Synopsis:

I am just a writer.
I am just a director.
I am just a producer.
I am just a stage crew.
I am just a light designer.
I am just a stage manager.
I am just a sound designer.
I am just a ticketing personnel.
I am just a marketing personnel.
I am just...

In life, we play many roles - as parent, children, employers, employees, workers, consumers, thinkers, doers, and so on. Sometimes these roles are liberating and enjoyable. Sometimes, they are oppressive and testing. How do we take on our roles? Are we able to break boundaries? Or do we have to perform them the way they should conventionally be?

Emergency Shelter - training arm of experimental theatre company Emergency Stairs - brings you its first production, OFF STAGE in May! Members of Emergency Shelter will take on roles in theatre as both cast and crew to look at conventions in theatre-making and examine how we can take on roles in different ways.

Do our roles define us, or do we define our roles?

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Post-show dialogues: Immediately after 2 June, 3pm & 3 June, 3pm performances

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Shelter Members & Performers
Chanel Chan, Chong Woon Yong, Darren Guo, Zachary Ho, WahWah Hung Chit Wah, Doreen Toh, Theresa Wee-Yenko, Jasmine Xie, Lina Yu.

About Emergency Shelter
Emergency Shelter is the training and experimental arm of Emergency Stairs. It currently comprises a mix of 9 emerging, mid-career, and veteran theatre practitioners. It is not like any other youth platform or actor training groups of companies who teaches young people about acting. We are a group of people with the same belief, curiosity, and hunger who wants to train not just as actors, but also artists, who wants to create through experimentation of traditional, current and conventional practices, and explore the boundaries of arts making through theatre.

About STAIRCASE
With the new home space of Emergency Stairs situated in an industrial estate instead of an arts housing, it will be interesting to see how we use this unconventional setting as an element to create meaningful pieces of theatre. It is fitting for a company whose position is in the experimental. The choice to stage Shelter's first show there also allows us to explore the relationship and connection between theatre and space. We believe it will be an exciting chance for us and the audience to experience our venue, to explore how we deal with an unconventional new space. It will be an intimate and cosy experience.

About Emergency Stairs
Emergency Stairs is an intercultural, and experimental not-for-profit theatre company based in Singapore. We believe that: Theatre is revolutionary, revolution is experimental, and experimentation is subversive. Theatre continually destructs and constructs our perceptions towards art, life and the world. And Time, Space and Body are the basic elements of this revolution. Hence, we will approach intercultural dialogue openly, deconstruct the works of our predecessors boldly, and reconstruct the theatre of the future confidently.

Emergency Stairs is supported by the National Arts Council under the Seed Grant Scheme for the period from 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2020.