It took much cajoling before Carol Tan agreed to share her experience as a cultural diplomat. Even so, she prefers to leave barely a mark of herself, pushing Dr Tan Chin Nam and Goh Ching Lee as the initiators and experts in the various high-profile cultural missions that Singapore embarked on in the last decade.

Michael Koh shares several strategies that the National Heritage Board has used to reach out to all residents to enjoy arts, culture and heritage. The innovative programmes to make museums less stodgy have seen huge leaps in museum visits.

Indians made significant contributions to the visual arts in Singapore at a national level. At the ethnic Indian level, Indian visual arts in Singapore remain modest. The exponential developments in Chinese visual arts in Singapore emanate from the Chinese population size and the Chinese merchants and elite, clan associations, and Chinese art societies that nurtured and supported them. Several of these artists have become national icons, such as Liu Kang, Chen Wen Hsi, Cheong Soo Pieng, and Georgette Chen. By contrast, Indian merchants did not have the same passion for visual arts. They, along with the Indian elite, tended to favour Indian performing art. Despite these constraints, Indians have contributed to the visual arts in Singapore by transcending the Indian community and focusing on Singapore as a whole. It was principally the establishment of art institutions, notably the LaSalle-SIA College of the Arts, which spurred Indian artists to move to centre stage. The LaSalle group that emerged included S. Namasivayam, Venka Puroshothaman, Dr. S. Chandrasekaran, Kumari Nahappan, and Jeremy Sharma.

The majority of the resident Indian community in Singapore is of South Indian origin, particularly of Tamil ancestry. Early settlers, many of whom were indentured labourers, brought with them to Singapore their traditions, languages and a strong sense of culture. In Singapore, Indian writers, using both English and in the vernacular, have developed the genres of poetry, drama and the short story to particular relevance, and these literary forms still remain more popular than the genre of the novel. Yet, the pool of Indian writing in English as compared to the body of writing in the vernacular is small. A portion of Tamil writing is translated into English, but few Tamil writers write directly in the English language, and translations are not considered in this short assessment.

My aim for this chapter is to use descriptions of the work of some key choreographers and their interconnecting relationships to sketch an impression of Singapore’s contemporary dance scene from the late 1990s to 2020. As it is only a sketch, I apologize for the loss of nuance and complexity of the scene and for companies and artists who may only be mentioned briefly. This is not a history of modern and contemporary dance in Singapore, though the influence of seminal figures such as Goh Lay Kuan and Lim Fei Shen is acknowledged; rather, it is a first-person account based on my experiences as a dancer, choreographer, and reviewer working within the industry at this time.

The introduction draws upon the notion of ‘Asia as method’ to propose a new framework for the analysis of collaborative performance: ‘City as method’. Noting how Hong Kong and Singapore have shared and yet divergent histories, perspectives derived from area studies, post-colonialism, postmodernism, and interculturalism are deployed to demonstrate how ‘city as method’ facilitates a comparative analytical space that does not automatically connect intercultural collaborative projects with questions of national identity. Rather, a more fluid space emerges that is fundamentally ‘in-between’. As a significant conduit for this ‘in-betweenness’, the globalised city is characterised as a nexus of transnationalism, mobility, and collaborative practice. In such a liminal space, national geopolitics can be dislocated or reinforced according to the collaborative relationships between artists and the projects they pursue. ‘In-betweenness’ also leads a critique of the conception of the intercultural ecology a within theatre studies as horizontal and egalitarian. Instead, it is proposed that interculturalism is reliant upon disjuncture to make cities meaningful as physical sites. Such an interpretation supports the significance of ‘in-betweenness’ for the mapping of different strategies for city-to-city collaboration, which includes the affective landscapes that lie within as well as between cities. The introduction proposes that ‘city as method’ facilitates a greater understanding of the multiplicity of collaborative strategies and experiences that create place.