Drama Box & ArtsWok Collaborative

BOTH SIDES, NOW, an arts-based community engagement project exploring what it means to live well, and leave well, co-presented by Drama Box and ArtsWok Collaborative since 2013, returns this November. This latest edition, MENGUKIR HARAPAN, is made with, and largely for the Malay-Muslim community in Singapore. Mengukir Harapan – ‘carving hope’ - represents our wish to create a culturally contextual, safe space in which the community can share their aspirations, wishes and challenges about not just death, but the journey leading up to it.

More information about the organisers

Drama Box

Founded in 1990, Drama Box is a non-profit company known for creating theatre that inspires dialogue, reflection and change. A big part of Drama Box’s work is in bringing theatre to the community so that everyone can have the means to access and participate. By shining a spotlight on marginalised narratives and making space for the communal contemplation of complex issues, they seek to tell stories that provoke a deeper understanding of Singapore’s culture, history and identity.

Drama Box is a charity and Institution of Public Character (IPC) registered in Singapore, supported by the National Arts Council under the Major Company Scheme for the period of April 2020 to March 2023.

ArtsWok Collaborative

The work of ArtsWok Collaborative focuses on arts connecting communities by harnessing the power of the arts to create dialogue, invite social participation and build bridges across difference.

We work with multidisciplinary teams to design and implement innovative community-based arts programmes such as Both Sides, Now, an immersive arts experience that invites conversations about end-of-life issues, as well as IPS Prism, a civic-engagement piece which looked at governance in Singapore. In 2015, it launched the inaugural annual youth theatre festival Peer Pleasure, a platform for creative and open exchanges with young people through drama and dialogue. It developed and continues to facilitate The Greenhouse Sessions, a field- building initiative that catalyses learning through a community of practice as well as The Greenhouse Lab, an action-learning programme revolving around arts-based community development. It also conducts and shares research that builds legitimacy for the arts-based community development field. Our case studies and articles can be found on our website.

We are a charity and Institution of Public Character (IPC) registered in Singapore, supported by the National Arts Council under the Major Company Scheme for the period of April 2021 to March 2024.