INTERVIEW: Ice Factory Festival continues with ‘Who’s There?’
Photo: Sim Yan Ying “YY” is the co-director of Who’s There? Photo courtesy of artist / Provided by DARR Publicity with permission.
The Ice Factory Festival, off-Broadway’s annual celebration of theater at the New Ohio Theatre, has moved online this year, and so far they have presented intriguing virtual presentations for audiences. This week, the festival moves to Who’s There?, a new play by The Transit Ensemble and co-directed by Sim Yan Ying “YY” and Alvin Tan.
The show is billed as a “cross-cultural encounter involving artists based in Singapore, Malaysia and the United States,” one that uses Zoom as a new medium to explore the unstable ground between us and “the other.” Who’s There? offers commentary on race, class and gender, topics that are ever more important in these historic times.
Recently Hollywood Soapbox exchanged emails with YY, a theater artist based in both New York and Singapore. Her previous works include I Love White Men and Without Reason. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What inspired you to create this show?
Having grown up in Singapore and then living in the United States for the last five years, I have been craving an international collaboration with artists from both countries, to explore our differing value systems and cultural sensibilities. This pandemic and the halting of live theatre, while terrifying, was an almost perfect excuse to jumpstart this project. I was driven by the excitement of virtual creation as a way of bringing together people across geographically distant communities during a time of isolation and grief.
The New Ohio Theatre offered a valuable opportunity to present this work as part of Ice Factory 2020. I reached out to my mentor and friend in Singapore, Alvin Tan, about co-directing this work with me, and we began first by talking about my somewhat contradictory identities as a privileged Singaporean Chinese woman in my home country and a disadvantaged immigrant in the United States. This expanded into questions about racial conflicts that exist within and between individuals across countries, and how racial issues are perceived through different cultural lenses. Can viewing these events from the vantage point of ‘the other’ help us continue the struggle towards racial justice with more hope and perhaps clarity? How do we work towards negotiating our diversity with curiosity and care, and a commitment to deep listening?
Have there been challenges to craft a piece of theater for a virtual audience?
Absolutely. For most of us on the team, it’s our first full-length virtual production, and the learning curve is incredibly steep, while the schedule is incredibly short. Everything had to be re-learnt yet also given time and space to explore — from how character interactions can take shape, to the stage manager calling cues, to what the roles of a director/dramaturg/sound designer/multimedia artist/stage manager/intern entail in this digital space. After seven weeks of working together, with rehearsals three to four times a week at three hours each, it does feel like the roles have blended into one common effort, with everyone contributing in multiple areas.
The first thing the team readily embraced was that virtual theatre is not a replacement of live theatre, but rather an art form in and of itself. While we approached the work with our theatrical sensibilities, we also brought in cinematographic ideas, design explorations, technological quirks and more. Rather than lamenting what we lose by not currently having live theatre, we shared an intense curiosity about the digital medium and the new possibilities that it affords us.
Because everything happens online, it feels like the work never stops. As of now, I am counting 27 Facebook group chats we have for different permutations of collaborators, based on their area of work or scenes involved. Thirty minutes after we end a rehearsal, we get a question from a performer, an audio sample from our sound designer (Jay Ong), a new virtual background from our multimedia designer (Jevon Chandra), a tentative schedule for upcoming small-group rehearsals from our stage manager (Manuela Romero), a notification that a scene is edited and ready for review from our dramaturgs (Cheng Nien Yuan and J.Ed Araiza), and the list goes on. My co-director and I are sending out messages, too: transcriptions that the interns (Priyanka Kedia and Ryan Henry) should get to ASAP, notes on a video draft, preparation work for the actors (Camille Thomas, Ghafir Akbar, Neil Redfield, Rebekah Sangeetha Dorai, Sean Devare and myself).
It is a constant race against time — always plenty to get done before our next rehearsal in 24 or 48 hours. This is virtual, but also one of the most time and energy-consuming projects I have worked on.
How did rehearsals run with the cast members?
One thing that’s worth mentioning is that rehearsals are not just run with cast members but also with the dramaturgs and designers from day one of the process (our stage manager and interns then join for all sessions in the second half). It eventually became clear that they were and are attending every rehearsal not out of obligation but rather passion and excitement. In a new work creation, the dramaturgs’ keen insights are particularly necessary, and design and technology needed to be explored early on to be well-integrated into the work.
Our process is undoubtedly intense and ambitious. We are working towards a full-length virtual production that was only a seed of an idea two months ago — no script, no characters, no story. We divided our process into two phases. In Phase I (Exploration), we researched and discussed videos and articles about racial controversies in Singapore, Malaysia and the United States; collected found texts and interviews both historical and present-day, which we then experimented with performatively; had Play with Zoom (PWZ) sessions where our multimedia and sound designers led the team in expanding the potentials of the Zoom medium; created characters, forged character relationships and improvised (hyper)realism scenes; as well as explored our impulses in the form of movement and sporadic text in what we call ’10-minute kam sessions,’ which are often useful in freeing ourselves from the pressure of having to ‘make meaning.’ These all happened within the span of four weeks.
During the week ‘break’ between phases I and II, the team worked tirelessly to put the script together through a collaborative writing process, led by the co-directors. In Phase II (Pre-Production), the dramaturgs took the lead in revising the script up till the week before performances, while my co-director and I simultaneously staged the scenes that have been script-locked. The actors improvise new scenes that are needed. Our designers are working as fast as they can to create sound, videos and images, and the stage manager and interns are filling in the gaps wherever they can. We are now in the final week of our process and are working on putting the whole show together.
What do you hope are the important lessons or takeaways that the virtual audience leaves the production with?
Firstly, that there is still much untapped potential in virtual theatre, territories that are still unexplored and gems that are waiting to be discovered. I understand the resistance that some may feel towards virtual theatre because of a myriad of reasons — Zoom fatigue, mediocre experiences with digital work, grief of ‘losing’ live theatre, among others — but I hope that our rigorous investigation into and commitment towards virtual theatre will spark some excitement in our audience. I hope that they will be able to feel themselves sharing the space in real-time with people who are half the world away — or in the country next door — together engaging with complex and difficult issues around race. As the world becomes increasingly polarized and conversations seem harder and harder to have, I hope that Who’s There? will offer a new way of having these challenging discourses particularly with people who share seemingly opposing points of view or who grew up with a radically different set of experiences from us.
Do you feel that live theater has been changed forever because of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Yes — and I am hopeful that it is for the better in the long term. While the immediate financial repercussions and the prospect of a shrinking industry are terrifying, this pandemic period is also giving us the time and space for reflection. We are interrogating why we do live theatre and how it is special, and some of us are also tangibly working towards dismantling white power structures and making the industry a more inclusive and equitable space.
The silver lining during this period for me is also that the shift to virtual creation evens the playing field — anyone with a laptop and an internet connection can share their work of theatre with the public. The focus returns to the simple but essential elements of community-building and storytelling. We can do away with extravagant sets, lavish galas and oppressive hierarchies. We realize that we are more resilient and creative than we thought we could ever be.
When it is safe to make theatre in person again, I know that I will absolutely go back to it because live theatre is my first love and my home base. But I also know that I will continue to make works virtually as I have since learnt that it contains exciting possibilities that live theatre doesn’t. It is after all another way of building bridges and telling stories, and I hope to see it flourish in the future.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Ice Factory Festival continues with Who’s There?, presented as a live-stream through Aug. 8. Click here for more information.
