Starting tonight and over the weekend (22 to 24 January 2016), USP students will stage its annual theatrical USProductions – a double bill of "404: Not Found" and "Less Than Three” – at Drama Centre Black Box, National Library Board.

Over the years, USProductions has given USP students the opportunity to showcase their creative talents, or simply to experiment with theatre. A few USP students who used to be involved in USProductions in one way or another, have gone on to make their mark in the Singapore theatre scene. Stacy Ooi (Sociology + USP, Class of 2018) catches up with three of them to find out how they have been.

Lucas Ho (English Literature + USP, Class of 2009), Joel Tan (English Literature + USP, Class of 2012) and Shiv Tandan (Industrial & Systems Engineering + USP, Class of 2014) are a diverse bunch of thespians. Although they come at theatre from different majors and backgrounds, they have some things in common. All of them cited Prof Huzir Sulaiman and his wife Claire Wong as major influences on their journeys in theatre, and taking Prof Sulaiman’s playwriting module was a huge turning point for them. Shiv fondly recalls that Prof Sulaiman was flexible enough to open an extra class for him and his schoolmates, as the module clashed with a core engineering module of theirs.

Today, all of them are Associate Artists at Checkpoint Theatre, a theatre company set up by Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong to develop local writing and theatre. It was through Checkpoint Theatre that Joel recently published 'Volume I' of his collected plays. It was also with Checkpoint Theatre that Shiv was able to re-stage his 2011 play, which was nominated for Best Original Script at the Straits Time Life! Theatre Awards. Read on to find out what they love about theatre, how to write a good dialogue and getting things done in NUS.

How would you describe yourself and your work, in one sentence?

Lucas: I write chiefly for the stage, and I try to write stuff that I would like to see staged, very simply.

Joel: My work and I are both thoroughly caffeinated, borderline alcoholic and unfashionably Singaporean.

Shiv: I’m an engineer turned theatre and filmmaker person. I guess I'm always trying to come up with ways in which I can do something with both, and keep integrating things between this and that.

What do you love about theatre, and what motivates you to keep writing or creating?

Lucas: Everything about creative writing is challenging, but becomes rewarding when you've somehow managed to capture or distill a truth about human experience.

Joel: It varies with each play. I mean that each play has a very different set of impulses. But it's usually drawn from something I observe in the world that provokes a response in me. Sometimes I'm seized by an image, as in People, where the play began for me with six people, unrelated, all breathing quietly in the same space; or in Mosaic by the orange glow of street-lights in a dark, abandoned mosaic playground.

What keeps me going is the theatre's social component, I suppose. I love working with people, and every new show opens up new possibilities for collaboration, and I love that.

Shiv: What I'm trying to create out of all these diverse projects is the ability to say “I'm working on something beyond the medium that I'm using to make it”. It’s not so much I'm writing, directing, or creating an app.

The point is, what are you doing with it? (What motivates me is where) I have a problem that I'm really irritated by. So I would start thinking about how I can write about that problem, help solve that problem or mitigate the effects of the problem. With "Sholay" (a play Shiv wrote in 2011), I was bothered by change, the sense of placeless-ness I felt when I moved out of home. (The way I dealt with it) could have been a film, or a start-up. But at that point, the way I could express that was through writing for the stage.

How did you find your time in USP?

Joel: When I was in USP, the environment was messy, chaotic and deliriously inspiring. It was queer, it was smart, it was full of people unafraid to be themselves. It was more than just intellectually stimulating — there was a real sense of community and of shared learning. It totally contributed to my theatre journey. It's the kind of space that pushes you out of your comfort zone. I would never have mustered the courage to take a creative writing class if I hadn't been surrounded by people who were so creative and encouraging.

What advice would you give to aspiring USP thespians?

Lucas: Keep on listening. Keep on writing.

Shiv: In general, NUS resources are available to people who want to do awesome things. My experience with NUS has been really good. In Year Three, four of us came together and made our first feature film, an hour-long movie shot entirely in a PGP room…once you prove that you can finish a film, then the machinery really kicks in and NUS will help you a lot. We screened three nights at the Ngee Ann Kongsi Auditorium for free. NUS subsidised the venue, they helped us do the bookings, they talked us through the procedures, about how to get that kind of thing done.

After that we wanted to make a short film. OSA (Office of Student Affairs) actually bought a camera, bought some equipment, and loaned them to us. We helped them figure out what to buy, and then they invested in it.

In that sense, I think the atmosphere in NUS is that people are looking for creative work, and if you’re interested and passionate and will see something through to completion, then there’s nothing stopping you. You have to bang your head against some bureaucratic walls, but I think there is a lot of general goodwill. Everybody running the show in NUS is also a person, so just go and have a conversation. Nothing works out, nothing works out. But there's a big chance that it will - you just have to be persistent.

Joel: My biggest piece of advice would be to make new work, or stage Singaporean work. There's a tendency to throw a lot of energy into putting up Shakespeare or some hot contemporary American or British playwright, but really the urgency and the immediate spark of truth comes from the place you live in. You can make all sorts of claims about the universality of all drama, but if you're not making work about Singapore, then where's all that energy going?

(With regards to writing good dialogue) I think everyone has it in them. It comes naturally when we tell our friends funny stories over dinner—there's a "third person voice" that we all put on when we imitate someone else. We're all performers. So, rightly or wrongly, I believe drama is something that comes naturally to everyone. Maybe I'm a little more sensitive to it than most people because I'm also very “kaypoh”. It's what some people call having "an ear for dialogue". I think with writing dialogue, it's about cultivating a sense of how a conversation should breathe and flow—where the silences fall, where the conversation intensifies or eases. It's musical. My biggest advice to develop dialogue is to write it and hear it read often, to delight in it, and to use lots of silence.

We congratulate Lucas, Joel and Shiv for having completed the following projects recently. We will look forward to more of them.

Stage:
"What I Love About You Is Your Attitude Problem" — A 12-hour overnight festival at The Arts House as part of the Singapore Writers Festival in November 2015. It featured works by Shiv Tandan, Lucas Ho and Joel Tan.

"The Good, the Bad and the Sholay" — Written by Shiv Tandan, co-directed by Shiv Tandan and Huzir Sulaiman. A humorous coming-of-age story that chronicled a young boy's journey from boyhood in the small Indian city of Ambala to the metropolis of Singapore. Re-staged as part of the Kalaa Utsavam Festival in November 2015.

"The Emperor's New Clothes" — A musical written by Joel Tan, and staged by W!ld Rice Theatre in December 2015.

Print:
"Plays Volume I" — By Joel Tan. Available in the NUS Central Library.

"Voices Clear and True: New Singaporean Plays Volume I" — Featuring works by Shiv Tandan and Lucas Ho. Available in the NUS Central Library.