How were you first bitten by the theatre bug?
Ever since I was a wee child, my family has always had karaoke sessions at home and singing was our shared passion. Naturally, I joined the choir in my primary school, but grew curious and wanted to explore other forms of performance by the time I became a teenager. So, joining my secondary school drama club made a lot of sense to me. Plus, there was this guy in drama club whom I had a huge crush on – so joining the club was a win-win situation!
My first theatre experience was in acting. I remember playing a sassy beauty pageant contestant – my costume was a gaudy emerald-green cheongsam and a black feather boa – and I was just having fun, playing it for laughs. People started laughing and I enjoyed making people laugh.
Curious about all things theatre, I also explored working backstage, like being a stage manager for my junior college’s Singapore Youth Festival production of Kuo Pao Kun’s Mama Looking For Her Cat.
Above it all and, to sum it up nicely, I would just say that the translation of a text from the page to the stage is just magical.
How did you find your way into arts management and marketing?
After my A-Levels, I was having a bit of identity crisis and did not know where to go or what to do with my life. I just knew that I enjoyed working in theatre, but was struggling with the desire to make my parents happy by doing something more ‘mainstream’. So I talked to my friends and a mentor from a youth theatre group I had joined years earlier, and eventually found out about this mystical beast called ‘Arts Management’.
As one of the youth group’s committee members, I had learnt to write sponsorship letters, prepare production schedules and other things like that. I didn’t know that this was what we call arts management! So I joined LASALLE to study Arts Management in 2011, and everything fell into place after that.
When did W!LD RICE first come onto your radar?
Back when I was in junior college, I was studying The Importance of Being Earnest as a text and I had even acted in a school production of it. I played Gwendolen in a localised version with Peranakan costumes. Then came W!LD RICE’s The Importance of Being Earnest in 2009 – who would have thought of staging it with an all-male cast in Singapore? It was very avant-garde, and very novel. I was so inspired by it, and it was like love at first sight!
as they create the trailer for Public Enemy!
Tell us about how your journey in theatre finally led to your job in W!LD RICE.
When I was studying in LASALLE, I craved hands-on experience. We were encouraged to explore different disciplines in the arts, so I did internships in the film, music and events-management industries. Nothing really clicked, however. Finally, I decided to return to theatre, where I felt more comfortable. I took up an internship at W!LD RICE for very practical reasons – I wanted to know how a big theatre company works, and I felt that I should join a theatre company with a big name. W!LD RICE fit the bill on both counts!
What do you do as part of W!LD RICE’s marketing team?
The most basic thing is, of course, to sell shows. This means getting your sales message out, and making sure that people buy tickets, which is not easy in a time when everyone is constantly bombarded by e-mails and advertisements! This means working with our graphic designer on refining the artwork that we use to define the show, and making sure the right message goes out at different points during the entire marketing campaign.
What have you learnt?
I’m still learning to have confidence in myself. I’m relatively young and inexperienced, especially where a company as established as W!LD RICE is concerned, and I know I can put too much pressure on myself. I’m more conscious now that, if I make a mistake, I shouldn’t dwell on it too much. I need to learn from it, take it in my stride and move forward.
I’ve also learnt that real life is very different from what we’re taught in textbooks! We had plenty of case studies, but the model answers don’t always work out in practice. So I find myself faced with problems that I learnt about in school, but having to come up with creative solutions because the context is completely different and there are limitations and constraints that the textbooks don’t mention.
So what keeps you going every day?
Generally, we’re all in this because we love theatre. For me, personally, I love being in that creative atmosphere – every time I listen to Ivan talk about his plans for upcoming shows, I get inspired all over again. I also like that the work I do never gets boring. Broadly speaking, I’m doing the same thing with every show, but it’s always exciting because each production is different and poses different challenges.
