“The Most Difficult Part of the Day Is Waking Up” : Beverly Yuen on Pain, Memory and Rewriting Recovery

Grain Performance & Research Lab’s new physical theatre work, The Body Remembers, The Body Rewrites, asks what healing means when there is no going back.

Anxiety can alter our posture. Grief can change the way we move. Fear can change how we breathe.

For Beverly Yuen, the connection between body and emotion became impossible to ignore after a knee injury in 2023. What began as physical pain soon became something more tangled.

“Acute pain, persistent pain and emotional distress became entangled in ways I had not anticipated,” she says. “This led me to explore not only physical pain, but also how experiences and memories from the past can resurface when we are in a position of vulnerability.”

That experience is the seed of The Body Remembers, The Body Rewrites, a new physical theatre piece written and directed by Yuen, which plays at The Republic Cultural Centre from 15 to 17 January 2027.

A question without a tidy answer

At its heart, the production asks what recovery means when there is no straightforward return to who we were before. It wonders why an examination hall can still return in someone’s dreams decades later, why getting out of bed can feel like the hardest part of the day, and what recovery looks like when there may be no single moment at which a person becomes “fixed”.

Yuen is deliberate about the title. “The word ‘rewrites’ is important to me,” she says. “The work asks what we carry forward, what changes, and who we might become as our relationship with our experiences continues to evolve.”

Rather than treating healing as a matter of repairing what is broken, the piece explores living differently with what has happened: carrying the past without being defined by it, and letting recovery become a process of change rather than return.

Two Alices, and a man in pain

The story follows Alice, an adult dealing with the physical and emotional fallout of an injury. While she keeps up with the demands of everyday life, she finds herself confronting unresolved childhood experiences through an encounter with her younger self. Her path crosses with that of Caleb, whose own injury brings its own emotional challenges.

Yuen performs Alice, with Elaine Siow as Young Alice. In the production’s publicity image, the two sit close together, one hand resting on the other’s shoulder. The image carries the question at the centre of the work: what would you say to a younger self who was silenced, who couldn’t fight back, who was afraid?

Through the characters, the production looks at what living with pain involves beyond its physical symptoms, from disrupted sleep and helplessness to shame and the loss of a former sense of self. It combines movement, spoken text, live singing and humour.

Breaking the silence on men’s mental health

For assistant director and performer Matthew Martin, whose own experiences informed parts of the script, the work carries personal weight.

“Mental struggles aren’t just something women experience. Men experience it as well,” he says. “This is something not widely spoken about, probably because of stigma.”

His hope for audiences is simple: “Our past experiences affect the body, not just the mind. Caring for your mind is just as important as caring for your body.”

Where pain science meets the stage

The production was developed in collaboration with healthcare professionals. Physiotherapists Wendy Ng and Dr Lester Jones contributed to its creative development, alongside the lived experiences and imaginations of the artists and performers. Ng serves as Consultant in Pain Science & Embodied Movement, and Jones as Pain Literacy Educator.

Ng, who has worked with Grain PR Lab on previous productions, sees theatre as a way to widen how pain is understood. “Through my work as a clinician and pain researcher, I’ve learned that understanding pain requires us to look beyond clinical knowledge, to people’s lived experiences, their stories, relationships and contexts,” she says. “Beverly and the performers offer a powerful way to bring these different perspectives together through theatre, challenge how we think about pain, and ultimately help us see and understand the person in pain a little differently.”

The work is part of Yuen’s ongoing inquiry into pain, physical memory and recovery, which has run through several productions since 2024: Give Me the Mountain (2024), Whispering Tiger, Hidden Essence (2025) and After Rain, We Breathe (2026).

The production does not offer a prescription. It invites audiences into the less easily resolved spaces between pain and memory, vulnerability and resilience, past and present. As the company puts it, the question may not be only “How do I get back to who I was?” but also “Who am I becoming?”

About Beverly Yuen

Dr Beverly Yuen is a theatre practitioner and educator with a BA in Theatre Studies from NUS and a PhD in Communication Studies from NTU. She is also a certified personal trainer. In 1998, she trained for a year at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards in Italy. She later founded In Source Theatre, through which she created and performed in over 25 original works, and led NAC-funded research on “spiritual theatre”, documented in a full-length film.

About Grain Performance & Research Lab

Grain PR Lab is a not-for-profit physical theatre collective led by Yuen. It creates cross-disciplinary works that merge arts, science and embodied practice. Its mission is to produce a quality repertoire of physical and poetic theatre through interdisciplinary collaboration and research in performance anthropology.

Show details

The Body Remembers, The Body Rewrites

Dates: 15 January 2027 (Preview, 7:30 PM); 16 and 17 January 2027 (2:00 PM & 6:00 PM)

Venue: The Black Box (Level 2), The Republic Cultural Centre, Republic Polytechnic

Tickets: peatix.com/event/5250667. Tickets are SG Culture Pass eligible.

Cast: Annabel Diong, Elaine Siow, Matthew Martin, Pearl Han and Beverly Yuen

Director / Playwright: Beverly Yuen

Assistant Director: Matthew Martin