On Wednesday I travelled to Malaysia to present the first chapter of my dissertation and to better understand how to move forward with the writing. We spoke for one hour and thirty minutes. As always, Dr. Tetriana was precise and direct—she clearly pointed out both the strengths and the weaknesses of my work and helped guide the direction of the research.
Now I am back in Singapore, sitting at my desk and rewriting everything again from the beginning. It is not easy. But slowly the structure of the dissertation is beginning to appear, and I can start to see what the whole project might become.
One important realization is that for the past six months I have been deeply immersed in several theoretical fields: Performance Theory (Restored Behaviour), Liminality Theory, Embodiment and Phenomenology, Cultural Memory Theory, Practice-Led Epistemology, and Folklore Theory. At times it feels like an overwhelming landscape of ideas—almost endless. The horizon is still difficult to see.
Yet when I look back at these six months, a great deal has happened.
During this time I have:
– presented six performances,
– held one exhibition,
– had five meetings with Dr. Tetriana,
– created two new paintings,
– proposed five presentations in different places (two of them have already taken shape as full concepts),
– experienced one fall with a mild concussion—which fortunately seems to have passed.
And of course there was also the performance during Singapore Art Week.
Now another challenge is approaching. In two weeks I must submit my second assignment for the Oxford course.
So the landscape is vast, the path is still unfolding, and the amount of information sometimes feels impossible to hold. But step by step the work continues, and slowly the form of the research begins to reveal itself.