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CHIN Woon Ping grew up in Malacca, studied at Universiti Malaya, and has lived and worked in various countries. She has been an actor, director, playwright, poet and academic.
Chin's credits includes the thought-provoking play Details Body Cannot Wants, staged in Singapore in 1992, and her well-received first collection of verse, The Naturalization of Camellia Song. She has read and performed her works on stage, radio and television in the US, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, etc. At present, she is an associate professor at Singapore's National Institute of Education, where she teaches English literature to trainee teachers.
I caught up with her in her office for an interview.
Tan: Tell us more about Playful Phoenix, the compilation of plays you edited, which came out in print recently.
Chin: It's a collection of plays by women that have either been staged in Singapore or been commissioned to be staged. My contribution, Diary of a Madwoman, has not been staged yet, but I have been told by Theatreworks it'll be staged in October. I think the credit should go to (dramatist) Ong Keng Sen and Theatreworks for coming up with the idea for the book. A number of plays were already in their archives so that made the job (of editing) quite easy. What I had to do was select a couple more, read them and come up with a unifying concept. What's exciting is that it's the first time women have been featured in a collection here. All of the writers wrote about sisterhood, about being a woman, about their bodies, their struggles and conflicts.
Why "playful phoenix"?
I thought it was playful, a pun. I was looking for a symbol of women and this was an old Chinese symbol. Then a friend pointed out that the phoenix itself is a hermaphrodite symbol because it's got male and female parts. And I rather like that so as to break away from an essentialist, purist concept of what it means to be a woman - that we can be dual, that we have male and female elements. Another possible title was `Out of the Wings' - women coming out of the darkness, out of the wings. But the Theatreworks people liked the former, so it stuck.
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