Growing up in fast-paced Singapore with its high expectations gets to even the most resilient of people. There always comes a breaking point for everyone, yet, we keep telling ourselves we can take on more and more and more. For Cheryl Ho, Rachel Lee, who form theatre collective MASHH (Mm and Something Happens Here), they liken it to the unusual metaphor of seaweed, and how quickly it grows bigger when it absorbs water all around them, much like the unending pressure that seems to plague us all on a daily basis.

Should we be like seaweed then? All that and more gets answered in MASHH’s fringe show I Am Seaweed, which arrives in Singapore this January after a successful run at the 2023 Melbourne Fringe. Performed by Cheryl Ho, with lighting and production design by Rachel Lee, and directed by Tan Hui Er, meet Sheryl with an ‘S’, who strives to become as resilient and as versatile as seaweed, in this quirky, whimsical but resonant show that helps us understand ourselves all that much better.

“The idea for I Am Seaweed was first conceived in 2021 when I was with a friend in New South Wales, and she was making miso soup and putting some wakame seaweed inside. It was weird because we suddenly said “Wow, it’s amazing how big these things get!” And we sort of realised that it’s a very weird but interesting metaphor, and I just looked at my friend in the eye and went, ‘I am seaweed,'” says Cheryl. “So somehow that was the spark that seeded the entire show, where I ended up writing the bulk of it after moving back to Singapore that year.”

Of course, it’s never as simple as sitting down and allowing a play to form, but for Cheryl, who has begun to carve out a name for herself with twee, indie works that strike a chord, her creative process moves in moments and images. “I write very much in terms of scenes and moments, where I have a bunch of scenarios and start throwing them onto a page in different chapters, where it begins to take shape,” she says. “I think I write almost like a film, with the entire picture in mind, and I’ve had to learn how to pull back on my stage directions and descriptions a little and allow my designers and director to do more, and make decisions as to how it goes from page to stage.”

On the evolution of the play, Cheryl explains how there’s been plenty of time for the show to grow since its Melbourne run, and how she hopes Singapore audiences will connect with it in a very direct way. “Melbourne was a lot sparser, with a simple two table and chair set-up, but we’re dressing it up a lot more for Singapore and trying to make it more immersive and jazzing it up, with an ending that’s been tweaked slightly as well,” she says.

“I think that the beautiful thing about this script is how the idea seems so abstract, but when you see it, you understand the flow of the story, and how Sheryl in the show sees the world; you’ll see how even the light and sound are characters in the show as well, and we really got to play with the mise en scène and incorporating those filmic effects into a theatrical space,” says director Hui Er. “It’s been a very fun process where we kept asking ourselves ‘what if we did this…’ and worked these aesthetic choices into the character throughline.”

With such an emotional script, all three collaborators required strong interpersonal chemistry and mutual respect to ensure that everything went smoothly; as it is, that was exactly what happened, with strong collaboration and the ability to portray Sheryl’s journey from start to end. “It’s really been a very refreshing process for me as a director, to see this very personal story emerge from Cheryl, and the need to ensure it is always a safe space for her,” says Hui Er. “There’s a lot of charm in watching Cheryl perform, and how empowering it can be to see her make these choices as an actor, where it’s very organic going from page to stage each rehearsal, and always, so much talking that goes into it where we chart her journey.”

“It does help that we come from similar backgrounds and have some similar experiences growing up, so there’s a lot of things all three of us understand, especially when it comes to my ideas about the seaweed itself – we are all seaweed! And we just understand that, which is so important to me,” says Cheryl.

“Cheryl and I have been collaborating since 2017, and we’ve almost developed this shorthand language for when we create new work together. The script she gives me is always in chunks of words, and isn’t really a complete script yet, and so our work is for me to respond to each chunk of words with a visual image, and keep going into a back and forth process that eventually becomes the final script,” says Rachel.

On the origin of MASHH (Mm and Something Happens Here), Cheryl explains the power of collectives and how putting a name to their collaboration empowers them further, even in a world obsessed with labels that may or may not be limiting. “We’ve been working together for a while and in our own independent capacities, but in 2020, we did a show together for the Melbourne Fringe and thought – maybe there’s something here we should explore more? So that’s how MASHH came about, and a lot of just bouncing ideas off each other,” says Cheryl. “The people we bring into the work are very intentional in the collaboration as well, and more collaborative than dictatorial. It’s a bit of an experiment as a duo, but also just gives us space for exploring – the goal isn’t necessarily to keep churning out work, but just to see what we can do together. The core of what we do is to explore that quirky side to us, in terms of form and style, and bringing both design and performance together and our sensibilities to new places through MASHH.”

“Partially it’s a marketing thing beyond just saying ‘presented by Cheryl and Rachel’, but together, it helps provide some kind of grounding for us to hold space to try new things,” says Rachel. “I’m a lighting designer in Melbourne, but MASHH lets me explore things like video design and set design and dramaturgy as well, and a way for us to keep working together. For me, design is always at the forefront, and it excites me how I get to experiment with different ways for performance to interact with technology.”

On the way that I Am Seaweed has impacted audiences, MASHH feels that there is something real and emotionally resonant in it. “I think that I wrote this play for the teenage Cheryl Ho, and spending all those years in Melbourne helped me have time away from Singapore and the space to process my emotions more. I think without that time in Melbourne doing art, I couldn’t even have imagined creating a work like this,” says Cheryl. “We’ve always created work intended for a Melbourne audience, but now with I Am Seaweed, it feels much more Singaporean, with more code-switching, some translation needed for a Melbourne audience, and ultimately, something that speaks to Singaporeans who might have gone through something similar to what we did.”

“I was quite pleasantly surprised by the response we got in Melbourne, because the audience could catch a lot of the nuances we thought were very Singaporean, but most of all, we were comforted by how universal the message was,” says Rachel. “It was heartening that the audience was willing to follow us on this full journey, and some even came up to us after the show and thanked us for putting on this work, and both Australians and Singaporeans in Australia were like ‘I saw myself onstage’.”

“I was sitting in the audience for all the shows and saw the audience reacting – and they did. I always knew it was going to be a universal experience and resonate with a lot of people, and we can’t wait to bring it back to Singapore, where we feel that there’s a need for local audiences to see it,” says Hui Er.

For a play about stress, MASHH also reflected on their own coping mechanisms when it came to dealing with pressure. “Humour has always been so important to me – it’s healthy when it becomes a way to process the stress, but when its an escape, that’s when it dives into something more unhealthy. But in general, I just think that sleeping well, getting a massage and talking to friends is what I need most, and of course, therapy when you can afford it,” says Cheryl. “I’ve also been known to do dance parties at home with myself, as well as journalling my thoughts to process them better.”

“Similar to Cheryl, I tend to go into survival mode where I start to care for myself a lot more when I’m about to enter a stressful period, where I tell myself I need to eat properly, I need to be on top of things, to sleep well and really just maintain myself,” says Rachel. “Like going for walks in Melbourne or making sure I eat breakfast, though sometimes I do also end up doing things like binge-watching dramas just to make myself feel good for a while!”

“I used to be a lot worse at coping with stress, but my best advice is to do one thing for yourself each day, just to feel like you’ve made some kind of progress. It helps to put things in perspective, where you force yourself to step away and realise the world is so much bigger,” says Hui Er. “That’s a privilege as an artist as well – people’s lives don’t hang in the balance of our work, and for us to put out our best work, we need to respect the art, give it the space to breathe, and allow ourselves the rest and time needed to be at our best.”

On how they feel Singapore art is perceived in Australia, the team is happy that their work is providing new layers and new perspectives to Singapore. “I think Singapore tends to present itself in a very specific way to other countries that makes us seem very prim and proper and put together, but Singapore artists who bring work overseas usually peel back those layers and show a lot of the nuance that goes into being Singaporean,” says Rachel. “A lot of Australian friends tend to say ‘oh this is something different I never knew about Singaporeans’, from the slang to the idiosyncrasies we have – sometimes you see the Singaporeans in the audience being the only ones laughing because they get it. So in a way, it’s quite educational and eye-opening for foreigners to see a Singaporean work, where theres’s so much more colour and nuance that they initially thought.”

“There’s a cute moment in the show during a family dinner where the dialogue feels quintessentially Singaporean, where you see both love and conflict simultaneously being expressed – and to me, that’s so unique because of the way we show love for each other,” says Hui Er. “When we were doing tech in Melbourne, there was someone on the crew who was Singaporean and they ended up code switching back to Singlish and it felt very easy – I think that’s something people who aren’t Singaporeans don’t necessarily see until something Singaporean gets presented onstage, not to mention how the dialogue primarily being in Singlish really brims with authenticity and is so culturally us.”

“The Australians are very mesmerised by the language; I remember how initially I switched when I started my life in Melbourne, and people thought I was from Canada. And then I switched into Singlish and people were so wowed by it, even my own teachers who were somehow amazed by the ‘dialect’, when it’s really just how Singlish truncates words and how English can look so different,” says Cheryl.

“Adding on to that – I had an Australian friend who was so fascinated when was with a Singaporean friend – all I said was ‘Supermarket. Apple.’ She responded ‘Green?’, and I nodded, and we kept walking. My Australian friend was so flabbergasted that we could understand each other just like that!” says Rachel.

And on the M1SFF theme of displacement, MASHH reflects on it and its relevance to the play to round off our conversation. “It sounds very abstract, but really this idea of not belonging and feeling alone forms such a core part of the show, when you’re alone with your noisy thoughts that keep attacking you. We want people to know that they’re not alone in this, and that this was also our journey in making this, and that we experience something similar in our lives,” says Hui Er.

“There’s this sense of self being displaced, and you do end up dissociating sometimes, and being a Singaporean based in Melbourne, sometimes I do have to come to terms with what it means to me, and where I really belong, which I think came up a lot more in the process of this show,” says Rachel.

“Sheryl in the play sometimes doesn’t feel at home when in the presence of her family, and there can be this level of dissociation in different spaces because of all the noise in her head, and really it’s about her trying to be resilient amidst it all, trying to tell herself oh, life has to be joyful and maintain that positive mental attitude,” says Cheryl. “Sometimes you get that sense of displacement when you are trapped in a life you don’t choose for yourself, when you’re feeling the pressure of societal expectations. In the leadup to this play, we talked a lot about what we lose of ourselves in the pursuit of resilience and staying strong, and recognising that loss we’ve experienced.”

Featured Photo Credit: Illustrator Credit Vanessa Bong, All other Photo Credit: Lè Studio Photography

I Am Seaweed plays from 16th to 18th January 2025 at the NAFA Studio Theatre. Tickets available from BookMyShow

The 2025 M1 Singapore Fringe Festival will run from 8th to 19th January 2025. More information and full line-up available here

To contribute towards the Fringe Festival Fund, visit donate.necessary.org or Giving.sg.