Advanced Studies…. (Ten Lessons for Life)

Posted on 21 May, 2012

Advanced Studies…. (Ten Lessons for Life)
25-27 May 2012
SOTA Gallery

We’ve been there, done that. Been to school, stared at our teachers blankly, graduated. But what will it feel to be back in class, only that it is now all part of an act, and you are the audience?

Consider Advanced Studies… (Ten Lessons for Life), the nebulous experiential work that is part of the Singapore Arts Festival 2012, because it will give you a chance to be an audience-student, for ten nights only.

Advanced Studies is a ten-part experiential performance curated by local artist Heman Cheong. Each performance is a lesson is facilitated by one of ten students, designed to invert the age-old student-teacher role on consequential topics that will leave audiences deliberating life’s complexities beyond the SOTA Gallery. Selected from School of The Art’s Theatre and Visual Art faculties, the ten students will explicate a set of topics ranging from Historiography, Biotechnology to Existentialism.

The topics, possibly too serious for a 16 year old, is a reflection on literary themes that are crucial to the work of the artist Heman Chong. They are inspired by a set of source materials, including literary texts like J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. “The subject matter that spreads across the ten lessons is essentially an biography of the sets of knowledge that I have encountered and have found relevant for both myself, and my audience at large,” Heman shares. For instance, in “Advanced Studies in Existentialism”, the student-teacher considers how we view ourselves in this reality, and how there may exist unlimited possibilities once we understand that we can construct our own realities.

When it comes to the performance, one student-teacher takes center stage as the teacher of the session. Heman sees this transposition of the student’s role as a lesson in empathy. “This inversion will allow further empathy to surface out of the student for the role of the teacher, and to illustrate how difficult it is, not only to teach, but to also think about how to teach, and what to teach.” After all, which student ever considers the ever-invisible lesson plan? In preparing for “Advanced Studies in Alternative Histories”, the student-teacher developed a forty-five minute lesson plan discussing history as contested narratives based on both fact and fiction.

It is almost an axiom to think of teachers as performers, masking their true selves for the sake of education. Aptly, Advanced Studies melts and redefines the conventionally separate roles of teacher, student, and performer.

In fact, Heman sees his work as emerging from the conflation of the student-teacher- audience experience. At the core of Advanced Studies is the exploration of the school as a “site of the transmission of knowledge”. “The idea of education is then re-looked at as a site of exchange and dialogue, generating a multitude of interpretations for both the ‘performers’ and the ‘audience’.” This is further compounded by the, possibly dissociative, experience for the student-audience, since hearing out adolescent talk about some pretty serious issues concerning the world seem a particularly emo affair.

Contemplate the student, the artist, and the human. At the end of the day, to Heman, Advanced Studies is about recounting narratives. “The entire premise of the performance is based on the idea of story-telling; how we as human beings make sense of the world around us through the stories that we tell each other.”

TEXT BY APRILENE HUISHAN GOH