ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an interview with playwright and poet Tan Suet Lee, who was born in the UK but who now predominantly lives in Singapore. The interview discusses Tan’s praxis as a form of “minor translocalism,” combining Michael Peter Smith’s pioneering work on the material and imaginative translocal connections between urban centres, and literatures on “minor transnationalism” (Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih) that highlight the more tenuous, marginal and alternative spaces of cross-border flows. The interview covers: Tan’s connections to Singaporean and British East Asian theatre worlds and the varying degrees of success she has had in connecting these translocally (from her play Swing being included in the first British East Asian play anthology, Foreign Goods, with extracts performed at Theatre 503 in London and La MaMA in New York, to the difficulty of establishing and maintaining networks in and across different spheres); her mixed experiences of having her play A Second Life performed as part of the digital international theatre experiment LoNyLa which interwove digital and in-person networks; and the different collaborative opportunities opened up by her work as a poet as well as a playwright. Combined, this offers a more nuanced take on the fast-paced, frictionless flows often associated with transnational forms of artistic migration, instead highlighting the halting, stop-start networks of collaboration and individual practice.
