[Review] ITI's FYiP & Jyoti Rana's Hear the Grass As It Grows

[Pretext] of my relationship and encounters with ITI’s Final Year Projects

 
I first encountered the Intercultural Theatre Institute (ITI)’s Final Year Individual Projects (FYiP) in 2017, which also happened to be the bumper crop year of intake at ITI, with a graduating cohort of 14 students. Spread across two weeks, that year’s FYiP showcase was one of my first encounters with such a breadth of raw and still-developing individual work; I remember watching roughly two-thirds of the graduating cohort, moving between surprise, impact and, at times, fatigue as each student revealed a very different stage of artistic maturity and polish.

Each FYiP is, by nature, deeply individual. The students write, direct and perform their own solo works, drawing on the experiences, questions and artistic languages they have developed over three years of training. Yet, the making of these individual works is also remarkably communal. With close to no budget, students support one another in the building of sets, lighting and sound, technical setup, props and usher duties. The result is a curious contradiction: a collection of intensely personal performances made through collective labour.

This is perhaps fitting for ITI, whose three-year intensive acting training immerses actor-students in traditional Asian theatre forms and contemporary performance practices, while developing a rigorous understanding of the body, voice and processes of theatre-making. By the time they arrive at FYiP, they are not simply being asked to demonstrate what they have learnt as performers. They are given the responsibility of becoming theatre-makers: deciding what they want to say, how they want to construct it, and how they want an audience to encounter it.

Over the years, I have returned to watch FYiP of several cohorts, encountering wildly different approaches to that “freedom” of artistic expression. Some students excavate deeply personal memories, risking vulnerability but also sometimes risk being self-indulgent or navel-gazing; others test formal performance techniques and methodologies encountered during their training. Some construct elaborate theatrical worlds, while others strip performance down to their body and its relationship with space. I have never sat down to formally write about these grad showcases before, but I’ve always thought about them — I love the rawness and earnestness of unpolished works in progress, but watching them has become a way of observing not just individual artistic growth, but the questions an emerging theatre maker begins to ask when the responsibility for making the work is finally placed in their own hands.

This year, one particular work stayed with me…

[Review] of Hear the Grass As It Grows by Jyoti Rana

 
There is something arrestingly precise, or perhaps composed about Jyoti Rana’s Hear the Grass As It Grows. Her presentation is the second of three works presented tonight.

We were led into the studio, moments after the first energetic showcase by Henry Joseph Fundo had ended. The set is spare, striking in its simplicity: linear light tubes tracing the perimeter of the performance area, a single wooden bench, and on the wall, a wooden picture frame with a quiet steel grid mesh.

The long wooden bench is laid lengthwise on its side against the wall, creating a narrow recess, almost like a passageway. Jyoti moves back and forth repeatedly within this confined corridor, like a Pac-Man trapped between two walls —denied even the possibility of playing out its function within the game.

On the wall, the wooden picture frame inset with a grid-like steel mesh symbolised a window of sorts. Together with the clinical spareness and woody textures, the room carries something of that clean, almost Nordic domesticity familiar to trending HDB interiors, its woody textures and immaculate spareness carrying a quiet sense of oppression.

Jyoti’s work unfolds more like a poem, less like a linear narrative: fragments of movement, sound, light and image accumulating around the body of someone confined within an invisible system. The space itself becomes part of its language. Boxed white light frames the performer, sometimes trapping her, sometimes searching or scanning for her, and at others framing her upper body in a rectangle as she speaks, almost like the close-up of a news broadcaster, addressing us from within it.. Meanwhile, the lone “window” high on the wall suggests an outside world that remains curiously out of reach—and, perhaps more disturbingly, increasingly irrelevant. 

The single bench becomes the work’s most versatile object: furniture, boundary, hiding place, frame, enclosure. (Loved the way Jyoti made use of this singular furniture in her set.) At one point, Jyoti wedges herself between the upright bench and the wall, her body negotiating the narrow space left between them. Facing the wall, her back turned to us, she reaches behind herself towards the bench that conceals the full length of her body. Her hands beat against its wooden plank, producing a forceful rhythm that accompanies her text. The movement is simple, but the image is powerful: a body learning the dimensions of its confinement, testing where it can fit, and perhaps where it might still escape.

Near the end of the presentation, the room begins to soften. What began in clinical whites gradually melts into a beautiful honeydew-melon orange across the wall, almost like an Impressionist’s sunset. The warmth is fleeting, but enough—as though the body had found a small crack through which something humane could enter. And then there are the sounds—the loneliness of cricket calls hanging in the silence, making the vastness of the world outside feel almost cruelly close.

The ending folds the work quietly back onto its beginning, spatially, to where we began. A projection of grass fills the space as Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day slowly scrolls upwards. Jyoti lies down on her back within the recess of the bench its legs resting against the wall, returning us to the spatial arrangement we encountered upon entering. Except now, the recess resembles a coffin. The body is appears to be buried beneath the field of grass projected above her.

It is a contemplative image: one that looks like confinement, yet somehow feels like release (for the protagonist). Although Jyoti has not escaped the physical boundaries that have held her throughout the work; something in her seems to have shifted. Yet the image does not feel morbid. There is an unexpected repose to it—as though, without ever leaving the boundaries of her confinement, she has arrived somewhere else.

Hear the Grass As It Grows speaks of rules, repetition and the suffocating sameness of a life shaped by systems imposed by others. These are not unfamiliar themes in contemporary theatre. But what impresses is the composure with which Jyoti gives them theatrical form. Freedom here does not necessarily mean breaking out. Perhaps it lies instead in finding one's own way of inhabiting what cannot immediately be changed—in the body's persistent attempts to move, listen, imagine, and remain alive.Yet it does not need to announce resistance loudly. Instead, it finds resistance in the body’s persistent attempts to move, to occupy space, to listen, and perhaps simply to remain alive. It may not lie in escaping the structures that contain us, but in discovering how the mind and body might negotiate them—and somewhere within that negotiation, retain a sense of self.

Within the modest scale of a student showcase, Jyoti demonstrates how little theatre needs when the relationship between body, object, light and space is precisely considered. The result is poetic without becoming obscure, philosophical without overburdening itself —and, most importantly, a reminder that somewhere within the boundaries of palpable confinement, there is possibility of another kind of freedom quietly persisting.

Show attended:
ITI Final Year Individual Project 2026 — Hear The Grass As It Grows
by ITI Graduating Class of 2026 — Jyoti Rana
Date: 5 Sep 2026, 8 pm
Venue: ITI Studios