Still Life is an autobiographical play about Dana Lam’s life. It was directed by Claire Wong, who was also the dramaturg of this play, under Checkpoint Theatre. Dana Lam is most known for being President of AWARE (Association of Women for Action and Research) from 2000-2002 and from 2009-2010, after the well-documented AWARE saga where she stood up against an orchestrated takeover by a group of women with strong anti-LGBT and right-wing Christian leanings. However, she also wears many hats. As a writer, she has written Days of Being Wild on the watershed Singapore General Elections of 2006. As a film-maker, she created She Shapes a Nation (2009), a short documentary capturing women’s voices and choices in five decades of nation-making. Lastly, as a visual artist, her latest installation When Bellies Speak: You Are Your Own Work of Art received a warm reception at Hong Lim Park in 2015.
In my interview with Ms. Lam, I ask her which role in her life has been the most significant. She tells me, “Those are roles one takes on in life (even the role of daughter) and perform with varying degree of competency. Not so dissimilar to other roles such as being president of AWARE, for instance! You step into the shoes, you perform the task. There are emotions involved, ties that bind (to borrow a phrase). Any of the roles can have a liberating and/ or inhibiting impact. The challenge is to have enough self-awareness to work through it. Ha! Being a mother and, now, a grandmother was/is rather intense emotionally. I call it the cuddly baby trap. But that doesn’t mean I don’t relish the experience.” She also sees her art-making and political involvements as being deeply intertwined with each other as ‘the personal is the political’.
Now in her sixties, Dana Lam has chosen to write and act in an autobiographical play, taking us on a journey from the 1950s to the present. She tells me about how she attempted to tackle this art form which was new to her: “A play is an entirely different animal from what I’m used to. There is so much material, so many paths to go down. Reaching out to Claire Wong and Huzir Sulaiman, to Checkpoint Theatre, was a call for help. I realised I needed to work in a way that would give my writing dynamism. And, I was right! Readying my text for performance helped me to narrow down the field and make cuts I may not have made on my own. Working with Claire on the studio floor was especially helpful in finding a different, more robust voice and approach to writing.”
