6 Microlectures On Genocides is a daring work of hope in dark times

6 Microlectures On Genocides

theriverproduction
Drama Box Studio
Jan 23, 8pm

Few, if any, new Singaporean plays have addressed genocide head on – which makes this suite of six short scenes by Singaporean playwrights urgent, even belated.

Despite its title, it does not preach from its lectern. Instead, it is a poetic gathering of voices reconsidering how art and life should go on in the wake of genocide.

Genocide as seen from the vantage point of Singaporean artists and writers include film-maker Jason Soo’s documentary Al Awda (2024), which follows the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s attempt to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, and researcher Walid Jumblatt Abdullah’s best-selling book Why Palestine?: Reflections From Singapore (2025).

In this play, devised by Rizman Putra and Kok Heng Leun and open to about two dozen audience members a night, theatre is stripped down to its bare essentials: one body, a projector and a sparse set of everyday props.

As the audience drifts in, actor Rizman is hunched up and snipping up strips of gauze on a silver tray. He stuffs them into the right corner of his mouth and performs semi-gagged in the first microlecture, actress Oon Shu An’s Dinner Conversation.

Oon opens with an anecdote about a table of artists at a loss for words when a conversation about the beauty of Japanese ceramics leads to a remark that the Japanese had kidnapped Korean potters in the 16th century and enslaved them to teach pottery techniques.

The artists’ eloquence about beauty gives way to an awkward silence on violence, even as Oon’s voiceover raises how Israel has dropped more than the equivalent of six Hiroshima bombs on Gaza since Oct 7, 2023.

What Oon’s band of hushed artists fail to articulate – and, in fact, much of what is left unsaid in the production – the stage imagery powerfully supplements. The etymology of the word “gauze” is attributed to Gaza, as the breathable fabric for medical care is thought to have originated from the Palestinian city. Here, the gauze is instead a suffocating gag.

Rizman’s commanding physicality – which morphs from the posture of the beaten down to the bombast of genocide makers – lends much emotional heft to the work.

His physical work is akin to the endurance artist’s and one feels every movement inflected with pain. It is a testament to how physicality can intervene where discussions around genocide are silenced and supplement the existing vocabulary, which often feels inadequate to describe an unprecedented barbarism.

The six lectures – each taking up about 10 minutes – span a surprisingly wide array of genres and styles.

Neo Hai Bin’s A Single Chair uses the epistolary tradition as a mode of addressing the conscience of the writer and his subjects, which range from Rwandan businessman Felicien Kabuga, who financed the Rwanda Genocide, and Singaporean doctor Ang Swee Chai, co-founder of charity Medical Aid For Palestinians.

Meanwhile, theatremaker A Yagnya’s more documentary work Hummus weaves in the stories and footage of displaced Gazans, including theatre practitioner Tamer Nijim. Playwright Haresh Sharma is in his element with the dramatic monologue in The Follower, in which a concerned Muslim mother lodges a complaint against a drama teacher for posting about genocide on his social media.

It is to director Kok’s credit that all these lectures come together cohesively as an investigation into the responsibility of the artist in times of genocide.

From Oon’s opener about silence, the narrative widens to a more direct address, then proceeds to more allegorical forms like Carcass by Zulfadli Rashid, a contemporary Malay song written as an avian fable of how humans respond to bird killing.

It is reminiscent of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s famous poem Motto: “In the dark times, / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing / about the dark times.”

In Nabilah Said’s closing lecture Conjuring The Square, the playwright’s annotates one of her older plays in the aftermath of the genocide.

In it, Nabilah reflects on her use of absurdism – children gather in a square and start pointing to the sky, to the puzzlement of the adults, until the authorities crack down – and the limits of parable today. The square, she remarks, is so innocent in peacetime.

6 Microlectures On Genocides premiered in Nepal at the International People’s Theatre Festival in March 2025. Kok will take the work on tour to the Guling Street Avant-Garde Theatre in Taipei and to an undecided location in Busan.

He has committed to staging this show every month – including in Singapore – until the genocide ends in Gaza, a gesture of keeping the conversation ongoing.

German philosopher Theodor Adorno famously declared: “It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.”

It is barbaric, this work suggests instead, to write poetry, or make art, as if genocides are not ongoing. New words and gestures must be invented and songs about the dark times have to be sung – such is the emotional clarity and daring hope these six works articulate.