Sophie Hope

I tend to glaze over and my mind wanders as soon as pensions are mentioned. I’ve potentially got at least another 26 years of work ahead of me and I struggle to think about what’s happening next month let alone in the year 2044! The current changes proposed by Universities UK are forcing us employees in higher education to become experts in pensions so here’s me trying to get my head around what the hell is going on. It’s also a way of me finding that nugget of anger that I feel I need to sustain me for 14 days of picketing! 

Most of my friends don’t have a pension. As freelance cultural workers they can’t necessarily afford to pay into one. I became a salaried employee for the first time in 2010, aged 33. That was the first time I could afford to join a pension scheme. There are precarious generations heading into pension black holes.

Birkbeck relies a lot on hourly paid teaching and scholarship staff. Many of them have uncertain futures in terms of employment and pensions (they aren’t putting as much in and so won’t get as much back). The most precarious workers are unsurprisingly the worst off in terms of financial long term security. This is worth baring in mind as we enter 14 days of unpaid strike action.

My pension is called the Universities Superannuation Scheme. It is the largest private sector pension in the country.

Universities UK (UUK), ‘the voice of universities’, has proposed changes​ to this scheme. ​

Currently as an employee 26% of my salary goes into the USS defined benefit pension scheme (8% from my salary and 18% from my employer). These pension benefits are based on each year’s salary throughout the period of my membership to the scheme.

UUK wants to close this scheme and transfer our investments into a full defined contribution fund.

It’s really important we understand the difference between these, as this is what the strike action is all about.

As far as I understand it, a defined benefit scheme places the financial risk on the employer (that’s what we’ve currently got) whereas a defined contribution plan places the financial risk on the employee. So you can see why this move is popular for UUK and the university employers they represent.

According to Alistair Jarvis, Chief Executive of UUK: “Without reform now, universities will likely be forced to divert funding allocated from research and teaching to fill a pensions funding gap, or if they did not, they would risk the sustainability of USS. The option of no reform is a dangerous gamble. It is a risk that employers cannot take.” 

The UUK proposal is to shift this risk onto the individual employees leaving the university more able to survive the turbulent times ahead. Pension pots invest in the markets to make interest, enabling them to pay people back the salaries they decided to defer when they can no longer work (I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but that’s how I understand it). It’s a risky business, the questions are where does that risk lie, who takes that risk and at what cost? The defined benefit pension means as employees we are protected from the fluctuating profits and losses of those markets – our employer is still responsible for paying us that pension, no matter what how the investments perform. We know we will have a guaranteed, fixed amount once we retire.

Changing the scheme to a defined contribution fund would mean as employees we are likely to have less income from this scheme when we retire. Employees “may be faced with a decision to delay retirement or find a source of supplemental income when they retire” . According to First Actuarial “lecturers who started working in 2007 and have 10 years of service will lose out on £131,000, a loss of £6,100 annually, while staff with 20 years of service could lose out on £35,000 in total by the time they retire in 2027”.

I can’t imagine ever retiring, but at some point I imagine I will have to stop working. As a parent of a 2 year old with learning difficulties, in 25 years time when I am 66 and Alice is 27 I may well still be a carer. If a defined benefit pension scheme is one guaranteed way I can support her and others who haven’t had the benefits of being able to pay into a pension so far, then that is definitely a fight worth having, in my opinion. Especially given the demise of disability benefits and state pensions. 

We had a high turn out at Birkbeck in our ballot for industrial action over this. 53.7% of members returned their ballot papers (I wish it had been higher, why did so many not return their ballot?!). Of them, 93.7% voted to strike. We had the first of our weekly meetings at Birkbeck to organise which was really well attended. People are angry and now I’ve found my nugget of anger in this sly shifting of risk, I hope even more of my colleagues will get angry too.

By joining the picket lines from 22 Feb I am prepared to lose pay for the days I am striking as I want to stand alongside my colleagues and fight these changes publicly and loudly.

I hope those who voted to strike will join us on the picket lines (if you work at Birkbeck email ucu@bbk.ac.uk to be added to the picket rota).

I hope those who aren’t members are encouraged to join UCU and stand with us in this fighting this threat to our terms and conditions of employment.

Email me on sophiehope[at]me.com if you have any edits to suggest, facts to add, or stories to share on this matter!

Disclaimer: These are my own thoughts and ideas on the matter, best check your union branches and employers for more info. 

“From a historical point of view – no matter how miserable my situation is – at this hour in the world’s history I have an advantage over you because I am compelled – I am speaking as a Black man, to doubt my history, to examine it, and I am compelled to try to create it”…”That means I have to question everything, whereas the White liberals at precisely the opposite position of being in the main, unwilling, and as well as unable, to examine the forces which have brought him to where he is, which have created him in fact. To make, which must be very difficult, to know that quite apart from whatever his own attitudes, aspirations, morality may be that he is never-the-less part of the people who at this very hour are jailing some Black boy in Mississippi, who at this very hour are whipping some black African slave, who at this very hour are perpetrating the most tremendous enormities against aggregatable people who look like me. That innocence can be – in crucial moments – a very grave danger. It can menace much more than the white liberal can imagine.”*
James Baldwin and Dick Gregory’s ‘Baldwin’s Nigger’ (1969)

I was at a workshop yesterday in Kings Cross, with about 20 other invited people (independent practitioners, people working in/through organisations and researchers). We spent the day talking about ‘socially engaged art’, in a broad sense, through critical reflections of first hand experiences. The workshop was titled ‘Curating Community? The Relational and Agonistic Value of Participatory Arts in Superdiverse Localities’. It was part of the AHRC-funded Cultural Value project, organised by the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths. The discussions flew in numerous directions, I sensed urgency, passion and anger in the room. Everyone had a lot to say. This was a group of people who spend a lot of time thinking, writing and doing this stuff, probably talking to lots of people about it, but this particular configuration of ‘experts’ (as we were labelled) was new (to me at least) as it cut across art-forms, institutions and disciplines. I can imagine we were all taking mental and/or written notes of triggers, frustrations, inspirations and references to follow up and deal with at some point. I thought I’d share a few of mine here.

There was some discussion on what and who the Cultural Value project was for. It seems it is primarily a project to inform, open up and ‘advance’ the debates on the value of culture. We talked about the need for this debate to also attempt to effect change, perhaps through policy. I think many people in the room are trying to effect change, in a myriad of direct and indirect ways, through their work, so why not through the channel of a funding body like the AHRC? We didn’t get to clarify exactly what those changes might be.

We tried to identify what it was about the role of art and the artist (for it is the The Artist who is still at the centre of the Industry we were there to discuss), that purports to hold open a space for conflict to play out. What is it about artistic forms of facilitation that other forms of facilitation and mediation don’t manage to do? Is there even a difference? I’m not sure we managed to communicate how artists harness those special art powers of theirs (where’s the aesthetics in these situations?). But maybe that’s because there isn’t any mystery about it – it’s just people using skills they have learnt over the years to negotiate situations and hold back, ignore and / or challenge existing pressures, frameworks and demands. (I need to follow up the point about how socially engaged artists are taking work away from community development workers.)

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May Day rally in Trafalgar square

There has been much written and said about the professionalisation of the socially engaged artist and how they are carrying out, critically-minded or not, the ‘harmonisation’ (cleansing) process needed for neo-liberal urban development to continue. Most of the people in the room, it seems, have been involved in the critique and subversion of this in various ways. But even though some little clogs have been jammed in the machine, it hasn’t stopped the bigger wheels from turning. How do you position yourself? Who are your allies? Race needs to be talked about upfront. How are we perpetuating and reinforcing the same colonial, entrenched positions? In the debates on cultural value, whose culture, whose values are being promoted?

Which imperial Western/European/North American vidmate intellectual tools of conflict, critique and disruption are being appropriated by artists and others to sell their theories of art? I am reminded of a Pacific Island artist I met in Melbourne who refused the call for art to be ‘angry, naughty and confronting’. For her, the value of culture is in preserving, training, moulding, respecting. It’s about humility.

We discussed the ethics of introducing doubt and embracing uncertainty, about embodying fear and embarrassment (to return to Baldwin’s need “to doubt my history, to examine it”). There was a strong sense that this wasn’t happening nearly enough. The structures that surround, support and create obstacles for the kinds of thinking and practice in the room are a constant source of frustration. These relationships between individuals and structures are necessary, they are intersubjective, relational, co-dependent. These structures can be ignored or engaged with. It depends on where we put our energy and resources, for there was plenty of both in the room yesterday.

*Thanks to Barby Asante for the link to the Baldwin clip

I’m not sure where to start. I’ll go with the 1984 Dinner as that was my main reason for visiting South Africa. As with Singapore and Melbourne, I feel I have just scratched the surface of what there is to know about art and politics here. Repeating the format of the dinner has also been about rehearsing the method and learning new things about the process of convening, co-hosting and facilitating, and my role in this.

1984 Dinner, Bag Factory, Johannesburg, 20.3.14

The dinner took place on Thursday 20 March at the Bag Factory. There were twelve guests: Monique Vajifdar, Pat Motlau, Santu Mofokeng, Brett Pyper, Firdoze Bulbulia, Faith Isiakpere , Anton Harber, Joachim Schonfeldt, Malcolm Purky, Molefe Pheto, Aura G Msimang and David Koloane. I also had one to one conversations with people who couldn’t make the dinner: Ali Khangela Hlongwane, Omar Badsha, Cedric Nunn, Kevin Harris and Neil Dundas. There are still so many people I want to speak to.

The dinner and pre/proceeding conversations threw up lots of fascinating information and stories about South Africa in 1984. I feel like I have experienced a steep learning curve, with plenty still left to comprehend. I’m going to be doing some careful listening to all of the audio material gathered during the dinners over the next month, so here I just want to jot down some key terms and places that have been mentioned to me over the last couple of weeks. It might be that many of these are obvious and well-trodden ground, but it is the detail of the conversations that I want to eventually dive into – the tones, language, the nuances and divergences between opinions, the ways that people narrate their past selves.

Sketch from my bedroom window

1984 was still a very oppressive period in South Africa, eight years on from the Soweto uprising and a State of Emergency declared the following year. While it was obvious who the enemy was, there were also ideological differences between the Black Consciousness movement (aligned with the PAC) and the ANC, which also played out in the cultural movements at the time. Visiting the Apartheid Museum, Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum and Rise and Fall of Apartheid photography exhibition at Museum Africa were emotional, immersive exhibitions that documented the atrocities and struggles.

Phrases that came up over the last couple of weeks included: uprising, revolution, liberation. Cultural action was central to the struggle, satire and humour was important as was the power of images, interpreting and capturing the everyday reality of apartheid beyond the superficial tropes. The use of the body and symbolism in theatre to avoid the censors, the role of trade unions, using art (images, theatre) as political intervention, the role of education and workshops in townships, the need to keep a record and the role of people’s media (posters, pamphlets) as a form of dissemination.

Informers.

Many of the people active then are now dead. A 1984 dinner of ghosts.

Significant organisations people mentioned to me included:
FUBA (Federation Union of Black Artists)
Funda Art Centre (in Soweto)
Medu Arts Ensemble (Botswana)
Soyikwa African Theatre
Johannesburg Art Foundation (set up by Bill Ainsly)
Market Theatre Precinct
South African Council of Churches (funded a lot of the anti-apartheid work being done)
Afrapix documentary photographers collective
Congress of South African Writers
Creative Youth Association
Staffrider journal
…

I’d love to do a walking tour to these (mainly long gone) places, led by people who were active in them.

Front cover of Staffrider magazine, 1984

I found a copy of the 1984 Staffrider issue in a library at Wits University and read Njabulo Ndebele’s article ‘Turkish Tales and Some Thoughts on South African Fiction’. He wrote that there was an issue with art that was about ‘informing rather than transforming’:

“All the writer needs to understand is that he can only be genuinely committed to politics through a commitment to the demands of his art”.

He was critical of ‘sloganeering’ : “The slogan is the substitution of the gut response for clarity of analysis based on systematically acquired information”. Ali Khangela Hlongwane when I met him talked about how the theatre group he was involved with at the time (Soyikwa African Theatre) was a theatre of resistance rather than protest theatre. This distinction was important, rather than being reactionary and dogmatic, the theatre he was involved in was about the people themselves being the vehicle for change. And Wally Serote who was in the military wing of the ANC, stressed (at a talk of his I went to at Museum Africa) how their training then was about being informed about what was happening – this was crucial before beginning to learn how to rebel.

In the basement of the library

The issue of how to record, understand and comprehend recent histories seems to be an ongoing question, it has to be.

Part of Stephen Hobbs’ exhibition JAG SNAG

I visited Johannesburg Art Gallery and saw the ‘architectural responses’ by Stephen Hobbs in the basement which exposed the fact that the place is in need of major renovation. Rather than block off the mouldy, falling down bits of the museum, you can walk under the scaffolding and view the flaking walls for yourself. Tidy piles of wood lie about, waiting to be put to use. I spoke to one of the members of staff who explained the ‘organagram’ the artist had painted on the wall – the frozen posts are non-existent. This national museum is operating on a shoe string.

In contrast to JAG,vidmate on another day I found my way to the top of the gallery Circa to a plush lounge, splendid views and cabinets of curiosity while the sounds of a steel workers union protest faded into the distance.

At the top of Circa

At Goodman Gallery down the road, Hank Wills Thomas had made sculptures based on extracts of well-known photos (the burning of pass books and lining up of naked miners) and massive replica badges of political movements complete with pins on the back.

Singer, activist, Aura G Msimang showed me around her neighbourhood, Yeoville. She bought me a mango which I donated to Monique (sorry Monique, I forgot you’re not eating sugar)! Aura showed me where she used to organise open mic sessions every other Sunday in a park, the amazing undercover market and the Rasta house where I chatted to a young, newly trained traditional healer who’d had a calling.

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Another sketch from my window.

My time in Joburg would probably have been quite different if it wasn’t for these lovely people: Gabi Ngcobo and Rangoato Hlasane for talking through the project with me and suggesting guests (and Gabi for making me feel so at home!), Razia Saleh for explaining some of the SA background, Masimba Sasa for helping me shop for the dinner, Ashley Whitfield and Sarah Jury for your company, Molemo Moiloa for having a chat about the dinner, David for letting me share ‘his’ pool, Sara Hallet for being excited about the project and helping me contact people, James French for setting up and washing up and Monique Vajifdar for giving me her time, sharing her extensive knowledge and being so generous with her address book!

May the conversations continue.

Australia (1 February – 10 March 2013)

Weekly blogging hasn’t really worked. I was immersing myself in Melbourne life and didn’t really feel like writing it up at the time. The transitory space of the airplane seems to be the ideal time for this. I’m on the 14 hour non-stop flight to Johannesburg following one month in Melbourne. I’ve just had two days in Sydney, which mainly involved meandering about getting lost. I went to see Once in Royal David’s City by Michael Gow which was well worth it (funny, sad, clever, political). I popped my head into the Museum of Contemporary Art but it was all feeling very familiar (I think it was the same hang of the collection I saw when I was here in 2012). Anyway, the beach was calling. Bondi beach is a strange place full of fit people jogging with their iphones strapped to their arms, keeping out the sound of the sea and birds.

image: a view of Sydney

Post-conference, it took a while to get the balance right between productive sabbatical time and tourist-time. When seeing the sites, I felt like I should be working, and when working, I thought I should be out and about making the most of being somewhere different. The notion and experience of a sabbatical is quite unusual, it’s never happened to me before. It’s a strange limbo-like space where some well-needed thinking time starts to occur because there’s not a long list of things I should be doing. In my case, this has been a chance to further some of the research I’ve been doing into art and politics, but also to have valuable, slow conversations with some amazing people which has furthered my thinking and understanding (including Marnie Badham, Lachlan MacDowall, Rob Ball, Bianca Tainsh, Adva Weinstein, James Oliver, Bern Fitzgerald, Andy Best, Danielle Wyatt and many others). I got to spend some quality time with Anne Douglas, who was my PhD supervisor and who is also coincidentally in Melbourne on a fellowship. Anne gave an inspiring talk at the VCA last week on re-imagining the ‘social turn’, thinking beyond binary oppositions (e.g. control / freedom, autonomy / control) and towards contingency, situatedness and improvised aspects of leadership in the arts.

image: our flat on the VCA campus, next to the NGV

I haven’t done as much reading as I thought I would this month, but I spent some valuable time in the VCA library as part of my research into Australian community arts histories and started to read Gay Hawkins’ book ‘From Nimbin to Mardi Gras’ (1993) which is a fascinating insight into the policy-driven history of community arts. Hawkins critiques Left accounts of community arts as ‘romanticised’ and ‘stultifying’, too simplistic in their accounts of ‘ordinary people’ against the capitalist state. Instead, she focuses on the official invention of community arts and a framework of analysis based on the historical and institutional context of the development of a democratic cultural policy in Australia marked by the setting up of a separate Community Art Program in 1973. There are some interesting parallels with UK policy development in relation to community arts funding (e.g. the Arts Council of Great Britain established a Community Arts Committee in 1974). More on that in due course. A footnote in Hawkins’ book led me to an issue of ‘Art Network’ from 1982 which I dug out of the library, with a special supplement on ‘Socially Engaged and Community Art’. I was quite excited about this because it is a very early mention of the term ‘socially engaged art’. The earliest I have found in the UK is in Malcolm Dickson’s ‘Art with People’ published in 1995.

image: the subscription page from the Art Network magazine (1982)

My 1984 dinner in Melbourne took place on 3 March and was co-hosted by Bern Fitzgerald at Footscray Community Arts Centre and Marnie Badham, Centre for Creative Partnerships, VCA. Our guests were: Jon Hawkes, Heather Horrocks, Robin Laurie, Uncle Larry Walsh and Fotis Kapetopoulos. We held the dinner in the gallery space at Footscray, and ate a lot of Vietnamese food. The guests spoke of the relationship between art and politics at the time, including the fights against terms such as ‘community arts’ and ‘multiculturalism’, the importance of support and friendship between people, the rise and rise of bureaucracy and contradictions with indigenous ways of organising. I’m going to be setting up a website to house the research and audio of the dinners. Excitingly, it looks like there will be a dinner in Adelaide in June co-hosted by Steve Mayhew, who I met at the Spectres of Evaluation Masterclass and Marnie is looking to develop 1984 dinners on her travels to Indonesia, the US and Canada later this year.

image: the 1984 dinner at Footscray Community Art Centre, 3 March 2014

Other work-based activities in Melbourne these past few weeks have included a workshop I set up with Adva Weinstein, a performance artist and student I met during the Spectres of Evaluation Masterclass. We brought together five ‘cultural workers’ to map out and discuss physical and emotional relationships to work using drawing, discussion and movement. This is forming part of the Manual Labours practice-based research I’m doing with Jenny Richards and an article we are currently writing on the issues and implications of love and enjoyment of work. We did an exercise where we moulded our partners bodies into the shapes that we often find ourselves in to reflect on the physical and emotional experiences of these scenarios. My partner’s contorted, frantic pose, spitting swear words, perched on the edge of a chair reflecting me trying to answer a never ending flow of emails is an image I won’t forget!

image: one of the body drawings from the Manual Labours ‘Loving Work’ workshop

I also set up a workshop with Anne Douglas for PhD students at VCA about their practice-led research, asking the question: How is my Art Research? How is my Research Art? Everyone was invited to bring an ‘object’ of their research and we worked in pairs to interview each other, using the object as a talking point. This was a difficult exercise, but really pushed us to reflect on the specifics of the practice and how it related to the research questions we have (acknowledging that the questions can arise from the practice rather than a specific research question always directing the practice from the outset).

image: the collection of ‘objects’ brought to the practice-led research workshop at VCA

Other things we did: Rob Ball took Barry and I on a very enjoyable ‘Artist Run Initiatives’ (ARI) tour on Melbourne bikes, during which we made up a term for a new genre, Flop and Prop, for all the various found materials we found resting carefully against gallery walls. ARI’s are a peculiarly Australian phenomenon which seem to involve artists paying to use galleries as a career step towards commercial representation or shows in public spaces. I need to find out more as this seems an odd set up, especially in relation to campaigns elsewhere for fair pay for artists/cultural workers.

Andy Best took us to Heide Museum of Modern Art, an amazing art gallery just out of town, where artists John and Sunday Reed lived from the 1930s-80s. We saw Future Primitive, an exhibition of contemporary Australian artists, and the beautiful modernist extension built for the couple to live in.

image: me in a pond in Tasmania

Barry and I also spent three nights in Tasmania, driving around the beautiful countryside, walking up a couple of hills, drinking wine, meeting distant relatives (the lovely Dillon’s on my mum’s side), visiting the old convict colony on Port Arthur and spending a long time in the Museum of New and Old Art (MONA needs a whole blog post but I’m not sure I can be bothered).

image: a page from a 1984 Time Magazine bought in an Op Shop on the Great Ocean Road

Barry, Anne and I borrowed Hazel, Marnie’s car, to drive up the Great Ocean Road and stayed in vidmate an amazing airbnb house in Port Campbell, just past the Twelve Apostles. After some stunning views, winding roads, lovely grub and a speeding ticket (I discovered later), we managed to get back to Melbourne just in time for a mini-gathering at our flat before experiencing Melbourne’s White Night – a festival in the CBD that runs from 7am-7pm with events, light projections, outdoor exhibitions. The streets were packed, people were clambering up the sides of one building trying to take a peek at the synchronised swimming because of the two hour queue to get in. The crowds were eagerly searching for a cultural experience, hungry for the spectacle, happy to be part of it. It seemed we were taking to the streets for the sake of it, no one quite sure of the destination or purpose. We lasted until about 2am and went to bed after watching a Pierre Huyghe film in the park opposite our flat.

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image: drawing on the body, Loving Work workshop, VCA

Another thing that has stuck in my mind is the aboriginal tour Anne and I tagged along to that was organised for some VCA students. It started opposite the Crown Hotel, under the train bridge, where some of Melbourne’s homeless gather and where homeless man Wayne ‘Mousey’ Perry was murdered in January this year. Our guide, Dean Stewart (a Wemba Wergaia man), set out to challenge our perceptions of the city, and he successfully achieved this in my case. We went a short distance along the Birrarung river (original name for the Warra) in two hours but covered hundreds of years of history, focusing on the changing landscape we were walking through. The city of Melbourne was developed rapidly. Within 25 years of the invasion by the English in 1835 and development of the gold mining industry, the landscape had changed dramatically from eucalyptus forests and wetlands to a built up city. Dean described it as a cultural tsunami; about 80% of the indigenous population were wiped out. This meant that important oral histories and traditions were lost (such as the name, songs and dances connected to the waterfall that marked an important crossing and fresh water site before the English invasion).

The tidy patch of imported East African grass we walked across was wetland less than 200 years ago. Dean points out that it was a place the Wurundjeri, the traditional owners of the land where Melbourne was built, used to eat, drink, meet – a custom that still attracts people to the bars and restaurants of the Southbank today (at least those who can afford it). While Dean was keen for the purpose of the tour to be for anyone born in Melbourne to reconnect to their roots, the important process of understanding cultural and social histories of relationship to place was compelling and thought provoking. It left me with the obvious shame of being connected to English history (I’m feeling that a lot on this trip), but also a question of how and why we connect to layers of experience in the places we come from, walk through and inhabit, in a way that might inform and complicate attempts to preserve and to change. This seems to be about a slow, careful and respectful listening to those around us and the places we walk through.

In the back of a taxi heading from my hotel in the far East of Singapore towards the National University of Singapore in the west, my eye follows the container port that stretches for miles along the coast. My thoughts have been occupied by containers and the politics of global shipping for the last few weeks due to the Ship of Empty Boxes conference and to be witnessing a transport hub on this scale all seems very pertinent. Apparently the entire port is going to me moved along the coast, presumably to make way for more fancy hotels and ocean view appartments. The fact that Singapore seems to be reclaiming land on a grand scale makes me think this absurd logistical nightmare of moving an entire port down the road is just part of Singapore’s daily grind.

Later, I see ships on the horizon from my hotel window and find an underpass that takes me to the water’s edge where I watch these huge boats waiting in the sea. I’m no closer to knowing what they are doing out there. I visit an exhibition by the artist (and ex-sailor) Charles Lim who has been making work about Singapore’s relationship to the ocean. In a video piece you see an arial shot of him floating in an expanse of sea – an odd site for a seascape that is usually associated with shipping rather than swimming

Singapore has been hot, but apparently it’s experiencing a welcome cool spell. The taxi takes me to see Terence Chong who works at the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies. Waiting for him, I browse the ISEAS books on pirates and globalisation. Terence and I plot the details for the 1984 Dinner the following evening. That evening I meet Paul Rae who takes me to a Hawker Market opposite my hotel and we eat some very tasty food, the small food outlets all under one canvas serve a range of Chinese, Malay and Indian food. We were spoilt for choice. I return here everyday to try something different. Later in the week, I ask the silly question if there are any fields in Singapore. This city really does seem to embody globalisation – all supplies are shipped in (there’s no Transition Town movement here, as far as I’m aware).

The whole place lends itself to dystopian fiction – it wouldn’t take much to render this city-state unlivable if cut off from the ships that sail towards and away from it on a daily basis. I picture a humanless dying city, weeds growing through the immaculate hotel lobby floor and sunbleached rusting containers still piled high. I need to look into this, but apparently many of its authors focus on lost, contentious histories rather than dwell on future problems.

The National Museum tells Singapore’s history through ‘events’ or ‘stories’ – the audio guide asks you which path you want to take. It’s a busy, fact filled display, that warrants revisiting. Before Raffles took possession of the island on behalf of the British East India Trading Company in the early 19th Century, there were 1000 people living on the island, there are now over 5 million. The museum shows pictures of some of the unpaid workforce of Indian slaves who built the city. The city continues to be in a constant state of redevelopment, physically constructed by underpaid ‘transient workers’ in a country with no minimum wage. Talking to various taxi drivers, I keep hearing stories of how stressful the city is and how much they want to escape it, relying on the good fortunes of their offspring to get them out of here.

The 1984 dinner went well, I’ll write more on that later. So much was covered, mainly focusing on the work of the political theatre group, Third Stage, two members of which were at the table. Among the things discussed were the form their work took, the sense there was a promise of change in the air, the influence of Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA), the roll of Shell as a sponsor of theatre in the 1980s, the way in which political theatre at the time was one of the only vehicles for talking back to the state, the banning of forum theatre (from 1994-2004), what it means to develop an anti-state narrative, stories of censorship, arrest, aesthetic camoflage and Singapore’s current relationship to civil disobedience and public space.

There is a different threshold of risk now. You still have to submit your script to be vidmate checked by the Media Development Authority (although this process is taking a worrying turn as arts administrators are expected to internalise the process becoming their own self-censors). I went to visit Speakers Corner, the site for approved protest in Singapore (the only type of protest tolerated). There is a stage in the corner, neatly cut grass and a sign with a list of terms and conditions for demonstrators to follow.

Happy Lunar New Year!