ONCE UPON A MEMORY
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Ms Tan (centre, front row) with team mates from the NUS Debating team in Australia circa 1993-1994.
It won for Best Director. The prize was an all-expenses-paid trip to attend a summer course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, Australia. During that trip, she went by herself to the Sydney Opera House, not knowing what to watch. The ticketing person suggested Godspell, a musical based on the Gospel according to St Matthew. “I loved it and I prayed that God would let me perform in that musical one day. When my second year in Law School started, I opened up my campus mailbox and on top of all the readings for the year was an audition notice for Godspell – it was the Singapore Repertory Theatre’s first production. I went to the audition and the audition pianist was my long-lost friend Elaine Chan! I [got the role of] the character who sings the song ‘O Bless The Lord My Soul’.” Ms Tan’s other big passion was being part of the NUS Debating Team in her second year. “I got to travel and meet really inspiring and interesting
I ACTUALLY GOT NAMED NINTH BEST DEBATER IN THE WORLD. IT WAS A RIOT!
Showbiz whiz It was her years in the Law Faculty that prepared Ms Selena Tan (Law ‘94) for a life in theatre, and also to make a business out of it. BY THERESA TAN 20
ALUMNUS
contemporaries. My mates were mainly from Law School. “We went to Australia, Hong Kong and once to Oxford, UK where we took part in the World Debating Championships. It was hilarious because nobody thought we could speak English. We were entered into the ‘English as a foreign language’ category! “We tried not to let on that we only spoke English, and then when we opened our mouths to debate, everyone was just floored – it was a riot! We won best team for English as a foreign language, made it to the semi-finals and I actually got named ninth-best debater in the world!” Ms Tan graduated from Law School in 1994 and was a pupil under Senior Counsel Molly Lim. She continued in litigation for about three years, but theatre continued to beckon, and she worked as a freelance actor. “At that time, with very little savings, I decided to manage all my business commitments, So in 2000, I incorporated Dream Academy to do my one-woman comedies like Report Cuts, Medisaves, PS 21+.” Running a theatre business that turned a profit four years after its incorporation takes a certain amount of savvy, which Ms Tan credits to her legal training. “I think my legal education taught me a lot about rational thinking, how to solve disputes, mediate and also how to carry out research starting from nowhere. Valuable lessons for every day life, for character study in theatre, and for business, as it turns out.”
Photos courtesy of Selena Tan
ince I was seven or eight, I had wanted to be a lawyer,” says Selena Tan, 42, founder of stage production company Dream Academy and creative director for this year’s National Day Parade. “I think it had a lot to do with TV. I loved legal shows – there was The Paper Chase back then. The law fascinated me, particularly criminal law and litigation. I felt that justice was important, from a young age.” Ms Tan fulfilled that desire when she entered NUS’ Law Faculty in 1990. “I enjoyed Moot Court and the legal method and systems classes. I loved Constitutional Law [and listening to my] tutors. There seemed – and still does – to be so many holes to plug [in our Constitution]”. Ms Tan names among her favourite former lecturers Ms Eleanor Wong, then a part-time lecturer on contract negotiations and a playwright famed for Invitation To Treat, a trilogy of plays centered on a lesbian lawyer protaganist. “Eleanor’s was really the best class because you just read the brief, and then started play acting and tried to ‘get your way’,” Ms Tan recalls. Already into theatre way before she joined NUS, and busy with her campus extra-curricular activities, Ms Tan relished those classes because they were “easy and fun”. For someone who had been acting and directing since she was in primary school, NUS was a veritable playground. In her first year of University, Ms Tan, with another friend, Ms Seema Gupta, directed Anton Chekov’s The Good Doctor for the National University of Singapore Students’ Union Arts Festival Competition.