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Breaking the Silence - A love letter to the arts community Over the past 4 months, since the re-enactment of Josef Ng’s ‘Don’t Go Swimming, It’s Not Safe’ as part of RITES on November 15, 2012, friends have been asking how I have been taking the comments that are being posted on Facebook regarding the performance and my work. It took a lot of self-restraint and discipline to remain silent. There are times when it is tempting to correct empirical errors. I kept to the silence as I held on to the fundamental belief that a work is co-created by two parties, the audience and the artistic team. The artistic team (I am labeling this as a team as it includes the curator, administrator etc.) sets out the frame for his work, puts the content within and opens it up for interpretation. The audience reads the work and forms a discourse around the work. I can control the frame and content of the work, but I cannot dictate how an audience chooses to read a piece of work. I absorb the comments and I learn how my work is misinterpreted and I contemplate how I should amend the framing of my next work and sharpen the clarity of my intent. It is with this spirit that I am breaking this silence now, not as a defense of my past work, but to clarify the intent for my upcoming performance. On Re-enactments Re-enactment is a label and a misnomer - to enact is to make. The question is how to re-make something that is supposedly transient or ephemeral. There is nothing new about re-enactments, it has been happening in various other instances beyond the artistic realm. (i.e. historical re-enactments, religious re-enactments) Wen has already pointed out in his writings the impossibility of re-enactments (http://republicofdaydreams.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/the-impossibility-of-re-enactments-leads-to-our-inevitable-desire-attempt/) The very act of re-enacting is an interpretation. It can never be the same performance, never be the same body, and is never intended to be, it is the act of striving towards the impossible, which is the desire to recreate that should be acknowledged with a critical eye. In science experiments we have a ‘control’, a constant, and it is this constant that we measure all the other results by. ‘Brother Cane’ is the control we measure our State, measure our audience and measure our artists against. To reiterate, I cannot control how the audience receives the work, but I will urge the audience to acknowledge that the work lies in the differences between these two performances and not in how faithfully I represent the original performance. On the Third Co-creator If we are to function as artists within Singapore, we have to acknowledge the presence of a third co-creator in addition to the two in the equation above. Besides the artistic team and the audience, this third co-creator is the State and the apparatuses that shape their ideology. This is not unique to our country alone but is part and parcel of various other countries in the region. When we made the choice to practice in Singapore, we have chosen to acknowledge this presence. We can choose to engage or ignore their role in this three-way relationship. The ideal situation they would like is for us to ignore their presence, for their role to be invisible. It is the opponent who remains in the shadows in a three-cornered fight who will win the match. When artists choose to engage with the State, the State’s hand in the creation process becomes visible. Many of the most visible methods of engagement within the arts community have been in brute opposition. Recently, we have witnessed a shift within the arts community in line with the political shift in the nation. This shift has been brought about by the apparatuses of transparency and accountability that are made available to artists and the audience – one of these key devices being the infrastructure that started this discourse itself, new media. We see the first semblance of this in Tan Tarn How’s ‘Fear of Writing’, and I hope to continue this trajectory in ‘Cane’. We are rendering the State’s hand visible in our creation process, and acknowledging them as a co-creator. We are not meeting them in opposition, but forming a dialogue with them in the creation of our work. We are inviting them to meet us on our terms, in our territory (on stage, in performance) and acknowledging the compromises we have to make as part of our work.  ‘Cane’ will be entirely scripted, in line with the Media Development Authority’s requirement that all scripts for performances will have to be submitted for vetting and licensing. We submitted our script on the December 15, 2011 and we received our license to perform on February 10, 2012. This is acknowledged as part of the performance. Audience members will receive a copy of the script when they enter the performance space and I will be adhering to the script faithfully. On Selling Out One of the most unexpected threads that came out of the conversation surrounding ‘Cane’ was this notion of ‘selling out’. Besides the obvious pun on the state of the ticket sales, it was directed mostly at the argument that performance art should be free and that it should not be ticketed like theatre. My question is ‘why not?’ How is a form like performance going to remain sustainable and viable in the long run if the only economic model we adopt is state funding? I would like to highlight the model of the three co-creators, the State, the Artist and the audience. If the audience does not start to support the form economically, it will always remain the role of the State and the Artist to foot the bill for staging the work. How many works can the Artist stage before he has to file for bankruptcy? How can an artist create ‘autonomous’ and critical work while subscribing to the funding structures of the State? There is a second part of the argument that is more disturbing to an arts practitioner - the line on the ground drawn between and within art forms, namely between theatre and performance art. Given the limited size of the talent pool in this country, and the state of the arts internationally, isn’t it time to eradicate these lines drawn on the ground, lines originally drawn by the State, and emphasized further in 1993 by the distinction of forum theatre from performance art, with the intention to divide and conquer? The Quest for the Impossible A nation will get the art that it deserves. You as an audience member shape ‘Cane’ with your reading as much as I shape it with the frame I have placed around it. The question I am seeking to address is whether ‘re-enactment’ is a viable mode of creation for an art form that prides itself conventionally in spontaneity and the ‘live’ presence. ‘Cane’ is part of that quest for that impossible answer. For those who managed to secure tickets, I would invite you to be part of this work on February 19, 2012 (Sunday), 8 p.m. at the Substation Theatre. This will be the most direct method of accessing the work. Due to limitations in resources we have to restrict the number of tickets sold, the Substation Theatre can only take so many people safely. We kept it a one-night only event as an artistic and logistical choice. I will be releasing documentation from the performance and making it available for public access, this should be acknowledged as another method of experiencing the work, no less important than being there in person. I will value your opinion and input after the performance to help shape the direction of my practice in the future. Thank you to all the people who have helped me one way or another in realizing ‘Cane’, and have supported and defended the work these past months, it is the last leg of this marathon and I have to focus my energy in completing it. Have a great Valentine’s Day. Sincerely, Zihan February 14, 2012