Pooja Nansi is a performer and a spoken word poet. Her work includes her one-woman show You Are Here and Thick Beats for Good Girls.
Photo credit: Joel Lim @ Calibre Pictures
Thick Beats for
Good Girls
Written and performed by
Jessica Bellamy and Pooja Nansi
Directed and dramaturged by
Huzir Sulaiman
Presented by
Checkpoint Theatre
April 2018
“Where’s all the women that still remember who they slept with? / Where’s all the girls too busy studying to make the guest list? But when you go out, you still working what you was blessed with [...] / Don’t make the good girls go bad, no.”
But what is a good girl anyway? Does she have to know her prayers by heart? Can she ever let go, and get her freak on? Thick Beats for Good Girls is the electrifying collaboration between performance-poet Pooja Nansi and playwright Jessica Bellamy, who have a ton of questions about the balancing act that is being a woman, an ethnic or religious minority and—God forbid—a hip-hop enthusiast.
This is the coming-of-age anthem Singapore hasn’t heard yet—mainly because it wouldn’t make it onto national radio. This is love and finding a sense of belonging while rapping along to lyrics your mom wouldn’t approve of, the rush of walking into a club and feeling the bass in your bones. This is learning to stand in your own light. This is asking the question: Do good girls ever get to call the shots?
Directed and dramaturged by Huzir Sulaiman, Thick Beats combines the distinctive, bold voices of Pooja and Jessica as they ignite the stage with original poems, rhymes and musings on life. At once thoughtful and joyful, claiming and reclaiming, Thick Beats for Good Girlsdelves into the intersections between race, culture, femininity and hip-hop while embracing the contradictions that lie at the crossroads.
Photo credit: Crispian Chan
You Are Here
Written and performed by
Pooja Nansi
Directed and dramaturged by
Joel Tan
Presented by
The Esplanade Studios Series
April 2016
Queensland Poetry Festival
August 2016
Kalaa Utsavam - Indian Festival of Arts November 2016 - Esplanade
Pooja Nansi is getting married, and planning a wedding in Singapore is making her think about her roots. As with all migration stories, hers bears the weight of travellers past, a complex cultural map of her parents’ move from India to Singapore, and the border-crossing love story of her grandparents. At the same time, her life is a constant, often funny struggle with finding a place for her culturally-mixed voice within Singapore’s idiosyncratic ethnic rubric.
This one-woman show, interspersed with Pooja’s trademark mix of poetry and storytelling, is an attempt to find a place for her family's messy sprawl of stories in orderly Singapore. You Are Here is about navigating and positioning, and as Pooja soon discovers, a map doesn’t provide one with answers; it only suggests where one should begin—whether in discovering and orienting oneself, putting things into perspective, or re-examining things.
Directed and dramaturged by Joel Tan, You Are Here was first commissioned and performed to great acclaim at Checkpoint Theatre’s What I Love About You Is Your Attitude Problem in November 2015.