文︰陳霖靈 | 上載日期︰2024年9月23日 | 文章類別︰月旦舞台

2024年9月

 

“...in the often intense struggle with cultural intermediaries, 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.”[1]

 

When I first joined The Straits Times[2] as an arts reporter and theatre critic in 2010, a senior editor sat me down with a word of caution. “Always remember,” they said drily, “these artists are not your friends.” In the newsroom, the intimacy of friendship was a hard line in the sands of performance criticism. Artists, in my editor’s view, were mercurial and self-interested, and any overtures of friendship would be motivated by whatever media publicity they might be able to extract from me. My role at the newspaper was to write about artists, not with them.

 

I often wilfully ignored these warnings even though, as a young journalist, I could not yet articulate why they frustrated me, along with the artists whose work I was witnessing. There was something about this logic of paranoia and suspicion that didn’t feel generative for the theatre scene, nor generous of spirit. I’d entered the newsroom during an uneasy detente between Singapore’s mainstream media and its theatre artists: during a digital transition where social media (and the freedoms it afforded) was muscling its way into the fray, and during a political transition where opposition to the incumbent party was growing more confident—and a younger generation of journalists, such as myself, hadn’t yet been defanged by political quietism. The blunt force tools of censorship and overt political repression had given way to something more banal, but also perhaps more quietly insidious: self-censorship, organisational inertia, old-school hierarchies of decision-making. But this also meant that there was more latitude for theatre practitioners and journalists to recast outdated relationship configurations that we’d inherited from our predecessors.

 

In the almost 15 years since that encounter with my editor, I’ve seen Singaporean and Southeast Asian arts journalists and critics come and go with astonishing frequency. Some of these individuals were exceptional writers, and their departures have been our loss. But faculty with words doesn’t automatically translate to facility with relationships. We often prioritise the textual output of criticism; most stereotypically (though this is fast changing), we’ve put a premium on criticism’s “clear-eyed” and dispassionate analysis, diagnosis and assessment of performance. But we rarely prioritise what ultimately sustains critics in the under-resourced and close-knit arts sectors across Southeast Asia: tending regularly to a dense network of relationships.

 

The epigraph that prefaces this essay is part of a broader discussion of the critic’s role in Singapore. Scholar Terence Chong, in his in-depth interviews with theatre practitioners, journalists and critics, both current and former, singles out a key dimension of the critic’s role: that of the intermediary. Often what requires development isn’t just the craft of writing, but the craft of relationships: their building, maintenance and repair. A bad, badly-written or bad-faith review can often produce antagonisms and animosities with a long shadow, including feelings of betrayal (that the critic, meant to be the embodiment of cultural capital, has not fully understood a work) and of hurt (that the critic has humiliated the artist in a public way). Effort isn’t excellence, and criticism isn’t meant to be a salve for shoddy work. But I believe that done well, and in good faith, criticism can offer both provocation and companionship to the artists whose work it responds to. This is especially valuable over time, as both artist and critic mature in their respective crafts and also in their professional relationships.

 

As part of my PhD, I spent five years researching performance criticism in archipelagic Southeast Asia. I spoke with about 60 critics and artists, tested out alternative approaches to criticism with arts groups and students, and ran a six-month series of focus group discussions with 12 critics from across the Malay Archipelago. Over the course of my research, I’ve come to realise that criticism is a relational act. As intermediaries, what also requires development is how the critic mediates between audience and performance, between reader and text, between artist and their publics—through their presence at performances, and how these embodied and affective experiences are translated into text.

 

I’ve chosen to highlight three developmental possibilities when it comes to the critic’s relationship-building in Singapore, which I hope might also apply to adjacent contexts.

 

1. Developing emerging arts writers and editors

 

Arts criticism prior to the early 2000s was the domain of mainstream media. One of my former editors and most beloved mentors, Clarissa Oon, now head of communications and content at our national performing arts centre Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, has spoken and written perceptively about this period of local arts journalism in her keynote speech at the 2019 Asian Arts Media Roundtable. In the years since, the digital space has significantly democratised arts writing and criticism; any arts enthusiast can now start their own blog or newsletter dedicated to performance. There are now a number of free-to-access critical platforms occupying this space in Singapore, including more recent communal spaces prioritising peer accountability such as Critics Circle Blog, or more experienced independent critics such as Crystalwords.

 

Left: Corrie Tan presenting at the 2019 Asian Arts Media Roundtable;
Right: Clarissa Oon (right) and Corrie Tan (second right) at the Roundtable
(Photos provided by ArtsEquator)

 

This proliferation of eager and emerging arts writers, however, hasn’t developed in tandem with training that might (a) hone their craft beyond more formulaic assessments and analyses of performance, (b) cultivate a distinct personal voice that is a reflection of that writer’s specific positionality: their personal and political histories, their journey of spectatorship, their aesthetic tastes and preferences, and their relational vantage point given their own multi-hyphenate roles within the arts ecology and, perhaps most significantly, (c) there are even fewer editors with the kind of disciplinary and affective specialisation required to both meticulously and patiently edit the volume of criticism being produced. (There’s also almost no adequate remuneration for critical writing, which means that robust criticism is chronically under-valued, but I’ll save that for another essay.)

 

Who critiques the critics? I’m indebted to the editors who’ve tightened my writing by trimming my adjectival fat; pointing out the fragility and the flaws in my arguments; rearranging paragraphs to rid my essays of elliptical writing and gaps in logic. The best editors were those who knew how to retain my voice and opinion while refining everything else, and who could explain exactly why and how they’d made the editorial decisions that would get the piece into better shape. We often think of writing as a solitary act, but I’m convinced that the best writing is necessarily collaborative. There is an extraordinary vulnerability that accompanies sending a first, raw, unruly draft to an editor. The number of desperate annotations I’ve left in those margins: “I know this isn’t the right word, let me know if you think of a better one”; “I’m really dissatisfied with the ending, but I don’t know how else to conclude”; “does this part make sense???”; “is this just way too long???”

 

My editors are the safety net and extra eyes I’ve come to rely on over a decade of public-facing writing; even today, I regularly seek out Clarissa, as well as fellow editors Nabilah Said (now editorial lead at Kontinentalist, former editor of ArtsEquator) and Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh (editor-in-chief at Jom), all of whom I trust to give me frank feedback in the most generous way possible. These long-term writing relationships have also shepherded my writing through various creative chapters of my life. I’ve written for traditional print media, for trade journals and for indie magazines, and the writing you ultimately read is invisibly shaped by the rigorous intimacies of these editorial processes.

 

Sharpening my editorial craft has also made me a better critic. As editor, you’re compelled to toggle between the perspectives of reader, artist and writer as you work your way through a piece, inhabiting each role in turn. How might a general reader respond to a technical term? What analysis might an arts aficionado crave? What context might a first-time theatre-goer require? How might this writer respond to the cuts I’m making to their piece? How might this artist respond to a particularly acerbic zinger? Asking these questions while editing and revising my own reviews (we are, after all, our first editors) has helped to flesh out my writing while keeping its backbone, but also work the muscle of moving between and across points of view.

 

2. Developing long-term relationships with artists

 

My long-term relationships with my editors have built trust and credibility between us. We’re all working in service of writer, reader and performance—and the same can be said when we, as critics, commit to durational relationships with artists.

 

Not all of these relationships demand constant closeness, nor do they demand categorisation as “friendship”. I like to think of my journeys with artists as walking both in step with them, but also keeping their routes in my periphery when my work and practice takes me on a parallel path. I’ve been the distant critic and the intimate one: I’ve sat in theatre stalls, scratching away at my notebook and typing up pages for publication early the next morning; I’ve also come very close to the labour of performance-making, sitting on sprung floors and in studio corners while performers tested out gestures and words.

 

The late Malaysian theatre icon, Krishen Jit, was the embodiment of this long-term commitment. Between 1972 and 1994, Jit published the column “Talking Drama with Utih” in the New Straits Times; it remains the longest-running arts column to have ever been printed in the newspaper[3]. Charlene Rajendran, Malaysian dramaturg and performance studies scholar, recalls Jit watching and being watched in Skin Trilogy (1995), a three-part work staged in Kuala Lumpur’s National Art Gallery:

 

Krishen watched and was watched. He too occupied a space, just as the musicians, actors and dancers occupied spaces that the visual artists had set up to be inhabited [...] we see Krishen sitting pensively on one of the structures, probably watching performers at work. His watchfulness was itself a powerful presence within the work. The artwork is no longer the object, but part of the subject. It has become the space from which subjectivity is reconfigured, a platform on which to pause, and a place where actors produce performance [...][4]

 

This powerful watchfulness that Rajendran perceives is part of the broader discipline of attention that I desire to cultivate as a critic. Not just on the timescale of two hours of attention, or the span of a single work; but two decades of attention, perhaps the lifespan of a career. The art historian Claire Bishop writes, in her latest book on the attention economy: “Attention is so valued precisely because it is rare and unstable, continually unravelling from within.”[5] Attention on that scale requires affective endurance. Jit both constituted the artwork he was witnessing through his column—but was also constituted by all who witnessed him, night after night, attending and tending to the theatre.

 

The political scientist Joan Tronto considers attentiveness one of four ethical elements of care. “If we are not attentive to the needs of others, then we cannot possibly address those needs,” she writes, situating attentiveness alongside the moral imperative to not look away from atrocity and harm.[6] As critics, I believe our ethical responsibility is to develop our attentive stamina so that we can pay attention to artists over time. This attention can act as both reflection and spotlight, especially when directed at artists and work who might otherwise not be documented or responded to. As Tronto puts it: “in order for caring to become a more prominent part of social life, certain types of moral problems that are currently obscured by their peripheral location in contemporary theory will be made central”[7]. It is sometimes only after years of following an artist’s work that their decisions, preoccupations, investments and trajectories become clear.

 

3. Developing communities of readership

 

I often think about the page (or screen) as a site of encounter for readers. They’re encountering my writing and, by extension, me; they’re encountering an artist that they may be unfamiliar with, or whose work they may know better than I do; and they’re encountering themselves: their tastes and preferences, their memories of shows past, the friends who shared in that moment of spectatorship. How I set up this encounter—how a reader makes acquaintance with an artist or artwork—is part of my duty.

 

At the same time, it’s often hard to tell who your readers are and how they’re making sense of your writing. While I was resident critic with ArtsEquator, its co-founder Kathy Rowland initiated a new platform called “Critics Live!”, a critics-led programme designed to give arts audiences insight into how critics formulate their responses to performances. Instead of sitting behind a screen or a wall of text, readers and audiences had a front row seat to the critical process. I was involved in a few of these discussions, both as facilitator and respondent, where three or four of us would take part in some friendly sparring over what we’d just witnessed, why we loved it—or why we didn’t.

 

The first few editions were wobbly: not all critics enjoy public speaking, a few sessions were more reactive than responsive, and several arts groups were understandably nervous about inviting outsider critics into insider spaces. But ArtsEquator persisted, and ran “Critics Live!” alongside their podcast series, where you get to hear the collegiality of critics, including when they might be persuaded to change their mind or stumble into a moment of insight. These post-show reflections and discussions facilitated by critics aren’t new. In Singapore, the reviews platform Arts Republic hosted several years of “Plunge: New Ways to Talk about Theatre”, which they styled as a cross between a post-show discussion and a review of a show. These monthly gatherings emphasised informality and intimacy, and the organisers would furnish their chosen venue with cushions, carpets and curated reading materials relevant to the selected shows. The No Readgrets Book Club has also occasionally programmed their reading selections around ongoing theatre productions. These reading groups, post-show discussions and watch parties invoke the communal experience of sitting elbow-to-elbow with either a stranger or a friend in a darkened auditorium and feeling them laugh, gasp or sniffle as the performance unfolds.

 

Left: Critics Live! 2019 (Photo provided by ArtsEquator);

Right: Plunge: New Ways to Talk about Theatre (Photo: Grassroots Book Room)

 

I am the arts editor for Jom, a fairly new independent media platform in Singapore. We’re still finding our feet, financially and organisationally, and it’s both terrifying and thrilling to be able to shape the foundations of an arts and culture beat in a media landscape so different from the one I came of age in. When I was a rookie reporter, print was king and critics were tastemakers; now, as a mid-career writer, I work almost entirely in the digital realm, where influencers and content creators have largely punted critics out of their seats. Is there still room for Jom’s slow journalism and long-form writing in a world of brief attention spans and atomised communities? I think so. Part of the reason is because our work celebrates hyperlocality and respects both the municipal and the political issues that are at the forefront of our Singaporean readers’ daily lives.

 

Jom runs an in-person event series called “Jom Cakap” (Malay for “let’s chat”), where our readers and subscribers can partake in discussions on anything from everyday racism to what it’s like to be a foreign correspondent from Singapore, or be in frank conversation with local politicians and researchers. I’m always warmed by how involved and incisive our readers are, bucking the stereotype that Singaporeans are a passive, politically apathetic people whose only preoccupation is living a comfortable life. In the theatre of the social and political, “Jom Cakap” is our post-show dialogue about the world we’re collectively building.

 

In this essay, I’ve written about how the niche vocations of editor, artist and critic come into relationship with each other, how editors might accompany critics, and how critics should accompany artists. But we’re all citizens of a much broader community—of readers. How might we build a community where all of us feel included, or have a stake in its future? In Tronto’s vision of a caring democracy, she argues that we must offer “a large investment of time and energy” to learn about our fellow citizens “in order to understand [our] caring responsibilities thoroughly”.[8] To me, criticism is my attempt at being “the good citizen”: to be attentive to my community, to journey with them, to build a world we didn’t think possible otherwise.

 

本文章並不代表國際演藝評論家協會（香港分會）之立場；歡迎所評的劇團或劇作者回應，回應文章將置放於評論文章後。
本網站內一切內容之版權均屬國際演藝評論家協會（香港分會）及原作者所有，未經本會及/或原作者書面同意，不得轉載。

陳霖靈博士通過個人的書寫來感知藝術。她是來自新加坡的研究員、評論人、劇場構作和策劃者，其工作範疇包括東南亞地區的關懷倫理學研究、合作性的表演實踐與藝術評論的新方式。她參與藝評寫作逾十五年，經常為《衛報》、《ArtsEquator》和《海峽時報》等平台撰寫有關表演和文化的文章，目前是網上獨立雜誌《Jom》的藝術編輯。她擁有倫敦國王學院與新加坡國立大學聯合頒授的戲劇與表演研究博士學位。她現任亞洲劇場構作網路（Asian Dramaturgs’ Network）的總監，並透過各種創作計劃以及與Centre 42、Drama Box和P7:1SMA等團體的合作，思考當代群島思維如何為我們彼此之間的關係和身份的形成提供新格局。www.corrie-tan.com