Black Cube: The Stage for Performance in Singapore, 1995–96

Abstract

This article proposes the term 'black cube' to describe some forms of performance art in Singapore in the mid-1990s. While Claire Bishop had persuasively theorised the "gray zone" for theatrically-influenced performance art being presented in American art institutions, her gray zone does not describe the situation in Singapore.¹ The gray zone presupposed a history of suspicion between the fields of visual art and theatre, a history that existed in New York through the writings of Michael Fried. This lineage does not properly exist in Singapore, as there has been a close relationship between visual art and theatre. This relationship deepened especially after 1994, when an incident with the Singapore state threw practitioners of both art and theatre toward a united front. This article will discuss events such as THE CUTTING EDGE [no, not the arts festival …] (29 February–30 March 1996), an experimental theatre festival by TheatreWorks (renamed T:>Works in 2020), which presented work that hovered on the precipice of art while determinedly declaring themselves as theatre. Jailani "Zai" Kuning's Growing Madness: The Day After (7–9 March 1996), Lee Wen's Hand-Made Tales (14–16 March 1996) were two works from this festival that demonstrate the character of the black cube. By discussing these case studies, the article expands upon Bishop's theorisation of performance space from a Singaporean lens. Unlike gray zone works, which were habituated to the white cube, black cube works continued to antagonise the categories of visual art and theatre through denying objective distance in the work.

Figure 1.

Pillows scattered over the floor of The Black Box, TheatreWorks, Singapore. Screenshot from Ray Langenbach's impression of Zai Kuning, Growing Madness: The Day After, 7–9 March 1996. Courtesy of Ray Langenbach.

Theatre in Art

Coming into the foreground with Michael Fried's declaration in his 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood" that "theatre and theatricality are at war today … with art", ideas of theatre and theatricality in visual art had been viewed with caution and sometimes suspicion.² The problem with theatricality, according to Fried, was that the artwork included:

all of it—including, it seems, the beholder's body. There is nothing within his field of vision—nothing that he takes note of in any way—that, as it were, declares its irrelevance to the situation, and therefore to the experience, in question.…it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him.

[italics in original]³

Theatre, as originally theorised by Fried, was not the artistic practice or discipline of theatre but a narrow band of artistic practice that engaged and demanded viewer participation in real time, whether willingly or otherwise. For Fried, the pursuit of art and aesthetic experience was intrinsically linked to the dematerialisation of the body. Speaking to the New York art world reading Donald Judd's 1965 essay "Specific Objects", "Art and Objecthood" was a direct attempt, through the essay title and explicit mentions of Judd and other Minimalists in the argument, to refute Judd's assertions for Minimal art.⁴ "Theatrical" works of art, like those produced by Judd, confronted the beholder. They did not allow for the beholder to suspend their own physicality. This suspension was fundamental for what Brian O'Doherty in 1976 conceptualised as the white cube:

The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, space-occupying bodies are not—or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins for further study.⁵

By 1976, the presence of bodies in the New York art galleries was a taint on the white cube gallery. In this space, objects met "a transforming force … the empty gallery itself becomes art manqué, and so preserves it".⁶ O'Doherty's white cube allowed for a subtle but significant shift: art historical theatricality was adopted by a specific place, the white cube, and it was this space that framed the singular relationship between the beholder and the artwork beheld.⁷ The body was left at the door of the white cube, where only the Cartesian mind, the roving eye, the camera's lens and the installation shot could enter.

Neither Fried nor O'Doherty were thinking about Asia, Southeast Asia or Singapore in their writing. Fried was mounting a challenge against Judd and Judd's competing views for art from the "American new world".⁸ O'Doherty was making observations on fashionable commercial galleries in New York in the 1970s. As Australian art critic Terry Smith already pointed out in a September 1974 Artforum article, "provincialism pervades" even within New York.⁹ That Fried was having a very specific argument with Judd and that O'Doherty was looking at something in his literal physical presence did not matter to everyone else who applied their ideas liberally to the rest of New York and the world. This was an argument postcolonial scholars might recognise through Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincialising Europe (2000), published a quarter of a decade after Smith.¹⁰ Chakrabarty's engagement with "the universals … forged in eighteenth-century Europe" was preceded by, in a slightly different way, Smith's critique that universal artistic recognition was limited to "a few artists, galleries, critics, collectors, museums, and magazines" like Artforum.¹¹ That the world continued to see itself as peripheral to New York despite Smith's essay in one of the leading art magazines of its day was further evidenced by the successful exportation of white cube architecture from New York to the rest of the world. In Singapore, the Singapore Art Museum (founded 1992, opened 1996) was renovated as a "post-modern" museum. Gallery spaces were designed, seemingly without objection by the founding director Kwok Kian Chow, as "white boxes".¹² While New York was geographically and culturally distant from Singapore, its battles were being exported and felt in Singapore.

In comparison to the white cube, theatre's black box does not seem to have attracted as much scholarly ink as the white cube. Bishop attributed the black box's rising popularity to Jerzy Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) and Peter Brook's The Empty Space (1968).¹³ This attribution posed a particularly interesting art historical parallel in chronological time. At around the same time that Judd articulated modernist painting as an attempt to "get rid of … the salient and most objectionable relics of European art", Grotowski was calling for a poor theatre "eliminating whatever proved superfluous".¹⁴ At around the same time when O'Doherty was discussing "kinesthetic mannequins" in the gallery, Brook had claimed "any empty space" as "a bare stage" for theatre: "A man walks across this empty space … this is all that is needed for an act of theatre."¹⁵ O'Doherty's turn of phrase, white cube, was in direct parallel to theatre's black box. What Grotowski and Brook wanted to remove from modern theatre was exactly the details that revealed the physical reality of the human body and how it may relate to the theatrical audience.¹⁶

Both the white cube and the black box were similar discipline-specific spaces that crystalised and supported the Modernist rebellion against formal or structural traditions from European history.¹⁷ Both were attempts to interrogate what was specific to their respective disciplines, a liminal point for what constituted art or theatre respectively. Bishop's post-smartphone gray zone acknowledged this historical legacy and was suggesting a form of coalescence, where theatre practitioners moved out of the limitations of two-hour black box showings to the durational, and physically demanding, expectations of a museum open from 10am–6pm every day. In "White Cube, Black Box, Gray Zone" (2018), Claire Bishop observed the increasing "incursion of the performing arts" in museological spaces.¹⁸ Sitting between the black box and white cube, these performances were conceptualised by a visual artist and performed by professional dancers, singers and actors according to a loose "event-score".¹⁹ Bishop came to this term through John Latham's understanding of "a theory of 'event-structure,' in which the 'least event' is the minimum unit of existence"²⁰ and Richard Stites's description of The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920) by Nikolai Evreinov as containing a "detailed score".²¹ Latham was describing art that was reducible to a singular statement while Stites's "score" emphasised the importance of heavy directorial, or artistic, input as well as technical finesse in a visually compelling work.²² As the "score" suggested, the performers' capabilities were key to artistic success.²³ The idea of an event-score thus implies a form of controlled improvisation by the performer-actors while recuperating the singularity of the artist. This was in distinct opposition to what Fried and O'Doherty had identified and named—a form of art that was in "an antagonistic and de-skilled relationship with the performing arts".²⁴ In Bishop's gray zone, the visual artist relied on performing artists to actualise their art: it was a space in which dance intervened in contemporary art space.²⁵ In doing so, she mounted an oblique critique on the High Modernist demand for "full concentration and focused vision" in the white cube.²⁶

A contemporary art festival, like the Venice Biennale, afforded a perfect middle ground or gray zone between the anti-theatrical white cube and the physically dynamic black box. Relieved of its architectural burdens, it was where theatre could venture into the story of modern and contemporary art. At the same time, the white cube could remain untouched. The grey zone recognised a demilitarised zone where the actors of art and theatre interacted, cautiously. While it was true that the body was now activated into action, its physical labour remained separated from the roving eye's, which critically tracked the event-score's unfolding from a distance. Bishop's placement of dance-influenced performance art in the art institution was only accomplished in parenthesis. The contemporary art museum remained white and was only coloured in authorised spaces at the fringes. In every space, the body should be set aside.

It would be amiss not to point out, at least in passing, the imperialist overtones of O'Doherty's white cube. Even in its conception, O'Doherty had dreamt of "a temporal corridor hung with blank canvases—from 1850, 1880, 1910, 1950, 1970. Each contains, before a brush is laid on it, assumptions implicit in the art of its era." The white cube was not neutral but already full of art and art history, specifically from the French salon. Any work produced from the post-colony was necessarily alien to the cube and, if made for the cube, had to establish its right to a place in the French art historical lineage. Within these conditions of heightened rigour for the post-colonial artwork, the black box served as an alternative space for the production of work, whether visual art or theatre.

Figure 2.

Roszali b Samad, Roy Payamal and Ivory Chu in full bodysuits running in circles while laughing hysterically in The Black Box, TheatreWorks, Singapore. Screenshot from Ray Langenbach's impression of Zai Kuning, Growing Madness: The Day After, 7–9 March 1996. Courtesy of Ray Langenbach.

What thus remained unsaid was the kind of space investigated by artists such as Zai Kuning (b. 1964–) and Lee Wen (b. 1957–d. 2019), who moved from the sustained visibility of the white cube in favour of the ephemeral contingency of theatre. Their relationships with the disciplines of art and theatre were neither antagonistic, as the gray cube artists, nor wholly orthodox, as the white cube artists and black box actors. Rather, their practices fit uncomfortably in both disciplines as exploring the durational across and through different performances in time. This space would be referred to in this article as the black cube.²⁷ Working outside of the white cube from the black box and exceeding their demands, this article suggests that their work at THE CUTTING EDGE festival was simultaneously experimental performance art and experimental theatre.

Zai Kuning

In November 1995, it was announced that Zai Kuning (b. 1964–) would be leading one of three theatre groups in residence at The Substation, a multi-disciplinary, artist-run space in Singapore. This residency programme was tied to the annual Raw Theatre festival, a flagship event for The Substation, which aimed to support "exploratory theatre projects".²⁸ Zai's residency project was titled The Growing Madness. In the same article reporting his participation in Raw Theatre, theatre critic Quah Sy Ren described Zai as one of the "leaders from different areas of theatre".²⁹ In March 1996, after five months of workshops and rehearsals for Raw Theatre, Zai further presented Growing Madness: The Day After (7–9 March 1996, hence The Day After) at THE CUTTING EDGE, a theatre festival emphasising "new theatre forms, styles, techniques and talents".³⁰ Within a period of six months, Zai had received support from two major theatre spaces in Singapore, The Substation and TheatreWorks, a feat most emerging theatre practitioners would be unable to achieve.³¹ Taken together, these endorsements recognise this theatre practitioner's work as a significant contribution to the theatre scene in Singapore.³²

Zai had been continuously involved in theatre since the early 1990s. In 1991, he was a collaborator in the first annual Raw Theatre festival.³³ In 1992, he initiated Metabolic Theatre Laboratory (MTL), a physical theatre group focusing on rituals and trance in Southeast Asian cultures.³⁴ In 1999, after disbanding MTL, he continued with a travelling residency about the orang laut (sea people) with TheatreWorks, initially for three months and later extended to a six-month period.³⁵ In 2004, he began studying mak yong, an ancient opera from Mantang, Riau, Indonesia. In 2010, he was an advisor to TheatreWorks and in 2013 was awarded a Creation Grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore (NAC) to research and stage mak yong performances in Singapore.³⁶ His work has attracted critical interest from scholars in theatre and performance studies, including a notable 2018 discussion by Paul Rae calling "Zai Kuning … a theatre person".³⁷

Zai was trained in visual art before his foray into theatre. In 1989, he completed a diploma in ceramics at LASALLE College of the Arts (LASALLE). In the same year, he joined as founding member and first President of The Artists Village (TAV). He continued being involved in TAV through the 1990s, including living at its original Lorong Gambas location in 1989.³⁸ Throughout his collaboration in Raw Theatre, in which he was involved from its inaugural edition in 1991, he contributed to exhibitions like A Sculpture Seminar (1991, The National Museum Art Gallery (NMAG), Singapore) while further working on MTL.³⁹ In fact, when interviewed about Growing Madness for Raw Theatre, Zai confessed that he was not sure how he ended up in the programme. While he had been aware of and was involved as a collaborator in Raw Theatre since 1991, his work "was more performance art" than theatre.⁴⁰ In 1996, while MTL was still active and while working on The Day After, he further completed a

Figure 3.

Ivory Chu and Roy Payamal in full bodysuits confronting Azmy "Azmi" Hassan. Screenshot from Ray Langenbach's impression of Zai Kuning, Growing Madness: The Day After, 7–9 March 1996. Courtesy of Ray Langenbach.

BA in Fine Art at LASALLE and was an invited artist at the 2nd Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT2, 22 September 1996–19 January 1997) in Queensland Art Gallery (QAG), Brisbane, Australia, a major contemporary art festival. His exploration in visual art and theatre happened simultaneously. At no point was a choice made to step decisively from one discipline to another. He was equally a full theatre practitioner and a full visual artist.

While the gray zone seemed an effective concept for the reception of a significant cross section of contemporary art involving theatre practitioners, Zai's theatre was not working in the gray zone in either the physical or metaphorical sense. Growing Madness: The Day After (7–9 March 2021) was presented at The Black Box, TheatreWorks, Fort Canning Park, Singapore.⁴¹ In recordings of pre-performance rehearsals, Zai provided detailed directorial inputs, instructing and refining to his performers' movements. As director, he observed, critiqued and adjusted the performers in their craft. The final performance survived in the form of a video impression by Ray Langenbach, who recorded it across all three days of performance and edited the raw footage into a single video.⁴² Langenbach's impression suggested The Day After was precise and consciously choreographed with costume, script, intonation,

Figure 4.

Zai Kuning in white slacks captured in Ray Langenbach's impression of ZaiKuning, Growing Madness: The Day After, 7–9 March 1996. Courtesy of Ray Langenbach.

footwork, lighting and music. In the darkened space, four barefoot performers moved, interacted and reacted to the accompaniment of pulsing music, surrounded by audience members who sat along one side of the Box's walls. Three of the performers, one female (Ivory Chu) and two male (Roy Payamal and Roszali b Samad), began the performance dressed in beige-white loincloths and beige-white bodysuits padded with scrap cloth and pillows layered over white or black T-shirts and shorts. They screamed, laughed hysterically, ran back and forth across the stage, engaged in personal confessionals and sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in English and Mandarin. They were joined by Azmy "Azmi" Hassan, who was topless and in dark slacks. They performed soliloquys, made hostile demands of each other, and engaged in physical tumbles with each other. As the performance progressed, Chu, Roszali and Payamal stripped themselves and each other of their bodysuits, littering the stage floor. Azmi also removed his slacks as the show progressed, closing the performance in light-coloured, patterned boxers. While uncredited in TheatreWorks' material on the event, Zai made an appearance as the fifth performer, performing a solo segment in white slacks, followed by a collaborative segment with the other named performers.⁴³ The white cube, let alone the grey zone, was not of any concern in the making and staging of The Growing Madness series. This was black box theatre.

It seemed clear that Zai's dual practice in visual art and theatre was understood and accepted in the mid-1990s. Such a reading was particularly compelling when considering the corresponding Chinese translation of the term "performance art" in the bilingual article about Raw Theatre in The Substation News. The remark that his practice was "more performance art" was translated as 视觉艺术 (shìjué yìshù).⁴⁴ Shìjué yìshù, which transliterates as 'sense art', was more commonly used to describe visual art rather than performance art. Furthermore, between 1995 and 1996, shìjué yìshù was only used two other times in this bilingual bi-monthly magazine, both times in relation to visual, rather than performance art.⁴⁵ In Sinophone art historical literature in and outside of Singapore, performance art has been referred to with a variety of terms including 表演艺术 (biǎoyǎn yìshù, performance art), 现场艺术 (xiànchǎng yìshù, live art), 动态艺术 (dòngtài yìshù, movement art), 身体艺术 (shēntǐ yìshù, body art) and 行为艺术 (xíngwéi yìshù, action art), the most popular being the last. At the time of this writing, xíngwéi yìshù has been established as the most common term for performance art, followed by biǎoyǎn yìshù. The latter term was further chosen by Cheo Chai-Hiang in his 2004 essay about performance art, published in the catalogue for the first Future of Imagination (FoI) performance art festival in Singapore.⁴⁶ The term shìjué yìshù, in relation to the plethora of terms available, was comparatively imprecise. Choosing to describe Zai's work as more shìjué (visual) art in the same article that considered him a leader of an area of theatre suggested that, at least from the perspective of Chinese-language theatre discourse in Singapore, there was a space for visual artists to perform in the black box theatre.

That shìjué yìshù, rather than the other, more popular terms, was used was deliberate. Listed as a contact person for Raw Theatre was Chinese-literate performance artist Amanda Heng, who would have been familiar with the different terms and their nuances in Chinese.⁴⁷ Furthermore, in the only other instance the term "performance art" had been used in this same bilingual magazine that year, the translation chosen was dòngtài yìshù or movement art.⁴⁸ The inconsistency in translation not only betrayed an editorial opinion about Zai's form of theatre, which tended toward visual rather than movement-based art, but further subsumed his practice under what contemporary reviewer and future-Artistic Co-Director of The Substation Lee Weng Choy called "visual theatre".⁴⁹ What exactly visual theatre was and how it could be distinguished from performance art or non-visual theatre remained unexplained.⁵⁰ However, taking the idea of shìjué theatre seriously allows us to reconsider the value and potential of visual artists' autonomy within the black box in Singapore.

Socio-political Constraints

The socio-political conditions of mid-1990s Singapore encouraged an alliance between practitioners nominally affiliated with visual art, performance art and theatre. On 21 January 1994, a de facto ban on a certain form of performance was instituted by the Singapore state. The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the then Ministry of Information and the Arts (MITA, currently restructured as Ministry of Communications and Information or MCI), the ministries in charge of the ban, stated that:

Organisers of scriptless public performances must provide a synopsis when they apply for a public entertainment license. …NAC … will not support performance art or forum theatre.⁵¹

In instituting its de facto ban, the ministries had to be explicit on what kind of performance was to be restricted. "Performance art" and "forum theatre", as discursive terms in the discipline, were too vague. Rather, the specific characteristic under contention, its "scriptless" nature, had to be spelt out. Here, "scriptless" contrasted performances such as Shakespearean plays, for which detailed written directions for both verbal and non-verbal action were prepared, with the improvisational and seemingly unprepared nature of some forms of performance art and forum theatre. This announcement impacted the development of performance art and theatre in two primary ways. First, addressing both performance art and forum theatre rallied the practitioners and allies of both disciplines and encouraged bipartisan behaviour among two groups that should have, according to Fried's theorisation, been opposed. Second, the explicit ban of a limited and specific type of performance art and forum theatre, those that were completely "scriptless", encouraged the artistic community to focus their enquiry on theatrically-influenced, rather than activist, dance-oriented, community-engaged or other directions that had been explored in performance art to date.⁵² Theatrically-influenced performance art was loosely scripted and often partially rehearsed.⁵³ It followed event-scores that adapted to the site and audience of performance.

Much has been said and published by artist-scholars such as Susie Lingham and Ray Langenbach on the debilitating impact of the de facto ban on artistic practice from 1994 to 2003 in Singapore.⁵⁴ More recently, curator June Yap referred to 1994 as "the unfortunate fallout … in art history and the art scene".⁵⁵ Lingham, Langenbach and Yap's criticisms insisted determinedly on a misunderstanding between the artistic community and the Singapore state. Yap argued:

in looking at these artworks could one categorically profess them to be sufficiently radical to rile the State?.…in the case of Brother Cane.…the charge of delinquency was triggered by an unfortunate incendiary headline, rather than by the performance itself⁵⁶

The events leading up to the ban has already been comprehensively covered and is otherwise outside the scope of this article. In brief, a series of performances, including Vincent Leow's Coffee Talk (31 December 1992–1 January 1993, Body Fields, 5th Passage Gallery) and Josef Ng's Brother Cane (1 January 1994, AGA, 5th Passage Gallery), were negatively reported by Singapore state media. Leow's Coffee Talk was reduced to a single act, the unacceptable drinking of bodily discharge.⁵⁷ Ng's Brother Cane was similarly reduced to unacceptable public nudity and gross trimming of pubic hair.⁵⁸ Decontextualised actions that corresponded to societal perceptions of 'delinquency' were reported by the state media, resulting in a fundamental misunderstanding of what happened by the general newspaper-reading public in Singapore. Consequently, the Singapore state was obliged to react and to impose restrictions on this little-understood art form, resulting in a curtailment of performance art for the following decade. This narrative suggested that with proper education, a de facto ban would not have been imposed. The works' "scriptless" nature was not the issue. Rather, it was a lack of understanding for what these performances and the art form in general was about.

Current scholarship tends to isolate the negotiation of performance art in Singapore from the global movement of political and social expression. In Coffee Talk, Leow had a chat with the audience about art in an installation "set like a cafe". He then turned away from his audience and urinated in a cup. Re-joining his audience, he drank from the cup before cutting locks of his hair which he placed in envelopes, then distributed to select members of the audience. He performed as himself, the artist, the producer and consumer of art, critiquing the lack of support for the arts in Singapore.⁵⁹ In Brother Cane, Ng thematized coverage of a sting operation at a known cruising site for gay men. Presenting a series of newspaper clips about this operation alongside silken tofu and bags of red-dyed water, he danced and hit the tofu with a rattan cane, a common tool of punishment for children in the Singaporean household in the mid-1990s. He then moved away from the audience. With his back to his audience, he pulled down the front of his shorts and snipped off tufts of his pubic hair. Rejoining his audience after readjusting his shorts, he presented the hair with the whipped tofu. The persona of Brother Cane embodied simultaneously the Singapore state's policy of corporal punishment of gay men, and the Singapore citizen who enacted self-censorship upon his fellow citizens. These artists saw and used their bodies politically, drawing attention to their passive audiences' implicit endorsement of poor state patronage and punishment respectively. This strategy echoed positively with Bishop's interpretation of European artists such as Elmgreen & Dragset, Maurizio Cattelan and Jeremy Deller using their bodies as "metonymic shorthand for politicised identity", visualising economic disjuncture in their respective societies.⁶⁰ Lack of understanding was not the issue. Rather, it was the concisely understood political threat by the kind of performance art practised by artists such as Leow and Ng in the mid-1990s that was at stake.⁶¹

While there were some seemingly vulgar acts involved in their performances, the fundamental offence was exposing problematic societal disjunctions: visions of the artist forced to consume and gift his own product and of the virtuous citizen enacting physical violence upon other citizens. In both performances, Leow and Ng were commenting on the responsibilities and disjunctions experienced by the Singaporean Artist and Citizen respectively.⁶² In the former, Leow simultaneously tapped into the concerns of a society that did not and arguably continues not to have a culture of art appreciation and the anxieties of a state that only just began making a stand in the global art world.⁶³ In the latter, Ng visualised the inherent contradiction of a communal society divided by the societal demand for self- and peer-censorship. The threat was not merely the vulgar drinking of urine or offensive nudity in an art space.⁶⁴ While the curtailment of artistic liberty may align with misunderstandings about performance art and forum theatre as practised in 1990s Singapore, it was more precisely enacted in response to the political activist potential of performance art practised at this time.

On 28 November 2003, the de facto ban was lifted via grants awarded to Future of Imagination (FoI), Singapore's first performance art festival, and a forum theatre piece by Drama Box.⁶⁵ By this time, the de facto ban had been in place for almost a decade. The cast of predominantly local artists and actors for both events performing a mere week from the grant approval would suggest that the ban did not stop performance or theatre from flourishing in Singapore. Clearly, the ban, while significant, did not completely eradicate both art forms in Singapore. As recently expressed on Facebook by the major artist group The Artists Village (TAV), performance art and forum theatre were not banned in this decade. Rather, performance artists and forum theatre practitioners continued to practise by finding other forms of funding.⁶⁶ This was accomplished through a series of linguistic acrobatics centred around the terms "scriptless", "experimental" and "theatre".

Scriptless

What does it mean to present performance art in the black box and how does that differ from the white cube or grey zone work? Key to Zai's TheatreWorks' presentation was demonstrable pre-meditation. The Day After was presented for the first time in TheatreWorks, but to the bureaucrats, it did not seem that way because its full title was Growing Madness: The Day After. The written proposal for TheatreWorks would have seemed like it was a re-presentation of his Raw Theatre project, Growing Madness. In other words, there seemed to be nothing new in the TheatreWorks performance. Both followed the same event-score. However, between The Substation and TheatreWorks, Growing Madness had gone from a residency project to a ticketed production. The distinction was that of a work-in-progress which was not presented to the public except incidentally, and a finished work subjected to the bureaucratic evaluations of public performances. The former did not need a script while the latter did. This expectation was echoed in Lee Wen's Hand-Made Tales, the third event for THE CUTTING EDGE. Lee's triple-bill show (Handmade Tales, 14–16 March 1996, The Black Box, TheatreWorks) presented performances that had previously been enacted exclusively in art museums or performance art festivals: Journey of a Yellow Man no. 8: Annotated Version of the Story So Far … (14 March 1996), Neo-Baba: Licensed Road (15 March 1996) and Ghosts Stories (16 March 1996). Yellow Man was in its eighth iteration, Neo-Baba and Ghosts Stories in their fourth.⁶⁷ None of these four performances had a script. However, in being repeat performances, there were event-scores. Such performances progressed from one to another, making the Growing Madness's progression from residency project to public performance both accurate and a fundamental misunderstanding of the work. Hence, the paradox of the de facto ban on performance art and forum theatre: while there were no dramatic scripts for Zai or Lee Wen's productions, they were also scripted, as evidenced by written synopses on event collateral. By corresponding to the expectations of movement-based theatre, they could not be bureaucratically understood as "scriptless" or performance art. At least, they were shìjué theatre, a form of new experimental theatre that ironically deserved further promotion. This was despite, in Lee's case, having been performed exclusively in white cube spaces and having been previously recognised exclusively as performance art and not theatre or shìjué theatre. The site and context of previous performances were irrelevant. What mattered was that both artists did not present 'new' work. All four performances referred to earlier performances that could be referenced, narrated and verified for non-incendiary socio-political impact.

In Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, performance studies scholar Shannon Jackson argued that the experimental in performance was a disruption of a medium. There was

a kind of experimental chiasmus across the arts; a movement toward painting and sculpture underpins post-dramatic theatre, but a movement toward theatre also underpins post-studio art … a critical sense of their innovation will differ depending upon what medium they understand themselves to be disrupting, i.e. which medium is on the other end of whose "post."⁶⁸

To recognise a work as "post-dramatic theatre" or "post-studio art" was simultaneously affirming its place as performance either through theatre or art. Shìjué theatre, as exemplified by Zai's and Lee Wen's presentations at THE CUTTING EDGE, was that linguistic stutter where at least one Chinese twentieth-century conceptualisation of performance art pre-empted that uncertain space for work that fit in, and was often seen to engage with, both theatre and art. It was exactly because the Growing Madness project was supported by and produced in two theatre spaces—Raw Theatre at The Substation and TheatreWorks—that it was understood as theatrical work. At the same time, Zai's training in fine art and his continued participation in art exhibitions from the 1990s to the present suggested that there was a movement toward the visual, even if neither his residency with Raw Theatre nor the presentation at TheatreWorks was ever received as visual performance art or delegated performance.

Nothing in the recordings of Zai's Growing Madness project at either The Substation or TheatreWorks was out of the ordinary for a theatre rehearsal. However, the process from rehearsal to public production could also be seen as an expected, or understandable, process for delegated performances. Unlike conventional dramatic theatre, there was also no linear or coherent narrative. The Substation presentation was effectively a series of images and sounds collaged together as if it was a visual art exhibition presented in linear time. Correspondingly, the Growing Madness project could have been performed in white cube institutions and would have then been understood as experimental performance or post-studio art because of directorial control, mode of rehearsal, linear time and the use of other spatial and temporal conventions from the dramatic theatre. Depending on which medium or discipline Zai began from, it was either experimental theatre or experimental art. That it could be presented in both the black box and the white cube but not comprehensible as a grey zone work is what defines the character of the black cube.

The simultaneous movement toward post-dramatic theatre and post-studio art could be more clearly understood with the documents available around Lee Wen's presentation of Neo-Baba. In 1995, Neo-Baba was presented at VA:nishiogi Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Castle of Imagination—3rd International Artists Meeting, Bytow, Poland; and 3rd Chiang Mai Social Installation, Chiang Mai, Thailand. It was further performed, after its TheatreWorks presentation on 15 March 1996, in October 1996 at Rencontre internationale d'art performance et Multimédia 1996, Le Lieu, Quebec, Canada, and in December 1997 at Bangkok Performance Conference, Bangkok, Thailand after TheatreWorks. Among the documentation for the latter conference was the following statement by German organiser Boris Nieslony:

Although the conference can be humorous and much alive, it shall not be like a Festival" [sic] where simply different acts are presented to amuse the audience. Artperformance [sic] is no theatre … [my italics].⁶⁹

Nieslony was very familiar with Lee's practice as they were both part of Black Market International, a grouping of performance artists. He would have known that a version of Neo-Baba was presented as part of a festival that showcased "bold new Singapore theatre" the year before. "Artperformance" was a direct translation of the German compound word Kunstperformance, coming from the German die Kunst (art) and die Performance (performance). These terms in turn emerged in reaction to the increasingly blurred boundaries between the visual and performing arts. By declaring "Artperformance is no theatre", Nieslony effectively declared Neo-Baba was Kunstperformance (performance art), not theatre (die Darstellenden Künste or das Theater).

Scripts and text took a central role in the objectification and definition of performances and performance art in Singapore. In the aftermath of the de facto ban, fully scripted performances were viewed as orthodox while "scriptless" performance art was viewed with suspicion. Neither properly existed. At the same time, some forms of performance art did work from event-scores that were a kind of script. It was in that space of limited but clear scripting that performances such as The Day After, Yellow Man, Neo-Baba and Ghosts Stories could be granted public entertainment licences in Singapore just one year after the MITA declaration that "NAC … will not support performance art or forum theatre."⁷⁰

Figure 5.

Lee Wen looking confused while contemplating whether he was an actor or performance artist in Ray Langenbach's impression of Lee Wen, Neo-Baba: Licensed Road, 15 March 1996. Courtesy of Ray Langenbach.

Art in Theatre

The mid-1990s Singapore context, especially at THE CUTTING EDGE, exceeded Jackson's idea of experimental performance as post-medium. Zai did not understand himself as a theatre or visual art practitioner; he considered both disciplines as part of a singular artistic practice.⁷¹ He did not deliberately set out to disrupt either or both. Similarly, while a case could be made for Lee's negotiation of experimental art, the potential for the performances of Hand-Made Tales to be seen and literally considered at TheatreWorks as experimental theatre could not be ignored. Performances developed in the white cube became, in the A5 brochure about THE CUTTING EDGE, "the future of the performing arts … a bold new Singapore theatre".⁷² In one gesture, Lee brought these works from the white cube into the black box, producing a "post" performance artwork. Yet these works never left the white cube either. Nieslony's contemporaneous interpretation of Neo-Baba as "no theatre" sat in direct contraposition to the promotional material of TheatreWorks. That Lee never bothered to correct TheatreWorks, Nieslony, or both, was exactly the kind of obfuscation and ambiguity that this article

Figure 6.

Audience for Lee Wen's Ghost Stories at The Black Box, TheatreWorks, Singapore, fidgeting and looking around for instruction after the overhead lights have been turned on. From Ray Langenbach's impression of Lee Wen, Ghost Stories, 16 March 1996. Courtesy of Ray Langenbach.

argues distinguished the negotiations of artistic space and augmented the presence of the black cube in this period in Singapore.

The audience for THE CUTTING EDGE may not have recognised it as a performance art festival. The Neo-Baba series thematised speech and communication, specifically the loss of alleged language skills and origins. This event-score was contextualised to Singapore by Lee in Neo-Baba: Licensed Road. Upon entering the stage in TheatreWorks, he spoke confusedly about whether he was a performance artist who acted or an actor acting as a performance artist. He regularly referenced theatrical expectations, albeit to admit he had forgotten his lines. These statements, which respond to the partial censorship of some forms of performance art and theatre, were unique to the TheatreWorks iteration. The subtitle for this work, Licensed Road, further pointed to questions of legality. Lee Wen's statements were site-sympathetic or site-responsive adaptations to Singapore, where the breakdown in communication hinged on the precise artistic identity of the performer. Neo-Baba was followed on the next evening by Ghost Stories. The Ghost Stories series of performances played with whispers, truths and half-carried out plans that left its audiences confused, or paranoid, about what was or was not real. By the time the lights came on, most audience members remained paralysed in their seats, fidgeting restlessly. They were unclear whether the performance was over as, in a white cube gallery, the adjustment of lights did not necessarily indicate the end of a performance but merely its progression. Embarrassed laughter ensued when an unidentified man finally said "Uh, the show is over."⁷³ Hand-Made Tales at TheatreWorks kept up a tension between theatre and performance art, leaving its audience uncomfortable as to what genre of art it belonged.

A theatrical turn happened between Coffee Talk, Brother Cane and Hand-Made Tales. All three were performed to a small, select audience and watched from beginning to the end. However, where Coffee Talk and Brother Cane were presented in 5th Passage, a space started by visual artists, Hand-Made Tales was presented in a space literally named Black Box and was framed as theatre. Where Coffee Talk and Brother Cane were unique works, Hand-Made Tales was already successfully presented internationally prior to TheatreWorks, repeating and thus denying the charge of complete scriptlessness. Where Leow and Ng exemplified a form of performance art that was recognised and immediately addressed by the Singapore state, Lee returned to identities created by and within known performances, embracing fiction and opacity over critical reality.⁷⁴ Within the frame of the black box theatre, the body could no longer be symbolic of itself. It was a signifier determinedly not of the real, political world and, consequently, did not possess the same antagonistic power.

Lee's known and established identities as the yellow man, the neobaba and the ghost storyteller simultaneously allowed the performances bureaucratic exemption and became the contextual crutch that needed to be confronted and overcome in the Black Box. In Neo-Baba: Licensed Road, he was not an artist but an actor, or perhaps an artist attempting to be an actor playing the role of the performance artist on the theatrical stage. The deliberate walking, re-walking and turning back of these identities highlighted exactly the limitation that a black cube performance held in comparison to those of the white cube: signification.⁷⁵ "It's not a show, it's a performance! It's not a show!" yelled fellow artist Gilles Massot from the backstage of Ghost Stories as the audience vacated their seats to explore the set.⁷⁶ In distinguishing between a "show" and a "performance", Massot was referring to that cutting edge between a theatrical show and a performance art presentation. In the former, the seated audience watched the performance around them, skilfully orchestrated by the invisible labour of theatrical crew. In the latter, the active audience moved through the space laboriously ordered by an installation crew, albeit a world that, once presented, was static for visual

Figure 7.

Close-up of Roy Payamal juggling dark-coloured pins decorated with strips of white. Screenshot from Ray Langenbach's impression of Zai Kuning, Growing Madness: The Day After, 7–9 March 1996. Courtesy of Ray Langenbach.

inspection. Where Leow and Ng broke through the illusionistic veil through self-presentation, Lee needed to break through yet another layer, that of an actor-performer simply delivering their lines.

Similar but differently, Zai made use of his performers' identities outside of theatre within The Day After. Payamal, who is better known as a busker and street performer, juggled. He shared stories of his time in Macau. Zai worked with Payamal as a "street performer" and spoke positively about his "improvisation". For Zai, street improvisation was aligned with the kind of theatre he was personally interested in, "which rejects script".⁷⁷ In including Payamal and his juggling into the work, Zai transplanted a theatrical identity foreign to the black box, unseating his audience as to the form of art being presented. Both performances flickered uncertainly between one frame and another for the audiences throughout their presentations, keeping them uncertain and on the cutting edge, as it were, of the black cube.

Black Cube

As Jackson argued, the sense of the experimental was more than just a movement toward other mediums. It was further "a formal questioning of artistic form and its embedded support systems".⁷⁸ By playing a jester, Payamal exposed the economic inequality between two forms: free street theatre versus ticketed black box production. By muttering about forgotten lines, Lee exposed the unknown hours of work actors spent memorising their lines for effortless delivery on stage and the economic disjunction between free performance art and ticketed theatrical productions. Crucially, both Zai and Lee made visible the individual's contributions to economic work. Where Bishop's gray zone worked as a diplomatic ground negotiating the end of Fried's war, Zai and Lee refamiliarised their audiences with the intimate and tenuous frames that bracketed art and theatre. In so doing, they laid bare the historical conventions that Modernist art and theatre sought to get rid of, producing work that was simultaneously experimental art and experimental theatre.

As Neo-Baba migrated from its international white cube to the Singaporesited black box, the performance remained relatively intact. In a post-show interview, Jason Lim stated he had already seen Neo-Baba from the year before.⁷⁹ More informed audience members, like Lim, have experienced previous iterations and understood these works as performance art pieces. To be more precise, they may know that the three works by Lee in THE CUTTING EDGE festival were previously enacted as works of performance art and was, in TheatreWorks, theatrically inspired "post" performance art. That the focus remained on a textual script despite overwhelming evidence that the works were recognised as performance art was crucial in producing and maintaining this pressure point. Simultaneously, the stakes were those of theatre, specifically its ability to formalise, repeat and demilitarise the politically destabilising potential of live installation.

Much has been said about how between 1995 and 2003, theatre and performance art in Singapore were united in their caution toward the state. Less discussion has been undertaken about how that united front may have impacted the development of both theatre and performance art in Singapore. While not unheard of outside of Singapore, I argue that the socio-political circumstances of mid-1990s Singapore heightened the collaborative impetus between theatre and art. This supported the practices of artists such as Zai, who maintains respect and regard from practitioners and scholars of both theatre and art to date. Such artists, which this article has argued to be working within the black cube, were distinct from interdisciplinary performers of the gray zone. Simultaneously orthodox and experimental in both art and theatre, black cube artists in mid-to-late 1990s Singapore simultaneously elided bureaucratic limitations and generated a socially informed experimental art form that was a different kind of proposal for interdisciplinary performance.