Meet ONG Keng Sen, the Artistic Director of Singapore’s T:>Works and Keynote Speaker at the 2024 Singapore Literature Festival in NYC

The 6^th biennial Singapore Literature Festival is held in New York City on October 19 and 20, 2024. Under the title “Living Adaptations,” the festival will spotlight writing and directing for the stage and screen.

The keynote speaker at the festival is ONG Keng Sen, the Artistic Director of Singapore’s T:>Works, an independent and international arts company based in Singapore, which was founded in 1985 and have been under Keng Sen’s leadership since 1988. T:>Works’ mission and vision are the “pioneering of thought leadership in the arts focused on transdisciplinary, transcultural, and inclusive processes.”

Keng Sen was also the founding Festival Director of Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) and initiated the Young Curators Academy in Berlin. During the pandemic he was Artistic Director of Amsterdam-based Prince Claus Funds’ digital 25-hour festival (2021) to commemorate 25 years of cultural innovation in the Global South. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Keng Sen’s keynote speech “Tradition and the Contemporary Global Moment,” at the Korean Cultural Center New York, 3 – 5pm on October 19, will focus on his adaptation of Euripides’ play Trojan Women into a modern opera based on Pansori and K-pop, in collaboration with the National Theatre of Korea. This production played at BAM Next Wave Festival in New York (2022) and Edinburgh International Festival (2023) to rave reviews. He will also participate on the panel “Adapting Classics for the Stage” on October 20, where he will speak about his queer adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play and Richard Strauss’s opera “Salome.”

The following is a conversation between ONG Keng Sen and Walter Byongsok Chon in October 2024.

What inspired you to become a theatre artist? Were there specific experiences – writings, productions, or teachers, etc. – that led you do this path?

ONG Keng Sen: It was a little bit of a Dame Maggie Smith moment in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”. One day a teacher who was expressive and full of presence went from class to class of my elementary school announcing she was starting a literary drama and debate society. She canvassed us to join her. I was 7 years old.

Which artists have inspired you the most? How have their works inspired your works?

ONG Keng Sen: Meredith Monk was a strong influence in my formative years as an international artist. I met her work when I came to study in New York University in 1993. I never saw her early work live, only heard recordings. But I did see “Roosevelt Island” in 1994 and experienced how she made site specific work. Her flow from body to emotion to spirituality to a holistic intelligence was remarkable. A total immersion in the material. She was the first artist I met talking about affinity rather than identity and that made so much sense to me. I suppose I was tired about being pigeon-holed in my Singaporean Chinese identity, and it was liberating. New York and all the artists living, working here in the early nineties were enchanting and new. It was here that I moved into a performative archival practice – you could liken it to reading fiction or non-fiction books. I started making non-fiction works rather than fiction works on stage because of my experience in New York.

Many of your works as a director are intercultural, multinational, and interdisciplinary, adapting classical works into contemporary frames, and mixing various Asian cultural and artistic forms of a wide range. You adapted Trojan Women into a modern opera with pansori and K-pop. Your Sandaime Richard (Richard III) brought together kabuki, kyogen, and Indonesian shadow puppetry. Search Hamlet integrated Balinese mask performance, Thai classical khon dance, Malaysian silat martial arts, and Japanese Butoh. And the list goes on. How would you describe your creative process? How do you choose which work to adapt and which forms to put together in the adaptation? How do the various forms come together for you?

ONG Keng Sen: My process is collaborative, and I begin by listening intensely to each individual’s journey in their artwork. I do rely a lot on biographical and personal experience of all collaborators, and often ask them to respond to their desires. I create an affects space and time in my rehearsals and final artworks. From my first seminal international work “Lear” premiering in Tokyo, with Asian artists from 6 different countries speaking their own language on stage in text as well as embodying traditional artforms, I fell headlong into the politics of intercultural performance. As an auteur this political process was very relevant to me. In recent years, there has been a lot of talk about decolonizing art and becoming sensitive to power in different contexts. I was already walking the tightrope of this politics in 1997, engaging directly in my practice to the critique of Peter Brooks’ work in “Mahabharata”. The accusations of appropriation in art were very loud in those years. However, I loved the dynamics within the rehearsal room and without, namely the inter-Asian geopolitics. Both were very stark and the practice of decolonizing power in an intercultural (or transcultural) process became central to my work. So I learnt a lot from that first experience in 1995-1999 of “Lear” which is the red line in my practice. We took three years to make the work and toured after that to seven countries. You could say in contemporary work of that kind between cultures and between traditions, we were moving at the speed of trust. If there is no trust, the foundation of such work will be very shallow. Lastly I love to choose works which interact with where I am at that moment. In “Lear” then, it was about killing the father, a tremendous moment as Asia entered the new millenium.

You have been wearing many hats throughout your career. How do you balance your work as an artistic director, director, and writer?

ONG Keng Sen: Perhaps I don’t see a divide in these different hats. I see that I am making artworks in all these. The process is also artwork to me. The question of what is writing is central. As a director collaborating sometimes with existing scripts or music theatre, my mis-en-scene or my gesamtkunstwerk or my writing is invisible as there is no text left behind in an official score. Perhaps the closest is the stage manager’s call book as it’s full of directorial decisions. The call book will contain some of my collaboration with designers which can be very rich indeed.

Could you share a little bit about how theatre in Singapore dealt with the challenges during the pandemic? What was your experience? Do you think the pandemic inspired new or different artistic trends, forms, or expressions?

ONG Keng Sen: This is an incredible question, thank you. I haven’t shared these reflections in another interview strangely enough! Actually, I was very happy during the pandemic and very productive! Even though it was completely digital and again I was outside of that skill. But it’s not that different from being outside of pansori (Korean opera) or Kabuki or Indonesian gamelan. My work as an artist is to bridge gaps with other experts. I saw all digital processes as artistic work, and I made a lot of advancements in those years. In the shock of the early months I created a series of lectures called “Curating No-thing”. It was phenomenal. In May 2020, the first lecture attracted 900 individuals who were hungry for something, anything, most of them from outside of Singapore. In this 6-weeks process, I mentored 16 individuals from around the world in curatorial clinics. This was encouraging as it meant that any event made from your living room for the first time was international. Before, there was always radio and livestreaming. but it was always an overt design. The pandemic made this communication into a living practice. It became so potent for me – the concept of the local, and multiple locals from around the world transforming into the new international, rather than a global standard being circulated world-wide. This concept became my central take-away from the pandemic which still empowers my work today. I moved during the pandemic to be based in Berlin which seemed more central as it was possible to move within European Union. Although few did as all hotels were closed, and arriving in another EU city was as much a nightmare. I went through 3 quarantines to continue my live work in Seoul, in Singapore, and in Taipei. After three weeks in Taipei in March 2021, it was enough. It was then that I realized how much I preferred digital work during this time. I was happiest in my apartment in Berlin conducting the “Young Curators Academy” which was based at Gorki Theater in Berlin. But we couldn’t really meet there because we were interacting with 15 young curators from around the world. it was all online. And the intense preparation for the Prince Claus “25 Years 25 Hours Festival” left a great impression on me. Asking 25 sites around the world from Kyrgyzistan to Colombia to Niger to Ramallah to make videos and send them to the festival which was then screened by Amsterdam. We sat alone in an empty Amsterdam hotel room to watch the festival over 25 hours in one night in December 2021. Those were bizarre years which I am grateful for.

How does it feel to return to NYC, where you completed your Ph.D. in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University? Do you have any favorite memories during your time at NYU?

ONG Keng Sen: I have never really left NYC. Those years when I did my Masters I remember very vividly because it’s a New York that some say has already vanished. When I arrived in the fall of 1993, people told me that performance in the New York of the 70s in SoHo lofts had already disappeared, eg. Robert Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. However, it’s all still there in different manifestations if we open our eyes, our ears, our intuition.

How has your immersion in the field of Performance Studies informed and inspired your creative process?

ONG Keng Sen: It’s who I am completely. I am eternally grateful to my mentor Richard Schechner. Always challenging, always rewarding. And I was fortunate to come back to the same department again 17 years later to work with my former classmates Andre Lepecki, Karen Shimakawa, Diana Taylor, Ann Pellegrini, Jose Munoz, all my forever heroes.

Would you mind sharing a little bit about your next project?

ONG Keng Sen: I have made a new film in Italy called “The House of Janus” as a response to “Dido and Aeneas,” Henry Purcell’s opera of 1689. It will premiere in a film festival this year (keeping my fingers crossed)! It’s an ongoing research from the pandemic of classics in homes. This will be combined with a live queer, trans and drag cabaret re-entitled “Dido and Aeneas The Belindas” which is a work in progress that I have made in Singapore. We will travel to Yokohama this December. In Yokohama, we constitute a local ensemble called the Yokohama Belindas. An instance of multiple locals becoming the new international. Everything comes together in 2025 for the 40^th anniversary of TheatreWorks or T:>Works.

Do you have any advice for emerging theatre artists?

ONG Keng Sen: It’s all a process. Je ne regrette rien.

Lastly, do you have anything else you’d like to share with the Singapore Literature Festival audience?

ONG Keng Sen: I am happy that Jee Leong Koh has taken the bold step to look at writing in its different forms from theatre to film this year. There is something different about performing in our imaginations as we read a book, although writing is an intense performative act. It will all come together in this year’s Singapore Literature Festival, and I am very excited to witness it. I hope to meet each of you there.   

Thank you so much for taking your time for this interview!

Learn more about ONG Keng Sen and his works at the Singapore Literature Festival on October 19 and 20!