Where Things Happen

Over the last few days, I've come across another problem: what do you do when you know more than you're letting on?

Of course, the ideal situation would be for you never to know more than you're letting on. After all, this is called being frank, and being generous with your ideas. But there were times over the last few days when I saw something and then felt I could not offer it for consideration. It just didn't seem appropriate or useful to interject to submit a new idea for discussion. It seemed inappropriate because it would undermine the social convention of the class (i.e. I would look like a smart aleck poking holes in other people's arguments), and it seemed useless because sometimes, you can tell when people are not amenable to considering new ideas. Comfort is a strong incentive, and provocation does not sit well with a sort of intellectual inertia.

What I find really disturbing is how, sometimes, people get away with saying things without substantiating them. It just seems like laziness to me. And yet, people get away with it, taking away a feeling of self-satisfaction and calling it good thinking. Inasmuch as making your views known is a self-serving enterprise (and I have to admit because it's true that this is usually the case at least for me), it is wholly understandable to like things that make you feel nice inside. But then again, this is a university, and when we use words in class we should be more careful, and value meaning and rigour over hazy feel-good ideas.

But it is also true that people don't take kindly to having this pointed out. This is not to say, of course, that one should not point it out, but rather, if your objective is to provoke a reconsideration of the validity of ideas, then one should wait for the appropriate time to point it out, a time when people are more amenable to listening. And sometimes, that means refraining from saying anything.

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Anyway. I find myself part of the Nomads Theatre Workshop. It's not so much a theatre troupe as it is a theatrical experiment, it seems to me. How it works is that it brings together a director, a writer, a group of actors and a producer to come up with a production from scratch. The model seems to be a collaborative one, in which the writer tailors a script to fit the peculiar strengths and personalities of the actors he works with, and the actors can suggest directions to the director, and the director can adjust the script as he goes along. This is another level of improvisational theatre, I guess, taking the improvisation techique out of its usual place in onstage comedies and infusing the entire play-producing process with its ethos.

Quite frankly, I don't knw how this will turn out. Firstly, and perhaps foremost, I haven't had anything to do with a stage for almost three years now, which means that my most recent involvement was with G's TSD production in J2 (incidentally, G, if you're reading this, remember the Akami script I wrote for your production on a lark? I submitted it to Nomads, and it landed me this spot - so credit goes to you too!). And, up till now, the one production that informs my entire impression of theatre is still the 2002 production of The Road Less Travelled, which was done for the SYF competition. As you can probably tell, my exposure to this medium of expression has not been exactly wide, and has not been exactly up to date.

And secondly, what little theatre I've done has been rather rigid and well-defined, following a clear path from the writer's conceptualisation, through the director's guidance till the actor's performance on the stage. I guess, theoretically, I can appreciate how a more fluid, collaborative process can work, but I've never done anything like this for real before, and in my experience the lack of a rigid structure leads to a potentially lethal lack of discipline in the production. The theory, I guess, is that freeing everyone involved from the rigid process will also liberate creative energies that are outside our normal conception, and make everyone more involved in the final product, enhancing the feeling of ownership. I would really like that to happen. It would then prove that theatre does not need to be a technical profession, but can happen anywhere with the most basic set of preconditions. But my hope is tempered by the suspicion founded on limited experience.

At any rate, I find myself utterly overwhelmed by the range of talent that I've seen in this troupe. This is not a big operation at all, and I haven't by any means met every member yet, but the directors, writers and producers all seem to have stellar talent. They spout jargon effortlessly, lapse into moments of self-expression (singing, dancing, monologue - you name it), and they know that they're good. Here is a group which can namedrop the pantheon of theatre carelessly, and come across as if they know full well what they're talking about (because, surely, they really do). And they take the process so seriously, getting worked up and passionate when defending their creative space and fending off the apparently tyrannical intentions of the producers. Against all this, I can only sit quietly and observe with a mixture of incredulity and amazement. On the one hand, I can hardly take all this seriously - there is a certain absurdity in how I had managed to sneak in on an operation that is so tight. On the other hand, I also cannot see how I can conceivably contribute, except through doing the actual brute work of writing the damn play. Quite frankly, therefore, I wonder what I've gone and gotten myself into; I feel out of my league.

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But on a lighter note, today was the 7th anniversary of 9/11. 9/11 - it is one of those moments in history when everyone remembers where they were. I happened to be sleeping that fateful morning, and I never quite figured out why my parents did not wake me when the planes hit, so that I only found out the truth the next day, staring disbelievingly at the horrifying photos on the front page of the Straits Times. I remember how, the next day at school, every lesson was permeated by discussion of this event, how every radio show and every TV channel had minute-by-minute updates. How each moment was infused with the acute awareness of being on a historic threshold. How moments of heartwarming togetherness and solidarity were contrasted with heartbreaking examples of callousness. How 9/11 affected all of us, and how we all decided to deal with it in our own ways.

And now that I think back on it, it is quite possible that 9/11 was the first real instance of New York touching my life in a palpable way, and thus 9/11 also formed the kernel around which I built my fictional and vicarious impression of this city. Would it be too callous, too presumptious to say that 9/11 made me a New Yorker at heart? Well, at least it made me start thinking of whether I wanted to be a New Yorker. But who knows about these things, eh? Who know if, for example, I would have come here even if 9/11 had not happened? The fact is that I remember 9/11, and now I'm in New York City, and my mind would like there to be a link, because such a link would be elegant and intriguing. And in that sense, maybe I find a link that is not really there.

Anyway, to commemorate the anniversary, Columbia hosted the ServiceNation forum organised by TIME Magazine. Among the speakers at the forum were Columbia's President Lee Bollinger, New York's new governor David Patterson, Tobey Maguire (aka Peter Parker), and the two presidential candidates. It's an example of the fantastic opportunities that simply being here makes available to us. This thing, this chance to be where things happen, to be at the very point of breaking news, just fell into our laps without us having to do anything or put in any more effort than that which was required to turn up. And to think that, only a few months ago, I was using Obama's Iowa victory speech to teach public speaking skills to my English classes. And just now, I was within a hundred metres of the guy, listening to him talk live. It's a mind-blowing thought.

The actual event was held in the Roone Arledge Auditorium, which, while being the biggest room in Columbia, still could only hold at most 1,200 people. Most of those seats were filled by 9/11 victims or their families, and only 100 students were picked by lottery to attend the forum itself. The rest of us made do with a big screen set up in front of Low Plaza.

So there we were, among thousands of students and staff, sitting on the steps leading up to Low Library and waiting for the speeches to begin. The atmosphere was festive; people had brought dinner out to eat on picnic mats, people were sprawled on the grass, and people were chatting in high tones about the virtues of Obama (predictably). And among all these people were news anchors, radio journalists and reporters weaving in and out and trying to get a good soundbite out of all the hubbub. On the periphery, Columbia's private police force and officers from the NYPD patrolled the grounds, with black-suited Secret Service men standing guard outside the building housing the Auditorium. I felt certain that, somewhere on the roofs of the campus, snipers had been positioned too.

We had gotten excellent seats through one of our CUE friends, which put us almost right in front of the big screen. And I was simply enjoying the vibe. Although I didn't rightly know what was going on in the speeches, and though I don't have the right to vote anyway, it was nice to lose oneself in the masses, to cheer and jeer and shout and applaud together as the sky darkened from blue to orange to navy, and the images on the big screen shifted. This is something that you will almost certainly never see back home.

So, I leave you with a short video of the proceedings, picturing (variously) the big screen with Butler Library in the background, and cheering crowds on the steps of Low Library. Who knows, maybe this little segment will appear on the news soon? It's a humbling and exhilarating thought.