A Creative Awakening

SOMETIME IN FEBRUARY, Jed Tay started to dread going to work. As COO of NoonTalk Media, a media company specialising in production, events and artiste management, he was receiving calls almost every day from clients requesting to cancel a shoot or an event.

"Within a couple of weeks, all our projects for the next three months had been cancelled. Some 80 percent of our business had been wiped out. And every one of our staff was worried about the future," says Mr Tay.

Mr Tay, 30, vowed not to let the Covid-19 pandemic beat him. He decided to rewrite the company's pitch deck, this time addressing the public health situation and promising a solution to social distancing and the restrictions on group assembly.

Instead of holding a large-scale event, a company could get NoonTalk to live-stream a smaller event from its studio to the whole world. NoonTalk would use cutting-edge technology to make the event look hip and dazzling, and the cost of doing so may be even lower than that of a live event.

Mr Tay and his team worked out ways so that very few people needed to be at the actual shoot. Except for a handful of key talents, the rest could carry out their roles, such as picture and sound mixing, remotely.

Mr Tay completed the pitch deck in early March and sent it out to a WhatsApp group of business owners. Within hours, he received dozens of calls. Within days, he closed 10 deals. Within weeks, his team was shooting new productions at the studio.

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He says: "I was getting calls from people I didn't know, who had somehow gotten hold of the deck. I even got a call from Thailand because someone wanted to see if we could help live-stream an event taking place in Bangkok..."

"I guess we've always had the capabilities to do something like this - we have the cameras, the studio, the sound and mixing equipment. But it took a pandemic to force us to go into digital streaming as a solution for our clients."

Starting last week, NoonTalk Media began live-streaming a Mandarin variety show titled Let's Get Live every Wednesday and Friday. It offers Covid-19 information and entertainment throughout April. The show is commissioned by the government.

THE VIRTUAL STAGE

This is not to suggest that Covid-19 has been more boon than bane. Like most industries, the creative sector has been ravaged by the pandemic, and the impact is particularly severe here because over 40 percent of its workers are self-employed.

The ILostMyGig.sg website invites professionals and freelancers in the arts, design and entertainment industries to report details of their cancelled gigs. The tally for income lost due to Covid-19 is over S$28 million so far. And that's from just the reported losses.

Meanwhile, a two-month-old Facebook group called SG Covid-19 Creative/Cultural Professionals & Freelancers Support Group has attracted over 6,300 members, many seeking solace and/or offering support to peers riding out the storm. Like Mr Tay of NoonTalk Media, many are turning to digital solutions to keep their businesses going.

Arts company Checkpoint Theatre, for instance, was dealt a heavy blow when it had to cancel its eagerly-anticipated play The Nuclear Family, scheduled to run in March. Joint artistic directors Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong nonetheless honoured the contracts of 19 freelancers by paying them their two to three month wages.

Mr Huzir chooses to embrace optimism. He says: "We can no longer do live theatre because it's not possible to get people together. However, Checkpoint Theatre sees itself as not just a theatre company, but a company which tells original stories across different media. So we're going to explore the things we've also wanted to do, such as video games, graphic novels and hip-hop tracks."

Checkpoint Theatre was supposed to debut another play, The Heart Comes To Mind, in April, starring actress and influencer Oon Shu An. But it now plans to turn that into a radio play instead. Meanwhile Mr Huzir, who has a solid reputation for nurturing young writers, is running a new playwriting course via video conferencing. Though he typically conducts workshops in intimate group settings, social distancing times call for social distancing measures.

He says: "We won't let the virus beat us. We will stay nimble and open-hearted, and find ways to connect with our audiences still - even if we can no longer get them together in the same room."

DIGITAL DREAMS REALISED

In many cases, arts and entertainment are going online, both to affirm the importance of the creative sectors in a time of crisis, and as a means of persuading people to stay home and stay safe.

Singapore Dance Theatre got its dancer Kensuke Yorozu to teach ballet on the company's Instagram account. The Necessary Stage and Nine Years Theatre are streaming video recordings of their previous productions on Vimeo or YouTube for a limited time. And the Singapore Symphony Orchestra is putting up videos of past triumphs on YouTube, such as its thrilling 2015 performance of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony.

The Singapore Heritage Festival 2020 will go digital, as will many collections of museums that are currently closed. Some of these efforts are being supported by the government's S$55 million Arts and Culture Resilience Package, which includes a Digitalisation Fund to help artists and arts organisations go online. The Ministry for Culture, Community and Youth (MCCY) plans to support more than 200 digital projects through the fund.

Meanwhile, creative freelancers can also tap on other schemes such as the Temporary Relief Fund and the Self-Employed Person Income Relief Scheme to help tide them over the pandemic.

The great - if possibly temporary - migration of Singapore's art scene onto the digital realm is part of a larger trend all over the world of putting art rapidly online. Top organisations, such as the Bolshoi Ballet, the Paris Opera and several New York museums, are releasing videos of performances, interviews, tours and other forms of online content to make stay-at-home orders more bearable. Many audiences have expressed appreciation for these efforts, and some have made donations to keep their favourite institutions going.

KEEP 'EM LAUGHING

On the individual level, many actors, musicians and dancers are posting homemade videos on social media to reach out to their audience - and also, well, relieve their own boredom of staying indoors.

They include Dwayne Lau, a stage actor who's appeared in plays such as Hotel and Peter Pan In Serangoon Gardens. Mr Lau scored comic gold when he donned a pink shirt and pretended to be Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong singing a song about the importance of staying home. The video was shared over 100 times and liked by several thousand viewers on social media.

Mr Lau says: "I received countless messages from people thanking me for making them laugh. They include my step sister, who was supposed to get married in May, but had to cancel her wedding. She had been crying all day until she happened to click on my video. It made her laugh, and it was the first thing that made her feel better."

Mr Lau followed it up with a video of him playing a kopitiam uncle mourning the loss of business and singing the Les Miserables' song Empty Chairs And Empty Tables - and then later, as Colonel Sanders trying out the infamous recipe of cooking rice with KFC chicken in the rice cooker.

Mr Lau says he has lost some S$40,000 worth of income due to cancelled theatre performances and school drama lessons. He says: "At first I was panicking because I wasn't sure how I was going to pay my basic bills and insurance premiums. I was also sad because I wouldn't be able to do what I love to do most: teaching drama and performing for a live audience."

"But then I realised I could still reach out to an audience online. I could still make funny videos using just my iPhone. Creativity, after all, is a muscle. You have to keep using it so you don't lose it. And I tell myself I'm providing comic relief to all the stressed-out Singaporeans, the harried mums and dads struggling with parenting and caregiving at home, and the many uncles and aunties who wrote to me to say how much they enjoyed my videos."

HEROES ABOUND

There are countless other heroes in this crisis. There's artist-designer Weiman Kow whose infocomics on Covid-19 have proven to be so popular, people have been printing them out as posters to pin on their walls. Her social media numbers have shot up - she now has 31,000 followers on Instagram and 10,000 on Facebook, and counting.

There's also the Pasar Glamour Art Aid started by actresses Janice Koh, Pam Oei and Petrina Kow, which aims to raise S$100,000 for freelancers in urgent need of financial aid. The women will match every donation, dollar for dollar, up to S$50,000, and provide one-off grants of S$500 to as many as 200 struggling arts practitioners.

The Singapore Association of Motion Picture Professionals also launched a S$40,000 SAMPP Covid-19 Relief Fund to support Singapore-based motion picture freelancers who have lost all jobs and income. SAMPP offers grants of between S$300 and S$500.

Then there's Ng Swee San, a 55-year-old freelance writer who put out a Facebook call to her friends to help her raise funds for what she calls a "Creatives Commissioning Creatives" initiative. She's invited creatives from all sectors to send her project pitches, from which she will draw the best to give creation grants of up to S$300. So far a handful of artists, including a filmmaker, puppeteer and illustrator, have each been given S$300 for a "one-week stay home residency" to complete their projects.

Ms Ng herself has lost income of up to S$20,000 since the pandemic struck. But she says: "I am lucky. I just got my CPF money when I turned 55, so I'm living off that for this period of time. There are so many creatives who have less than me, and it breaks my heart to think that some of them are starving. I just want them to stay home and stay safe, and spend this time creating art instead."

"I believe that for a long time, we've been valuing the wrong things. We worship certain professions, and we pay these people millions of dollars. But those working in what we now call 'essential services' - such as nurses, cleaners and supermarket staff - are all underpaid.

"Meanwhile, artists who create works that bring joy and hope, and help people connect with each other - things that we desperately need in this crisis - are also routinely underpaid... I hope this crisis is a wake-up call for all of us to realise just how important these people are to our lives."