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TheatreWorks’ Desdemona and the Question of Decipherability

Part of my research involves understanding how the poetics of postcolonial performances expand our political imagination in terms of the re-imagination of postcolonial subjectivity and community. As a result, on two separate occasions, I have visited Singapore interviewing performers and cultural critics in an effort to understand how postcolonial performances enact a ‘counter gaze’ to those dominant ideological modes of authority and power that cohere around identity-securing discourses. As a result of my research, I have also come to learn that the poetics of such performances often involve aesthetic practices that actively foreground a dialogic relationship with the problematics and conceptual frameworks that postcolonial theorists have delineated. Issues such as identity, subjectivity, community, fetishism and colonial history have been investigated by artists in their own right. What has often emerged in these re-visionary performance practices, as I have also witnessed, is the process and the work of subjectivity being performed. The poetics of these performances often foreground via their aesthetic practices, the possibility of imagining and knowing ourselves differently. I have come to understand, such is the agonism of these postcolonial performances that while what is often expressed is the desire to imagine subjectivities differently, none the less what is also performed is the desire to keep open the irreducibility of such questions. Such a desire is also often manifested in a similar desire to become otherwise from the inscriptions of the colonial past. It was while I was immersing myself in the audio-visual archives of TheatreWorks in Singapore that I had my first encounter with Desdemona. While I was generating pages of notes in an attempt to understand how this and other contemporary Singaporean performances (one of the most overt sites where we witness embodied resistances to dominant state discourses that attempt to secure subjectivity, sexuality and community) disrupt, resist