Nabilah Said’s play, ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native, had a sold-out run at the 2019 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. With its lens trained on an adopted woman’s decision to join a national singing competition, the play mashes timelines, characters and genre, and challenges authenticity and historicity to paint a picture of the Malay minority experience in Singapore.
At the heart of NEW PATHS / NEW WORKS is a conversation between the playwright Nabilah Said and the theatre critic Corrie Tan. Together, the two will discuss how Nabilah’s newest works use experimentations in form and narrative to explore the intersections of gender, race and religion, and the dislocations and relocations of personal and geographic histories. ANGKAT, alongside two other plays by Nabilah Said, will also be presented in a series of dramatic readings interspersed across the duration of the event.
The event begins at 8.15pm; door opens at 8pm. We hope to end by 9.30pm, although truth be told it might end at 10pm, as we will open the floor to a Q&A session. Although the event is free admission*, we encourage guests to bring donations, which will go to the lovely people involved. Guests might hear John Coltrane’s Giant Steps playing in the background.
This event is powered by the National Youth Council’s Young ChangeMakers Grant. NEW PATHS / NEW WORKS is also Nabilah Said’s public-facing programme as Sing Lit Station’s 2018/2019 Jalan Besar Writer-in-Residence.
Nabilah Said is a playwright whose work has been presented in Singapore and London by theatre companies Teater Ekamatra, The Necessary Stage and Bhumi Collective. Recent work include ANGKAT: A Definitive, Alternative, Reclaimed Narrative of a Native and yesterday it rained salt, which were both presented at M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2019. She is the co-founder of international theatre collective Lazy Native, under which she presented Inside Voicesin London in 2019. In 2016 she founded Main Tulis Group, Singapore’s first collective of playwrights writing in Malay and English. Formerly an arts correspondent with The Straits Times, Nabilah is a theatre critic and arts writer and is currently a writer-in-residence at Sing Lit Station. She holds an M.A. in Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. nabilahsaid.com. (Credit: Erfendi Dhahlan)
Corrie Tan is a writer, editor and researcher based in Singapore. She is into radical shifts in performance criticism – redefining the critic as dramaturg, collaborator, archivist, ethnographer and shapeshifter. Corrie is resident critic and contributing editor at Arts Equator, where she co-convenes a critics' reading group and a performance criticism mentorship programme. She has also written regularly about performance for The Guardian, The Stage, Exeunt Magazine and The Straits Times. She is currently a doctoral student in Theatre Studies on the joint PhD programme between the National University of Singapore and King's College London. (Credit: Elizabeth Chan)
VENUE: Sing Lit Station
ADDRESS: 22 Dickson Road, #02-01, Singapore 209506
EVENT WEBSITE: Facebook
DATE AND TIME
20 Mar 2019, 8pm