The Listening Biennial - Singapore

13/10/2025

13/10/2025

08/10/2025

Across a Membrane
By Aine Nakamura (US/Japan)

Presented by Listening Biennial Singapore and LASALLE College of the ArtsMcNally School of Fine Arts, in collaboration with Diploma in Theatre Production and Management

Address: 1 McNally Street Singapore 187940

Artist Talk (Open to all)

2.30 PM - 3:30 PM
Venue: F101a Seminar Room

Workshop

3:35 PM - 5 PM
Venue: H102 (L1 dance studio)
(Please register for the workshop via Google Form: https://forms.gle/MYSe4T12nER1xeY89

Due to limited capacity, successful participants will be informed via email)

“I started to generate my art form through a few experiences that shifted my view and my listening. One of them was this. I was asked to introduce myself without making sounds. It was snowing outside. I moved my body slowly. I realized I was listening not only to the sound of the room but more so to the sound outside the window, imagining the world outside, and then listening to myself, embracing myself in it. I began to listen to songs in body, and I continue to do so. In addition, performance experiences and a few vocal, physical and psychological injuries helped me search what sensing, listening and art-making can be. I would like to spend time with the participants to think about the possibilities and potentialities of voice and body, and art. Being able to hold and be together in fragility is a strength, I believe. I will talk and give a few work exercises with a hope to learn together about what it means to create a space for beings and feelings, and how we might imagine and evolve for relations even at this crisis of the world.”

About the Artist:

Aine Nakamura (US/Japan)

With her unique transnational background growing up between Japan and the United States, Aine Nakamura has developed her transborder and interdisciplinary art of voice and movement. She tells stories through her performances, exploring nuanced potentialities of voice and body, and of listening and sensing. Her recent works include her solo performance of sung and spoken voice and body Under an Unnamed Flower, presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which focused on war, weaving, silk, and mourning, gestures and objects connecting the multiple; solo performance project Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains (2022), presented at Theatertreffen at Berliner Festspiele after its premiere at the Gallatin Galleries, focused on time-transcending recovery in season changes; and a month-long site-specific exhibition and performance project hands on tape (2025), presented at The Lab in SF, unfolded over research, conversations and collaborations, exploring architectural changes and hidden stories, silk threads, erased labor, and metamorphosis of bodies and materials as she explored through experiences of surgeries and changes of inner shapes in a community. Nakamura is recently interested in the topics of love, fragile kindness, and folds or wrinkles, a realm that is ungraspable but open to opacity and evolvement. Nakamura has been awarded the Venice Biennale Site-Specific Performance Grant, the Fulbright Fellowship (Berlin), and The Leo Bronstein Homage Award (New York University).

Register for the Public Talk:
https://www.eventbrite.sg/e/listening-circle-across-a-membrane-artist-talk-by-aine-nakamura-tickets-1748098081419?aff=odcleoeventsincollection

An artist talk by Aine Nakamura on the possibilities and potentialities of voice and body

08/10/2025

Presented by Listening Biennial Singapore and LASALLE College of the Arts McNally School of Fine Arts, in collaboration with Diploma in Theatre Production and Management

Designed for mutual learning and exchange between participants, the Listening Circle offerstalks, participatory experiences and workshops by diverse practitioners who share methods,practices and knowledge on listening, care, and collaboration.

To apply as a participant, sign up here: https://forms.gle/shGrgcZWDUcpMAWm8

STORY-(RE)TELLING: A Workshop on Performing With Care
By Chng Yi Kai

9.30 AM - 12 PMH102 (L1 dance studio)
Group size: 6 - 10 pax

Drawing from the processes of documentary theatre and ethnodrama, STORY-(RE)TELLING explores the craft of listening to stories and gathering them from the realworld and real individuals. As practitioners of care, we receive many honest andvulnerable stories that people entrust to us - often in hope that we share them to thelarger world as means of connection. But what does it mean to truly listen to thesestories? And how do we honor these delicate experiences when sharing them with thelarger world?

STORY-(RE)TELLING invites us to lean into the intricate journey of interviewing, writingand performing real stories through the form of documentary theatre. If story-telling issaid to bring our communities together, how do we - as care practitioners - also practisebeing story-receivers, story-listeners, and perhaps most importantly, story-(re)tellers?

Participant notes: Please bring along writing materials as journaling will be part of the process.

06/10/2025

Presented by Listening Biennial Singapore and LASALLE College of the Arts McNally School of Fine Arts, in collaboration with Diploma in Theatre Production and Management

Designed for mutual learning and exchange between participants, the Listening Circle offerstalks, participatory experiences and workshops by diverse practitioners who share methods,practices and knowledge on listening, care, and collaboration.

To apply as a participant, sign up here: https://forms.gle/shGrgcZWDUcpMAWm8

Becoming Intertidal
Workshop
By Teo Xiao Ting and Jill J. Tan

2 PM - 4 PM
H102 (L1 dance studio)

Becoming Intertidal combines two workshop practices of Xiao Ting (becoming rocks/ again) and Jill (feeding (on) another) to explore what it’s like to be part of an intertidal zone through embodiment and co-being. Drawing on the rich diversity of the intertidal zone where seaorganisms are momentarily visible above water, we consider how we might attune to each other(and ourselves) at low tide and high tide, as seaweed, barnacles, rocks, waves, and whateverparticipants feel like being. What does it mean to sense and relate to each other as beings wedon’t usually identify with, and what are the sounds that want to emerge from our bodies as wedo so?

Facilitator Bios:

Teo Xiao Ting
Xiao Ting plays with ‘words’ and their resonances, ‘art’and its transubstantiation. They run Rehearsal Room, a container devoted to the continuous effort towards sprouting worlds that are more joyous, habitable, and honest. Right now, its offerings include workshops and one-to-one therapy sessions. Her written work can be found in Jom, ArtsEquator, Asian Film Archive, amongothers. They are committed to CITRUS practices, a working group of arts practitioners exploring ways to build better practices around care and intimacy in artmaking. She is an affiliate counsellor and somatic therapist with Sol Therapy, and a Stranger-in-Residence with StrangerConversations.

Jill J. Tan
Jill is a writer, artist, and researcher committed to collaborative practice and multimodal exploration through games, performance and poetics. As a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Yale University, she studies the contemporary management of death in Singapore. More broadly, her interests lie in how community art and urbaninfrastructure mediate end-of-life issues and care practices in Singapore and Malaysia. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Mynah, Brack, The Journal of Public Pedagogies, The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Cityand Society Journal, and the edited volumes Resistant Hybridities, Death and the Afterlife, and Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore. Tan’s research issupported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation; a SSRC4 Graduate Research Fellowship; NUS Development Grants; Tan Kah Kee Foundation and Tan Ean Kiam Foundation. At Yale, Tan was awarded the 2022 TheronRockwell Field Prize, and has taught a self-designed Writing Creative Ethnographies course.