The Substation at 45 Armenian Street was founded in 1990 by the late Kuo Pao Kun
Photo: The Substation/Facebook
Please read THIS announcement regarding the permanent closure of The Substation, if you haven’t already.
This is very sad news.
As a Singapore-based bharatanatyam practitioner, it was The Substation that gave me the space and support to step out of the confines of the classical dance form as I worked towards creating my dance theatre piece - Outcaste Eternal. I still remember Sasi and I sitting in one of the classrooms upstairs to audition the actors. As artistic director of The Substation that provided us with venue support, he did not need to help me. But he did. It was the first time I was doing something like that, after decades of being steeped in bharatanatyam. This was way back in 1998.
Outcaste Eternal was not a happy tale that glorified Indian culture. Instead it shone the light on the deep rooted misogyny and oppressive caste system. At the time, there was no other space for me to venture into such challenging and controversial territory.
23 years later, I can perhaps count on 1 hand or 1 finger, the emergence of other spaces that support the incubation of alternative works in bharatanatyam. But no space can touch the vision and scope of The Substation.
In 2012, I returned there to create and present I watched the flowers with my collaborator Sze Wei. This was a work in which we centred bharatanatyam but allowed ourselves the complete freedom to investigate the repertoire through the lenses of tradition & transition, interculturality, intergenerationality, gender and sexuality. This was possible with The Substation's firm support, then in the hands of Effendy.
I come from a dance form that demands, even in diasporic settings such as Singapore, that its practitioners conform to the prescribed norms and subscribe to the burdensome notion of cultural custodianship. There is very little room for manoeuvre for the few who seek to resist the hegemonic prescriptions. At crucial points on my journey, The Substation was a refuge and stepping stone.
Especially in a context like Singapore, we lose all potential when we devalue and thus erase the one interstice that has truly embraced experimentation in every discipline. The Substation has braved a black and white milieu that rewards political correctness. In this landscape the pushing of boundaries in the arts would generally be explored in alignment with a capitalist model, offering little scope for failure. I think to have the freedom to possibly fail, or let's say to not HAVE to keep proclaiming "success", is also an important part of experimentation.
And then there are the various silos here - of ethnicities, artistic disciplines etc. While there are efforts to transcend them, The Substation seemed to somehow carry in its DNA the dissolution of these boundaries.
The Substation may have made the choice to close, but it was a Hobson's choice.
I think we need to view this as an existential crisis for the arts and artists in Singapore.
Nirmala Seshadri