About
Xin Xuan is a Singaporean theatre practitioner and educator working across acting, directing, performance-making, facilitation and research.
Trained as an actor, she graduated from the BA(Hons) Acting programme at LASALLE College of the Arts in 2014.
Over the past decade, Xin Xuan has developed a practice grounded in collaboration, experimentation and an ongoing curiosity about the human condition. Her work moves across performance, community engagement and socially engaged practices, often exploring how we relate to one another and the worlds we inhabit. She is particularly interested in creating spaces for audiences and collaborators to encounter, question and make meaning together.
Her recent work includes Project 12, an ongoing eco-social arts initiative by Drama Box exploring sustainable living and collective futures on Pulau Ubin. Through the project, she engages communities in conversations around ecology, place, and ways of imagining more sustainable futures together.
As an actor, her credits include In the Middle of the Water and Tanah, directed by Kok Heng Leun; The Precise Purpose of Being Broken by Koh Wan Ching for the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival; and Becoming Graphic by Edith Podesta and Sonny Liew for the Singapore International Arts Festival.
Xin Xuan is also committed to exploring collaborative and non-hierarchical ways of making theatre. Alongside her artistic practice, she teaches part-time at LASALLE College of the Arts and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA), working with actors through the Suzuki Method of Actor Training and through a module titled 'Stylised Theatre'.
The Making of Tech M: "How to create theatre that is critical and non-didactic, encouraging audiences to reflect on their relationship with digital technology?"
This practice-as-research (PaR) project investigates how theatre can be both critical and non-didactic while encouraging audiences to reflect on their relationships with digital technology.
Situated within the context of the Singapore theatre landscape, this research seeks to explore an alternative approach to conventional theatre hierarchies in the rehearsal process, in order to move beyond didactic modes of performance.
At the same time, this research responds to concerns about being in an increasingly digitalised world, and offers the act of watching in the theatre as a way to resist the influence of Big Tech.
The research was conducted in three phases. Phase I involved the use of qualitative interviews to examine participants’ lived experiences with digital technology. Phase II adopted a collaborative devising process inspired by the pedagogies of Paulo Freire and Jacques Rancière and the rehearsal methods of Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints, seeking to embody the principles of shared authorship and equal intelligence amongst the team in the rehearsal room.
Audience observation, survey responses and informal post-show conversations from phase III suggest that Tech M was successful in using humour and nostalgia to allow for connection and shared reflection about digital technology to occur amongst the audience. However, these affective responses did not develop into sustained critical reflection that is required for praxis to occur.
The research revealed that although humour is effective in creating connection and accessibility, it can also redirect the audience’s attention away from the more complex social, ethical and political implications of an increasingly digitalised world.
This exegesis then makes the case that the criticality of non-didactic theatre lies not in its ability to persuade the audience to adopt a particular standpoint, but rather, in its creation of conditions that can allow for dialogue and for uncertainty to exist.
This research contributes to an evolving rehearsal methodology that is grounded in collaboration and dialogue, and proposes a relooking at what critical theatre can do for its audiences in today’s digital world.
Professional practice
Choi Jeong Won
Jerry Teo
Gaby Rae
Michelle Zhang
Marcus “Marzipan” Tan
Lai Juan-Xiang, Jesse
