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Going beyond theatre at SIFA

The Singapore International Festival of Arts explores intimacy and reflection in public spaces.

SINGAPORE — Climb into bed with actresses and lie by their sides as they recollect and reminisce about their childhood. Or watch a man’s life play out publicly as he reflects on his life and goes through various situations in a house located at a prominent space.

This year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa) is rolling out site-specific performances that challenge the idea of normality. Managed by the Arts House Limited and commissioned by the National Arts Council, it follows the tone set by its pre-festival O.P.E.N (Open. Participate. Engage. Negotiate), with programmes going beyond characteristic theatre performances.

“The audience is very game to try new things, that was what we saw from the Open. The Singapore audience is not as inhibited as the old perceived image of them, and the Sifa audience is definitely not conservative,” observed Ong Keng Sen, its festival director since 2014.

With popular programmes such as the controversial photography exhibition I Know Why The Rebel Sings by Newsha Tavakolian, and documentary performance Ibsen: Ghosts by Markus&Markus, the Open, which drew to a close on July 9, reached nearly 16,500 attendees this year, a 37.5 per cent increase in attendance from 2015 and double the attendees in 2014, the inaugural year of the Open.

For Sifa, a highlight would be uniquely Singapore versions of Everything By My Side and Time Between Us, two performance pieces created by Argentine artist Fernando Rubio that unfold in visible spaces while engaging the audience in an uncomfortable and intimate manner.

For Ong, these works are all about “the potentiality of stripping away defences and moving the theatre outside to unsafe situations, such as being one on one with persons we don’t know in an intimate space”.

Everything By My Side will take place on 10 white beds at National Gallery Singapore — with 10 actresses lying side by side with individual audience members, whispering childhood memories to the participant next to them. This performance intends to “transform the relationship with the unknown in an emotional movement through silence and collective memory that the text and the emotions enable”, Rubio, 41, shared.

The actresses represent the 10 different countries Everything By My Side has toured to, such as Argentina, Brazil, Croatia and Holland, and now Singapore, which will be represented by veteran actress Margaret Chan.

Chan hopes that she is able to reach out to the person she shares her bed with. “Paradoxically, it is easier to move an audience when you’re further from the audience. Here you’re lying side by side, just whispering,” she said.

“There are no grand gestures, no theatrics, no techniques. I know I will be totally in the moment and entirely honest, and I hope that this honesty will be meaningful so my audience won’t think, ‘whoa, just 12 minutes, is this all there is?’” she shared.

As for Time Between Us, a house built with pieces of other houses is located at the Marina Bay Sands (MBS) event plaza. There, a man, played by award-winning actor and director Oliver Chong, will live for five days, searching to be someone else.

Chong, who has never done a durational piece before, admitted that he found the concept interesting and challenging. “I will be playing a persona rather than a character. Time Between Us is about the actor taking a vacation from himself: From the place he knows. From his habits. He packs. He leaves home. He forgets his name. He becomes a stranger to everyone he knew and himself, and becomes a conduit of memories of people he knew, of characters in books, movies, songs and people he encounters.”

Performed for the first time outside of South America, Chong explained how he perceives Time Between Us to engage a Singapore audience. “Most city dwellers, like Singaporeans, pretty much live a mindless existence and forget to quieten down to reflect, to contemplate life, much less willing to question the meaning of their existence,” he noted.

“In Time Between Us, audiences watch a man taking up the challenge to leave home and try to live another person’s life in a small house by the river just outside MBS. I think the artistic merit in this piece lies in it being experiential both for the audience as well as the performer, who is actually not really performing.”

Over at The Meadow @ Gardens by the Bay, renowned architect and designer Ron Arad, famous for his constant experimentation with materials and structures, presents 720° — an outdoor video installation made up of 5,600 silicon cords totalling more than 37km in length, suspended from a height of 8m and made into a circle 18m in diameter. The lightweight rods, which sway easily, serve as an interactive video screen for both sides of the 360-degree stage.

The opening week of 720° will feature a specially created production — melding live performance with digital multimedia — helmed by film director, video artist and performance-maker Brian Gothong Tan.

Titled Tropical Traumas, “it will involve six performers and is basically inspired by the writings of Sophia Hull, second wife of Sir Stamford Raffles, and Alfred Wallace regarding their explorations into the Malay Archipelago”, shared Tan, 36. “It is a contemporary deconstructed piece, not historical, but with a more surreal and dream-like approach towards the stories.”

Ultimately, Sifa aims to portray bold performances that span a wide and diverse range. “Sifa is a very, very dynamic festival. It looks daringly at contemporary design (in Arad’s 720°) and even takes on intimacy (in Rubio’s Everything By My Side and Time Between Us),” said Ong. “I would like to think Sifa is good for the city and the audience — that there is a connection. As a festival director who is an artist, our first responsibility is what do we do with the audience; our first question is how do we engage the audience.”

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