Last Saturday afternoon (27 September), I attended a 4hour workshop co-hosted by Theatreworks and Asian Urban lab. William Lim – chairman of Asian Urban Lab – opened the session by describing the project as one that would “allow people to share their dreams […] [and] reflect the interest of the larger community”. What resonated with me was the project’s aim to redefine and better understand the sense of being ‘Singaporean’, and how it would do so through this concept of the dream, which is in its essence a shared human experience. Though the question of what defined us as ‘Singaporean’ is certainly not one that is easily answered within 4 hours, the workshop certainly offered myriad perspectives from economists, architects, thespians and writers about their dreams for Singapore.
As I had expected the Singapore Dreaming Project to cover the issues of Art, Culture and Heritage in Singapore, it was initially puzzling that economists and architects were invited to talk about issues concerning Sustainability and Urbanization in Singapore. However, it soon begin to make sense that issues concerning the Arts and Urban Sustainability – though appearing at first to be so wholly separate – were in fact interlinked, especially in the Singaporean context. This is especially so when we consider the effect that urbanization has on the social memory of our country.
Wee Wan Ling drew from the example in Goh Poh Seng’s novel – If We Dream Too Long – about how the emergence of public housing in the 1970s became synonymous with notions of standardization and modernization, which was presented in contrast with the unique dreams of the individual. This begged the question of whether the homogenization of our architectural landscape – the construction of HDB flats being the most prominent – was reflective of an increasingly ‘rational’ society whose system entraps the dreams of an individual; have we then become a society that only dreams what the state allows us to dream?
While increasing urbanization certainly affects the living, it can also extend to the dead – in particular the exhumed dead. The imprint of its effect was further reiterated by Catherine Lim, who talked about the “Ladies of the Straits Settlements”, focusing particularly on women in Bukit Brown cemetery. Lim aims to bring these female dreams into being, pointing out that the narratives of these ladies were neglected to the extent that their graves lacked an epithet. Thus, for Lim, her focus is in recovering and supplementing the portion of the Singapore narrative that is biased in favor of male representations.
Departing from these morbid relationships between Urbanization and Art is the project “Goli” by Drama Box, where developments in the areas of architecture have allowed the building of a ‘portable’ theatre. What this means is that a theatre space can be moved from one location to another, in accordance with the demand from the community. Through “Goli”, a form of ‘sustainable theatre’ is created in order to provide inclusive theatre spaces for the community. The interesting thing about “Goli” is its emphasis on the interdependence between the theatre and community, where the theatre becomes a type of communal forum. Moreover, the notion of the theatre as a permanent and physical space is overturned, and the site of theatre becomes more fluid and inclusive. The aims of the “Goli” project tied in with what William Lim addressed at his opening speech, which was that the Singapore Dreaming Project was concerned with reworking the top-down approach that is so often the case in our society. Here, “Goli” creates a space for theatre to begin from the level of community involvement. Nevertheless, as professor Joseph Lim pointed out in his segment, such dreams of creating vibrancy through ‘free’ spaces can be rather idealistic, which reflects the notion of the ‘dream’ in that it carries with it a connotation of that that is impossible.
On the whole Saturday’s workshop seemed to emphasize discussion in the areas of architecture and economics – this is not to say that such areas are unimportant, or necessarily divergent from the Arts – more than it did in the sector of literature and the arts. What this signaled to me was the tendency for our Singaporean dreams to be aligned with the sense of the pragmatic. As much as The Singapore Dreaming project is laudable in its aims to create a more inclusive space for one to share their dreams, the focus of discussion in Saturday’s workshop seems to reveal a slight discrepancy in the aims and actual practices of the project.