Category: News

 

Come July, Prasatt Arumugam, a former English Literature major who graduated in January 2016, will be embarking on an immense expedition that will be a first for Singapore. He will trek the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which stretches 4,280km from Canada to Mexico, in a bid to be the first Singaporean to thru-hike the PCT. This arduous journey which takes more than 5 months to complete is a true test of the mind and body. It demands walking for 10 hours a day, with a backpack that can weigh up to 20kg, through a distance equivalent to walking from Singapore to China. He will also have to battle challenging terrain such as icy mountain passes and parched deserts. It is no wonder that more people have reached the summit of Mt Everest than completed the trail.

But for Prasatt, this endeavor is fueled by a cause larger than himself. This campaign is dedicated to the brave children whom he volunteers with at the Children’s Cancer Foundation (CCF). His journey with CCF began after his aunt passed away from cancer. She was like a mother to him and her loss was a particularly hard blow for him. This eventually prompted Prasatt to want to reach out to others suffering from cancer like his aunt did. Combined with his love for children, CCF became the logical choice.

Prasatt currently volunteers as a play personnel at the CCF Playroom in the National University Hospital. He engages in distraction play therapy, to help take the minds of the children off the pain and discomfort of treatments and check-ups. This allows them not to associate the hospital as merely a place of sadness and pain, but also as a place where they can meet friends and do things they love.  In his time there, he has met many young ones afflicted with cancer. Despite their youth, they face their immense battle with cancer with such courage and grace that Prasatt feels they deserve every possible chance of success in their fight. This is why he has decided to embark on TrekInvicta – a social initiative in support of CCF.

Through his own arduous journey, he aims to present a tangible parallel to the struggles that these children of CCF face on their long road to recovery. In doing so, he hopes to draw greater awareness to their cause and raise $26,660 – $10 for every mile – for CCF to continue its good work. 100% of all gross proceeds will go to CCF and donations above $50 are eligible for a 2.5x tax deduction. The funds raised are put to good use. According to CCF’s 2014 Annual Report, about 92% of CCF’s funds are channeled directly to aid its beneficiaries in the form of programs such as financial assistance, casework and counselling, and CCF’s learning centre, Place for Academic Learning and Support (PALS).

Prasatt hopes that readers of this blogpost can lend their support to these children to let them know that they are not alone in their fight. You can contribute to the campaign by heading to http://tinyurl.com/give2trekinvicta. No amount is too small, and every dollar makes a difference in the lives of these children! To learn more about the campaign, please head to http://trekinvicta.com. Should you require any further information, Prasatt can be contacted at trekinvicta@gmail.com. Let us stand together with one of our own to stand in solidarity with children afflicted with cancer.

On 15 April, our Emeritus Professor, Edwin Thumboo, received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from FASS.

The award was recognition of a career and a life, in which Prof Thumboo (affectionately known simply as “Prof”) has been a poet, scholar, academic leader and champion of Singapore writing. A sentence like that is often qualified with the term “variously,” but that would be misleading here. Prof has not variously performed these roles—usually he has performed them all at once.

He became Dean of FASS in 1980, and remained in that position for 11 years. During his tenure, he oversaw a number of important reforms of what the faculty offered. FASS grew, and English Language, Japanese Studies, Psychology, Linguistics, European Studies and Mass Communications all came into being as Majors in his time. Other notable achievements included the founding of the Centre for Advanced Studies and the Centre for the Arts.  He also instituted Singapore Writers Week (renamed the Singapore Writers Festival in 1991), the journal Singa: Literature & the Arts (1980-2000) and the annual 5-day Residential Creative Arts Programme.

After giving up the Deanship, he became Director of the Centre for the Arts, where he was able to pursue another of his lifelong passions, the encouragement of the creative arts in Singapore. Many student groups established themselves with his encouragement, including NUS Dance Synergy, NUS Jazz Band, NUS Lion Dance, NUS Dance Blast, NUS Chinese Drama, nu(STUDIOS) Film Production, NUS Singa Nglaras Gamelan Ensemble, Kent Ridge Ensemble and the NUS Arts Festival. He also played an instrumental role in the establishment of the University Cultural Centre. Facts like these can document individual achievements, but perhaps they fail to identify the most substantial achievement. As Director, Prof made the arts a central part of NUS’s life and identity.

A scholar of English literature, Prof is also a well known poet, indeed, in some ways he can be considered the father of Singapore poetry. His main publications are Rib of Earth (1956), Gods Can Die (1977), Ulysses by the Merlion (1979), A Third Map (1993) and Still Travelling (2008). For works such as these he has been recognised with the 1978, 1980 and 1994 National Book Development Council of Singapore awards for poetry in English, the 1979 Southeast Asia Write Award, the 1980 Cultural Medallion, the 1987 ASEAN Cultural and Communication Award in Literature, the 1981 Bintang Bakti Masyarakat (Public Service Star) and the Public Service Star (Bar) in 1991, the 2002 Raja Rao Award and the 2006 Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Meritorious Service Medal).

But Prof was never content simply to write and publish his own poetry. More perhaps than anyone else, he has worked to encourage and promote other Singaporean writers. Even as an undergraduate and a member of the Youth Poetry Circle, he organised readings and later anthologies The Flowering Tree (1970), Seven Poets (1973), The Second Tongue (1979), The Poetry of Singapore (1985) The Fiction of Singapore (1990), &WORDS: Poems Singapore and Beyond (2010).

Prof is still writing and still working for poetry here. Last year, he founded the  Singapore National Poetry Festival, a multilingual, multicultural organization that develops and promotes Singaporean poetry holistically.  He also initiated the Singapore Chapter of the ASEAN Young Writers Award.  He has a number of current projects. One of these is for poetry walls at NUS, public spaces in which poetry will be displayed. Another is for a Tamil translation of his poems to be launched in June.

The Distinguished Alumnus Award was well deserved. We congratulate Prof on this recognition for a lifetime of work for the humanities and the arts.  (Contributed by Professor John Richardson and Mdm Angeline Ang.)

We would like to congratulate Mr Raymund Victor Morales Vitorio, our graduate student in English Language, for winning the Graduate Student Teaching Award (GSTA) for teaching done in Semester 2 of 2014/2015.

Below Mr Vitorio explains his methods and ideals in teaching sociolinguistics to undergraduates.

“One of the biggest challenges in teaching sociolinguistic courses is the need to sufficiently address both the ‘socio’ and ‘linguistics’ branches of the field. As a teaching assistant, I always try to expose students to the great potential of using an interdisciplinary lens in viewing linguistic phenomena.

My training as a sociolinguist has influenced my view of teaching. I believe that the unique and influential position of the teacher in the classroom opens up opportunities for the simultaneous development of knowledge and critical stances. Hence, I have always striven to adopt transformative pedagogy in my teaching. I see the classroom as an opportunity to constantly question the positions of the students and the teacher, and to develop a sense of criticality of both. I aspire to make students develop critical thinking that would allow them to see that they are not just mere passive learners; rather, they are active agents who can realize concrete scholarly and social pursuits. This transformative approach also requires me to be self-aware and self-critical. Moreover, I highlight the inextricable connection between language and society in my teaching strategies. Given that language is one of the most important facets of humanity and society, I believe that there is a compelling need to teach students the technical aspects of linguistics in relation to their social repercussions. With this teaching philosophy, I aim to train my students as independent, critical, and responsible researchers.

While my position as a teaching assistant is rather constrained in terms of the formulation of the class topics and requirements, I always try to include ‘new’ yet relevant things in my tutorials. I always tell my students that the goal of tutorials is not to merely answer the discussion questions—rather, it is to come up with an intelligent discussion based on the given guiding questions. I encourage students to go beyond the discussion questions by interrogating larger issues of language and society, which includes critiquing the questions, applying the concepts in their own contexts/linguistic backgrounds, and suggesting good ways of conducting future studies. In this case, I can capitalize on my role as a teaching assistant as being someone who can make students transform knowledge for their self-improvement. Moreover, I require my students to ask good questions, and to address those questions made by their peers. This makes teaching more collaborative, and makes the tutorial an experience shared by everyone. In my experience in teaching various linguistics courses at NUS for the past four years, I have helped students appreciate the value of learning discrete features of language on a more personal level—which makes them see the role of linguistics in their everyday lives.”

 

Mei Fong graduated from NUS with a Bachelors of Arts (Hons.) in English Literature in 1997. She began her career as a journalist at The New Paper, then pursued a Masters in International Affairs at Columbia University before joining the Wall Street Journal as a correspondent in 2001. Her work as a correspondent at the Journal won her various accolades including a shared Pulitzer for her stories on China’s transformation ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. After leaving the China bureau, she was on faculty at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications and is currently a fellow at the thinktank New America. Mei Fong was recently in town in December to promote her new book “One Child,” an account of China’s failed attempt at social engineering and its pervasive effects on the Chinese people.

Q: How did your undergraduate education in NUS influence you as a writer or journalist?

I think the honours year really helped me blossom as a writer by teaching me to read and write critically, and not just on Shakespeare or Joyce but also on popular culture. There was a great class Tim White taught on film critique I enjoyed immensely, and I also remember classes by professors Barnard Turner, Yong Li Lan, Robbie Goh and Susan Ang vividly. Professors Goh and Ang in particular were influential because they encouraged my admittedly middle-brow tastes by lending me books on everything from science-fiction to Umberto Eco’s piece on James Bond. I knew I neither had the ability nor interest to write an epic canto, but their encouragement and examples showed me that it was possible–and indeed, necessary, to write intelligently about anything, even so-called “fluffy” topics.

Q: You have come a long way from being the 16-year old who was inspired by a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II to become a journalist and writer. Has there been a defining moment in your career thus far that you could share with us?

Lots of them! One was getting into a program to encourage creative writing that was sponsored by the Ministry of Education, when I was at Raffles Junior College. The program paired us up with mentors, and my mentor was the neurosurgeon and writer Gopal Baratham, who was a kindly influence. Gopal used to invite us mentees to the Tanglin Club for tea, and was generous about introducing us to the movers and shakers of Singaporean literary society. Imagine being a scrubby teenager and meeting folks like David Marshall and Catherine Lim. All these encounters inspired me, made me think there’s more to life than a 9-9 existence as an office peon.

Q: What inspired the writing of “One Child”?

I’d been reporting on China for several years, and the one-child policy was one of the most interesting and fascinating policies that really shaped Chinese society. At first, as a city dweller, it seemed as if the policy really only affected those in rural areas, who were more subject to its excesses, like forced abortions and sterilizations. Such things didn’t happen to educated women in cities. But over time, I came to realize it really shaped a lot of things for everyday Chinese, things like who you date, the jobs you choose, and how you die. But the key for me came when I was reporting on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, China’s biggest natural disaster in three decades. A lot of the children killed in the earthquake were only children, because the area near the earthquake’s epicenter had actually been a test pilot program for the one-child policy, before they launched it nationwide in 1980. Because of the coming Olympics, Beijing moved in ruthlessly to suppress dissent and parental concerns over the nature of these deaths–many in poorly built, “tofu” schools–and so, the earthquake became not just an illustration of the damaging effects of a natural disaster, but also exposed the great hurts inflicted by that unnatural disaster, the one child policy. While I was in the midst of reporting on all this, including taking a physically taxing journey with migrant workers, I discovered I was pregnant. I subsequently had a miscarriage. That brush with parenthood, and the pain of the loss, was a trigger for me to examine some of the issues raised in the book. Why do we want to have children? What happens when that desire is thwarted by nature or government fiat?

Q: Who should read “One Child” and why?

Anyone who’s interested in China, in the kind of dystopian worlds envisioned by Orwell and Huxley, anyone who’s interested in journalism, anyone contemplating the costs of parenthood, anyone with a uterus.

Q: Finally, do you have any advice for our undergraduates?

My advice is to those contemplating creative careers, in the arts, in writing, in journalism, filmmaking–all the so called “unsafe” jobs that your parents are horrified by. There are a million obstacles, but if you really want to do this, then YOU can’t be the first obstacle, you’ll never get anywhere. To those who want to go into it, I say, Find a Way.

And for those who’ve had some success in these fields, I say, Make a Way.

For a more comprehensive Q&A with Mei Fong, head to http://www.meifong.org/author-qa/ where she responds to questions about “One Child” in greater depth.

(Interview conducted by undergraduate Nigel Choo.)

 

This year, seven faculty members of the department won the Faculty Teaching Excellence Award for their teaching done in 2014/2015. Below we invite two of the winners–Dr Graham Wolfe and A/P Mie Hiramoto–to share their thoughts on teaching and education.

Interview with Dr Graham Wolfe

1. Firstly, what are some modules you teach and what do they cover?

At the moment I teach three modules: “The Theatre Experience” (GEK1055), “Major Playwrights of the 20th Century” (TS2239), and “Theatre and Postmodernism” (TS4218). “Major Playwrights” is a module that I always love doing because it’s focused on an era of theatre that I never get tired of learning more about. We look at some well-known 20th-century playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Caryl Churchill, but we also investigate some lesser-known but influential theatre movements. In “Theatre and Postmodernism”, we look at some very daring and innovative playwrights like Tom Stoppard and Alfian Sa’at, as well as some contemporary films and music videos, and we explore how different kinds of philosophy and theoretical writing can be applied to performance.

2. How do you hope your modules will impact students? What’s the value of your modules?

I’ll comment mostly on my GEK module, “The Theatre Experience”, which any student at NUS could take, even if they have no background in theatre. I often have students in the class who have never seen a play or gone to the theatre before, and I’m glad to have them. The module is intended to be very accessible, but I also try to make it appealing and challenging for students who do have background in theatre and are hoping to learn more. It’s focused on the roles that theatre plays in the world today, and it asks questions like, what are the attractions of theatre and what features make it different from film or TV? How can going to theatre enrich our understanding of society and human cultures? We explore different theatrical styles and forms, and we examine how cultures influence each other through theatre, and how theatre can provoke change in society.

3. Can you share some thoughts on how you approach your teaching?

As an instructor I often work with students intent on a career in theatre and drama, and I consider it my job to help provide these students with the skills that can help them actualize their goals. In many cases, however, the students in my classes are studying theatre and drama while on the road to a career of a different kind. In either situation, my aim is to help promote a life-long interest in the subject, encouraging students to look on theatre as an ongoing and vital means of exploring and appreciating the complexities of our lives, and of confronting questions and challenges that face us. I strive to find methods of presenting module material that are engaging for the specific group of students that I’m working with. I accentuate its relevance to contemporary experience and make frequent connections with issues and artworks that my students are familiar with. My aim is to promote what I call “intertextual” modes of thinking and seeing. I think that some of the best kinds of learning can happen when students are watching a TV show in the evening and start making connections of their own with the plays, theories, or ideas that they’ve been exploring in class.

4. Do you have any advice for a young person today who is presently undergoing his or her undergraduate education?

I think my main advice would be: you still have lots of time to get good at something that you don’t think you’re good at right now. For instance, I often come across students who warn me that they’re “no good” at writing and never will be. In so many cases, these students could be excellent writers if they worked on a few key things. I was a pretty bad writer as an undergrad student and I didn’t get better at it until later. Sadly, I think students often come out of high school with a pretty rigid conception of what they can and can’t do, but I think that people can develop themselves massively in their twenties and beyond. Incidentally, the same goes for acting. Students often tell me that they’re the “worst actor in the world”, but they end up delivering great performances later in the term.

 

Interview with A/P Mie Hiramoto

1. Firstly, what are some modules you teach and what do they cover?

I teach sociolinguistics under the English Language and Literature Department in FASS, currently teaching EL3211 Language in Contact and EL4253 Language, Gender, and Text (AY 14/15 Semester 1). The former is a study of the phenomena of language contact which explores the linguistic properties of contact languages such as Chinese Pidgin English and Singapore Colloquial English, as well as the theoretical issues of language emergence. The latter is critical analysis of the relationships between language, gender, and social practices. It aims to challenge students to think beyond stereotypes and question issues related to gender and sexuality for a more critical understanding of the political and intellectual issues at hand.

2. How do you hope your modules will impact students?

My hope is for my students to take away valuable analytical skills that enable them to engage with pertinent social issues in a critical manner that can impact change in society. Challenging students to tackle difficult social issues head on in classes opens up a space for discussion where perspectives and minds can be broadened.

3. Can you share some of your ideas about teaching?

I believe that teaching is a two-way street. Teaching is learning to me, and I have to keep my mind open to new ideas that students bring to the classes. I am always learning together with them.

4. Do you have any advice for a young person today who is presently undergoing his or her undergraduate education?

Don’t take everything your teachers say to be the only truth. It is good to question and challenge ideas.

The Theatre Studies programme has just hosted the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards.

Grotowski was a major twentieth-century theatre practitioner and theorist. Although he directed written plays when he was young, he quickly moved into what he called “bricolage” of text and physical actions. His approach (he rejected the word “method”) is far from being a way of producing imitative sounds and actions. Rather, it challenges participants to confront themselves, and to discover new ways of perceiving and of articulating perception.

The Workcenter has continued and developed Grotowski’s practice since his death in 1999. Thomas Richards, the Center’s Director, took an audience through his own connection with Grotowski and the Center’s work in a public lecture on 8 November. The lecture featured clips of the Center’s work in which performers explore songs and movement with remarkable, concentrated discipline. They work on each piece for years, searching through repetition and analysis for the resonance of each song for each performer.

Before the lecture, Richards had led Theatre Studies students in a two-day workshop. The Workcenter described the encounter as striving “to unearth the creative potential of each participant through two lines of exploration.” The students worked on a song and an “acting proposition” – a short performance of about three minutes.

One of the participants, Lara Tay, described the workshop as “an eyeopening experience, to say the very least.”

“Not only did we learn how ‘alive’ songs from the past can be,” she went on, “but we also learnt a lot about ourselves. One by one, we performed our acting propositions. And one by one, we learnt more about our past-selves, present-selves, and future-selves. We confronted issues that we either neglected or never even knew about –all of which we learnt can be used in our art.

“We’ve learnt to be inspired by our very own stories. We’ve all walked away from this experience with a greater understanding of ourselves, as well as the kind of art we may create in the future. It’s truly made me fall in love with theatre all over again. Our only wish is that we could have more time with the genius that is Thomas Richards.”

The Workcenter held the workshop as part of a larger Singapore schedule, jointly organised by Theatre Studies and the National Arts Council, facilitated and administered by Cheekeng Lee, who is currently working with the Theatre Studies program. John Phillips, the Deputy Head for Theatre Studies, explained that it was one of a series of workshops the program has organised over the past year.

“The workshops contribute to the program’s desire to further integrate performance practice into its teaching and research profiles,” he said. “Earlier this year we’ve had visits from a British academic and performance theorist, Simon Jones, on practice-as-research, and from the intercultural TASAT theatre group (popularly known as The Nanyang Sisters), on aspects of migrant theatre making. On this occasion, Thomas Richards ran three two-day workshops, two for professional practitioners and one for our students, introducing them to, or reacquainting them with, the current practice of Grotowski’s revolutionary theatre techniques. The programme intends to develop a longer-term relationship with the Workcenter, once we have overcome some practical difficulties. We would very much like to have them back in future to work with our students in a more sustained way than was possible on this visit.” (Contributed by Cheekeng Lee.)

The Singapore literary scene has certainly blossomed in the recent few decades, growing from a small but robust group to a diverse, multi-genre collection of writers. Prominent figures in the literary scene include established writers like our very own Emeritus Professor Edwin Thumboo, even as the literary landscape is expanding to include newer writers.

This has also resulted in the development of many programmes for writers to develop and hone their skills as well as to nurture a new generation of writers. The Singapore Creative Writing Residency is one such programme. Jointly organised by the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) University Scholars’ Programme (USP) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), and The Arts House (TAH), the programme offers time and space for writers to complete their work as well as provide opportunities for student writers to learn from the writers-in-residence.

In 2015, USP and FASS welcomed its new writer-in-residence, Ong Szu Yoong. In an interview with him, he discussed his thoughts on writing poetry, his thoughts on his favourite poets and poems, and imparted some advice for new writers.

Q: What prompted you to start writing poetry?
A: Reading Kafka as a 13-year-old.

Q: What do you think is the hardest part of writing?
A: Everything else.

Q: How important do you think is accessibility of meaning? (How important is it that the reader has to work hard to understand the poem?)
A: A poem has no meaning that it hides or hides behind. To quote Barthes: There is no other information in it but its immediate saying: no reservoir, no armoury of meaning.

Q: What do you think makes a poem “good”?
A: A good poem is what it is. That is to say, it refuses to be anything else.

Q: Who are some of your favourite poets, and what are some of your favourite poems? What is it about these poems that draw you to them?
A: Off the top of my head: Anne Carson, Arthur Yap, Rae Armantrout, Elizabeth Bishop. I like complex and pathetic poems whose complexity and pathos are inextricable. My favourite Carson, Yap, and Armantrout poems are like that. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, which I’ve just finished re-reading, is like that as well. Bishop belongs to another category – I admire her for her discipline, and her attention to objects as they are.

Q: Which of your poems do you think is your favourite, and why?
A: The one I’m working on.

Q: What advice would you give young poets and budding writers?
A: Read as much as possible. Write as much as is necessary. Sometimes it is necessary not to write. Most of all, don’t take just anyone’s advice. Nothing works for everyone.

Ong Szu Yoong will be staying at USP’s Cinnamon College and working as a writer-in-residence until the end of January next year. He is currently conducting creative writing seminars with interested students, hoping for the participants to “come out of it with a better idea of how they want to write and what poetry is for them–a better sense of their own poetics.” These sessions will be held weekly, and participating students can look forward to presenting their work at the conclusion of the series of seminars. (Contributed by undergraduate Deanna Lim)

On Friday 14 August, our department alumnus, Joel Tan, launched his first volume of plays at the National Library. The volume features seven plays, the earliest of which were written when Joel was a student with us. In the speech he gave at the end of the launch he explained that he had come to playwriting through the two classes taught here by local playwright, Huzir Sulaiman.

Huzir is the Joint Artistic Director of Checkpoint Theatre, where Joel is an Associate Artist. Two of the four other Associate Artists, Faith Ng and Lucas Ho, are also former members of Huzir’s class, as well as alumni of our department. Lucas edited the collection, his third volume with Checkpoint.

The launch featured readings from the plays in the volume, and demonstrated the range of Joel’s writing. Some excerpts were very funny, containing acerbic insights into modern urban life in Singapore, while others were gentler and more touching. The extract from The Way We Go, for instance, with which the readings ended, featured an ageing couple struggling against their own habits and ingrained characters to communicate and be close. It was movingly read by Huzir and his fellow Artistic Director, Claire Wong.

In his speech at the end, Joel reflected on the role of the playwright, and on the etymology of that peculiar word. A playwright is a maker, he explained, and makes plays in collaboration with a host of other people. All the plays in the volume had benefitted enormously from the people involved in them.

Huzir is no longer teaching in the department, but his classes are now being taught by Faith, who is fast establishing herself as one of Singapore’s best young playwrights alongside Joel. Her work like his brings a sharp dramatic intelligence to bear on life in modern Singapore. Joel ends the interview that accompanies the plays in the volume by talking about the “brief glimmer of truth” that a play performance can provide. Certainly, the readings at the launch provided many such glimmers. (Photos courtesy of Checkpoint Theatre. Photo credit: Ken Cheong.)

A Home on the Island: Bodies, Objects and Narratives

On 26 June 2015, an eight-hour applied theatre workshop was held from 9am to 5pm at the Theatre Studies Performance Studio, National University of Singapore. The workshop was facilitated by Ms Lee Yueh-lan, Artistic Director of Nanyang Sisters Theatre, and Ms Chen Shu-hui, a long-term member of Assignment Theatre, Even Nearer Playback Theatre and Cross Border Cultural Foundation. The workshop was attended by twelve members of Nanyang Sisters Theatre, seven NUS students, two NUS Theatre Studies alumni and three external participants. Altogether twenty-five participants were present at the workshop.

Founded in 2009 and based in Taipei, Nanyang Sisters Theatre is a theatre company with membership consisting of marriage migrants from various ASEAN countries. The theatre company is part of the NGO group called TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan (TASAT), which first began as a literacy program for foreign spouses in 1995. Since the founding of the company, it has created and extensively toured performances based on the life experience of its members, as well as those TASAT has assisted. Through performances, workshops and forums, the mission of the company is to offer support and consultancy to ASEAN marriage migrants, and to enhance public awareness and understanding of marriage migration.

As part of the workshop preparation, each participant was requested to bring an object which represented their understanding and concept of home. Through theatre games and exercises, group discussion, improvisation and scene creation, participants discussed, excavated and reflected upon issues regarding the flow of people, cultures and ideas across borders in an increasingly “flattened” world. Home, migration and globalization were the three central themes addressed in the workshop. The session concluded with Nanyang Sisters presenting the company’s latest performance production Happiness- No U-turn!?. The play gave a glimpse of the lives of those who had chosen marriage as a migratory route in a globalized world. (Contributed by Liang Peilin.)