Theatre and Performance Studies Research Events

Theatre and Performance Studies at Warwick has an active research community. As well as having a departmental Research Seminar Series which meets twice-termly, there are regular events hosted by individual members of our community relating to their current research projects. Above you'll see a link to our 'Past Events'. From here you can find out about individual events hosted recently, but can also link to ongoing research project webpages.

Departmental Seminar Series

Every year Theatre and Performance Studies run a twice-termly departmental seminar series. The dates and times for the 2024/25 Theatre and Performance Studies seminar series are as follows:

Research Seminar, Wednesday 21 May 2025, 11.30-1.00 pm, FAB 0.20

Marcus Tan, ‘This is us, this is our story’: Historicity, Musical(ity) and The Singapore Story

2015 was a portentous year in Singapore’s history in which the country celebrated its golden jubilee (entitled ‘SG50’). It was also the year in which famed statesman Lee Kuan Yew died. With the intention to be part of the SG50 celebrations, two musicals were staged and both of which became a performative means of memorialising and mythologising Singapore’s oft regarded founding father of the city-state. Singapura: The Musical (2015) was a musical theatre performance that attempted to chart ‘The Singapore Story’ – a national, state-fashioned, rags-to-riches story. The LKY Musical (2015), relatedly but dissimilarly, explored The Singapore Story through the personal lens of Lee. It follows his public and private lives and his metamorphosis into the nation’s first, and longest serving, Prime Minister. Both musicals were staged shortly after Lee’s death and, though primarily in conjunction with the SG50 celebrations, were distinct attempts at exploiting historicity for commercial expediency but inadvertently became appropriated for political gain. Regardless of creative intentions, staging a nation’s history (and her founder) is always already an act of political performativity where the mise-en-scene will necessarily be framed and read as a performance of the political. Consequently, in this seminar, I will interrogate the politics of music(als) and examine how both Singapura and LKY can be regarded as political artefacts that uncritically promote the ruling government’s dominant, singular narrative – The Singapore Story. In both musicals, the intent to perform a musical spectacle of the birth of a nation, and the larger-than-life biopic of a man whose status itself far exceeds any fictional representation, nullified the possibility of musicals as a medium for counter-narrativity; the need to cohere to prevailing sentiments and mood in 2015, the self-censorship prevalent in the arts, and the necessity of conforming to state-prescribed narratives meant Singapura and LKY were little more than reverberations of a founding fiction used to support the continued legitimacy of the prevailing single-party dominated government of the People’s Action Party. In relation to, and apart from, considering the surrounding events that led to the politicisation of both musicals, the paper invites considerations of the potential and precarity of staging history as musicals for musicality, the physical properties of sound, pitch, rhythm, timbre, as well as the lyrics, have profound impact on the construction of subjectivity. These advent questions of musical narrativity as representations of political history, considering how Jacques Attali posits that ‘any organisation of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality […] it is an attribute of power in all of its forms.’

If you would like to attend please email Rashna.Nicholson@warwick.ac.uk