Checkpoint Theatre

Original Singapore Stories with Honesty and Humour, Head and Heart

In Conversation: Singapore Beyond the Circuit Breaker

In Conversation: Singapore Beyond the Circuit Breaker

What are the implications of the global pandemic for how we organise society in Singapore?
Hosted on Checkpoint Theatre’s Facebook Live on 28 May 2020, Huzir Sulaiman and Dr. Joanne Yoong had an insightful discussion on topics ranging from education, healthcare, employment, to the cultural sector in Singapore, and how we can move forward in the ‘new normal’.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
DR. JOANNE YOONG is Senior Economist at the University of Southern California and Director of the Center for Economic and Social Research; Founder of Research for Impact, Singapore; Visiting Associate Professor at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS; and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
HUZIR SULAIMAN is the co-founder and Joint Artistic Director of Checkpoint Theatre. A critically acclaimed and award winning playwright, his Collected Plays 1998-2012 was published in 2013. His plays have been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, Indonesian and Mandarin. His essays and commentary pieces have appeared in The Star, The Straits Times, and The Huffington Post. Huzir was educated at Princeton University, where he won the Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize, and is a Yale World Fellow.

 

QUOTES: 

-“At the end of the day, when we’re dealing with something where there is a collective identity around the industry, we don’t want to see this monopoly structure emerging by default. And in some sense, the richness of the [arts] industry depends on the diversity within it.”  – Dr. Joanne Yoong
-“[The arts] desperately needs help in order to survive… We do have a deep belief in the value that we bring to Singapore society in telling Singapore stories not just to each other but for the global stage and we want structurally to be able to survive.” – Huzir Sulaiman

Reviews

  • Audience

We can glean a lot from data, with processing power and big data, but without proper communication, knowing how to bring the message across, whether through visualisation, or a proper narrative, the rich meaning in the data is lost.

L. Z. Q.

"Thank you to Huzir, Joanne and Checkpoint Theatre for a very informative, insightful and important discussion that I hope will spur more solution ideas."

Veronica Tsu-Yen Shunmugam

A department of government that understands and depends upon storytelling is the Futures Department. They base their work on data science, but often have to depend on hunches and emerging patterns. That kind of approach - of collaborating deeply with organizations like Checkpoint to imagine and communicate better futures ACROSS departments. That's what we need.

Shiv Tandan (Associate Artist)

Well Done, Huzir Sulaiman and Joanne Yoong, so informative and thought provoking, and exciting I think especially at the levels that you both plumbed the depths , in articulating our concerns.

Nandita Solomon
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