per cent were pleased with the international flavour of the Festival. Despite the Arts Festival's edgy programming, seventy-seven per cent were extremely satisfied with their

328 experience. Tourist visits to the Festival have also increased over the years, with forty-one per cent surveyed in 2006 saying that the Arts Festival was one of the reasons that they visited Singapore. It must be noted that the indicators will inevitably vary between audience attending core festival programmes and outreach/fringe activities.

In breaking down the top five ticketed performances, a Singaporean production Ghana Sangam and Bella Figura by the Nederland Dans Theater came up tops with eighty-two per cent and seventy-eight per cent of the respondents giving the nod to their production quality respectively. The excellent reception to Ghana Sangam, which presented traditional Indian and Chinese music with a contemporary flair, could be a response to mainstream sentiment about the lack of traditional art forms in the post- 1999 festivals or a greater interest in crossover programming. Nevertheless, there remains a segment of the audience (possibly about forty-five years and older) who are less open to the re-interpretations of tradition even in the form of fusion works. The general results of the survey indicate that the Arts Festival should build on its quality and variety of productions, capitalise on its growing international reputation and tap on the strong contingent of young adults.

7.4.1 The Media as Audience

Singapore style media (print, radio, television and the Internet) is one that functions as an instrument of governmentality (Seow, 1998; Wong, 2001). All but one printed press is owned by Singapore's largest conglomerate Singapore Press Holdings and broadcast under Mediacorp. The government's interference and control of the media remains historic, and Singapore continues to fair poorly in World Press Freedom Index standing

329 at 153 out of 180 countries in the 2015 assessment. Despite critics' lament over press freedom (George, 2012; Lee, 2012; Seow, 1998) and the rise of social media platforms, Singapore continues to remain steadfastly and unapologetically soldered to the governmental apparatus.

In relation to the Arts Festival and artistic enterprise, the media serves two functions: it is a tool of mass communication to reach out to the various publics with messages the Arts Festival puts forth, and second, like the public, it too is a consuming audience. The media works with it to promote organisational or institutional messages aligning the Arts Festival as a national occasion, as a festival of Singapore. The Festival over the years has had a small budget of approximately S$1.2 million working with various media to broker partnerships for news coverage, through advertising and media sponsorship, to reach out to the audience-at-large to promote the event in Singapore and internationally. The small festival marketing team works with the press to generate interest in the Festival especially the leading dailies in Singapore, notably The Straits Times and The Business Times, which provide an upbeat build-up to the Arts Festival. Today, the Internet and regional newspapers provide comprehensive coverage of the Arts Festival due to successful campaigning and networking.

Global positioning of the Arts Festival involves courting and cultivating international media. The Arts Festival, through its relationship with the Singapore Tourism Board, hosted opinion makers to help understand the event and its offerings. For example, the 2004 Festival played host to fifty- eight foreign media from fourteen countries and regions. There were twenty-five print journalists, twelve from television networks and one from a radio station. The majority of the media were from the Southeast Asian countries of Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Malaysia. Other regions represented included Australia, Hong Kong, Korea, New

330 Zealand, Argentina, Mexico, Germany and the Netherlands. The media displayed a healthy interest in the Arts Festival and the local arts scene. At the closing of the Festival, the coverage obtained numbered thirty articles from twenty-two publications and three broadcast reports from the foreign television stations. The press coverage from the international media does less for sale of tickets but helps profile the Arts Festival internationally and, at the same time, shape general perceptions of Singapore.

As a consuming audience, the media are reviewers and critics of the Arts Festival, of its productions and artists. For artists, this is a critical sounding board for them to assess their art. At different historical junctures, the media – particularly the print media – have played a formative role in promoting the Festival. Press coverage of the Festival throughout the early years was about providing encouragement to artists and supporting nation building. The post-1999 festivals have revealed a media that has grown in maturity and complexity in its thinking and criticality.

Singaporean journalists – many with strong arts practice – have contributed to the success of the Arts Festival and have become household names in the arts over the decades: notably Gracia Tay-Chee, Hannah Pandian, T. Sasitharan, Phan Ming Yen, Ong Sor Fern, Clarissa Oon, Tan Shzr Ee, Clara Chow, Hong Xinyi (The Straits Times); Violet Oon, Margaret Chan (the now-defunct New Nation); Lim Jen Erh (Lianhe Zaobao); Susan Tsang, Parvathi Nayar (The Business Times), to name a few. They not only reviewed the arts and the Arts Festival but also became implicit influencers of the artistic landscape in Singapore as the journey of arts journalism transformed from a generally tactful, congenial and supportive voice in the 1970s and 1980s – mirroring the developmental nature of the arts – to a generally more acute and critical voice from the 1990s onwards. The Festival, with its ever-widening range of multi-disciplinary productions,

331 poses a particular challenge to reviewers who may not have the experience to engage and critique innovative works adequately. This reflects the morphing scope of the arts in constantly being at the forefront of innovation often leaving its audiences not far behind.

This twin role of the media as publicist and critic for the Arts Festival leaves the relationship between the two particularly tenuous at times. On one level, it is common to assume that a significant national event such as the Festival requires the support of the media to raise awareness of its annual domestic and international mission. On another level, the media needs it just as much as the Arts Festival needs the media. Phan Ming Yen, then programming director of The Arts House, who anchored the coverage of the Festival in the 1990s both as an arts journalist with The Straits Times and the founding editor of the critically commended The Arts Magazine opines,

Even if the media did not cover the Arts Festival, the Festival would still go on. The organisers will reach out to the people via other means: flyers, posters and now the Internet and SMS [short messaging system], and people will get to know about the Festival. People will talk about the shows that they saw even if there were no reviews… If the media does not cover the Festival, people will ask: why isn’t the media doing its job by writing about the Festival? Why isn’t the media being responsible? (Purushothaman, 2007)

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Phan emphasises that the media needs content and the Festival is a primary source of content, "It is a means for the media to win new readers or to renew its faith with its existing readers through thorough and critical coverage of the Festival" (Phan cited in Purushothaman, 2007).

7.4.2 The Sponsor as Audience

Corporate sponsorship is the ubiquitous entry of the economic, financial and corporate into the social, cultural and political lives of communities. It has become a defining feature of every single and straightforward event be it a social service charity fundraiser; education including scholarships; arts; sports; cultural heritage; architecture; and community events. Presented through both in-cash and in-kind, sponsorships allow events to be realised and today remain a major financial line in the income/expense table of projects. Research around this field remains locked in self-help and how-to books, which support organisations to garner funding. Alternatively, the culture of philanthropy and patronage (e.g. Medici's Italy or Moghul's India) is widely documented within art history. Mark Rectanus' 2002 book, Museums, Artists and Corporate Sponsorship remains a significant scholarly text to contextualise corporate sponsorship within cultural studies. He maps the relationship between sponsor and receiver and how the process enables corporate organisations to define their public role as being external to the event or cultural project when in fact, it is a demonstration of their own institutionalised corporate cultural politics.

333 Corporate sponsorship, alongside box-office returns and government subsidy, is the life-blood of the Singapore Arts Festival. Corporate sponsorship remains vital for the Arts Festival to enable artists to create and present works that would otherwise not be made. For the Arts Festival, corporate sponsorship is a mutually beneficial business endeavour between the sponsor organisation and the Arts Festival. In return for financial or in- kind support (where cash is not exchanged, but the Festival is granted services such as air tickets, venues, catering, accommodation, etc.), the sponsor may receive certain benefits in return, and these may include programme exclusivity, free publicity and advertising, point-of-sale opportunities, complimentary and discounted tickets and tax incentives. Shows at the Arts Festival often serve as an opportune event for corporate companies to organise performance evenings to entertain their clients. Sponsoring the Arts Festival is a partnership between a corporate business and an event to help create brand awareness and communicate brand positioning through exposure to niche and mass markets. By suggesting a link to a performance or event, the sponsor hopes to create interest and consumption of their products and services.

The corporate citizenry, on the other hand, is a new form of cultural philanthropy where a corporate company may sponsor the arts but has a disinterest in the potential returns or benefits since its primary objective is to give back to the community for their support of its core business. The main motivation of corporate citizenry is often clear, transparent and meaningful, hence less tenuous than that of corporate sponsorship, which often leads to a value-for-value return on investment. However, it is undeniable that even these acts of corporate citizenry may generate publicity and position the organisation favourably to massage or manage public disdain with its products. Dubin (1992) identifies the role of multinational companies such as Philip Morris (tobacco companies) who sponsor in order of the

334 machinery of criticism against its business. Recent trends have shown that there is a growing practice of conflating both types of corporate activity, which has added to the complexities faced by the Arts Festival in seeking corporate sponsorship.

The Arts Festival started on the faith of a corporate sponsor, Mobil Oil, who by extension of its corporate citizenry was able to add to its strong presence in the Southeast Asian marketplace (See Chapter Four). In another scenario, OCBC Bank from the late 1990s, through its Arts Card (credit card), created an avenue for individual arts supporters to actively participate and contribute to the growth of the arts scene as the bank pledged a percentage of their fees to the Arts Festival. This provided the bank, just like Mobil in the 1970s and 1980s, divine exclusivity in increasing its customer base. Many sponsors in the previous festivals, throughout the 1990s, rallied to the call of the arts ministry to support the Arts Festival and over the years the Festival has grown to attract both cash and in-kind investment. Notably, the profile of sponsors has also changed from the proverbial generous multinational corporations (MNCs) being edged out by homegrown government-linked companies (GLCs) in their support. Cash sponsorship for the Arts Festival has grown from S$120,000 in 1977 to reach an all-time high of S$4.66 million in 1998. From 1999 to 2007 capital support ranged from S$1.66 million to S$3.44 million. In 2004, the festival recorded a total of seventy sponsors, sixteen of whom were new partners contributing about S$2.13 million in cash and S$1.91 million in kind. Some of the new sponsors included Yahoo! who came in as the Official Online Media and Comfort Ads (taxi advertising channel) as the Official Outdoor Media. Of significant note was Yahoo!’s partnership which introduced short messaging system (SMS) to the marketing mix of the Festival’s campaign and was developed as an online commercial, both for the very first time.

335 Despite the increased number of sponsors, the average contribution per sponsor decreased. Several reasons attest to this. First, as discussed earlier, as the Festival evolved from being a bi-annual to an annual festival it in effect halved its sponsorship as businesses were being stretched annually to support the Festival. Second, the economic climate following the financial crisis of the late 1990s softened, and businesses have been much more conservative with their marketing and communications expenditure. The demand for return on investment has grown to make corporate citizenry less appealing in comparison to hard-nosed sponsorship. Thirdly, while over the years corporate support of the arts had correspondingly increased with the growth in the number of arts activities, sponsorship per activity, in general, had not increased. From the Esplanade to The Arts House, from the Singapore Dance Theatre to The Necessary Stage and from the Singapore Arts Festival to the Singapore Fashion Festival, many arts organisers are seeking similar sponsors who are now spoilt for choice. Coupled with this, the fact remains that a national event like the Arts Festival, with its numerous sponsors, provides less scope for product exclusivity, heightened visibility and point-of-sales opportunities to service or attract new customers for individual sponsors. This has driven corporations to tie up with arts groups or events that offer them a more dominant presence and a more focused audience. Fourthly, corporate sponsors tend to aim at mass markets, which may be less attracted to contemporary and Asian programming. This is compounded by the fact that complex themes and RA-rated (productions with audience restrictions) and foreign language productions narrow the size of potential audiences, hence leading to difficulty in finding financial support.

The government’s drive to internationalise the Arts Festival has meant that there has to be greater financial support from the private sector for the Festival. Having said that, the Festival has been pioneering the international

336 dimension of its sponsors (just as with its programming) by attracting sponsors such as Yahoo! and Time magazine to reach out to a global audience rather than focusing on sponsorship that feeds into the national scene, which is amply supported by other arts organisations and upcoming small and medium enterprises in Singapore. Both sponsors and the Arts Festival continue to seek a global audience.

In studying the Arts Festival as a business and its sponsors, audiences and media the political economy of the arts as a ‘matter-of-fact’ exercise becomes evident and reinforces that, “culture in Singapore has become more than ever a site of governmentality and control” (Lee, 2004: 281). The administration, commodification and industrialisation of culture beckons an engagement with private sector corporates as sponsors, citizens as audiences and independent media as public relations tool enshrines the arts in Singapore into a public commercial good: funded by taxpayers for the larger benefit of the community (284). As discussed in Chapter One, the government's creation of ‘national enjoyment' through the arts and culture is "economically sensible, ideologically astute and designed to deliver benefits to the people" and as a social policy it generates a "culture of gratitude" and complicity amongst the people to the government's firm hold on power through the delivery of tangible benefits that they (the people) recognise and enjoy (Yao, 2004). Kong (2012) asserts that despite Singapore's proposition to be a global city for the arts, the government did not lose sight of the cultural and creative industries’ contribution to GDP growth. It incentivised sponsors and entertained audiences to create a vibrant city.

While this may be so, the type of arts that is supported through sponsorship and audience participation is predisposed to shaping public taste as to what kind of arts is and is not appropriate for the city-state’s economic and cultural position as a global city. Arts that do not attract support more often

337 includes those that are driven by aesthetic, theoretical and critical consideration as opposed to those that are entertaining, informative, institutionalised and exuberant. Bourdieu (1984), as discussed in Chapter Three, emphasises that “tastes are predisposed to function as markers of class” (2). Taste identifies class interests (e.g. the support for western symphonic music by English-educated upper middle-class Chinese Singaporeans) and “naturalise class differences” (Fiske, 1987: 18) by deepening ethnicity bound dance and theatre to their respective communities. While governments seek to involve community-at-large including corporates and their customer base, Stanziola (2007) argues that corporate support often veers toward prestigious and visible events thereby appealing to targeted customers as audiences. Moreover, critics argue that sponsorship and media can foster class inequalities by highlighting and supporting the tastes of the professionals and the upper middle-class (Wu, 2002; Bennett, et.al, 2009; Comunian, 2009; Hesmondhalgh, et.al, 2015). The developmental nature of the arts in Singapore does manufacture this inequality as a necessary means to ensure buy-in from all sectors of society with the ultimate goal of enshrining Singapore as a global city.

7.5 Conclusion

In sum, festivals as businesses need to be socially and economically viable. The Arts Festival's identity as a bold, edgy, progressive and contemporary festival is consistent and reflective of Singapore's cultural geography; economic aspirations, and cosmopolitanism, according to Goh CL. This direction gained the Arts Festival a high reputation and framed Singapore as a place of creation and global exchange between different cultural influences and art forms. She says, "This is a characteristic that gives Singapore a competitive advantage over other countries in Asia. The focus

338 on the contemporary with an emphasis on Asian works will give the Festival a unique identity in the region" (Purushothaman, 2007). The launch of the Singapore Biennale in 2006, with a similar thrust but in visual arts, found ready acceptance as a platform for contemporary art internationally, proving that the Arts Festival after more than thirty years had been moving in the right direction. For the Arts Festival, taking the business pathway ensured, and continues to do so, its survival. With rising costs and multiple demands on public funds, its approach in organising programming, akin to portfolio management in the financial sector, allowed the Arts Festival to gain control of its projects and deliver meaningful value to its key stakeholders. It was an opportunity to create new needs, expand market share and keep audiences. Managing the Arts Festival's portfolio akin to a financial portfolio meant that riskier strategic investments (world premieres, new works, new groups) were balanced with more conservative investments (commercially proven arts activities and community-based activities) and the mix constantly monitored and assessed. Rewording this from the audience perspective, festival-goers too can monitor and evaluate programmes that are appealing and beneficial to them, thus minimising social and financial risk. However, in the arts, risk management can only kick in with useful information on the production and its development and structure. A strong portfolio of programmes can maximise the value of arts investments while minimising risk; improve communication and alignment between the arts and its key stakeholders, and reduce the number of redundant projects thereby presenting a lean and tight Arts Festival that competes confidently on the global scene.

339 Chapter Eight

CONCLUSION

The primary purpose of this thesis was to study the culture and cultural policies of postcolonial Singapore to chart the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival from 1959 to 2012. In doing so, the study of the Arts Festival has served to examine the production of culture in Singapore and contextualise the morphing cultural landscape of Singapore. The thesis aimed to do the following: First, to study the role and place of the Arts Festival in arts and cultural development in Singapore. Second, to foreground the centrality of the arts in nation-building through the birth of the Arts Festival in 1959 as a formally structured offering to the public to the festival’s transformation by 2012 into an international site of cultural and aesthetic production. Third, to study the cultural policy dimension and how it contributes to the transformation of Singapore from a trading port to a global city to a renaissance city.

In undertaking the study of the design of culture in Singapore, the cultural policies that inform it, and its cultural history, this thesis reveals that national identity and nation-building in Singapore is not only a consequence of history but an intricate weaving of culture, policy and practice. The Arts Festival cannot be read in isolation but must be seen within this weave, this construct. Through the analysis of historical, cultural, economic and political drivers of the Arts Festival, the thesis advances the following findings. The Arts Festival has remained the single most important artery of cultural production in Singapore from 1959 to 2012. It provides a critical lens through which culture and policy are tested, implemented and measured. It reveals the Arts Festival has contributed significantly to the

340 design and shape of culture in Singapore through its direct engagement with policy drivers, be it socio-cultural (multicultural) or economic (global city). Its support of Singaporean artists has been astounding. Over the years, it has provided platforms for artists to learn from prominent international artists; work together within their respective artistic communities; professionalise them; internationalise them through partnerships and collaborations with international festivals. It doing this, it has produced a repertoire of uniquely Singaporean works. For audiences, it has served as socio-cultural glue in the 1970s and 1980s; brought the world through the arts into urban and suburban Singapore in the 1990s; internationalise Singapore as a hub for arts and culture through international commissions and collaboration; and make significant contribution to the nascent cultural and creative industries in the new millennium. The thesis finds that the production of arts is politicised by the government to maintain an economic pre-eminence.

To foreground this weave, the thesis has undertaken a thorough study of Singaporean arts and culture, concepts and theories around festivals and global and Singaporean cultural policies. The research has been deeply engaging and in Geertz’ terms thick. My research led me to discover the richness of emerging scholarship around festival cultures. This area remains under-theorised as festivals are often written in isolation as case studies or referenced to public, tourism or socio-religious events. I have addressed this by undertaking a detailed study of ideas around festival cultures making an original contribution to this field. The research around culture, cultural policies and cultural and creative industries were archaeological, to say the least. This too has been an enriching exercise which has given the thesis its central engine to study the Arts Festival. The research on the Arts Festival has been challenging but most fulfilling. Constructed from interviews, archival materials, emerging literature, commemorative books, these primary sources provide a grassroots perspective on the making of a

341 festival. These perspectives had to be edited, contextualised and reflected upon and re-questioned. Scholarship around the arts in Singapore is emerging, yet oddly rich through a diversity of platforms and foci. For examples, the study of cultural policies and urban geography has been rich while the study of dance, music, ethnic art forms and major events such as the Arts Festival, M1 Fringe limited. As such, this thesis provides an opportunity to contextualise the arts from 1959 to 2012. This a first.

To undertake the cultural history of the Arts Festival, the architecture of the thesis was as follows: Part One set out Singapore’s cultural context outlining the meteoric rise of Singapore from a colonial trading port to a global city. Chapter Two, Designing Culture and Policy for a Global City, studied the cultural policies that had shaped postcolonial Singapore since the 1950s. By drawing out the conceptual and structural approaches to ‘designing' culture in Singapore, it established policy drivers such as multiculturalism, Asian Values and Shared Values remain fundamental DNA of Singapore well into the 21st century. The release of the Advisory Council of Culture and Arts Report in 1989 was a turning point for Singapore and the arts community. It was bold and visionary in aspiring to make Singapore a global city to live, work and play through the development arts infrastructures, the professionalisation of arts groups, import of international shows, and bringing of artistic communities under the auspices of the Arts Festival from 1990 to 2000. The following decade, as Chapter Three demonstrated, critically evaluated the establishment of the arts as a contributor to GDP growth and Singapore's vision to be a Renaissance city for the arts in the new millennium. Part One evidenced that from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s the arts were primarily determined by cultural identity and nationhood build around multiculturalism. From the 1980s, the thesis has foregrounded the crystallisation of an economic

342 prerogative, as the only way forward, to understanding and managing the arts.

Part Two undertook a detailed study of the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival and the ways and means it contributed to the production of culture in Singapore. Chapter Four covered the period 1959-1989 unearthing a pre-colonial cultural policy informing the early days of postcolonial Singapore. The arts served initially as a social gel for migrant communities in the 1950s and 1960s and rallied an industrialising country behind nation-building in the 1970s. The Arts Festival started as an enterprise of decolonisation and was left forgotten until a public, private and people partnership propelled it into the limelight in 1977. This became the defining signpost for the Arts Festival. It was a multicultural festival oriented towards community and identity-formation and a celebration of being in a new society. This continued well within the 1980s where the bi- annual Arts Festival served to educate the public about the world through the arts thereby preparing the country for a global outlook. Chapter Five showed the muscular nature of the government shaping culture of the 1990s with the release of its visionary ACCA Report to make Singapore a global city for the arts by 2000.

The thesis revealed that the Arts Festivals of the 1990s marked a clear co- relationship between art, commerce and national identity woven tightly around Asian Values and Shared Values. However, despite an attempt to programme around identity the Arts Festival’s future was clearly tied to global and economic imperatives as reflected in the short life of the Festival of Asian Performing Arts. Global and economic imperatives were further enhanced by the participation of national companies such as Singapore Airlines and Singapore Tourism Board aiding to internationalise the Arts Festival and create urban vibrancy. Chapter Six unveiled the transformation

343 of the global city into a renaissance city where a newly emerging cultural and creative economy informed the programming direction. The Arts Festivals from 2000 to 2009 was globally connected, creating new economic value for Singapore. The Arts Festival was informed by the government’s agenda to create a liveable environment infused with culture - attractive to investors. It provided multiple opportunities for the public to engage with the arts and the Arts Festival entrenched itself as a key ally of exploring globalisation. It supported, inspired and negotiated the changing dynamics of cultural policy and prepared artists and audiences for artistic shifts in the global economy. The chapter showed how the Arts Festival was responding to the need to establish Singapore as a creative hub for the cultural and creative industries in a renaissance city. Furthermore, Singapore's artists were challenged to achieve new breakthroughs to reinforce Singapore as a platform to create original works, and develop world-class, bold and progressive programmes that were distinct from others in the region. More importantly, it produced an extensive repertoire of made-in-Singapore works.

From 2010-2012 the Art Festival was repositioned as a community-based event. It responded to the political climate of that time which saw a growing youth population distanced from the magic of nation-building. The programming was circumspect leading the way for the suspension of the Arts Festival in 2013 – to be reviewed by a panel on its future and viability. Sustainability in a business and economic environment is vital and as Chapter Seven showed the Arts Festival was active in mobilising various agencies from sponsors to the media in fulfilling the larger policy directions. This is in keeping with the highly managerial bureaucracy that ran the Arts Festival.

344 This thesis has shown that the Arts Festival plays an important national role in harnessing and professionalising artistic energies and forging a Singapore arts identity. Today, Singaporean artists are working professionally throughout the year engaging an international audience, through Arts Festival and non-Arts Festival commissions and collaborations and cultural exchange, and these provide artists with the opportunities to create new breakthroughs, expand their artistic boundaries, and make collaborative work through regional and international input. They form the backbone of the cultural and creative industries.

Given the history of the Arts Festival, the focus on artistic development, artistic creation and innovation are increasingly critical for future festivals. Bringing in international works of quality, creating adjunct programmes for professional development and dialogue, challenging Singapore's artists to develop substantial new works, helping them to find their global voice, just as they have done in the past, would contribute to riding the tide of a turbulent world. In short, building the cultural capital of Singapore is a key outcome of the Arts Festival and one that must continue to be fostered for changing world.

This thesis provides several opportunities for future research. It provides researchers and scholars on festivals, cultural policies, cultural and creative industries to study other leading festivals in Singapore and Southeast Asia. An emerging Southeast Asia is looking towards Singapore to learn and emulate. This research will help provide context and perspective. Secondly, policy-makers will find this research particularly useful for new frameworks in arts and cultural planning. If the past can provide a pier into the future, this could tremendously help with first-hand research.

345 The beginning of this thesis discussed the power of festivals to energise communities. The location of the Arts Festival in the 21st century has been critical to the success of modern Singapore. The trope of policy to drive and shape artistic, aesthetic and critical ecologies for an emerging nation is deeply rooted in Singapore's history albeit challenging; for the Arts Festival has been a site of celebration, contemplation, contradiction and containment. It presented culture and nationhood and nation and economics to Singaporeans. People and cultures have followed through the veins of the Arts Festival, and yet, the question as to what is ahead and beyond the horizon is eminent. However, it is important to remember that post- independence Singapore is mere fifty-two years old. This thesis will serve as a cultural history, archive and reminder of one aspect of the development of a modern, yet imagined, nation-state.

In conclusion, the Singapore Arts Festival’s role is really about art: ways of making it, showcasing it, and living it in a city-state long labelled a cultural desert. As an instrument of culture and cultural policy, the Arts Festival’s role in the production of culture in Singapore has fast become entrenched in the psyche of cultural critics and connoisseurs nationally and internationally. It has been noticed for presenting a unique sensibility beyond the gaze of western arts festivals and perceptions of what Asia is, and has offered programmes that have bonded multicultural communities, re-imagined Asia and served as a laboratory for the arts.

--- End

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Author/s: Purushothaman, Venkateswara

Title: Designing culture, policies and festivals: a cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival, 1959 to 2012

Date: 2017

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