On The Substation’s 21st Birthday

On The Substation’s 21st Birthday
By Audrey Wong

The article in The Straits Times on The Substation’s 21st anniversary (8 Sept 2011) took the angle of whether The Substation is “relevant” today – an angle which has covered before by various media in the past. Regulars at The Substation and close observers of the arts in Singapore would surely agree that there’s no question of its continued relevance.

What interests me more, as I reflect on The Substation’s birthday, is thinking about ‘what is the art that happens at The Substation and how and why this has connected with people all these years’. That took me down the road of thinking about Singapore’s arts development in the present day – not at the level of arts policy, but at the level of the everyday reality of the arts-goer and artists.

One clear development since the 2000 Renaissance City Report has been the increasing mainstreaming of the arts in Singapore. Once the government said, ‘it’s a go!’ we steamed ahead, and in the top-down fashion of Singapore, it became a game of numbers and hype, in order to win approval from policy-makers, influencers, the media, and ultimately the masses. The NAC, for instance, always issued a press release after each Singapore Arts Festival focusing on audience numbers and ticket sales, with hardly any discussion of the ‘artistic’ aspect of the festival. Such habits of thought and practice, using numbers as a measure of success, have become second nature to many Singaporeans and affected how we accept, receive, and perceive the arts. Our highly materialistic and results-focused society has bred a consumerist mentality towards the arts. We’re susceptible to the next big spectacle, the next ‘new’ thing, hype. A lot of present-day culture, especially popular culture, is built on the ‘new’ and the newsworthy: just think of the emphasis in the movie industry and across all the media, of a movie’s opening weekend box office take. When one thinks about it rationally, what’s the actual purpose of this emphasis? It’s not really about whether a movie is good or not, or even whether it’s worth watching; it’s about driving even more ticket sales and grabbing media attention. It’s about pushing the sale of a commodity and driving consumption, and everyone’s bought into this game. But, as my former partner-in-crime at The Substation Lee Weng Choy reminded us before, the ‘new’ had become normal business in contemporary arts in the 1990s. (“The Substation’s Place in Singapore Arts”, http://www.substation.org/about-us/artistic-mission). And sometimes, certain genres of art, artists and events become media darlings because of the spectacle or other reasons, and thus, gain a large part of the public’s mindshare, at the expense of the more alternative art forms.

What is it though, that drives people to seek out alternatives to the mainstream? I believe it’s something intangible that unfortunately, we don’t discuss a lot in the public sphere. At the risk of sounding overly romantic, it’s about any of these: it takes us out of our narrow banal everyday concerns and our selfish concerns; it provokes us to think about the world; and it just gets us beneath the surface of life and its glittering temptations. I was very moved when one of my students told me about what was recently his first experience of ‘serious’ theatre in Singapore. He was someone who had always focused on bread-and-butter issues, but he attended the “Remembering William Teo” event at The Substation and subsequently saw TheatreStrays’ performance, “What the Dog Knows”. He responded to the performance directly, emotionally and intellectually, and developed an interest in and admiration for William Teo and other practitioners who passionately dedicated themselves to the craft of theatre without consideration of material rewards. In short, it was a deeper experience of life.

Former Artistic Director Sasitharan said,

“Unless artists are capable of grappling with the full and unmitigated force of the complications of history, the dilemmas of modernity, the complexities of life as it is lived collectively by men, women and children, they will never be capable of making great art … There can be no great art, no living culture, without great lives, at least lives lived not just expansively but also more deeply.”

Living deeply, perhaps, is what attracts us to the arts. And maybe we Singaporeans could do with a reminder about this, every so often.  Earlier this week, another student told me that she enjoyed reading an article about how the media’s depiction of women affects social norms and influences the self-image of young women and girls. She had not seriously thought about these issues before, she said, and she was glad to have gone beyond the surface, and glad that it showed her truly what it meant “not to judge a book by its cover”.

Another aspect of living meaningfully has to be about making connections with our deeper selves and with others. I think of the artists who continue to gravitate towards The Substation even after 20 years – such as current artistic director Effendy, and artists associated with the early days of The Substation such as Lee Wen (former Associate Artist) and Amanda Heng. As for why some artists from the early days of The Substation stopped working here, I could offer three reasons: not enough space to accommodate everyone; some artists getting bigger and better stages, or their very own space (which is a good thing!); and something else which perhaps we might call the artistic director’s prerogative, or an artistic direction. More recent artists who are “still there” include Raka Maitra, Sherman Ong, Daniel Kok, Elizabeth de Roza; hopefully the newest ‘additions’ like Bani Haykal continue the relationship. Some of these artists have come together for Dance Tree Dance.

I’d venture to say that one aspect of this relationship between artist and arts centre is that it’s not merely transactional. Many artists do not go to The Substation just to get something back; if anything, the “getting back” has to do with the artists’ work … the work of constantly making, trying, failing, reflecting, persisting … There was a conversation among the programming team a couple of years ago about the selection criteria for Open Call, which concluded with the thought that the artist(s) selected should not look upon the programme as simply a chance to get exhibition space or get funding. It was about a deeper engagement, with the work, with The Substation as a space, with the ideas, with the public.

Another aspect of the relationship, and perhaps this has to do with the value of an alternative space, I can only explain this way: some years ago, a theatre artist I met talked about the image of stray dogs and why they matter and where there can be space for them. That struck me. You never know how a stray dog might turn out. It’s a life after all, and life matters. There will always be those who, by choice or circumstance, are left out of mainstream culture and arts, and society has to make spaces where they can be heard, where they can gather. They’re certainly not less important because they are strays. And so it is with arts and artists on the fringe.

Maybe what bugs me most about our consumerist mentality, is that we Singaporeans often unconsciously shackle our own imaginations. I’ve begun to understand this a little better, as in my present job I’ve met young people who have been trained to conform to the certainty of fixed structures, and habituated to repeating what the teacher wants. Unfortunately, as we train young people not to stray from a prescribed frame, we also train them in self-limitation. This isn’t about censorship; it’s really the shackles we ourselves put on our imaginations out of habit.

“Expectations, memories, nostalgia, frustrations, a potential in real limitations. Our resources are very limited. And to a large degree, our imagination – the Substation’s , everybody’s — has been kind of battered, with the loss of the garden, funding, cultural policies… In a way our imagination becomes restricted, reduced. The challenge now is to recognize the physical limitations and really see how small the space is, and at the same time find the potential of that space that has not been tapped yet.” – Noor Effendy Ibrahim.

Ultimately, the arts can’t be a hegemonic thing, prescribed to us by the powers-that-be or those with more money and social influence. It’s about the “more” in all of us, perhaps it’s the “more” that keeps me awake at 2am typing this out after a long day at work – because this matters to me, and I want to share it with others. Out of these little “more” moments that we carve out of our lives, perhaps, we find “the potential” of the untapped, the chink in the shutters of our minds.

Remarkably, I see that I’ve managed to write about The Substation without quoting Kuo Pao Kun. Perhaps that’s what he’d have wanted – if The Substation can go on without him, that’s probably proof enough that it’s needed?

Audrey Wong was artistic co-director together with Lee Weng Choy from 2000 – 2009. She is now Programme Leader of the MA Arts & Cultural Management Programme at LASALLE College of the Arts.