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Workshops

Devising with Actors and Playwrights

Part of TNS' Devising Platform, Devising With Actors and Playwrights comprised a five-month training programme for 20 participants led by Haresh Sharma that developed the capabilities of emerging playwrights, actors and dramaturgs to apply the company’s devising methodology in their theatre-making. The programme, which runs from April to September 2021, also featured workshops and clinics with Alvin Tan and other guest speakers, and culminated in a series of presentations of works-in-progress by the participants.

• • • 

Participants:

A Yagnya

Auderia Tan Yan Ying

Deonn Yang

Fadhil Daud

Te Hao Boon

Irny Irdina

Isaac Lim

Ivan Choong

Jaisilan Sathiasilan

Jean Tay

Jeramy Lim

Kimberly Arriola

Lareina Tham

Nicholas Bloodworth

Rajkumar Thiagaras

Ryan Ang 

Sabrina Sng

Shien Hian Lim

Sim Yan Ying "YY"

Tysha Khan

• • •

Works Presented:

Cost of Caring

by Sim Yan Ying "YY", Jean Tay, Lareina Tham, Lim Shien Hian, Te Hao Boon and Nicholas Bloodworth

A Perfect Day

by Ivan Choong, Fadhil Daud and Lim Shien Hian

Fractures

by Kimberly Arriola, Deonn Yang and Sabrina Sng

Never The Bride

by Rajkumar Thiagaras, Ryan Ang and Fadhil Daud

Misaligned Stars (错位的星星)

by A Yagnya, Auderia Tan Yan Ying and Isaac Lim

Dapat apa? (Get what?)

by Jeramy Lim, Irny Irdina and Tysha Khan
2021
 -
Singapore
 

Productions

Model Citizens

A man stabs an MP at a Meet the People Session. But this is not their story.

It is the story of the man’s girlfriend, an Indonesian maid who wants to get married and become a Singapore citizen. It is the story of the MP’s wife, who tries to cope with her husband’s injury and the media spotlight. It is the story of the maid’s employer, who is also struggling with her own tragedy.

These three women may mean nothing to each other, but they need one another to survive.

The maid, the employer and the MP’s wife. Are they all model citizens?

First staged in 2010 to critical acclaim and subsequently restaged in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur the following year, Model Citizens is a thought-provoking work helmed by director Alvin Tan and playwright Haresh Sharma. This new iteration of Model Citizens will see the return of the original cast—Goh Guat Kian, Karen Tan and Siti Khalijah Zainal—11 years since the production’s premiere.
2021
 -
Singapore
 

Workshops

They/Them: Verbatim Devising Workshop

The They/Them: Verbatim Devising Workshop was led by The Necessary Stage's Resident Playwright and Cultural Medallion recipient Haresh Sharma, and was an introductory workshop for 10 selected participants who identify as trans or non-binary.

Spanning seven workshop sessions, participants explored devising, improvisations and verbatim sharings centred on their personal hopes and experiences as a trans/non-binary person. Their work across these sessions culminated in a closed-door presentation to invited guests

The workshop ran from 6 February to 27 February 2021.

The final presentation was performed by:


Crazy Kitten Smile
Irie Aman
Karuna Marsh
Levin Tan
Michael Neo
Naomi
Ness
Roo Lee
Sumita Thiagarajan
Wisely Chow
 

2021
 -
Singapore
 

Festivals

M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2021

2021
 -
Singapore
 

Workshops

Virtual Reality Lab

How can theatre interact with virtual reality (VR) technology?

VR Lab opens up an opportunity for creators to explore this relationship. Fragments from two scripts penned by Haresh Sharma, namely Don't Forget To Remember Me and Future Perfect, serve as conceptual springboards for experimentation around notions of memory, dementia, world-making and alternate realities.

The practitioners involved will propose briefs that will be executed and evaluated, to see if there is potential for further development. These permutations may or may not involve audience members when shared through a livestream session or sessions at the end of the laboratory
2020
 -
Singapore
 

Productions

Off Centre

This interactive theatrical experience will feature excerpts of Off Centre that traces the friendships that the protagonist, Vinod, forges—one with Charlie, his ex-classmate from Junior College, and another with Saloma, who—like Vinod—struggles with a mental health condition.

Can Vinod draw support from his friends, in the face of social prejudices against those suffering from mental illnesses? Will their friendships be able to withstand the personal conflicts that each of them experience?

Off Centre is a landmark play in the history of Singapore theatre, best remembered for presenting an honest and unflinching look at mental illness and the stigma surrounding it. Selected in 2007 by the Ministry of Education (MOE) as the first Singaporean play to be offered as a GCE O- and N-Level literature text, Off Centre is once again back on the syllabus since 2018.

Off Centre will be presented live via Zoom. To support teachers through this new format of presentation, there will be a teachers’ briefing session prior to the performance. Attendance is compulsory.

Learning Objectives


Explore issues related to mental health conditions, its challenges and stigmas
Gain a better understanding of the experiences and feelings of people who live with mental health conditions
Be empowered to effect changes in their own lives and friendships

2020
 -
Singapore
 

Workshops

Playwrights' Cove 2020

In 2001, The Necessary Stage (TNS) launched Playwright's Cove, a development and mentorship programme aimed at nurturing, processing and platforming contemporary playwriting for Singapore theatre. Many of its participants are well-known practitioners and educators today, including Jean Tay, Ng Yi-sheng, Natalie Hennedige, Kenneth Kwok and Matthew Lyon.

The return of Playwrights’ Cove in 2020 is part of TNS' effort to consolidate and boost its skills development and creative exploration programmes through the launch of the TNS Devising Platform.

Playwrights' Cove is a five-month playwriting training and mentorship programme led by Resident Playwright Haresh Sharma for 10 selected participants.

Each playwright completed a play by the end of the programme, and had the play read before a public audience.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent safe management measures, the play-readings were made available via digital streaming in December 2020.
2020
 -
Singapore
 

Productions

Mari Memasak!

Our Reflection from Home series features a guest in the house for the first time!

Felix Heng joins our four ladies from Theatre for Seniors for Mari Memasak!, as they share about recipes close to their hearts—because one of the things they've been doing lots of during this COVID-19 period is to cook. Watch our seniors whip up a feast, with scrumptious treats like bak wan kepiting, kacang botol salad and dry tenggiri fish head curry—dishes that are intimately linked to their personal histories and cultural heritage. 
2020
 -
Singapore

Talks & Interviews

Making a Scene Episode 3: Art and Outbreaks

This line from Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ poem The Second Coming is often cited during periods of great upheaval. Its resonance deepens in the time of COVID-19, when we think about the poem’s historical context. Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1919, as his wife was recovering from a serious bout of the Spanish flu. That global pandemic would ultimately kill somewhere between 50 and 100 million people.

How have outbreaks throughout history shaped art? How have artists and thinkers grappled with the traumas and revelations of infection and disease? These are the questions we explore in this episode of Making A Scene. Hosting this conversation is theatre-maker Edith Podesta. The Associate Artistic Director of W!LD RICE’s youth division Young & W!LD, Podesta guides us through how the bubonic plague haunts the plays of Shakespeare; how the Spanish flu pandemic influenced modernist icons such as Yeats, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf; and how the AIDS crisis shaped artists, thinkers and activists.

To expand on the impact of AIDS on culture, Podesta spoke to Haresh Sharma, the Resident Playwright of The Necessary Stage (TNS), and Paul Rae, the former Artistic Co-Director of spell#7 and now Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne.

In 1999, Sharma and TNS Artistic Director Alvin Tan collaborated with Paddy Chew, the first man in Singapore to publicly speak about living with HIV/AIDS. The result was the landmark play Completely With/Out Character. Haresh recalls Paddy’s deep desire to provide public education about AIDS, and discusses parallels with how COVID-19 has surfaced latent prejudices.

Paul touches on the work of British artist Derek Jarman as he was dying of AIDS, and the performative energies of AIDS activism in the United States. He also talks about the machinations and metaphors of disease in Alfian Sa’at’s 2006 play Homesick, his own 2011 essay Pigs Might Fly: Dance in the Time of Swine Flu, and French dramatist Antonin Artaud’s seminal 1933 work Theatre and the Plague.

And finally, we ask the question: how will COVID-19 influence the themes that artists explore as we try to make sense of this changed world? There are no easy answers, but as the pandemic increasingly casts the struggles and sorrows of contemporary life into starker relief, we can only hope that surely, maybe, some revelation is at hand.
2020
 -
Singapore
 

Productions

My Childhood Home

What was the neighboorhood where you spent your childhood years like? 
Do you remember the street hawkers in those days, selling your favourite food? 
What sort of stories did you hear about the residents in the area?
How was your dating life like back then?

These were some of the prompts that our four ladies from Theatre for Seniors were provided in preparation for My Childhood Home, an online Zoom improvisation that is part of the Reflections from Home series. 

Over the years, our senior participants have often divulged anecdotes from the past with us, and we wanted to invite them to revisit these wonderfully entertaining tales from their past. My Childhood Home is an invitation to our seniors to deep-dive into their memories of youth, to share their rich stories that are always filled with warmth, scandal, and plenty of laughter. 
 
2020
 -
Singapore
 

Productions

COVID-19 Responses Around the World

How do our seniors view the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic? In this improvisation—part of our Reflections from Home series—our four intrepid ladies from Theatre for Seniors shared their thoughts on how different countries have been managing the unprecedented crisis that has impacted the world. 

To begin the process, we asked our seniors to watch a handful of videos, amongst which included late night comedy shows that lampooned world leaders who bungled their national responses to the pandemic, as well as videos of politicians communicating facts about the coronavirus to their constituents. The seniors were also provided with a list of prompts to prepare for the improvisation—what they have been hearing from their friends and family living abroad, their thoughts on how world leaders fared in the crisis, as well as the concerns they have about life after lockdown (when the circuit breaker in Singapore comes to an end on 2 June 2020). 

The resulting improvisation which you will be watching is a candid, humorous and no-holds barred exchange amongst the four senior ladies. 
2020
 -
Singapore
 

Productions

Going Green

Following Reflections from Home which featured four members of The Necessary Stage's Theatre for Seniors, Resident Playwright Haresh Sharma invited our senior participants to develop monologues on their thoughts about going green.  

After their video monologues, each of the seniors were assigned a documentary on green issues to watch. These documentaries covered issues as diverse as plastic pollution, food waste, and how the younger generation can teach seniors how to be more environmentally aware. We then regrouped a week later, and explored the participants' group dynamics via an improvisation co-created over Zoom.  

The improvisation included in the playlist of videos is the second take, with the seniors each given a provocation on climate-related issues separately by Alvin, at different times throughout the improvisation. These briefs were created by Haresh, and ranged from issues such as going childfree, solar energy generation, carbon footprints of flights and livestock we consume, and the world they would like to leave behind for future generations. 
2020
 -
Singapore
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