In pursuit of our mission to integrate the arts into university life, CFA manages several platforms year-round. Where the NUS Arts Festival presents the very best in campus arts (and beyond) and the HERE! Arts Carnival welcomes the new year with a taste of all the arts groups, ExxonMobil Campus Concerts (EMCC) hosts new or experimental pieces by students and external artists each semester.

With an emphasis on being bold and trying new things, numerous artists and works that were first staged as part of EMCC have gone on to achieve great things. The latest of these is Spacebar Theatre, founded by Eugene Koh and Lee Shu Yu (now alumni from FASS), whose piece The Utama Spaceship has been selected as part of the 2020 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival!

We spoke with the Eugene and Shu Yu about their work, their process and how EMCC helped them along the path to success in theatre.

The Utama Spaceship was a big hit at EMCC. What was the inspiration for the play?

As Theatre Studies students at FASS, our interests lay in performance and performance research. We were (and are) always looking for interesting ideas and forms to create theatre with. The Utama Spaceship truly began in September 2017 in a workshop by Dr Daniela Hahn (then post-doc fellow at Freie Universität Berlin).

Prompted to create a performance score (an unconventional starting point for making theatre) inspired by everyday experiences. Shu happened to draw a comic with two panels, which asked the responder to “imagine (they) are a spaceship”. The first panel was a drawing of a spaceship hurtling through space, and the second panel was the spaceship tripping and falling over. When Eugene saw the comic, he responded with an image of his own: a spaceship landing upon a beach with white sands, he called it, “The Utama Spaceship”.

We let this idea simmer for about a year before writing the script. Meanwhile, we collected more and more ideas, researched space travel, and even visited locations like the Seletar Rocket Tower.

Why did you decide to have the first showing of the play at EMCC?

Shu had been in EMCC Crew since her first year of University, so she understood what kind of performances and expectations EMCC had as a platform. It was also an itch for her to scratch. After seeing so many performances from the backstage, she knew she wanted to present something on the other side of the stage too.

We knew that EMCC provided the platform and funding and had very few restrictions on the type of content and creative process its artists could pursue. This was crucial for us, as researchers and as practitioners interested in hypothesising and experimenting. EMCC removed the pressure of selling tickets and making a profit that would normally come with hiring bigger venues and bigger platforms.

This sort of freedom is hard to find when you’re a young artist, and there was definitely a privilege in being able to access this platform to present a fresh work.

With The Utama Spaceship now scheduled to appear at next years’ M1SFF, what’s next?

We did not expect to have a second chance to explore the concept so soon so we’re both entirely focused on this showing.

We have several ideas brewing. Spacebar Theatre is interested in the intersections of theatre, technology and tall tales. Specifically, we’re interested in the human touch that comes with technology (‘hitting the spacebar’). We’re keen to explore not just the hardware, but also the software: how technology affects our thinking, our behaviours, how we relate to each other and especially how we tell stories.

You might see us revisit past work now that we’ve got a clearer focus on what we like and how we work. At the same time, we also have a long list of other strange things that human development has generated and that’s the exciting bit: putting seemingly outlandish ideas and methods through a meat-grinder and seeing what comes out the other side!

Any wise words for young budding talent who want to pursue their dreams in this industry?

Search for opportunities where you can, and if not, make them, even if it is just speaking an idea into existence! Grab a bunch of like-minded people and start something, however small. Look beyond your craft – that’s the most important thing. It’s important to get a range of perspectives from various disciplines and communities so that your work will be continuously renewed by new stimuli.

Don’t just limit yourself to what you know, now’s the time to experiment and explore new frontiers!