Resumen de Cross-Dress for Success: Performing Ivan Heng and Chowee Leow’s "An Occasional Orchid" and Stella Kon’s "Emily of Emerald Hill" on the Singapore Stage
This essay focuses on the Singapore performances of Ivan Heng and Chowee Leow’s An Occasional Orchid and Stella Kon’s Emily of Emerald Hill to query, first, the role of cross-dressing in the staging of the plays as a kind of feminist intervention and, second, the context of these performances as a conservative state’s engagement with globalization and artistic liberalization. The author’s interview with Heng, foregrounding the Britain-Singapore linkage, substantiates the essay’s analysis of Heng’s performances and illuminates in a different register the contradictions between liberatory and commodifying impulses and processes that trouble Heng’s praxis as cross-dressing performer.
