Performance & Health Symposium

30 Nov to 1 Dec 2023

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Panel: Medical Humanities

30 Nov 2023 • 15:25 - 16:50

Flexible Performance Space, Block F Level 1 #F102, 1 McNally Street, Singapore 187940 • Map

What roles can performance play within specific healthcare contexts and medical education? How can the perspectives offered by performance studies expand the medical humanities? While enhancing healthcare and its sensitivity to personal experience, can performance also provoke reconsiderations of its modes of communication, its technological developments, and its professional dynamics? This interdisciplinary panel’s presenters are interested in the potentials of performance to afford new ways of interacting with science and its often daunting conclusions, to contribute to identity formation in healthcare professions, and to enact new relationships between human beings, technology and AI in medical contexts.

Performance as a Tool to Enhance Communication Around Medical Situations
Dayal Singh
My discussion centers on how performances can be used as a tool for parents, students, and medical staff in communicating their values and behaviors around medical issues. The performance of Brave Maeve shows we can learn how to create dialogue in different ways around bad news and develop communication skills around situations that are often deemed depressing and life-threatening. It shows the perspectives of parents, children, and doctors, and how we may navigate these complications of the personal experiences they have.

Deep Medicine and Performance
Miguel Escobar
This presentation considers the hype and promise of AI applications for medical treatment from a performance studies perspective. I will analyze recent discourse on this topic in connection to the ideas of leading scholars of critical AI such as S. Scott Graham and Simone Natale. I will also consider recent theatre work that explores the anxieties and hopes of AI in the medical arena such as Francisco Mendoza’s Machine Learning (2021).

Medical Humanities and Healthcare Professionals
Ong Eng Koon
The medical humanities have the potential to impact healthcare professionals in various aspects, including medical education, clinical communications, and professional identity formation. The identity of healthcare professionals as stakeholders at the intersection between the humanities and medicine is evolving and a brief description of the current landscape through the lens of a clinician-educator will be presented.

People

  • Moderator
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    Associate Professor Graham Wolfe

    Associate Professor, Theatre and Performance Studies, National University of Singapore

  • Panelist
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    Dayal Gian Singh

    Producer, Actor, Singer, Writer, Filmmaker and Corporate Trainer

  • Panelist
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    Associate Professor Miguel Escobar Varela

    Associate Professor, Theatre and Performance Studies, National University of Singapore

  • Panelist
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    Dr Ong Eng Koon

    Director, Office of Medical Humanities, Singhealth Medicine Academic Clinical Programme

Graham Wolfe is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the National University of Singapore. He is currently the Head of the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies. His monograph, Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing, appeared in 2020, and his edited collection, The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction, will be published in November 2023. His articles on theatre, literature, and popular culture can be found in journals including Modern Drama, Mosaic, Adaptation and Performance Research.

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Dayal Gian Singh works internationally across a wide range of areas as a producer, actor, singer, writer, filmmaker, and corporate trainer.

As a performer, Dayal has performed across a range of media. He has toured with numerous plays and musicals across the globe, featuring in performances at the Royal Opera House (UK) to Marina Bay Sands (Singapore in The LKY Musical. In Perth, Australia, he is linked closely with local production house The Penguin Empire, working on numerous award-winning projects over the years. Recently he was involved in a feature film that saw him taking part in Sundance 2019.

In Singapore, Dayal has worked with a number of companies such as the Singapore Repertory Theatre, Pangdemonium, Bellepoquem, Stint On Stage, Centre Stage, I-Theatre and Mediacorp. As an educator he has delivered multiple drama programmes for schools internationally, as well as contributing and writing drama education books for course curricula.

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Miguel Escobar Varela is Associate Professor at NUS and has teaching appointments in Theatre and Performance Studies at Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and University Scholars Programme (USP). Dr Varela is a web developer and theatre researcher who has lived in Mexico, The Netherlands, Singapore and Indonesia. He is also the Academic Advisor on Digital Scholarship at the NUS Libraries and convenes the informal Digital Humanities Singapore group.

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Dr Ong is a specialist consultant in palliative medicine. As a clinical-educator, Dr Ong instructs on the topics of professionalism, ethics, communications, and humanities at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He is also Director, Office of Medical Humanities, Singhealth Medicine Academic Clinical Programme.

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