Built in 1979, the iconic Toa Payoh Dragon Playground and its brethren have long been a part of millennials’ memories growing up, eventually becoming key landmarks and cultural symbols in Singapore. Unfortunately, due to safety concerns, many of the other dragons have since been demolished, leaving the Toa Payoh Dragon Playground one of the few still standing, even amidst en bloc redevelopment of the flats around it.

In considering our attachment to such spaces with strong personal significance and childhood nostalgia, playwright Joel Tan crafted his play Mosaic, as he considered the place of heritage in the minds of youth in Singapore. First produced and presented in 2013, and subsequently restaged in 2015, the play follows three 20-something year old friends and a stranger to protest the demolition of an old playground in Ang Mo Kio. Each coming in with their own philosophy and mindset, relationships are tested and convictions are challenged, as they enter into a cycle of forgetting, destruction, loss and letting go.

Now receiving a restaging as part of the Esplanade’s 2023 The Studios series, we spoke to playwright Joel and director Tan Shou Chen, regarding the relevance of the play 10 years on in 2023, if Singapore has a place for nostalgia, and how much we tie our identity to spaces and places around us.

“The impulse for the play came about from conversations I had with friends surrounding heritage preservation and urban renewal, and as a young person in Singapore, I wondered about how that affected the way we moved forward in life, particularly as an ‘elder millennial who felt stuck in place,'” says Joel. “There’s certainly a lot more awareness and agitation surrounding such loss of built heritage these days, perhaps due to a greater feeling of loss and helplessness as to what we can do about it. All that revolves around the feeling of uncertainty about the future, which I sense young people today can articulate better and in a more profound way.”

“The themes in Mosaic are quite universal, particularly for people who’ve been through the ‘quarter-life crisis’ around their 20s, as they ask who they are and what they’re doing in life,” says Shou Chen. “Things always feel like they’re moving very fast, and sometimes, you’re really figuring out how to respond to all this change, and wondering where you stand amidst all of it as life passes you by.”

On being given the opportunity to restage Joel’s play, Shou Chen is excited at the possibilities that exist, particularly at the chance to use a new venue – the Singtel Waterfront Theatre. “With a new cast, a new space and new direction, there’s joy in facing the challenge of doing this play, where we can really do a completely new staging,” says Shou Chen. “My focus as a director is really to look at what it means to grow up in Singapore, and how the idea of memory feeds into this and how nostalgia feeds into identity, alongside our values and the choices we make. Each of these characters experience some kind of tragedy during the course of the play, as it rips away at their memory and experiences something traumatic enough to bring the drama. My role then is to make that clear, and make sure it speaks to the heart of everyone who has grown up here.”

Seeing as how the play was written ten years ago, Mosaic might even be considered a period piece, where the 2010s were a fundamentally different time from the present. “In looking back at Mosaic, I think I feel weird, even disembodied, because I was a different person back then, and it feels like someone else wrote it,” says Joel. “My interests and craft as a playwright have changed, and I tackle my ideas in a different way. Sometimes I look back in envy because I can’t write with the same youthful abandon and energy and silliness I had back then. I also think about the context, and how we conducted ourselves on the internet very differently and campaigned very differently as well, like the concept of the Facebook event.”

“One of the characters, Sharon, who identifies as an activist, is trying to organise a strike via Facebook, and for young people today, that would be virtually unheard of, or even how people are using their devices – Gen Z today might just be on their phones sending memes to each other the whole time instead,” he adds. “One thing I clearly recall is the 2011 General Elections, which showed us how things happening on the internet affects things in the real world. There was this naive optimism about politics and change, and that’s the atmosphere this play operates on,” says Joel. “And that idea of manifesting something in the real world from a discussion online has blossomed over the past 10 years, and it’s clear that there are repercussions and real life effects, sometimes maybe too much even.”

“Even so, with a Gen Z cast, I feel like they still understood it immediately, and there’s still something that resonates even with the youth of today. Directing certain parts, I could say things like ‘can you use the TikTok voice’ and it was immediately understandable for them and the vibe we wanted to bring,” says Shou Chen. “They’re not that far away from us in terms of age, but perhaps in another 10 years, where technology continues to change more, that’s when we really see a difference. But then again, I also see how some of their personal styling choices resemble stuff we used to wear in the ’90s, and it feels like we’re coming full circle in some kind of cycle.”

In Singapore, it often feels like nostalgia is both weaponised and belittled, as and when required to serve different needs, whether it’s patriotism over the glory days of the past or dismissing it for the sake of justifying destruction in the name of progress. “I think it’s seductive to live in the past, but not necessarily useful. It’s hard to make a judgment call because it’s so integral to who you are, it defines your stories and your identity, and especially for physical objects, they are tangible reminders of who you are, and that’s where nostalgia ultimately comes in,” says Shou Chen.

“This idea of change is such a human thing, and how often things slip away from us, both the ordinary and the valuable. I do get the sense that we don’t have enough of an infrastructure or community organised around anything in Singapore, whether regarding political life or saving a community or built heritage,” says Joel. “Take a look at Golden Mile Complex – if we had some kind of pre-existing group that stood up against that gentrifying agenda, if we had a more robust history around that, maybe there would have been a different outcome. I’m not an activist, but as an observer, you can sense a lot of growing anger and critical interest in the things shaping society, and there’s a lot of robust energy, but it’s simply the conditions surrounding them coming together as a collective are so hard.”

“None of that energy is translating into real world praxis, and much of that ties back to how the individual and community are often disempowered and disenfranchised, with no models to look to regarding preservation and organising such movements,” he adds. “In a way, we’re being deliberately prevented from maturing, and so we don’t know how to do that. We have so many last minute groups scrambling to take photos of things for the last time before they disappear, and while we may complain, what we need is more robust grassroots communities and organisations that can contest and argue these proposed changes against commercial and corporate entities.”

It is all this energy and mourning for lost space that manifests in daily conversations and in local literature, often forgotten once the space itself is gone, before rearing its head again when a new demolition project is announced. “I preface the play with Arthur Yap’s poem there is no future in nostalgia, and I think about how even back when he was writing this poem, he was already so ambivalent towards urban renewal, and saw nostalgia as a wasted emotion, and such ambivalence exists almost as a reaction to the relentless narrative of progress,” says Joel.

“When writing this, I was really over the whole conservation thing, and felt a similar ambivalence about how people ended up utilising these nostalgic feelings for social or cultural capital, like the whole craze with Ang Ku Kueh and Dragon Playground merchandise, when nostalgia became commercialised,” he adds. “It is concerning that we can’t bear to let go of things, and it poses an existential question – what does it mean to surround ourselves with memory if we can’t really hold onto these things? If no one is willing to agitate for these things, if no one is keeping an archive of things that are lost, then they will indeed be lost.”

“I think we will never give up this theme of progress and how we reflect on it. Even my cast talks about how much things have changed, and how things they remember from their youth are already gone. I myself think about the trees at Pasir Ris, or the old National Library building, and I think I’ve grown almost numb to it,” says Shou Chen. “In the play, there’s a character that holds on to a memory so tightly, but when he finds out it may not be as accurate as he remembers it, there’s that tragedy he experiences. But another perspective is that you look at that lost memory and you go ‘it’s ok, change is fine because change will happen’.”

Perhaps then, the problem then lies precisely with how much value we ascribe to spaces and places, and that the solution lies in the art of letting go. “The dragon playground is just a playground. It has no agency, it is just there, and meaning is given to it by the people who choose to link their identity to it,” says Shou Chen. “At the heart of it, this play really is about memories that are tied to certain spaces, and how our identity is shaped by them. Sometimes you look at spaces, and you think – accidents all over the world happen, and spaces are destroyed all the time. When we lose those spaces, can we have it in us to see it as making space for renewal?”

“And even if you say oh the government isn’t renewing or preserving certain spaces, maybe we need to learn that all this loss is part and parcel of life,” he concludes. “Of course that’s not saying we shouldn’t fight for such spaces, and if I was younger, I would probably react very strongly and think yes, we must preserve them. But nowadays, I think I’ve come to realise sometimes we need to clear those spaces to make room for the next generation to form their own memories, and I’m learning to be ok with that.”

Mosaic plays from 18th to 20th August 2023 at the Singtel Waterfront Theatre. Tickets available here

The Studios 2023 runs from July to September 2023 at the Esplanade. Full programme and tickets available here

Production Credits:

Playwright: Joel Tan Director: Tan Shou Chen Performers: Coco Wang Ling, Irsyad Dawood, Andre Chong, Rebecca Ashley Dass Set Designer: TK Hay Costume Stylist: Yvette Ng Lighting Designer: Alberta Wileo Sound Designer: Jing Ng Sound Engineer: Guo Ningru Producer: Shridar Mani (The Public Space) Production Manager: Cindy Yeong Technical Manager: Kailash Stage Manager: Celestine Wong Assistant Stage Manager: Chong Wee Nee Key Visual Design: Akbar Syadiq