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Staging

Mobile 2: Flat Cities

On the cusp of Japan's surrender during World War II, a Japanese general suffers a stroke and is tended to by a Malay gardener. As they spar, having heated debates about the war, the present is revealed: a Japanese man in a relationship with an Indian woman in Kuala Lumpur; his ex-wife coming to grips with an astrologer's predictions; their son, studying in the United States and confronted by his classmates about Japan's past.

A multilingual production featuring artists from Singapore, Malaysia and Japan, Mobile 2: Flat Cities casts the spotlight on stories of personal, social and universal struggles across Asian cities.

The play is The Necessary Stage's long-awaited follow up to the critically-acclaimed Mobile, which premiered at the 2006 Singapore Arts Festival and toured to Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo.
2013
 -
Malaysia
 

Productions

Future Perfect

3 stories are intertwined in this brand new play about human enhancement.

The first is about a couple, Melissa and Joe, who takes the Youth Fountain serum. Can the couple live to the age of 200 years?

The second story features a shop at the market which sells stem cells and the unlikely friendship that develops between seller Sam and Gina.

In the third story, a young husband and his mother visit Designer Babies, a new centre which creates perfect babies through genetic modification.

Light-hearted, dramatic and sometimes poignant, Future Perfect is the perfect educational play to highlight issues of biomedical ethics and to leave students wanting more. 
2013
 -
Singapore
 

Staging

Future Perfect

3 stories are intertwined in this brand new play about human enhancement.

The first is about a couple, Melissa and Joe, who takes the Youth Fountain serum. Can the couple live to the age of 200 years?

The second story features a shop at the market which sells stem cells and the unlikely friendship that develops between seller Sam and Gina.

In the third story, a young husband and his mother visit Designer Babies, a new centre which creates perfect babies through genetic modification.

Light-hearted, dramatic and sometimes poignant, Future Perfect is the perfect educational play to highlight issues of biomedical ethics and to leave students wanting more. 
2013
 -
Singapore

Talks & Interviews

Roots and Branches

The Arts House and Interlexis organised the inaugural Singapore International Translation Symposium 2013, the first major public translation-related event to be held in Singapore. The Symposium gathered foreign and local practitioners, researchers and language-enthusiasts to discuss the art and craft of translation based on the theme, Translation Matters.

The main objective of this symposium was to raise awareness about the role of translation in society, take stock of the current state of the translation industry and market, and exchange experiences and best practices with translators and translation organisations in other parts of the world.

Haresh Sharma, together with Quah Sy Ren and Jeremy Tiang, served as a panellist for Roots and Branches: Translation & Theatre, moderated by Clarissa Oon. They spoke on how translation has always been an integral part of theatre, and what is the role and function of the translator in relation to the playwright, director and actors if one sees a performance as a collaborative enterprise. Also discussed by the theatre practitioners, translators and scholars was what it means to “maintain the integrity” of a play in translation.
2013
 -
Singapore
 

Productions

Best Of

Award-winning actress Siti Khalijah Zainal takes centre-stage in this brand new one-woman show specially created for her by Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma. Best Of looks at issues of the day through collective stories and personal reflection. 
2013
 -
Singapore
 

Staging

Best Of

Award-winning actress Siti Khalijah Zainal takes centre-stage in this brand new one-woman show specially created for her by Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma. Best Of looks at issues of the day through collective stories and personal reflection. 
2013
 -
Singapore
 

Festivals

M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2013

2013
 

Productions

The Project

Ryan, Farah and Wee Kiat are best friends in school. When the principal assigns them a special project to explore and research Singapore's maritime industry, they take it in their stride. However, they later discover they have to make a presentation to the whole school. Can they rise up to the challenge? Will their friendship be tested by THE PROJECT?

Join these friends as they go on a fun and crazy adventure – unearthing secrets of Singapore's maritime past; going behind the scenes to explore world trade, meeting seafarers and storytellers...

The Project is an entertaining and educational play that will bring audiences on an unforgettable journey.
2013
 -
Singapore
 

Staging

The Project

Ryan, Farah and Wee Kiat are best friends in school. When the principal assigns them a special project to explore and research Singapore's maritime industry, they take it in their stride. However, they later discover they have to make a presentation to the whole school. Can they rise up to the challenge? Will their friendship be tested by THE PROJECT?

Join these friends as they go on a fun and crazy adventure – unearthing secrets of Singapore's maritime past; going behind the scenes to explore world trade, meeting seafarers and storytellers...

The Project is an entertaining and educational play that will bring audiences on an unforgettable journey.
2013
 -
Singapore
 

Workshops

Theatre For Youth and Community 2013

In September 1992, Artistic Director of The Necessary Stage Alvin Tan established the Theatre for Youth Branch, which was later renamed in 2002 as Theatre for Youth and Community (TFYC) Branch.

Since our inception, TFYC has reached to more than 1,000,000 students through school assemblies, interactive Theatre-in-Education programmes, customised workshops and process-based drama programmes. TFYC has also been featured in Esplanade's Feed Your Imagination series as part of the National Arts Council's Arts Excursion Programme, offering high quality, thought-provoking productions that provide students an all-rounded educational theatre experience.

Under the TFYC Branch, we have also embarked on successful partnerships with corporations, non-governmental organisations, statutory boards and government ministries to present works dealing with specific issues to the public.

From 2008-2011, the Company also launched the Theatre For Seniors, a programme geared towards training participants in various aspects of theatre-making. The project was supported by the Council for 3rd Age, Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple and the National Arts Council.

We believe that theatre must grow out of the community, and therefore pay close attention to issues that concern young people and education. Our programmes are developed from research, detailed planning and consultation because we believe that students can benefit fully through programmes that are relevant to their lives, and which involve theoretical and hands-on learning.

We believe that theatre is not meant to be simply a high-brow affair for the wealthy and intellectual - it is a language that each of us have the right to learn and speak, in order to release and to make sense of the world.
2013
 

Publications

Don't Forget to Remember Me

The Necessary Stage is at the forefront of social and community theatre in Singapore. Its plays, created through research and collaboration, actively engage different communities and empower audiences across all ages.

In recent years, The Necessary Stage has been creating and performing plays on specific medical issues such as dementia, suicide, biomedical ethics and palliative care.

Don't Forget to Remember Me is a brand new collection featuring six of these plays by award-winning playwright Haresh Sharma.

Drama is a very effective tool in raising public awareness on important social issues. The plays in this collection will especially appeal to schools and social service agencies because they are educational and reach out to a wider public.

The publication also contains notes on the plays by the writer as well as an introduction by The Necessary Stage's Founder and Artistic Director, Alvin Tan.
2013
 

Essays/Writings

Forum Theater in Singapore

Published in positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 21, Number 1, Winter.

The following is an extract from the essay/writing.The full version can be purchased online here.


Forum theater is an interactive practice whose “third-world” revolutionary origins have been transposed into techniques for dealing with “oppressions” within bourgeois societies. By constructing an analytical framework that articulates a Marcusean “one-dimensional society” approach and a Gramscian “constant struggle for hegemony” approach, this article discusses forum theater's relative autonomy from and susceptibility to the authoritarian and culture-industry logics of advanced industrial society. In 1993, forum theater was successfully introduced to Singapore by local professional theater company The Necessary Stage (TNS) and then quickly proscribed by the state for its Marxist associations and unscripted nature. At the turn of the millennium, however, the state has come to realize more clearly the economic value of the arts, including its “subversive” qualities that may generate excitement and nurture a culture of innovation necessary for the creative economy of renaissance Singapore, a global city for the arts. In the transition to this new climate, TNS and another professional theater company, Drama Box, have attempted to negotiate new forum spaces for critical thinking against the grain of hegemony, without being co-opted by authoritarian capitalism. Both have attempted this in often-contrasting ways: for instance, TNS addresses a mostly English-speaking, theater-attending, middle-class audience, while Drama Box inserts Chinese-language forum theater into the organic everyday-life spaces of working-class communities. While TNS stages most of its forum theater work within the conventional walls of theater space, Drama Box embraces an aesthetic and site specificity that are closer to the form's popular roots. The Marcusean/Gramscian framework presented in this article offers a dynamic approach for critically analyzing the birth, death, and rebirth of forum theater in Singapore, and the contrasting and yet complementary ways in which TNS and Drama Box have negotiated with new opportunities and limitations in their socially conscious artistic practice. That forum theater has “reemerged” — a decade after its proscription by the state — as a “legitimate” part of the global city's state-led and economically driven artistic and cultural “renaissance” calls into question the extent of its radicalism today, but it also offers suggestions for new and more sophisticated modes of resistance and collaboration.


Project Serial Number: AA201301

Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to reproduce the full essay/writing online. Please contact the resource owner directly for permissions if reproduction rights do not belong to The Necessary Stage Ltd. Otherwise, kindly contact us for access to the full resource. Do note that archival access and reproduction charges may apply.
2013
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