The highly contagious coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that began in late 2019 has greatly affected education globally, especially for learning skills that require human contact and constant practice in order to achieve competency. Similar to the rest of the world, the closure of theaters and suspension of school activities in Singapore have particularly impacted the dance and performing arts academies. As economies around the world gradually open up, performance-based colleges must find ways to provide a safe and sustainable environment while adhering to public health guidelines during a pandemic. Implementing safety protocols in the campus and studio can minimize disease transmission. This article presents measures and guidelines to help minimize the risk of viral spread, including using a blended model of virtual home-based and face-to-face training with faculty, in order to ensure continued adequate pre-professional dance education. The challenges of providing a blended model of education are also addressed. © 2021 National Dance Education Organization.

This article outlines the development of the Singapore Poetry Writing Month (SingPoWriMo) digital community, organised around an annual month-long poem-a-day, prompt-based writing challenge carried out on Facebook. As a highly active digital writing community, SingPoWriMo has generated more poetry in English in its six-year history than the Singapore literary community has since independence. The poems posted on SingPoWriMo are able to reach the group’s population of more than 7,000 members without the traditional filters to publication such as editorial input, publisher selection, economic choice and transaction, and critical review. Conversely, social media provides selective replacements for some of these functions, via comment threads, ‘likes’ and other reactions, as well as Facebook’s viral sharing function that allows poetry to reach an audience beyond the group. These factors of mass reach, rapidity, immediacy, and instant feedback have implications for the poetry generated, which goes on to integrate and remake traditional modes of publication and performance according to the qualities of a digital community. This article seeks to examine the historical antecedents and influences of high-volume, high-speed poetic output; the nature of the poetry being written in these digital writing communities; and the effects and implications of the SingPoWriMo phenomenon on the Singaporean and regional literary ecosystems. SingPoWriMo and its counterparts are new ways of writing that also create, and demand, new ways of understanding writing.

Professional musician-educators from a tertiary arts institution in Singapore collaborated on a cross-cultural performance in Beijing as part of their professional development. Through a case study, semi-structured interviews explored the music making experiences of four of the musician-educators involved: the composer, the singer, the pianist and the erhu performer. Their experiences address the concept of cross-cultural music making and its significance in professional development for musician-educators. The experiences shared by the four musician-educators illuminate challenges, tensions and some areas to further resolve and critically question regarding how cultures are engaged in the process of music-making. Through unpacking the narratives of musician-educators and how they experience interactions with culture in music making, there is the possibility to further understand diverse music making encounters in Singapore. © The Author(s) 2022.

At the time of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965, owing to the colonial past, a cultural gulf existed between English-educated Tamils and predominantly Tamil-using Tamils. Tamil literature was left to the latter to be fostered as part of their Tamil language efforts. Becoming and being a literati has been the ideal among them. This ideal was rooted in the late colonial period and fully developed in the post-colonial years in Tamil Nadu, Malaya and Singapore. Most writers were low-income earners associated with working-class Tamils. Most of them were unschooled and worked as daily rated labourers, hair-dressers, road laying coolies, port workers, Tamil school teachers and some were even unemployed. Their asset was their high aspiration to be recognised as a writer. This passion drove them to self-educate themselves in the art of writing grammatically structured poetry, short stories and novels and become eloquent public speakers. Amongst the Tamil writers of that era, those who worked at the radio stations and newspapers or at the Indian Movie News magazine were considered as being privileged as they were paid to write. Often, they remained a class apart from the rest of the writers.

Renee Lee explores the practice of fine art as a full-time career in this essay on Ong Kim Seng who has been a full-time watercolour painter since 1985. The relevance of landscape and still-life artworks is challenged in contemporary art circles, even as the fundamental skills in art are debated in art education. This essay explores key points in the journey of an artist who has an international following and who was accorded distinction by the American Watercolour Society.