All Singapore music for an all-S'pore cause

Singapore

FLYING the flag for Singapore music, students of School of the Arts (SOTA) are holding a Covid-19 online benefit concert featuring only music by local artists. One of the highlights of the show is 14-year-old music student Evan De Silva's stylish ukulele rendition of Dick Lee's iconic National Day song, Home. Another involves a group of hip-hop dancers jumping to a mash-up of Abangsapau's Buat Ape and Gentle Bones' JU1Y.

The concert will be livestreamed on YouTube on May 22 from 5pm to 5.45pm. Due to copyright issues, it will be streamed only once. But the four students who organised it - Izz Muhammad, Jessica Nobleza, Nur Izad Hamzah and Kavya Danani - hope to use the opportunity to salute frontliners in the Covid-19 fight, and raise funds for a campaign by not-for-profit organisation The RICE Company Limited to help vulnerable children during the crisis.

According to The RICE Company, some children are at risk of going hungry and/or being exposed to domestic conflicts during the extended circuit breaker period. The RICE Company has a #Engage2.0 campaign in which such students still go to school instead of staying home and spend part of the time on online arts classes shot by home-based instructors and streamed on YouTube.

The concert titled One Hope will feature many of the most talented students of SOTA across various disciplines, from music to acting. All the items will naturally observe the guidelines on social distancing.

One performer, Jovaan Tan, who is part of the hip-hop crew dancing to the Abangsapau and Gentle Bones number, says: "Despite the limitations of circuit breaker, we wanted to stay true to our originality, providing our authentic input as artists and citizens. We used songs by local artists to elicit a sense of patriotism within ourselves and within the audience."

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"The arts are held up by the community, which cannot congregate in ways we used to. But we cannot lose this community due to limitations and restrictions of this unprecedented time, and I feel that it is our responsibility as a part of this community to give back to it by holding concerts, and garnering support for the arts ecosystem."