We often speak about and are surrounded by discourse about why representation is crucial in media, arts and culture, and everyday life. But what does representation actually mean? Is it simply about recognition and visibility of underrepresented communities? Who gets to represent them—just those with these authentic lived experience or can allies speak for them too? And how can we distinguish true allyship from performativity and appropriation?
Join us for a thought-provoking panel discussion featuring Fringe theatre-makers Rosie McGowan (A Lesbian Love Story: The Musical), Sindhura Kalidas (Invisible), Sofie Buligis (Celup), and Wang Ping-Hsiang (Retina Manoeuvre) in this important conversation facilitated by co-founder of Arts Equator, Kathy Rowland. They will share their collective insights from their experiences not only with respect to their artistic creations at the Fringe, but also from their lives as part of diverse minorities.
Speech to text interpretation is available upon request. Please email your request to [email protected] by 5 December 2025.
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PANELLIST – ROSIE MCGOWAN (she/her)
Rosie is an actor, director, applied theatre facilitator, educator, and counsellor who uses drama and theatre to explore potentially difficult and sensitive themes. Rosie runs workshops and projects exploring themes of self-care, sexual assault trauma, self-harm, communication, leadership and understanding mental health. Rosie also offers artist well-being support with various Singapore theatre companies and venues – T:>Works, The Necessary Stage, W!LD RICE and Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay.
PANELLIST – SOFIE BULIGIS (she/her)
Sofie is a singer-actor, producer and arts educator. At the age of 20, Sofie helmed youth theatre collective The Runaway Company as creative director, platforming stories by other young, queer and brown artists. Since then, she graduated from LASALLE College of the Arts’ BA(Hons) Musical Theatre programme, and has acted with the likes of Teater Ekamatra, The Necessary Stage, and Singapore Repertory Theatre’s The Little Company. When not onstage, Sofie is a teaching artist with W!LD RICE and Centre Stage.
PANELLIST – SINDHURA KALIDAS
Sindhura Kalidas is a theatre practitioner and educator. She is currently an Associate Artist with The Necessary Stage (TNS) and a core team member of The Finger Players (TFP).
Sindhu’s recent performance credits include W!LD RICE’s Psychobitch, Deonn Yang’s Why Be Good When You Can Be The Best? (2023), presented as part of the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, TFP’s Little Mournings (2021), and TNS’s Off Centre (2019).
Sindhu is a recipient of the NAC Postgraduate Arts Scholarship and holds an MA (Distinction) in Dramaturgy and Writing for Performance from Goldsmiths, University of London. She hopes to continue exploring themes of race, gender, and community in future works and shed light on underrepresented and misrepresented groups in Singapore.
PANELLIST – WANG PING-HSIANG
Wang Ping-Hsiang is a Berlin-based theatre director from Taiwan. His signature aesthetic transforms the everyday into the uncanny—transposing familiar landscapes into hyperreal, often surreal, digital environments. For Wang, theatre is not just a stage but a perceptual technology—an apparatus for decoding reality and proposing new modes of communication.
Wang constructs performances where narrative becomes a fully immersive, sensory architecture, inviting audiences into worlds where meaning is layered, unstable, and constantly remade.
FACILTATOR – KATHY ROWLAND
Kathy Rowland is the Co-Founder of and Head of Research at ArtsEquator. She has worked in the arts for over 30 years, in the areas of critical writing and arts advocacy, with a special interest in artistic freedom of expression. Through ArtsEquator, Kathy has promoted critical discourse in Southeast Asia, designing programs such as the Asian Arts Media Roundtable and Critics Live! and the ArtsEquator Writing Fellowship. She has written and presented on arts censorship and artistic freedom in Southeast Asia since the early 2000s. In 2022, she launched the Southeast Asian Artistic Freedom RADAR (Research and Documentation Resource) which researches and documents challenges to artistic freedom in Southeast Asia. In Feb 2025, Kathy was a guest speaker on the “Artistic Freedom: The Road Ahead” panel, organised by the Permanent Delegations of Norway and Sweden at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.