All frame, no performance: anti-narrative dramaturgies in the storytelling state

media release: UW Center for Visual Cultures lecture, with Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies

All frame, no performance: anti-narrative dramaturgies in the storytelling state

Thursday, March 13, 2025, 5 PM, Helen C. White 6191. Click here to join through Zoom

WORKSHOP: Doing and using interview stories in documentary performance

Friday, March 14, 2025, 12 PM, University Club Room 313. *Please contact cvc@mailplus.wisc.edu to register the workshop.

This lecture builds on my forthcoming book, The Storytelling State: Performing Lives in Singapore (University of Hawai’i Press), to explore what it means to make art in a world where “story” reigns supreme. The book identifies a new phenomenon in Singapore’s mediascape – the proliferation of public (auto)biographical storytelling – that is facilitated by direct and indirect state involvement and elicited through oral history interviews. This phenomenon has its origins in the work of American organizations such as StoryCorps and the National Public Radio. Indeed, the storytelling state is just one node in a growing global trend of digitally passing our ideas, gestures, and affects to one another in viral, narrative form. This trend may seem to empower and “give voice” to the marginalized, but it can have deleterious and dehumanizing consequences.

The talk traces the work of documentarian Tan Pin Pin, whose films have been characterized as a form of performance research. In her more recent work, I argue that Tan utilizes an anti-narrative dramaturgy that makes visible the workings of a storytelling economy where the ordinary is spectacularized. Her work points to how art can and should make the familiar habits of telling and consuming life stories strange, revealing them as necessarily performative and political.

This lecture builds on my forthcoming book, The Storytelling State: Performing Lives in Singapore (University of Hawai’i Press), to explore what it means to make art in a world where “story” reigns supreme. The book identifies a new phenomenon in Singapore’s mediascape – the proliferation of public (auto)biographical storytelling – that is facilitated by direct and indirect state involvement and elicited through oral history interviews. This phenomenon has its origins in the work of American organizations such as StoryCorps and the National Public Radio. Indeed, the storytelling state is just one node in a growing global trend of digitally passing our ideas, gestures, and affects to one another in viral, narrative form. This trend may seem to empower and “give voice” to the marginalized, but it can have deleterious and dehumanizing consequences.

The talk traces the work of documentarian Tan Pin Pin, whose films have been characterized as a form of performance research. In her more recent work, I argue that Tan utilizes an anti-narrative dramaturgy that makes visible the workings of a storytelling economy where the ordinary is spectacularized. Her work points to how art can and should make the familiar habits of telling and consuming life stories strange, revealing them as necessarily performative and political.