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Abstract
In the recent years, Singapore, which once dubbed “a cultural desert,” has produced performance curators who took important positions in the region. This essay explores what were behind such developments.
Since the late 1990s, curation, especially performance curation, was recognized as the key to turn the disadvantage of Singapore into its advantage by both artists and the government. Singapore's cultural rootlessness was reframed as its openness to any cultures, and the methodology to achieve it was concretized by theatre practitioner Keng Sen Ong through his curatorial projects. Ong developed the model of New Asia, a new reality for an urbanizing Asia where dynamic interaction between the traditional and modern, specificity and universality takes place.
The government of Singapore adopted Ong's vision of New Asia as the foundation of its cultural policy in the early 2000s. It was advocated that the ideal citizens in the new millennium should be attuned to his Asian roots and at the same time connected to the global market, and the artists with an ability of curating cultures were considered the role model of the new Singaporeans. Although the cooperation between the artists and the government emerged, their relationship is not straightforward. The ownership of the methodology of curation is still being contested between them.
Contributor Notes
Ken Takiguchi is a dramaturg and translator. He was based in Malaysia and Singapore from 1999 to 2016 and obtained his PhD from National University of Singapore where he later worked as a research fellow. Ken is currently a General Manager of Setagaya Public Theatre in Tokyo and teaching part time at Tokyo University of the Arts and Tama Art University.
Helly Minarti is based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where she works as independent curator/dramaturg, aligning her practice to rethink radical strategies that connect practice and theory within the realm of contemporary performance. Her primary interest is on historiographies of choreography as discursive practice vis-à-vis the eclectic knowledge infusing the understanding of the intertwined relationship between human body, consciousness, and nature. She has curated a number of events/platforms, most recently titled The Sea Within, a curator residency at Taipei Arts Festival.