Sharon Frese

Actress

Sharon’s Corridor

– – – – –

England – Jamaica – Germany – US – Singapore – Malaysia

About

Sharon is an actor and artist and currently resides in Malaysia. Born and raised in England to Jamaican parents, Sharon started her career as a nurse in England. Following a move to Germany with her husband, she embarked on an Arts degree, retrained and began working as a stage actor in 2004. Sharon and her family relocated to Singapore in 2009.

Sharon has made significant contributions to the art scene in Singapore. She made her Singapore stage debut with the Necessary Stage company and has worked with several Singaporean and international theatre companies including Theatre Works, (now known as T:>Works), Wild Rice, HCAC, Addo Chamber Orchestra and Belle Epoque. She has also taught Theatre Sciences at the National University of Singapore (NUS) on its undergraduate arts degree program.

Education

BA (Hons) Theatre Studies from Rose Bruford College, UK. RGN (Registered General Nurse, RHV (Registered Health Visitor) Sharon also holds postgraduate nursing qualifications in Teaching, Counselling of Haemoglobinopathies (Sickle Cell Anaemia & Thalassaemia) and Operating Theatre Speciality.

Highlights

In 2019, the docu-play, Ayer Hitam: A Black History of Singapore, produced by Sharon Frese, Ng Yi-Sheng, and Irfan Kasban, was commissioned for the M1 Singapore Fringe Festival. Ayer-Hitam unearthed an easy-to-find, but forgotten or not talked about history of black people and their contributions to the present-day successful city-state Singapore, highlighting both historical and contemporary blacks in Singapore society. After a sell-out run at the M1 Fringe Festival, Ayer Hitam was commissioned and restaged twice – including online streaming during the pandemic following the George Floyd tragedy in 2020. Ayer Hitam was nominated at the 2020 Life Theatre Awards in Singapore for Best Script. Sharon performed her first self-devised work The Extraordinary Travels of Miss British staged at The Necessary Stage for The Orange Playground (TOP) and was the first actor invited to TOP’s Experimental Actor’s Lab in 2014. The work was later deconstructed and further developed with other actors in a collaboration with The Art of Strangers company and was staged at The Esplanade, Singapore in 2019 as Miss British.

Fun Fact

Sharon speaks and is fluent in German. She has also performed in languages she is not fluent in: Malay in Ma’Ma Yong, based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing commissioned by the Esplanade and directed by Najib Soiman in 2015; and French in Ubu Roi commissioned by The Theatre Factory at Alliance Francais and directed by Aole Miller

Sharon is also now a German Citizen ( since the Brexit malarkey!!!)

“It is in immersing oneself in a new and different culture, with an open mind to the fact that things can be different to what you know, that one can overcome some of the difficulties of not understanding the ‘other’. The safe environments afforded by rehearsals, performance and post-show dialogue helped me and my cast members get to know each other better and appreciate our differences.”

Sharon on Embracing Diversity