Updates
(11 Sep)
The fifth edition of NEW WORKS 2020 features representatives from arts organisations The Artground, Centre 42 and Dance Nucleus in a conversation about development, training and practice in a digital era. Tune in to NEW SITES / NEW WORKS via our Facebook event page: 28 Sep (Mon), 8pm, free admission.
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Writer’s block can manifest in various shapes and forms. For fiction writer Noelle Q. De Jesus, it has come in the unfortunate form of a pandemic, which she has also described to us as “a veritable lego land of procrastination”.
In an attempt to find balance in these uncertain times, Noelle has managed to uncover a few critical crucial techniques to tear down these blocks in order to finish her first novel, Another Immense Sky, which she developed during her time as one of the 2019/2020 Jalan Basar Writers-in-Residence. Set against the backdrop of political strife in the Philippines, the novel navigates complex family dynamics, love triangles, and what it means to be an artist and a responsible citizen, torn between the struggle to live the life one wants versus the life one actually gets.
NEW SKIES / NEW WORKS will feature excerpts of Noelle’s novel-in-progress, as well as an exploration into her own unique creative writing process amidst a still-unfolding global crisis. A Q&A segment will follow the discussion.
In light of the current circumstances, there will be no entry fee for this edition of NEW WORKS. We do however encourage you to make a donation to either Sing Lit Station. Every dollar counts!
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DETAILS
Price: Free (registration required; donations encouraged via giving.sg)
Date: 6 May 2020 (Wed)
Time: 7.30pm-8.30pm SGT
Venue: Online via live-stream
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NOTE ABOUT THE RESIDENCY: NEW SKIES / NEW WORKS is Noelle Q. de Jesus’s public-facing programme as a Sing Lit Station 2018/2019 Jalan Besar Writer-in-Residence. To find out more about the residency, visit: singlitstation.com/residency
NOTE ABOUT COVID-19: Sing Lit Station considers the health and safety of our staff and patrons our utmost priority. We are presently operating and conducting our programmes under the latest guidelines and measures stipulated by the government. If you note anything of concern, please reach out to us.
Noelle Q de Jesus was born in Connecticut, raised and educated in the Philippines and has, since 2000, lived in Singapore, where she and her husband raised her daughter and son. She is the author of two collections of short fiction, Cursed and Other Stories (Penguin Random House SEA) launched at the SWF 2019, and Blood Collected Stories (Ethos Books Singapore) launched at SWF 2015, which also won the 2016 Next Generation Indie Award for the Short Story. A French translation of Blood Collected Stories will be coming out of Editions Do in the fall. She is currently at work on her first literary novel, Another Immense Sky, and a volume of essays called Lessons From My Tennis Life. At the moment, she is also translating a Filipino novel into English for the Ateneo University Press called, For B or How Love Devastates Four Out Of Every Five Of Us by the Filipino novelist Ricky Lee. Noelle has an MFA in Fiction from Bowling Green State University.
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This edition of NEW WORKS invites you to explore artmaking and the role it plays in our larger cultural and ecological landscape. NEW CLIMATES / NEW WORKS features a multidisciplinary panel of artists — singer Inch Chua, writer and editor Esther Vincent (The Tiger Moth Review), professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson (Eating Chili Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore) and illustrator Tiffany Lovage. Pick their thoughts as they discuss their craft in the face of environmental calls-to-action and their views of the world through an ecocultural lens.
A Q&A will follow after the panel. Join the conversation in discussing ways to talk about the importance of conserving our environment to ensure a sustainable future.
Tickets are $5 via Peatix. Proceeds will go towards paying our speakers and helping Sing Lit Station defray the costs of its programmes. This programme also celebrates Ethos Books’ upcoming launch of Eating Chili Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore, launching on 27 June. Pre-order your copy now!
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DETAILS
Price: $5
Date: 20 Jun 2020 (Sat)
Time: 3pm-4pm SGT
Venue: Zoom (online)
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NOTE ABOUT COVID-19: Sing Lit Station considers the health and safety of our staff and patrons our utmost priority. We are presently operating and conducting our programmes under the latest guidelines and measures stipulated by the government. If you note anything of concern, please reach out to us.
Esther Vincent Xueming is the human behind The Tiger Moth Review. She is also co-editor of two poetry anthologies, Poetry Moves and Little Things, and reads for Frontier Poetry. Her poems have been published in QLRS, The Stinging Fly, Split Rock Review, Ghost City Review and elsewhere. A literature educator by profession, she is passionate about the relationship between art, literature and the environment.
Born in Singapore, educated in Fine-arts, and inducted into the music industry in Los Angeles, Inch has made a career as an international recording and performing artist. Her passion for the arts, wild places, and technology has led her to play at numerous festivals around the world and experimenting in a variety of art forms. An appreciator of good gin, random animal factoids and dense film essays, Inch is a recipient of the National Youth Award in 2018 for her contributions in the arts and was recently awarded Best Sound at the 2020 LIFE! Theatre Awards for her multisensory theatrical music production in 'Til The End Of The World, We'll Meet In No Man's Land. She is currently based in Singapore with her two cats and nursery of plants.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Yale-NUS College, where he writes and teaches about climate change, environmental literature, and environmental politics. He is author or editor of three books, including Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore (Ethos Books).
Tiffany Lovage is an artist and illustrator born and raised in Singapore. A fine art graduate, Lovage enjoys working with her hands in which she believes to be a more intimate approach with her penchant for detailing.
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Centred around social and familial issues, NEW LIGHT / NEW WORKS will feature a dramatised reading of Reply When You Can, a project by Farhanah Diyanah, one of our writers-in-residence at the Jalan Besar Writing Residency.
In early 2020, FD facilitated drama workshops and wrote scripts for Youth Stories, a collective made up of social workers and youths from financially-challenged families between the ages of 10 to 16 years old. Through this involvement, she gathered their personal stories and together with four other playwrights – Adib Kosnan, Nabilah Said, Nessa Anwar and Raimi Safari – they have written 8 to 10-minute plays that are inspired by the stories.
The plays will be read by theatre practitioners Daya AJ, Izzathy Halil, Kaykay Nizam, Rizman Putra, Rusydina Afiqah, Shida Mahadi, Siti Khalijah Zainal, Siti Zuraida and Suhaili Safari, with Stage Manager Rashid Shiddiq, and will be performed in English and Malay with English surtitles. This project is powered by National Youth Council, Young ChangeMakers and is supported by Beyond Social Services and Kampong Kapor Family Service Centre.
Tickets are $5 via Peatix, and all proceeds will go to the lovely people involved, donated to Youth Stories, and to help Sing Lit Station defray the costs of its programmes.
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DETAILS
Price: $5
Date: 25 Jul 2020 (Sat)
Time: 8pm–9.30pm SGT
Venue: Zoom (online)
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NOTE ON THE RESIDENCY: The Jalan Besar Writing Residency selects 2-3 Singapore-based writers every year and grants them full access to our office to work on any form of literary creation. Towards the close of their Residency, our Writers-in-Residence will be obliged to hold a public-facing programme (i.e. talk, workshop, reading) to commemorate the end of their time with Sing Lit Station.
NOTE ABOUT COVID-19: Sing Lit Station considers the health and safety of our staff and patrons our utmost priority. We are presently operating and conducting our programmes under the latest guidelines and measures stipulated by the government. If you note anything of concern, please reach out to us.
Farhanah Diyanah (FD) is a creative producer, a playwright and one of our 2019/2020 Jalan Besar Writers-in-Residence. Her writings revolve around interpersonal issues, which are magnified through magic realism or absurdism. She has written several plays for youths which won 1st place in competitions and was one of the panel of judges for Teater Pelajar 2016 and 2017, a nationwide drama competition for schools, organised by Teens Network Club Youth Division.
In 2016, she founded -wright Assembly, a collective that collaborates with art makers of different disciplines to research, discuss and present text-based works. FD is also a founding member of Main Tulis Group. She taps into her knowledge of Malay language and literature and pursues collaboration with artists of various platforms to explore different methods of storytelling. FD believes that the only purpose of art making is to contribute to unthinkable positive change in the world.
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What does it mean to understand reading as a form of encounter?
As part of his Jalan Besar Writing Residency, poet and essayist Lawrence Ypil chose to lead an online Southeast Asian reading group that revisited classic and contemporary fiction in English from the Philippines. Comprising of members Aditi Shivaramakrishnan, Ann Ang, Cheryl Julia Lee, Danny Yatim, Gautam Joseph, Lily Jamaludin, Ng Yi-sheng and Siddharta Perez, Lawrence and the reading group explored intersections of history, form, and the power of place, both real and imagined, distant and near.
In this fourth edition of NEW WORKS 2020, Lawrence and the reading group will share excerpts from the texts and talk about their experiences and responses to the stories. Watch them riff off, wax lyrical, call out, re-write, pay tribute and transform in this reading of a reading of a reading — its own kind of writing.
A Q&A segment will follow the presentation.
There will be no entry fee for this edition of NEW WORKS. We do however encourage you to make a donation to Sing Lit Station. Every dollar counts!
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DETAILS
Price: Free admission
Date: 26 Aug 2020 (Wed)
Time: 8pm–9.15pm SGT
Venue: Sing Lit Station (Facebook Live)
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NOTE ON THE RESIDENCY: The Jalan Besar Writing Residency selects 2-3 Singapore-based writers every year and grants them full access to our office to work on any form of literary creation. Towards the close of their Residency, our Writers-in-Residence will be obliged to hold a public-facing programme (i.e. talk, workshop, reading) to commemorate the end of their time with Sing Lit Station.
NOTE ABOUT COVID-19: Sing Lit Station considers the health and safety of our staff and patrons our utmost priority. We are presently operating and conducting our programmes under the latest guidelines and measures stipulated by the government. If you note anything of concern, please reach out to us.
Lawrence Lacambra Ypil is a poet and essayist and is the recipient of the prestigious Aning Dangal award in 2019. His latest book, The Experiment of the Tropics, was the co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book prize. His forthcoming book is Ang Pagkadiskubre sa Balak (The Discovery of Poetry), a translation of his first book of poems, The Highest Hiding Place.
Ypil received an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis on a Fulbright Scholarship. He currently teaches creative writing at Yale-NUS College.
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Our PH Lit reading group comprises of the following members:
– Ann Ang is a PhD candidate in postcolonial and world literature at the University of Oxford. She works on Anglophone writing from South Asia and Southeast Asia, and is also the author of Bang My Car (Math Paper Press, 2012).
– Aditi Shivaramakrishnan works as an arts manager, freelance editor and occasional writer.
– Cheryl Julia Lee is an Assistant Professor with the English department at NTU. Her poetry collection, We Were Always Eating Expired Things, was published in 2014 and nominated for the Singapore Literature Prize. She is also currently the critical editor of prose.sg.
– Danny Yatim is an adjunct lecturer in psychology at Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia and a writing instructor at BNDL Learning Studio.
– Gautam Joseph is a graduate student at NUS studying narratives of industrialisation and displacement from around the Indian Ocean through the experiences of two South Asian language- diasporas.
– Lily Jamaludin (bio pending)
– Ng Yi-Sheng is a poet, fictionist and researcher, author of Lion City and A Book of Hims.
– Siddharta Perez (they/she) is a curator who cultivates a research direction on forms of personal agency within legacies we inherit from national history and vernacular culture. They are currently affiliated with the NUS Museum.
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How can we re-design our spaces and make digital residencies relevant and exciting? What more can be done to support our artists and residents in these difficult times?
Featuring a cross-disciplinary panel of art organisations, this edition of NEW WORKS will explore the role of intermediaries to develop, incubate and facilitate theatre, literary, dance and art spaces. From community-building to archiving process-based practices, join the conversation as we discuss the re-imagining of residencies and venue support for artists in these digitally fatiguing and unprecedented times.
This edition of NEW WORKS is an interactive and collaborative dialogue, and the session will be facilitated via Mentimeter. We will be posting a set of questions on the Facebook event page closer to the event date to facilitate the discussion!
There will be no entry fee for this edition of NEW WORKS. We do, however, encourage you to show your support to the organisations featured by making a donation via the links below. Every dollar helps the development of the arts in Singapore!
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DETAILS
Price: Free admission
Date: 28 Aug 2020 (Mon)
Time: 8pm–9.30pm SGT
Venue: Sing Lit Station (Facebook Live)
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NOTE ABOUT COVID-19: Sing Lit Station considers the health and safety of our staff and patrons our utmost priority. We are presently operating and conducting our programmes under the latest guidelines and measures stipulated by the government. If you note anything of concern, please reach out to us.
The Artground – A Curious Place to be is managed by The Ground Co Limited, a registered arts charity dedicated to children from birth to 9 years old. Our vision ‘To let art do, what art does’ defines what we do. As the first multi-disciplinary children’s arts centre in Singapore, we aim to provide positive arts experiences across a variety of art forms, and build bridges between artists, educators, parents and children from various communities so that they may discover and co-create meaningful arts experiences together.
Since our opening in July 2017, we have welcomed more than 175,000 visitors to our Visual Arts Space where we provide tiered levels of access. As a free admission arts space, we rely heavily on donations to keep our doors open and accessible. We hope that The Artground will be a space where artists, teachers, children and their families can feel at ease to come to, to discover and to be curious.
Centre 42 is a non-profit organisation, registered charity and Institution of Public Character (IPC). We are committed to the creation, documentation and promotion of texts and writings for the Singapore stage. We incubate original writing for production development; provide space for artists and new work creation; and develop a functional archive documenting the histories and processes of Singapore theatre. We function as an independent intermediary in the theatre ecosystem connecting makers, enablers, and consumers. For more information, visit our website at www.centre42.sg. If you would like to help us to grow the local scene, consider making a donation via our annual fundraising campaign Grow The Cloud 2020: https://centre42.sg/cloud/
Dance Nucleus is an initiative by the National Arts Council to support independent dance artists and their practices revolving around contemporary performance. It is a space for artist and creative development for independent / contemporary performance in Singapore. Dance Nucleus fosters a culture of critical discourse, self-education, artistic exchange and practical support. We exist to enable the development of artistic practices and creations of independent performing artists in Singapore, promoting research in dance and choreography as cultural knowledge. We develop a network of collaborative partnerships in Singapore, Southeast Asia, Asia & Australia, and internationally.