Kirin HengAugust 2025, Kirin Heng
In June last year, Drama Box hosted the International Community Arts Festival Hub in Singapore, with the theme of The Gathering. Festival Director Koh Hui Ling of Drama Box reminded us of the power of community arts to gather people from all walks of life amidst an increasingly fractured world.
Before we commence, I invite you to ask yourself the following questions: What is your idea of a gathering? Who in your community would you invite? Who sits on its fringes, perhaps behind the scenes – preparing dishes, tending to children, caring for the elderly? And if the gathering takes place in a building, have those who built it brick by brick been invited to enjoy the fruits of their labour within those same walls?
Although migrant and domestic workers are critical to Singapore’s social fabric and material landscape, they are often unseen, their voices unheard. In her seminal work Can the Subaltern Speak? scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that the subaltern—those who are socially and economically marginalised—cannot truly “speak” in dominant systems of knowledge and power in a way that is heard or understood on their own terms. She thus calls for those of us with relative economic privilege and freedom to, rather than speaking on behalf of the subaltern, instead make spaces for listening.
One of the few public arenas in Singapore where the voices of the subaltern—in this case migrant and domestic workers—can be heard without mediation is through the arts, which can potentially allow them to tell their own stories, in their own words.
As part of The Gathering, the Birds Migrant Theatre staged a play reading of some of their most resonant works, written by Deni Apriyani, AK Zilani, Sugiarti Mustiarjo, and Wiwi Tri, and performed by Deni, Zilani, and Rina Hakim. The group positions itself as a bridge between migrant workers and local audiences, seeking to “break the stereotypes, and [for workers] to be seen as more than just permit holders.”
Mentored by theatre powerhouses Haresh Sharma and Serena Ho, the group has followed a collective structure since its formation in 2018. It was founded by Wiwi Tri and Sugiarti Mustiarjo, and each piece is born from the rich insights and lived experiences of its members, with Ho and Sharma shaping the work through guidance in dramaturgy, structure, and performance. This process of devising places authorship and voice firmly in the hands of the workers themselves.
The selection of play excerpts that were performed touched on themes of migrancy, unpacking dominant narratives about migrant and domestic workers in Singapore. Each excerpt offered a different facet of the worker experience, confronting audiences, many of whom were middle-class Singaporeans, alongside international festival attendees, with the performers’ humanity and the complexity of their lived experiences.
Spivak makes a distinction between representation (speaking for) and re-presentation (aesthetic representation). With the former, there lies the risk of reinforcing existing power structures by presuming to speak on behalf of a disenfranchised group. The Birds Migrant Theatre’s practice aligns more closely with re-presentation.
Spivak, however, cautions that re-presentation is not the perfect corrective: it risks flattening the complexities of the subaltern experience when a select few representatives are taken to stand in for many. Yet, The Birds skillfully avoids claiming to be a mouthpiece for all migrant and domestic workers, instead using an aestheticised version of lived experiences as a means to create connection. The group transforms lived realities into aestheticised forms of storytelling that balance gravity with levity, offering multiple openings for empathy, without claiming to speak for all.
One play, Foreign Bodies, tackled the stigma surrounding relationships between domestic helpers and foreign workers, especially when these relationships lead to pregnancy. Deni played a helper who becomes pregnant and returns to Indonesia for an abortion. Two possible realities unfold. In the first, her mother (played by Rina) urges her to keep the child: “The baby is innocent. Be a good mother.” But Deni’s character turns to the audience and says: “Such a thing will not happen. Such a mother won’t exist.” In the more likely scenario, her mother tells her to either get rid of the baby or hide away from the gossip of neighbours. “Pretend I just died in Singapore,” the daughter replies.
The Birds Migrant Theatre moved between heavy truths and light-hearted moments with ease, using humour to open audiences up to difficult realities. A line like, “Other children come back home with a car, motorbike, or house for their parents. And you come back with a baby,” drew laughs even as it underscored deep societal and familial pressures. In Look Ma, I’m British, a satirical take on cultural hybridity in the age of globalisation, a helper returns home with an affected British accent. This prompts her mother to exclaim: “What did her employer feed her until she forgot her identity? Is she embarrassed of being poor?”
Some scenes anchored us firmly in the lives left behind. In one, Zilani played a migrant worker returning home to marry at his family’s urging, only to have to leave his wife almost immediately for work in Singapore.
The performance closed with a powerful epilogue from In Between. The cast recalled the strict instructions from employment agencies upon arrival in Singapore: “Don’t cause trouble to the locals.” One performer admitted she was afraid to even sit beside locals on the train during her first few years here. Another shared that the cost of food provided to migrant workers is SGD120 per month for three meals a day, but at the price of nutritional value; they say “even pet dogs are fed better-quality food than that.”
“Do we deserve better?” they ask. “The answer should come from you.”
During the post-show Q&A, performers Deni, Rina, and Zilani shared more about processes behind Birds Migrant Theatre works. Legally, migrant and domestic workers in Singapore are entitled to one rest day a week, and members often use this precious time to attend Birds Migrant Theatre workshops and prepare for productions. Yet attendance is always precarious: some members commit to months of workshops only to be unable to perform due to restrictive employers or sudden changes in their schedules.
Zilani, who has worked in Singapore for 15 years, recalled that for his first five or six years, he “did not do much, just existing.” Now, through his involvement with Birds Migrant Theatre, he feels a sense of belonging. Membership is fluid, shaped by overseas postings and employer goodwill, but the community endures, committed to creating an oeuvre of plays that speak deeply to the human experience, creating much needed spaces for listening.
About the writer
Kirin Heng is a writer whose research is focused on participatory art processes, informed by her Research Master of Arts in media, art and performance studies, and her past work with ArtsWok Collaborative. Now, her work as a UX Writer and Content Designer is deeply influenced by this background, helping her shape empathetic and inclusive user experiences.