One of the foundational things you learn when improvising and devising scenes in the theatre is the invitation “yes, and”. You learn that there are an infinite number of ways to say yes.
Yes, and?
Yes, and—
Yes, and...
It’s a shorthand for what improvisers call “accepting offers” that propel a scene forward, even if these ideas and interjections come from left field. It’s also a term that’s easily misunderstood. A “no, but” can also be a “yes, and” if it develops a narrative premise; a “no, but” can also reshape unethical offers that might compromise a performer’s safety.
You learn a lot from how someone receives your “no”.
Alfian Sa’at’s “The Death of Singapore Theatre as Scripted by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore”, begins with a lot of “nos”. Alfian has embedded “Dear Censor” in his title, and the play’s been described as a “love letter” to IMDA, although it could also be a demand letter; a cease and desist letter; a letter to the editor, if we take academic Terence Chong’s provocation that “the Singaporean bureaucrat is the most important art critic in the country”; or a message in a bottle—if a letter is written to IMDA, but IMDA doesn’t acknowledge receipt, is it still a letter?
Alfian addresses his censor(s) through the voice and virtuosic performance of Farah Ong, and also takes us on a whistlestop tour of artistic censorship in Singapore from the 1890s to the present day. The Arts Term Licensing saga makes an appearance about halfway through. In 2014, the Media Development Authority (MDA; forebear of the current Infocomm Media Development Authority or IMDA), had included a new scheme in a list of proposed amendments to the Public Entertainments and Meetings Act: Arts Term Licensing. This opt-in scheme was pushed out as a step towards “co-regulation” rather than “censorship” in the arts, in line with recommendations from both the 2003 and 2010 national Censorship Reviews.
The scheme would have seen groups appointing individuals as MDA-registered “content assessors”, who’d then be trained to “self-classify” their performances with “age-appropriate ratings”, from G (general) to R18 (restricted to those above 18), in line with the authority’s classification codes. Had this amendment been successful, it would have also cut a significant amount of the statutory board’s bureaucratic backlog. In 2013, there were 1,200 arts entertainment licences issued here. Imagine the administrative overwork that comes with having to assess and rate every single production from at least 80 active licensees, whether arts groups or other event organisers. The MDA intended Arts Term Licensing to trim red tape and offer increased classificatory autonomy to artists.
On May 12th, the statutory board launched a public consultation exercise on these proposed changes. Artists, appalled, pointed out that the MDA could still reject their classifications and revoke their licences, or fine them up to S$5,000 for “mis-classifying” work. What if a group believed its work deserved an R18 rating, but MDA felt it should be “Not Allowed For All Ratings” (a very unwieldy title for a ban)? Would “co-regulation” lead to greater self-censorship? By May 30th, the artists’ network Arts Engage had put together a position paper signed by 45 arts groups objecting to the scheme.
MDA made an offer. Artists said “no”.
If artists were frustrated and confused, so was the MDA. The statutory board eventually decided to take the scheme off the table, but in a way that felt more like: if you don’t want nice things, we won’t give them to you. I remember the day the story broke. I remember thinking that MDA probably thought they were doing the right thing. As a rookie arts reporter with The Straits Times covering this series of unfortunate events, I was emailed this quote from Koh Lin-Net, then chief executive of MDA:
“We appreciate the very useful dialogues we had with Arts Engage, where we identified areas where we could work even better together. However in the area of term licensing, we realised that it was not a matter of whether or not the scheme could have been better designed. Rather, that there were fundamental differences in views which could not be resolved. For example, whether or not at the highest level of rating [R18], any form of content should be allowed. Hence, it is better not to proceed with the option of the term licensing scheme.”
The irony of writing about arts censorship for a censorial national broadsheet was not lost on me. While working on an op-ed on censorship in the wake of the saga, I decided to keep a diary of the process titled “anatomy of a commentary on censorship”—complete with dates, transcripts from emails, and exchanges from our internal messaging system. An editor told me that my written rage would be better received if I channelled it with restraint. A sub-editor questioned my use of “agency” in this sentence: “The voluntary scheme is meant to give artists and arts groups that sign up for it more agency in self-classifying their shows.” He thought I’d meant artists were starting an agency, and that I had made a grammatical error. It was one of my more Orwellian days at the paper.
I remember reading playwright Tan Tarn How’s much more paranoid and deflating diary of censorship appended to the first edition of “The Lady of Soul” a year later. It is strange to revisit my anger now, ten years later, now that my political rage has grown in complexity and geographic range, and has found both explicit shapes and implicit forms. As a 20-something rookie reporter, I wanted to march into my editors’ offices and scream, “NO!!!!” I couldn’t understand their “no, but”, or what happens, as I wrote in a review of Tan’s “Press Gang” (2018), when an institution is slowly but steadily defanged.
I have also followed Alfian’s political rage over the past decade, a rage channelled into poetry, short stories, and perhaps his favoured polemical vehicle: the play. Alfian is good—no, excellent—at harvesting the rage of others and patterning it around his own. He began these verbatim and documentary theatre explorations of Singapore with “Cooling Off Day” (2012; electoral politics), and they’ve continued with “Cook A Pot Of Curry” (2013; racism and xenophobia), “Merdeka” (2019; decoloniality), and “Pulau Ujong” (2022; the climate crisis).
Verbatim and documentary theatre isn’t the only volume in Alfian’s theatrical catalogue, of course. Some of my favourite works by him have been the collaborative, sprawling productions that were astonishing in their historical ambit (and ambition), including “Tiger of Malaya” (2018; on historical reenactment and national archives), and “Hotel” (2015; toying with historical timescales from a single vantage point); but also the intimate, black-box family dramas like “Nadirah” (2009; on intermarriage and religious conversion) and the hysterical “Kakak Kau Punya Laki” (2013; on fundamentalism in the wake of the Mas Selamat saga).
I’ve watched Singaporean playwrights and performance-makers whet and sate their omnivorous political appetites on different genres over the years, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that Alfian is in his Performance Lecture Era. It’s a genre where a lecture costumes itself with theatre, making use of performance devices and strategies (narrative, characterisation, participation) to communicate knotty theoretical concepts or present complex research.
Loo Zihan, performance artist and scholar, is one artist who’s made the form utterly his own. Loo presents and facilitates all his performance lectures with quiet charisma. In “Catamite” (2019), Loo first invites us to explore our personal inventories of objects—both the functional and frivolous things we’ve brought into the theatre space with us. And then we end up on a confronting journey through Singapore’s queer history as we handle speculative doubles of the objects used as evidence in a very real court case that will determine the fate of a young Malay man in colonial-era Singapore.
In “Death of Singapore Theatre”, Farah is a consistently charismatic performer, and she can deliver dense archival research on one beat and rhythmic rhetorical flourishes the next without losing her emotional tempo or her audience. Even the most sceptical among us will want to eat out of her hand (or hold it, as the script invites us to) by the end of the show. She charms us by splicing Alfian’s cutting sarcasm, both textual and gestural (a raised eyebrow, a well-timed pause), with a warmth and comic precision that imbues so much of her dynamic character work on stage. Director Irfan Kasban, ever the architect of seductive stage environments, invites us into the safety of a darkened lecture theatre before turning the spotlights on us. There’s a cleverness about this framing, but the play also delights in its own cleverness as it dissects the very censorship system it was subject to in order to arrive on the Singapore stage.
Alfian isn’t a stranger to lectures, and has given a fair amount of them himself, but when it comes to the stage I often wonder if his performance-lecture characters are characters, or really avatars of himself. One might argue that all characters are avatars of their creators somehow, but what happens when a particular character is their creator, or close enough to the bone? Would it diminish the glitter of Farah’s performance if we thought of her more as a mouthpiece giving extraordinary performative shape to the work—and also holding the state to account, all by herself, on the vulnerable expanse of the stage?
My favourite Alfian characters aren’t the talking heads he turns to when he needs someone to be a vehicle for a complex concept. They don’t even have to occupy the stage for very long, but they can be luminous. His rendition of the betrayed, bereaved nenek in “Hotel”, who survives the Japanese Occupation only to be derailed by an unexpected reunion 40 years later. Or his evocation of Teo Soh Lung, former political detainee and lawyer, who concludes “Cooling Off Day” with such generosity of spirit:
Hopefully that cloud is cleared lah
That we can say that
All those who were involved
Were unfortunate
But that we didn’t do anything wrong.
And the friends we implicated
Should also feel that they have been vindicated
From all these unfair unjust criticism.
And that is good lah.
In a way we settle all the scores
And we cleared the slate.
For decades, artists such as Alfian have had to take on the mantle of state critic, a responsibility that mainstream journalists and public intellectuals in Singapore have often shirked. The philosopher Michel Foucault perhaps most famously described the act of critique as “the art of not being governed quite so much”, where the critic—a figure traditionally vested with expertise, legitimacy, authority—is bestowed with the power to hold power to account.
Whether that’s unveiling an oppressive apparatus or exposing dominant ideologies, this brand of criticism can feel emancipatory in this part of the world. The authoritarian South-east Asian states of the 1970s to 1990s were shaped to varying degrees by histories of violence and repression from martial law and military rule—or bent to the wills of political strongmen who recoiled from public criticism and responded with crackdowns and censorship.
Over the past few decades, censorship of the arts in Singapore has evolved from what we might characterise as a “totalitarian” system of top-down policing to a more “post-totalitarian” system of bottom-up self-policing. Before the MDA was formed in 2003, the Singapore Police Force’s Public Entertainment Licensing Unit (PELU) was responsible for redactions, which they would embark on with a by-the-book zeal. Playwright Haresh Sharma describes the irony of this earlier process: “If you want to say something really subversive, you just put a lot of ‘fuck,’ ‘fuck,’ ‘fuck’...They’ll go into a cancelling frenzy. Meanwhile you can write a really critical script and they would be too distracted to notice.”
With the more recent attempts at arts term licensing, on the other hand, the state made a minor evolutionary leap with the sophistication of self-censorship. But formal legislation isn’t the only means by which the state can assert its reach. There have been artists and groups who have reported not receiving their performance licences till mere days before their shows open, leading to anxiety about recouping ticket sales should their licences have been denied. Vaclav Havel—the late poet, playwright and former Czech Republic president—describes how this self-policing decentralises the burden of control from a “ruling clique” because the “blind automatism” of the system takes over, where the system “serves people only to the extent necessary to ensure that people will serve it” through “conformity, uniformity, and discipline”.
Theatre and performance here have long acted as forms of political critique, protest and resistance through their non-conformist creators. Because of this, much of socially- and politically-engaged performance in Singapore is criticism. Performance-as-criticism and political criticism are not always separable from each other. Then, along comes the arts critic, who naturally might be expected to behave less like an arbiter of taste and more like a fellow member of the cultural and intellectual elite who are making sense of the competing ideologies and political urgencies of the times through their art.
But what happens if the artist has accumulated more cultural capital than the critic, or if the critic is perceived as unsophisticated or low-brow in their tastes? The most frequent critique of the critic, perhaps, is that they are a parasite who leeches off a work, one who siphons resources and nutrition from an artform in order to make a living, and does so by writing about the work in a state-adjacent media mouthpiece. Those who can’t do, critique—so the bastardised Aristotelian saying might go. The critic then becomes seen as the first censor: yet another “content assessor”, rather than a critical interlocutor.
There are two double-binds in “Death of Singapore Theatre”. The first is the paradox of cooption in Singapore. If a play about censorship is passed without censorship, does censorship exist? If a play about censorship is censored, banned from the stage, and the public never gets to encounter its censure: does the play exist? This reminds me of an excerpt from Tan Tarn How’s “Undercover” (1994), a biting play-within-a-play where an undercover agent tries to infiltrate an agitprop theatre group that is trying to stage a play on detention without trial. The boundaries between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, and it is eventually unclear if they are staging a play about detention or if they are, in fact, the ones being detained.
QIANG: But there is a problem with the play. More fundamental. An inherent paradox in the premise of the play.
BAGS: A paradox?
QIANG: Yes. You see, the play is saying that “they” don’t tolerate dissent, right?
WILLY: Well, yes.
QIANG: Is this play an example of dissent?
WILLY: It is critical of them, no doubt about it. Yes, I would say so.
QIANG: So—let’s, for argument’s sake, consider one possible scenario—let’s say they allow our play to be performed.
WILLY: You mean they don’t censor it.
QIANG: Yes. That would demonstrate that they are not intolerant of the dissent. And since the play’s premise is that they are intolerant, the premise would fail if they let it through.
WILLY: Yes. But what if they don’t allow it to be staged?
QIANG: By censoring the play, which is an example of dissent, they would be shown to be intolerant of dissent. Then the play’s premise would be borne out.
WILLY: Exactly! So the play’s premise works!
QIANG: Not quite.
—From “Undercover” (1994) by Tan Tarn How
Cooption, of course, isn’t a zero-sum game. These either-or debates can trap us in an endless siege mentality, both in our dealings with the state and within our own artistic community.
Which brings me to the second double-bind of the play. How do you critique a play that’s critiquing a state whose infrastructure and ideology has so deeply infiltrated the Singaporean consciousness? “Death of Singapore Theatre” takes us methodically through every single way in which the system is stacked against artists, and it’s a persuasive argument (or rant) for how the censor has circumscribed, defined and envisioned art and the artist’s role in the nation-state.
Chong’s book, The Theatre and the State in Singapore: Orthodoxy and Resistance , describes how some of these in-group and out-group divisions and tensions play out between artists, critics and the state. The critic also then wields the censorial shears when they become part of wider concentric circles of inertia, self-censorship and political quietism. Chong cites mainstream arts journalists who acknowledge that critics are often perceived as “failed” artists, how artists have threatened to “destroy” a critic’s career, or how critics reduce the complexity of artwork to appeal to the “lowest common denominator” of readers. The clincher: “the Singapore theatre practitioner not only claims for herself artistic talent which the critic has failed to recognize but also patriotism, which the critic lacks.” If you’re not fighting with us against a stacked system, then you must be batting for the other team. Can there be any criticism that might be perceived as good-faith criticism in Singapore?
If there’s gatekeeping in the practice of arts criticism, what’s far less discussed is gatekeeping in the practice of political criticism. There are multiple ways to deal with censorship; even as its machinery evolves in Singapore to snare artists within bureaucratic and administrative tangles, so have artists learned to be resourceful and playful about responding to and eluding them. Wild Rice keeps an online archive of some of these anti-censorship strategies in a series called “Uncensored Conversations”. If censorship wants to be invisible, as Alfian and the team put it, then we must expose it in this “collective project of un-silencing”.
Yet there are artists and groups who do not necessarily want to embark on this expedition towards exposure. Those who know they must rely on the state to get their work on stage, or who prefer acts of obscuring and refusal as a strategy for art-making, may be at odds with the antagonistic angle that “Death of Singapore Theatre” has chosen. Indigenous scholars Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write about “refusing research”—where marginal communities may be inadvertently over-exposed by social science researchers wanting to depict their trauma and pain. These communities may draw agency and refuge from refusing to take part in research processes and publications, even if researchers believe the research is in the best interests of or may benefit the group at large. There are many ways of critiquing a powerful, oppressive system, and not all artists may want to expose their pain and animosity on stage as a means for that crique.
As someone who has documented some truly harebrained decisions around arts censorship in Singapore, I deeply felt Alfian’s—and Wild Rice’s—frustration, anger and humiliation at being subject to the same. I would never dare diminish this rage. Rage can be so, so revitalising. I think the play was urgent and necessary, and snips at the iron curtain of Singaporean bureaucracy to snipe at those in secure positions of power. But I also struggle with how this approach might work in tandem with—or against—those who take a different tack.
In conjuring up the spectre of the shadowy IMDA censor, what kind of interlocutor are we creating for ourselves? What critical responsibilities do we absolve ourselves of if only the state is to shoulder the blame? And how does each artist and arts group operate on a spectrum of positions in relation to state actors? I often think about the infighting among civil society groups and progressives when, really, we’re all on the same page. Some are in the centre, some take the margins, and both can be remarkably effective in their reach. We need critics who operate outside of the system and can needle and prod its overreach; just as much as we need intermediaries who know how to lubricate state-artist relationships and negotiate across polarisation. We need an expansive view of censorship, of insiders and outsiders, of how each system operates. “Death of Singapore Theatre” presents us with a particular vision that is true—but that may also be limiting.
Like Alfian, and all Singaporean artists, I don’t want someone else to script my creative death. I’d like very much to script my artistic life. Sometimes—not all the time, but sometimes—I want to say “yes”. Yes to so many ways of being in this world. Yes to provoking authority, but also yes to repairing rupture. Yes to the humanity of individuals within an institution, but yes to recognising that it is also individuals who make inhumane institutions. Yes, so that our improvisatory narrative continues to unfold. We don’t want you to write this, they might say, and we’ll find ways to make sure you don’t. And we’ll smile and go: “Yes. And?”
Corrie Tan is the arts editor of Jom. She is also the director of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network. This essay was completed as part of the 2024 ArtsEquator Fellowship.
“The Death of Singapore Theatre as Scripted by the Infocomm Media Development Authority of Singapore” ran from March 14th to 30th at Wild Rice @ Funan. “Dear Artist” is embedded in the headline of this review.
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