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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
 

Workshops

Workshop for Senior Trainers

Theatre For Seniors Workshop for Senior Trainers is a trainer's workshop focusing on the pedagogy of teaching basic acting skills to seniors. It aims to have trained senior facilitators run their own basic acting workshops for their own pool of senior clients.

The programme is specially tailored for seniors who have undergone the Theatre for Seniors programme, expanding their skill sets beyond theatre making. Participants will be required to conduct 50 hours worth of on-site training with a select group of seniors before graduating from the course
2012

Talks & Interviews

My Book is Studied in Schools!

Singapore writers talk about their works studied as texts ― is this the ultimate canonical nod? Who are the canon‘s
gatekeepers anyway? This panel discusses how students have responded to their works, and whether literature
homework and exams snuff out - or stimulate - interest in reading and creative writing.
2012
 -
Singapore
 

Productions

October

October takes a look at the lives of a group of elderly people, all living in a small neighbourhood that is undergoing upgrading. Into this scenario comes a young and ambitious property agent looking for prospective sellers. As their paths cross, they each find new sources of strength for renewal, regeneration and rejuvenation.
2012
 -
Singapore
 

Staging

October

October takes a look at the lives of a group of elderly people, all living in a small neighbourhood that is undergoing upgrading. Into this scenario comes a young and ambitious property agent looking for prospective sellers. As their paths cross, they each find new sources of strength for renewal, regeneration and rejuvenation.
2012
 -
Singapore

Productions

Don't Forget to Remember Me

Dementia is not normal ageing. When Madam Wong begins her retirement, all she can think of is enjoying her golden years with rest and serenity, surrounded by family and friends. However, rest turns into restlessness as she starts to lose her short-term memory. Her dream of a peaceful life soon becomes a nightmare of remembering and forgetting. 
2012
 -
Singapore

Staging

Don't Forget to Remember Me

Dementia is not normal ageing. When Madam Wong begins her retirement, all she can think of is enjoying her golden years with rest and serenity, surrounded by family and friends. However, rest turns into restlessness as she starts to lose her short-term memory. Her dream of a peaceful life soon becomes a nightmare of remembering and forgetting. 
2012
 -
Singapore
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