Feast: Dramafest 2013

Mon, 23 Sep 2013
4 min read
2 Comments

Dramafest combined rehearsals at Eusoff Hall

So one of the things I’ve been busy with this year: coaching undergraduate hostelites from the National University of Singapore (NUS) with their short plays.

Some background about Dramafest:

  • The Halls of Residence at NUS are a pretty competitive bunch. I should know; I stayed at Kent Ridge Hall from 2004 to 2008.

  • An idea was mooted back in 2007/2008 to do something a bit more collaborative.

    Since then, the NUS Halls of Residence have been putting up an annual combined theatre production.

    It involves residents across halls working with one another as they write, direct and act in short plays of about 15 to 20 minutes.

  • I was a part of Dramafest 2008! I think I was super onz then so I submitted four plays… I can’t remember because it was so long ago.

    Anyway, the highlight of that year’s Dramafest was when one of my plays got censored.

    (Context: There’s a joke about making art in Singapore, in that you know you’ve made it as an artist when your work gets censored.)

    If you’re curious, Ho Yi Jian has done a pretty impressive job of archiving some stuff from the past over here and over here.

Anyway, I was invited to be a dramaturg for last year’s Dramafest.

I don’t think I mentioned it here because I remember last year being a damn busy period for me as I learnt how to cope with the freelance life.

Thankfully, I did a fairly decent job, so I was again invited to be the dramaturg for this year’s Dramafest.

As Lee Kuan Yew has said before, it’s always easier the second time round, so ladies and gentlemen, presenting to you: Feast – Dramafest 2013 by the NUS Halls of Residence!

Feast: Dramafest 2013 – Presented by the NUS Halls of Residence

Feast: Dramafest 2013 – Presented by the NUS Halls of Residence
Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2013
Time: 7pm – 10pm
Venue: University Cultural Centre, NUS
Admission is FREE

The plays, in order of performance:

The Stake
By Darryl Lim Yu Cong
In an age where pleasure is prized and gratification is instant, what does it mean to stay faithful to the one you love? The Stake explores themes of love, addiction and infidelity as it portrays a Singaporean man’s entry into the intoxicating world of lust and desire, in a sordid side of Singapore not often seen by many.

The Plumber’s Chime
By Minlu Zheng
Being loved is a lovely feeling: it means care, affection, and, perhaps, having someone to share your life and future with. But being loved can also mean that the distance between two naked bodies is a chasm far too wide to be crossed. How much are you willing to pay for love – or the feeling of being loved?

Playing Games
By Terence Lo
Human beings play games for many reasons: to cope; to entertain themselves; to pass the time. Games are also played because they’re designed in a specific way – to ensure that human beings keep playing the game. But what happens when we break the rules of a game? Playing Games portrays the “sweet sorrow” that the game of love between two people can sometimes bring.

Our Lady Biscotti
By Joelynn Wong
Two nosey baristas. A struggling coffee joint. A flamboyant food critic. A recipe for disaster? Join Gwendolyn and Cecily as they learn the importance of using Ernest – their earnest friend – in their bid to impress a tough food critic and help save Our Lady Biscotti.

Jia(k)
By Gwen Lee
It’s 7pm in an HDB apartment and 愛 (Love) – a popular Taiwanese television drama – has just begun screening. As the opening refrain of the show’s theme song streams forth from the TV, an estranged daughter, a layabout son and an ageing mother have dinner together for the first time in ages. Unlike Taiwanese dramas, however, these characters don’t take weeks to say their lines…

Join the Facebook event here, but more importantly, please join me in watching the students’ work next Saturday!

Stuff you must read today (Fri, 20 Sep 2013) – The Happiness Edition

Fri, 20 Sep 2013
1 min read
2 Comments

The thing about work

Thu, 19 Sep 2013
4 min read
Add Comment

"The bid offer is so wide you could drive a bus through it".

A month ago, I wrote about love and how being with someone should make you more awesome than you already are.

(That hasn’t changed; please keep on with the search for finding that someone if you haven’t already found her/him.)

A month on, some of my friends and loved ones have moved from finding love and romance to finding new careers – or at least gaining some traction in their current ones.

I’m happy for all of them, and thankfully, this time, they’re relatively happy with what they’ve found.

Unfortunately, some of my other friends and loved ones are still stuck in jobs that they dread, dragging their feet into the office in the mornings to do work they can’t stand.

Why?

After five years of being in the workforce and one year of leading the freelance life, I’m convinced that the main reason why people hate their jobs and/or leave is because of the quality of the leadership.

No doubt, there may be other reasons at play.

But if my experiences – and those of my peers – are anything to go by, a good leader makes all the difference.

Like love, the thing about work is that it needs to add value to your life (assuming, of course, that you’re already bringing something to the table).

But a job is a job; it’s something that you do in order to earn your keep.

The real game-changer is the leader who’s giving you good feedback so you minimise the possibility of making mistakes; guiding you so that you avoid pitfalls; and providing you with opportunities for growth and demonstration of value, among others.

I’ve written and posted about the principles of leadership before (read Part I here – the difference between a boss and a leader – and Part II, on what kind of vision a leader needs to have).

Google also has well-researched rules on how to become a better leader, which reiterates what I’ve written about leadership.

At the end of the day, the easiest rubric for measuring how good a leader is is this:

How, and in what ways, is my leader preparing me to take over her/him?

I know this sounds counter-intuitive and self-destructive: who would want to consume herself/himself, break his/her rice bowl, etc.?

But think about it: the moment your leader actively begins to prepare you to take over her/him, isn’t s/he fulfilling all the requisite characteristics a good leader should have, namely:

  • Empowering the team and its members;
  • Being a good communicator; and
  • Helping employees with career development, among others?

(Assuming your organisation is interested in keeping employees, because of the benefits such as talent retention and utilisation, institutional memory, etc.)

Furthermore, if your leader is preparing you to take over her/him, it also gives her/him the impetus to either step aside so that you can grow – or move upward to replace her/his leader (who, ideally, should also be preparing your leader to take over her/him), and so on.

So borrowing from my earlier post about love, if you’re with a leader who constrains you; curtails your development as a human being; turns you into a shadow of your awesome self, then is that leader really good for you?

We shouldn’t let past happiness or promises of future bliss in the work we’re doing cloud our vision.

What we should be doing, really, is focusing on the fundamental issue of how much our leaders are preparing us to take over her/him.

And if the gauge shows a reading that is minimal, negligible – or even negative – then I’d say you know the answer for what you need to do to be happy.