CHENG Nien Yuan

Lecture Abstract:

This lecture builds on my forthcoming book, The Storytelling State: Performing Lives in Singapore (University of Hawai’i Press), to explore what it means to make art in a world where “story” reigns supreme. The book identifies a new phenomenon in Singapore’s mediascape – the proliferation of public (auto)biographical storytelling – that is facilitated by direct and indirect state involvement and elicited through oral history interviews. This phenomenon has its origins in the work of American organizations such as StoryCorps and the National Public Radio. Indeed, the storytelling state is just one node in a growing global trend of digitally passing our ideas, gestures, and affects to one another in viral, narrative form. This trend may seem to empower and “give voice” to the marginalized, but it can have deleterious and dehumanizing consequences.

The talk traces the work of documentarian Tan Pin Pin, whose films have been characterized as a form of performance research. In her more recent work, I argue that Tan utilizes an anti-narrative dramaturgy that makes visible the workings of a storytelling economy where the ordinary is spectacularized. Her work points to how art can and should make the familiar habits of telling and consuming life stories strange, revealing them as necessarily performative and political.

Workshop Abstract:

This workshop draws from my experiences as a dramaturg for devised theater productions that rely on personal interviews as a mode of research and as material for performances. I will go through the potentials and pitfalls of such a method, and outline possible ways one can make art with personal interviews in a critically reflexive manner. Participants will explore how documentary theater can subvert or resist the tropes of a storytelling state instead of perpetuating them.

Biography:

CHENG Nien Yuan is a Singaporean performance scholar and dramaturg. She is presently a Faculty Early Career Award Fellow at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. She obtained her PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney in 2020. Her work explores the politics and poetics of storytelling and dramaturgy in the digital age, intercultural theatre, and oral histories in/as performance. Her work has been published in the Oral History Review, Studies in Theatre and Performance, and Performance Paradigm among others. She has a forthcoming book, The Storytelling State: Performing Lives in Singapore, published by the University of Hawai’i Press (2025). http://cheng-nienyuan.com