Interculturality And Transdisciplinarity

The name of our company is The Necessary Stage. I formed this company in 1987 while still at university, as a non-profit theatre company. Our mission is to create original indigenous and innovative theatre. Over the years, we have developed a collaborative method. We try not to have too much hierarchy in our working processes. Instead, playwright and directors work together as collaborators. Something that is important to us is to use our stage to represent the different cultures which make up Singaporean society. We always try to work with actors from different nationalities, who speak different languages, to explore issues of cultural identity. This is what we refer to as interculturalism. We have rejected the notion of “multiculturalism” because we feel it has been tested and failed. Multiculturalism is simply different cultures co-existing in one country. What concerns us is how different cultures, be they Malay, Chinese, Eurasian, Peranakan, or Indian interact and how they can come together. I am Peranakan, my family came from China and settled in South East Asia. My sister married into a Malay family, and so my family is already a mix, and is the expression of a new form of ethnicity which emerged from these cultural encounters, which is the product of interculturality, ethnic hybridity. Singapore is unlike any other Asian country. Traditionally, Asian countries have a strong mother culture, which is the case in Korea, Japan, Malaysia or India. Singapore, however, has been known to be a “cultural oven.” We do not have our own culture because our culture is what has emerged from all our migrant cultures coming together. The strength we have resides in how we blend those cultures together and how they interact with one another. Singapore has become an example of a veritable global village. This aspect of our community is something we wanted to explore from the outset. Neither I nor the playwright we work with studied drama per se, simply because there was no such major at that time, 1989. We both studied literature; I also took sociology and he took languages. Our theatre making is, in fact, the coming together of these three disciplines. Sociology plays a very strong part in what we do; this involves a lot of field work, research and interviews. That is what makes our theatre socially engaged…