‘A Creative Stream’: a performance lecture by Ang Gey Pin

Conversations 2010 #3
Friday 29 October, 8pm
The Substation Theatre
Free admission

Ang Gey Pin is a Singaporean theatre performer and instructor currently working in Europe.

During this event, Ang will demonstrate her creative processes and engage the audience in a conversation about how she develops her works. Focusing on particular fragments of her performance, Ang will introduce a body of research on interweaving text and songs into performance, and her investigation into an approach to develop and deliver these performance elements. Ang will also discuss the impulse behind her creations, how the various performance elements build a montage and flow in a ‘creative stream’, and her relationship with her work.

Ang Gey Pin, a Singaporean artist currently working in Europe, is a pedagogue, director and actress. Early on, Ang participated in Grotowski’s final Objective Drama session at the University of California-Irvine. Once back in Singapore, she co-founded Theatre OX (1995-2007). As its artistic director, she led Theatre OX’s research into Chinese performative elements and performances in unconventional spaces, in many instances under the scheme of artist-in-residence at The Substation (1996-1997).

Ang was a member of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards (Italy) for nearly a decade, touring across Europe and Asia with the company’s Project The Bridge: developing theatre arts. She performed lead roles in the Workcenter’s One breath left (UBU Special Award, Italy) and Dies Irae:  My Preposterous Theatrum Interioris Show.

Working since 2006 as an independent artist, Ang teaches, performs and collaborates with various international artists. She has presented works, acted as artist-in-residence and pedagogue at the Grotowski Institute (Poland), Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore), the University of Kent at Canterbury (United Kingdom), Wesleyan University and Yale University (United States), among others.

Ang has created and performed to audiences in Europe, Asia, North and South America. Some phases of her work are featured in scholarly journals and books dedicated to intercultural theatre, including The Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards’ ‘Opere E Sentieri’ (Volume I, Bulzoni Editore, 2007), Paul Allain’s “After Grotowski: The New Generation” (New Theatre Quarterly 18.1, 2002) and Cláudia Tatinge Nascimento’s Crossing Cultural Borders Through the Actor’s Work: Foreign Bodies of Knowledge (Routledge, 2008). Ang holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with distinction from the University of Hawaii-Manoa and is a recipient of theatre awards granted by the Singapore National Arts Council.

Works she created, performed and collaborated include:  By the Way (2006), Winter Never Come Spring Already Arrived (2007), Feast of You Shen (2008-2009).

A new work entitled Wandering.Birds will be presented at Esplanade-Theatres On The Bay, The Studios April /May 2011 season.

Conversations 2010 are all about The Substation engaging all genres/disciplines of artists from everywhere who are interested to have dialogues with the local community, local artists, or both, for meaningful critical artistic/cultural exchanges. It will also allow us to engage non-artists – such as cultural workers, activists, etc who want to engage art practices in a meaningful and critical dialogue.