Chia didn’t start out in the theatre. The son of a housewife and a businessman, he was hardworking and disciplined as a student, which made him a good fit for the uniformed groups in secondary school. His plan was to eventually sign on as a regular with the Singapore navy. He appreciated the steady promotion up the ranks and believed it was a career that suited him.
Then in 1993, his younger sister spotted an audition notice by Toy Factory Productions, a fledgling theatre company at the time, and coaxed Chia into accompanying her. Lim Chin Huat from dance group Ecnad was leading the audition. Copy his movements? I could do that, Chia thought. He was called back, his sister wasn’t.
He took part in his first theatre production, an experimental theatre piece set in a swimming pool atop the Pan Pacific hotel, and also went on to perform as part of the ensemble in Toy Factory’s popular production of Titoudao, which follows the real-life triumphs and tribulations of a Hokkien opera starlet. Something clicked in him. He’d applied for a Singapore Armed Forces scholarship to study at the National University of Singapore, but this discovery of the stage was an epiphany. In 1995, he gave up the scholarship and the navy, and enrolled in the university’s theatre studies programme.
During his theatre career, Chia has excelled as a performer and a director, as well as the occasional translator, frequently working with Toy Factory, The Theatre Practice, and Wild Rice. The theatremakers who would go on to heavily influence his artistic trajectory included the late Kuo Pao Kun and the late William Teo of the Asia-in-Theatre Research Centre. The former taught him deep character work, the latter the playfulness and the organisation of the ensemble; the former’s plays have now become Singaporean classics, the latter was drawn to adapt classics with a strong Asian sensibility, such as The Mahabharata or The Conference of the Birds.
In 2006, while pondering how actors might be able to continue to train after completing their formal education in the theatre, Chia attended a workshop where he had his first proper encounter with the Suzuki Method of Actor Training and Viewpoints – both rigorous, physical demanding systems of actor training that cultivate the actor’s body and mind. This was another revelation, which he elaborated on during a 2014 interview with me for The Straits Times:
“I saw the SITI Company, how they trained in
Viewpoints and they trained in Suzuki, how
they train before they rehearse, or they train
when they’re not rehearsing. And I thought
, there are actually people who do these things,
and these things are repeatable, like ballet or
sports exercises. There are things you can do,
and maybe you might discover new things as
you get better. I thought, hey, a method is
what I need. A system is what I need.“
In 2008, he flew to New York for a month-long formal workshop with the SITI Company; several years later, he trained in the Suzuki Method and performed in the Toga Festival with the Suzuki Company of Toga in Japan. He was astonished to observe how the Suzuki Company actors worked together as a whole, taking care of the maintenance of the company’s premises but also handling up to three different productions in a single day without flubbing a line.
Chia’s visions of the work an ensemble could create led him to become a founding member of the performance collective A GROUP OF PEOPLE, which attempted to produce democratic collaborative pieces led by each member in turn.
They found uneven success, with interdisciplinary, boundary-breaking work that both baffled and delighted, and the collective was visibly stunned when they won The Straits Times Life Theatre Award for Production of the Year for their small-scale experimental piece A Cage Goes in Search of a Bird (2010).
While A GROUP OF PEOPLE folded in less than four years, the possibility of such collaborative methods of working and regular training stuck with Chia. He thought these different strands—training the actor, building the ensemble, reviving the classic—might be able to cohere in a different form, and Nine Years Theatre was born shortly after.
