The reading material arrived in my inbox on a Wednesday, five days before the workshop was due to start.
It was from a 2016 book: “Applied Theatre: Facilitation
Pedagogies, Practices, Resilience”, by Sheila Preston. Chapter 1 presented a case study where:
a member of a mental health institution expressed his disquiet at the idea that other members of the group were happy to perform, in public, a play about the experience of mental illness. He felt uncomfortable with the association and that they would be representing “him”.
Indeed, any intervention – which may sometimes be a facilitated workshop, or a staged theatre production – may run the risk of reproducing dominant narratives, leading to anxiety and sensitivity among the disenfranchised.
What then is the role of a facilitator in this social and cultural system that surrounds the facilitator on all sides – whether at the family dinner table, or at the workplace desk, or during the morning commute?
Date: 21 August 2026, 8 PM.
Venue: Waterfront Theatre at Esplanade, Singapore
A howl emerged from the character on stage. “You're a bag of rats!”
The character had a pot belly, wore a beard, and sported a mass of curly, rust-brown hair – and when he got upon his feet, after having lain down conspicuously, the audience could see, stretching around his corpulent belly, the waistband of his off-white underwear.
“My mental health is going from bad to worse!” he screamed.
The character was not in a monologue; for the large part of half an hour, he had been verbally jabbed, poked, and mocked by another character: buxom, blonde and lipstick-ed. And cruel.
The (public) pianist is not like a lone barista, who sits at a shop counter, waiting for customers to approach him for a dose of caffeine (which is a legal psychoactive drug, by the way).
People gather up the courage – or recklessness – to ask the pianist to play their favorite songs.
No, this wasn't rock-climbing, this was bouldering – just like her colleagues have done, in Thailand.
But this time, she was stranded on an island in the Indonesian archipelago. She looked at her son beside her, who had just produced some faeces in his baby-blue pants; the poor infant had been born blind. He was howling.
In her hair was still the hibiscus flower her husband had given her, when he had tearfully waved goodbye to her at the ship-port. Where was her husband when she needed him?
