Goh Lay Kuan (Chinese: 吴丽娟; born 1939) is an Indonesian-born Singaporean dancer, choreographer, educator, and pioneer of dance in Singapore.
Together with her husband, Kuo Pao Kun, she co-founded the Singapore Performing Arts School (now The Theatre Practice), a seminal institution in Singaporean modern theater and dance.
During the mid-1970s, both Goh and her husband were branded as enemies of the state and detained in mass arrests of alleged communist sympathizers.
When she was still an infant, the family moved to Sungai Petani, British Malaya (now Malaysia), where Goh's father worked as the principal of a school.
Her motivations to return included racial discrimination, a sense that her people did not have a cultural identity to call their own, and the 1963 openings of the Singapore National Theatre and an arts-focused television station.
[2][3] In 1965, playwright Kuo Pao Kun, whom Goh had met and began dating in Australia, also moved back to Singapore.
Goh began to choreograph dances for the students, and her first work of ballet choreography was completed the same year that the school was founded.
As a result, Goh and Kuo, in addition to teaching and creating works to perform, also handled costumes and stage design themselves.
The school had a "Go Into Life" campaign, which urged artists to spend time working alongside farmers and laborers in order to experience their lives.
That work, which was influenced by Chinese mythology, became Nu Wa – Mender of the Heavens, Singapore's first full-length modern dance production.
These works included Sheng Ji ("Rites of Life") and Yu Gui ("Homing"), which were first performed in 1994 by the Guangdong Modern Dance Company.