spell#7 is a Singapore-based performance company that creates intimate theatrical performances and environmental soundworks. Formed in 1997 by Kaylene Tan (Singapore) and Paul Rae (UK), the company has developed a distinctive and inventive focus on the ways history, culture and politics intersect in everyday life and experience.

Collaboration has always been integral to the company’s work, be it with designers, performers or other theatre companies (for example, as Resident Artists with TheatreWorks (Singapore) in 1999, and as partners with Bodies in Flight (UK) in 2000, 2003, 2009). Over the course of their development, spell#7 have worked with a range of local and foreign artists, and key collaborators include digital artist Hanin Zainomum, performers Chua Enlai, Janice Koh and Marianne Wee, architect Ling Hao, composer and musician Emma Stow, and writer Simon Jones.

The company has produced work in a range of venues, from conventional theatre spaces and art galleries to nightclubs, a converted convent and an office block. They have explored the intersections of multi-media, CD-Rom and Internet technologies with live performance, and have a reputation for their canny integration of live and mixed music into their productions. In 2001, they wrote and staged a “micro-musical”, My Last Night in Sin, which was part of the Singapore Arts Festival.

In 2002, the company moved into their current premises in Little India, and Ben Slater (UK) joined as Associate Director, bringing his experience as a programmer of film and new media events at Sheffield’s Showroom cinema in the UK. In addition to Paul and Kaylene writing two critically acclaimed and award winning play-texts for the Singaporean company TheatreWorks, 2003 also saw the company curating and producing the first digital and new media arts festival in Singapore, entitled The Year of Living Digitally. This groundbreaking series of events included performances by international theatre, sound and video artists as well as a commission of a local new media artwork.

In 2004, the company collaborated with sound designer Evan Tan to produce an audio tour of Little India, Desire Paths, which is accompanied by a CD-ROM designed by Hanin Zainomum. The tour is on-going, and is available in English, Mandarin and Japanese.

In addition, Paul and Kaylene began work on an on-going performance project, Duets, a series of pseudo-autobiographical performances about the power of two in a world of many; Tree Duet is the fourth in the series. In their soundworks, they explore the relationship between the rambunctious life of the city, and the inner worlds of the people moving through it.

This approach took a new turn in June 2009, when spell#7 premiered its performance walk, Dream–Work / Dream-Home, a collaboration with Bodies in Flight (UK) for the Singapore Arts Festival and In-Between Time (Bristol). Other performances have been more directly interactive, including Consultation (2005), a dialogue about urban malaise with a single audience member, and National Language Class (2008), a language lesson with the audience in Mandarin and Malay.

As befits this focus on the daily life of remarkable times, spell#7’s recent works have been developed over a period of years, and continue to change as they travel and are re-staged. Both National Language Class and Tree Duet are about intercultural experience, and in form they reflect the journeys they have made around Southeast Asia. Submitting these regional imprints to an international context is the next stage in the development of the work.

Paul Rae
Director, spell#7
Paul combines his work as co-artistic director of spell#7 with academic research into performance theory and contemporary Southeast Asian performance.

To read some of Paul's writings, click here.
To visit his National University of Singapore homepage, click here.

Kaylene Tan
Director, spell#7
Kaylene performs, writes and designs.