ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the introduction of The Viewpoints to students and performers from non-Western and/or non-English speaking backgrounds and looks at the application of The Viewpoints as a performance pedagogy that can overcome different genres, disciplines, trainings and languages. The Viewpoints is a system of investigation and improvisation around performance related applications of time and space. Singapore is made up of four officially recognized races and languages. Despite English being the lingua franca of the land, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil are equally recognized and all signage displays the four languages. When teaching students in Singapore, one is confronted with a myriad of languages, interpretations, cultural understandings, performance traditions and historical narratives that must be taken into consideration before introducing new material. When we translated the terms into Vietnamese and Japanese in the earlier workshops, the English terms and understanding of the terms dominated the conversation.
