Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
Finland
fellow
Corrie Tan
Home institution
King’s College London and National University of Singapore
Country of origin (home institution)
Singapore
Discipline(s)
Arts and arts studies
Theme(s)
Environment, Sustainability & Biodiversity
Performing arts
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Corrie Tan makes sense of art through intimate writing. A wayfarer between journalism and academia, her creative practice traverses criticism, dramaturgy, facilitation and research. She holds a Ph.D. in theatre and performance studies from King’s College London and the National University of Singapore, and for the past 15 years has written extensively about performance and culture for The Guardian, ArtsEquator, Exeunt Magazine and The Straits Times. Corrie is the arts editor of Jom, an independent digital magazine based in Singapore, and the director of the Asian Dramaturgs’ Network. In her work, she is committed to a politics of care in critical discourse across Southeast Asia.
Research Project
Dramaturgies of Inconvenience: Archipelagic Performance-Making in a Polycrisis
Corrie Tan’s research project traces the dramaturgical practices of three Singaporean artists/groups — socially engaged theatre company Drama Box, minority dance group P7:1SMA and playwright Nabilah Said — as they navigate the climate transition from a small island in the Malay Archipelago. In artmaking, we often consider how the climate and adjacent crises might dictate the creative processes of a work, where artists might source for sustainable materials, reuse sets, or offset carbon. Here, Tan considers the reverse: how dramaturgical thinking can shape climate thinking, especially for island ecosystems that are especially at risk of the ongoing polycrisis. In this vein, her project identifies emergent “dramaturgies of inconvenience” in ecologically oriented Singaporean artmaking, and articulates how inconvenience, and its contingent affects of discomfort, slowness and friction, can become a productive — even pleasurable — frame through which we might collectively address disagreement and dissensus in service of a planetary call to action.
Research Interests:
Theatre and performance studies; Southeast Asian studies; arts criticism; dramaturgy; archipelagic thinking