FESTIVAL CALENDAR

FESTIVAL DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE

SIFA 2022 reflects a dissolution of categories or labels; to invite, instead, and adopt artistically fluid collaborations and collaborators, gathering within individual creations a range of artistic disciplines, practices and perspectives. The festival invites practitioners of vivid cultural hues from different walks of life to embrace a blending of genres, artistic disciplines and internationality – in performances made by artists with strong and unique perspectives – in the poly-dynamic and universal language of art.

This echoes the ways in which contemporary performance is being made in the world. Also, importantly, it reflects how our dialogue with each other on a human level requires nuance because we live in systems of such complexity, within a world having gone through serious bouts of illness and faced with pertinent social and political movements that continue to test our passions and challenge us. The performing arts, therefore, needs to be upheld as space for reflection, openness and nuanced creative articulation to be freely expressed.

It was important for me too that SIFA be a platform for originality, propelling artists and performance creation coming from Singapore, while imagining what a meaningful international dynamic looks like within our city’s pinnacle performing arts festival.

The next three editions of SIFA will see a recurring title The Anatomy of Performance, accompanied by a changing subtitle. 2022’s is Ritual.

Ritual can be distilled into the conditions of time, artefact and gesture. In performance, we adhere to these conditions. Time (is duration), artefact (is costume, installation and prop) and gesture (is expressive movement and charged stillness). Rituals are evolving. They relate to our shifting perspectives. They relate to our beliefs and life’s philosophy. We can define our own rituals to effect transformation in our lives and immediate surroundings, as well as to create powerful performance.

SIFA 2022 is forging a deepened relationship with some of Singapore’s most prolific artists to engineer dynamic design possibility. Wong Chee Wai, Andy Lim, Philip Tan, Brian Gothong Tan, Randy Chan and Max Tan create for multiple commissions. Notably, Wong Chee Wai creates a set designed for two commissions within the Pasir Panjang Power Station, his imaginative dexterity discovering transformative design strategies in relation to this magnificent space. Architect Randy Chan dynamises the Esplanade’s proscenium theatre for three festival commissions woven into a singular experience, with festival attendees positioned on stage as well as in the auditorium, offering unique perspectives and engagement with the work depending on where you are seated.

Situating commissions within the historic premises of Pasir Panjang Power Station, idyllic remote locations such as Pulau Ubin, and a newly imagined virtual venue defined by SIFA’s Life Profusion, highlights SIFA’s intent to treat audiences with the experience of the unusual excursion where the venue or destination holds as much charm and creative vitality as the actual performance.

The curatorial strategy is comprised of three layers:

CREATION or prime offerings Life Profusion or digital offerings SIFA X or wilder offerings

CREATION is a platform for SIFA’s prime offerings encompassing new commissions, fresh iterations of works and the presentation of outstanding works from around the world to capture the imagination and inspire. Life Profusion is SIFA’s virtual platform; a portal for creation, discovery and exchange. Creation begins with an empty stage. Virtually, you can also define an empty stage as a portal for inspired artistic creation. For me, it was about essentialising a new imagination for SIFA’s online presence, mining the digital space creatively because the possibilities are almost as vast as the physical universe.

Finally, SIFA X, a (micro) festival within the festival, injects transformational energy within Goodman Arts Centre and Aliwal Arts Centre with music, dance and installation.

CREATION, Life Profusion and SIFA X in unison explore and expand notions of Ritual and contemporary performance practice in unending and nuanced dimensions.

I want to thank Arts House Limited’s (AHL) Executive Director Tan Boon Hui and the AHL team including Ken Tan, Mervyn Quek, Hoo Kuan Cien, Christie Chua, Fezhah Maznan and Ye Junmin whose constancy and creative dynamism ground and propel this festival.

The world changes rapidly and erratically. We can’t tell where it is going or what tomorrow brings. Like a protagonist in an epic narrative, the world stands perpetually at a turning point of crisis struggling in a crucible of trial and testing, flawed and awesome at once. Yet, Art carries a kind of prophetic quality: it can embody and reveal things about the past, present and future, moving us to think and feel, reminding us that we all have a place and a say in this strange and beautiful world.

Welcome to SIFA 2022. May we all in precious fleeting moments be moved by the beauty and power of art.

Natalie Hennedige

Festival Director

CREATION is a platform for SIFA’s prime offerings encompassing new commissions, fresh iterations of works and the presentation of outstanding works from around the world to capture the imagination and inspire.

MEPAAN

By Singapore Chinese Orchestra (Singapore) and Tuyang Initiative (Sarawak, Borneo – Malaysia)

20 – 22 May, Fri – Sun 8pm Pasir Panjang Power Station

1h 15m, No Intermission

Rating to be determined Recommended for audiences age 13 and above

Tickets: $58*

*Limited concessions available for students, NSFs and seniors

Also available on SIFA On Demand $15 per show $25 for bundle of 4 (U.P $60)

From the Singapore Chinese Orchestra and Tuyang Initiative comes a magnificent performance evoking the sublime rituals of Southeast Asia and its native people, brought to life by an electrifying team of creatives.

MEPAAN – meaning always in the Kayan language of the indigenous Kayan people of Borneo – is a sonic and visual trip into the wellspring of spiritual and cultural nuance embedded in Southeast Asian native culture.

In a breathtaking performance, stirring strains of indigenous music and vocal tradition from Southeast Asia’s island nations are woven into a fabric of powerful orchestral compositions, evoking grand ritual and ceremony to transport the mind into the pristine rainforests of Southeast Asia. Helmed by the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in collaboration with Tuyang Initiative – a Sarawak-based creative agency focused on Borneo indigenous cultural heritage – MEPAAN delves into dynamic new dimensions with astounding design interventions.

Local fashion designer Max Tan creates the costumes, weaving the ethereal with the earth connecting bodies in rapt musical and physical expression, with fabric and design that vertically connects the natural with the eternal.

Singaporean Sean Lee’s photography and Sarawak-based indigenous film-maker Harry Frederick capture through their unique individual lens and artistic approaches the anatomical landscape and cultural history embodied in indigenous bodies and lived spaces.

The imagination of set designer Wong Chee Wai and lighting designer Andy Lim collectively evoke the surreal grandeur of the work set within the cavernous halls of Pasir Panjang Power Station, as multimedia artist Brian Gothong Tan takes the entire experience into transcendence with his visual treatment.

Directed by Natalie Hennedige, MEPAAN is set to thrill audiences in an arresting evening of music, beauty and transcendence.

Image Credit: Sean Lee

EMPTINESS

An exhibition by Sean Lee

20 May – 5 Jun, Fri – Sun 10am – 7pm daily The Arts House Free Admission

In tandem with SIFA 2022’s opening performance, MEPAAN, acclaimed Singaporean photographer Sean Lee showcases a selection of his works depicting of a kaleidoscopic universe of flora and fauna. Originally captured and featured in festival commission MEPAAN at the Pasir Panjang Power Station, this companion photographic exhibition offers an alternative encounter with Lee’s sensuous nature imagery.

(United States)

20 & 21 May, Fri & Sat 8pm Victoria Theatre

1h, No Intermission

Rating to be determined Recommended for audiences age 13 and above

Tickets: $38*, $48

*Limited concessions available for students, NSFs and seniors

One of the most intelligent, disruptive musical voices of our age, experimental musician Holly Herndon dazzles in her first concert in Asia at SIFA 2022.

Billed as “shaping the future of A.I.” by CNN, Holly Herndon navigates the nexus of technological evolution and musical catharsis through elevated live performances with her vocal ensemble.

Operating at the edge of electronic and avant-garde pop music, her work involves augmentation of her voice and image, facilitated by critical research in Artificial Intelligence and decentralised infrastructure.

On her most recent full-length album, PROTO (released in 2019 via 4AD), Herndon fronts and conducts an electronic pop choir, comprised of both human and A.I. voices, over a musical palette that encompasses everything from synths to Sacred Harp stylings. PROTO is a thrilling engagement with one of today’s greatest cultural shifts – the “protocol era” – where rapidly surfacing ideological battles over the future of A.I. protocols, centralised and decentralised internet protocols, and personal and political protocols are emerging.

The sounds synthesised on stage by Herndon, her A.I. “baby” Spawn, and the ensemble combine elements from Herndon’s dynamic and idiosyncratic personal journey: the timeless folk traditions of her childhood experiences in church-going East Tennessee (particularly the prismatic layered practice of Sacred Harp singing); the avantgarde music she explored while at Mills College; and the radical club culture of Berlin; all enhanced by her recent PhD composition studies researching machine learning and music.

Euphoric, dynamic and eye-opening, Holly Herndon: PROTO promises to be an exhilarating concert from a musician at the forefront of today’s technological revolutions.