S’pore arts fest to go islandwide

SINGAPORE — The Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) is spreading its wings wide — the entire island is set to become a performance venue of sorts for this year’s edition.

Aside from typical performing arts venues such as the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall and Drama Centre, the festival, which will run from Aug 6 to Sept 20, will include performances at four Housing and Development Board (HDB) estates and 25 homes.

The performers include comedian Kumar and a selection of stand-up comics such as Sharul Channa and Zaliha Hamid, who will be holding fort at the HDB estates in the show Living Together.

Meanwhile, the programme Open Homes will see theatre performances inside people’s living rooms, done in collaboration with the People’s Association’s PAssionArts.

Festival director Ong Keng Sen said having the shows in the heartlands was a way of “bringing the arts more intimately and closer to the audiences of Singapore”.

“The arts in the heartlands happens in certain fixed ways. It’s karaoke, line dancing, mass something. So, we decided to bring Kumar and other stand-up comics to talk about how the different races live together, this sense of sharing space in this diverse landscape,” he told TODAY.

With the theme of POST-Empires, which looks at what the world is like after colonialism, communism and even globalisation, this year’s SIFA will run for seven weeks — one week longer than last year’s edition — and feature four anchor productions spread out over the weeks, instead of a single major opening show kicking off the festival.

Each show will correspond to one of the four festival “lines” or threads: Transformations, Archives, POST-Empires: What Remains After? and Playing With POST-.

Production details will be revealed in April, said the organisers. Last year’s festival drew 22,000 people, with 86 per cent of tickets sold. Sixty per cent of the line-up will comprise local works, a conscious decision in light of Singapore’s 50th anniversary celebrations, the organisers said.

Among the participants are experimental musician Margaret Leng Tan as well as theatre companies Cake and W!LD RICE, which will premiere a new play, Hotel.

Mr Ong’s six-hour production The Incredible Adventures Of The Border-Crossers, which debuts in Paris next month as part of the Singapore Festival in France, will also be re-staged.

Other festival highlights include Nanyang — The Musical, a commissioned Mandarin musical loosely based on the lives of the Nanyang artists of Singapore such as Cheong Soo Pieng and Liu Kang, who made a groundbreaking trip to Bali in the 1950s and came back with new ideas that would influence a generation of artists.

The musical is written by renowned music producers and songwriters Eric Ng and Xiao Han, arranged by Goh Kheng Long and directed by Alec Tok.

Singapore’s dance greats are also coming together in Homecoming, the first work by Cultural Medallion (CM) recipient and dance pioneer Goh Lay Kuan in 20 years. It will bring together Chinese, Malay, Indian and contemporary dancers who have been mentored by fellow CM recipients Som Said and Santha Bhaskar.

The coming together of these influential figures and the various types of dances provides “an alternative vision to a national company”, said Mr Ong.

Elsewhere, popular classical ensemble T’ang Quartet will be curating three concerts, including a collaboration with pianist Melvyn Tan; Hungary’s Proton Theatre will present the play Dementia, directed by Mr Kornel Mondruczo (whose film White Dog won top prize at the Un Certain Regard section at last year’s Cannes Film Festival); and South African video artist William Kentridge will offer a multimedia rendition of composer Franz Schubert’s song cycle, Winterreise.

A 16-day mini dance festival will also take place during SIFA, titled Dance Marathon — Open With A Punk Spirit!

Organisers said it would take place at a yet-to-be-confirmed heritage site that will be transformed into a “dance house” featuring dance artists from Japan, India and South-east Asia.

SIFA’s pre-festival event The OPEN will also return and will run from June 17 to July 4. While it will still include talks, film screenings and exhibitions, Mr Ong said there will be more performances this time around.

“Ideas can be exposed not just through talks, but also through experiencing performances,” he said.

Like the festival proper, The OPEN will have two “lines” running through it: The Young And The Restless and Augmented Reality. The latter will feature an augmented-reality tour of a heritage site via a downloadable app.

The Singapore International Festival of Arts runs from Aug 6 to Sept 20, while The OPEN runs from June 17 to July 4. Ticket sales start on April 8 from SISTIC. For more information, visit http://sifa.sg