Kenneth Chan, National University of Singapore
Vol. 23, No. 1 (Spring 2004), 29-43

This essay focuses on the Singapore performances of Ivan Heng and Chowee Leow’s An Occasional Orchid and Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill to query, first, the role of cross-dressing in the staging of the plays as a kind of feminist intervention and, second, the context of these performances as a conservative state’s engagement with globalization and artistic liberalization. The author’s interview with Heng, foregrounding the Britain-Singapore linkage, substantiates the essay’s analysis of Heng’s performances and illuminates in a different register the contradictions between liberatory and commodifying impulses and processes that trouble Heng’s praxis as cross-dressing performer.