Creating Inconvenience
“I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. I don’t always want to do it, and it’s not always technically enjoyable; sometimes it’s boring or slow, sometimes it’s tiring and pointless, sometimes it’s cold or wet or windy and I’m retracing the same steps around my neighborhood that I’ve walked a thousand times and it sucks and I’m miserable and wish I’d stayed inside. Nonetheless, I always feel worse in my body and mind when I avoid it for too long, and it’s a loss that feels greater than just the quantifiable enumeration of calories I didn’t burn or sunlight I didn’t see. Of course, walking offers the chance of unmatched material reward: only through walking might you stumble upon a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that isn’t on Google Maps, a rich lady doing a yard sale on her stoop, a garden, a special tree, a cat, a $10 bill on the ground. But you also might get spat on by a pervert. When you choose to walk, you choose not to pursue immediate gratification or even comfort but simply to expand the number of things that might happen to you. Walking invests in the potentiality of your experience with almost no promise of tangible reward at all, which is something like being alive.” — Choosing to walk, Rayne Fisher-Quann
This residency has been full of walking, of inconvenience, by design and by accident. I was tasked with curating my own residency, and in thinking about what it might look like, I prioritised three guiding principles, or personal agreements:
People First
Take It Slow
Do one thing a time
I then designed the tasks and projects around these agreements and I took on three playdates, and two verbatim projects for the year. I also knew that I wanted to keep things flexible and remain adaptable, to react to the moment and follow where the journey takes me instead of being fixed to the plan. I knew that I knew very little and the plan was a general road map for me to “walk” through discoveries and curiousities around theatre making.
I have been “walking” a lot in the past 8 months of my residency. The residency has been filled with many creative and non-creative tasks. The nature of my residency requires me to have encounters with people in which I have to schedule time with them, travelling to where they’re at and working around their tasks (like sitting in a barber shop and having conversations in between customers). But juggling this residency, going for rehearsals, performing and making sure I have time to rest in between makes the process very highly inconvenient. This inconvenience created a lot of friction between me and the work, which resulted in a lot of procrastination. And because it’s a verbatim project as well, I spend a lot of time infront of my computer going through transcripts and making notes. I absolutely despise sitting infront of my laptop to do work (which became very clear during this residency). Part of this realisation also meant that I had to make the decision to pause the madrasah project. I realised that the project required a greated amount of attention and care than I am able to afford at the current moment. While I did hesitat to make this decision as it felt like I was abandoning an important project, it was also an act of care to the community that I commit to returning to it when I am able to give it the attention it deserves rather than rush the work for the sake of it.
I think part of this was also an active decision to take it slow. To let things ruminate and not be so eager to create, to go with the flow instead of rushing the process. To take in the moments between the moments, letting the narrators take me to places. I spent 5 hours all the way in changi just listening to Cik Ismail and his band play for retired line dancers on a Thursday evening. I went to the mosque for friday prayers, one to hear Cik Ismail give the call to prayer and meet his mates at an old mosque where there used to be a kampung, and another at the historic Masjid Chulia, just because. I broke fast with madrasah boys, and had conversations that were more candid and told me more about them than the 2 hour focus group we had prior. I met many of Cik Ismail’s friends, peers, customers, and spent time in the different spaces he traverses, hearing, seeing and feeling the essence of his life by being there. But many of these gems that I was collecting along the way won’t reveal themselves to me until only recently, after my final playdate (I’ll share more later)
I have also been walking in the playdates I have been having with different artists. I knew I wanted most of this process to centered around discovery. I have enjoyed bringing different people together. I was very intentional in bringing people together who I know have complimentary art hearts (a term my favourite actress Stephanie Hsu uses to describe our affinity to certain intangible aspects of creativity and art), but may have not been in the same room before. The collective discovery state of these playdates has been exciting. As the facilitator of these playdates, I design and plan with the intention of discovering something I don’t know or have never tried before while also making sure that it is worth the participant’s time. What I loved was being able to learn from how and what they discover, and the playdates created an opportunity for me to think about some of my curiousities through different lenses at a time. However, while the playdates were fruitful, it also did come with the feeling that I was procrastinating, that all I’m doing is playing around and not actually making anything. A guilt that stems from being so product-oriented all the time, also having in my awareness of the resources I’m pulling from. I can’t help but to think this stems from my capitalist Singaporean conditioning. I catch myself in these moments, and had to remind myself to trust in the slowness and that time will reveal the right opportunities, and when that happens, all I have to do is jump on it. Like waiting for a train, you can’t wait faster, you just have to be at the station ready to go. The playdates were my train stations.
Honestly, writing these refelctions have also been very inconvenient. I take so long to write these reflections, I doubt a lot of my discoveries and go back and forth with myself deciding what is worth writing. I’ve been very heartened to hear that people have been reading my reflections too, with some feeling affirmed of their own experiences and others just excited to read about what I’ve been up to. But I am also damn stress knowing that people read these, and I feel like I want to write more “coherently” or “better” or whatever. Like right now, aiya, whatever ah, you don’t understand is okay, I understand can already.
Okay anyways, what I really want to say here is that the inconvenience of the process has been a very valuable part of my residency. In an age where we are spoilt for convenience, and work culture pushing us to “make more time” to hustle, where it is easy for us to scroll to the next interesting thing or scroll past to ignore certain things in the world, letting the algorithms create a feed that make us feel good all the time, or see things only we want to see, inconvenience is now an asset that creates opportunities we wouldnt otherwise stumble upon. Fisher-Quann describes walking as something that “invests in the potentiality of your experience with almost no promise of tangible reward at all, which is something like being alive” in the above quote. Embracing inconvenience means accepting discomfort and confronting inconvenient truths. We often pursue convenience so reflexively that we lose sight of our purpose, whether in creative endeavors or in addressing the injustices in the world. wow deep.
Unrelated to the residency, in an upcoming self-produced show, I have decided to print physical tickets/invites that I have been delivering to invitees in real life, an act that is highly inconvenient but has rewarded me with so many lovely encounters with people who are dear to me, whether it be a coffee chat or a 10 second interaction while we are both rushing off to other appointments.
Inconvenience and slowing down in my residency has plagued me with the guilt of feeling unproductive and feels like procrastinating, but as of my last playdate, rewarded me with a eureka moment where everything finally clicked. I had been wracking my brains trying to figure out what to create for a WIP. I have been leaving my mentors hanging as I had nothing to show or work on, just discoveries and playdates, play play but no work. (hi mentors thank you for your patience with me, you are in my mind all the time, i just didnt want to bother you when i had nothing yet). Then one night, after concluding the final playdate, everything clicked. It felt like my brain finally made the connections between all my discoveries and time spent with people, with the final playdate being the last part of that puzzle, and an idea for a WIP came to me. Something that made me feel excited, and felt like it made sense to the work and people I have spent the past 8 months with. My worry was that I made something just because, and that I would feel like I was creating for the sake of it, but this idea feels just right, in terms of concept, in terms of form, in terms of my why (all this which I will have to refine). The train has finally arrived, and I have all my bags packed to hop on and get to where I need/want to be. (Details of this idea and the initial WIP to be unpacked in another post)
