SIFA 2026: The best shows, from free outdoor spectacles to theatre classics

[SINGAPORE] At a time when global conflicts weigh on the world, the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) returns this May with a note of determined, defiant optimism.

That optimism is reflected in how the festival has been designed – not quite as one festival, but two.

One festival unfolds inside theatres such as Victoria Theatre and the Esplanade, where ticketed productions offer serious contemporary works and bold reinterpretations of classics such as Hamlet, Hedda Gabler and Death Of A Salesman.

The other festival spills into parks, lawns and riverfront promenades, where some 90 per cent of the programming has been made free. 

“We want to lower the threshold for entry and draw people who might never otherwise consider attending an arts festival,” says festival director Chong Tze Chien.

The move comes as Singapore’s arts scene faces shrinking attention spans and shifting leisure habits – factors behind Pangdemonium’s recent closure and the potential cancellation of the Singapore Fringe Festival.

The heart of its outdoor programming lies in the Festival Village on Empress Lawn, a lively gathering point where free performances, installations and late-night happenings spill across lawns and riverfront promenades.

“I’m bringing back the Festival Village because I want people to come to the festival and spend the evening there,” Chong says. “I want to create a culture of not just watching one show, but doing three or four things at the same time.”

Audiences are encouraged to wander, beginning the evening perhaps with an aerial performance suspended high above the lawn, stumbling across a theatrical procession weaving through the crowd, and then drifting towards a music party before midnight – all completely free of charge.

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The programming reflects Chong’s belief that the arts today must meet audiences where they are – even if that means shorter performances, unconventional venues or works that look as impressive on TikTok as they do on a stage.

“Younger audiences want shorter experiences – and that’s okay,” he says. SIFA is organised by Arts House Group and commissioned by the National Arts Council.

Here are the top 10 outdoor and indoor highlights.

Outdoor shows for everyone

1. Noli Timere

This will likely be the most Instagrammed performance at SIFA 2026 – aerial performers suspended eight metres in the air, moving within and upon a voluminous, billowing net sculpture designed by artist Janet Echelman, choreographed to an original score by Quebecois composer Jorane. 

The product of a five-year collaboration between two Guggenheim Fellowship recipients – choreographer Rebecca Lazier and sculptor Echelman – Noli Timere (Latin for “be not afraid”) is a formal work of considerable ambition as well as a piece of spectacular public theatre. 

It plays free at Empress Lawn (May 15 to 17) before travelling to Punggol Digital District (May 22 to 30), where it becomes the centrepiece of the festival’s push into the heartlands. 

2. Makan Culture

Set at the Festival Market on Empress Lawn, Makan Culture is an interactive, riotously communal performance in which a community show celebrating Singapore’s food heritage is disrupted by a critic – igniting a debate about what elevates both food and art. There is puppetry, music, theatre and, of course, actual food for a peckish audience. 

Running throughout the festival season at 6 pm, 8 pm and 10 pm, this is the perfect gateway production for first-timers, families and anyone who has ever argued about whether food is an art form (it is). And because there is food being served, the show is ticketed at S$20 – which you can pay for using your Culture Pass.

3. Rupture

Are you a morning person? If so, catch Observatory’s site-specific two-hour sound installation – performed at 6.30 am on May 28 to 30 at the Wayang Stage on Empress Lawn. It is both a characteristic act of inspired madness from the cult band, as well as a radical programming decision by Sifa to expose the Central Business District crowd to experimental soundscapes. 

Drawing on seismic research, volcanic field recordings, and mythology, Rupture transforms the early morning into a two-hour sonic ritual that moves from darkness to light. To encounter this particular work at this particular hour as the city stirs around you is to experience Singapore as you never have before. The show is free.

4. Just Keep Swimming, Just Keep Swimming 

The Theatre Practice’s offering is one of the most conceptually elegant works in the entire programme – and it is also free.

Set on the Wayang Stage at Empress Lawn, it unfolds as a live conversation between an artist and an interviewer, exploring mentorship and artistic lineage, before the dialogue dissolves into a singular music track that takes over the space.

Audiences seated on bean bags and benches soon find themselves, quite without warning, in the middle of a communal dance-movement session. It runs May 15 to 17 at 8 pm.

5. Automata: Excess Without Return 

For the night owls, the Automata series – curated by Hothouse – is SIFA’s most exhilarating late-night experimental offerings which run on May 15, May 16, May 21 and May 23 at 10 pm. The series culminates on May 30 with Excess Without Return, a three-hour closing party produced by Big Duck Music, running from 9.30 pm to midnight at Empress Lawn with three regional acts: Hidemen, Houg, and goneMUNE. 

It is free, it is outdoors, and its curatorial note promises new avatars, identities, and worlds emerging from “the fodder of our times”. Sounds wild. 

Indoor highlights for serious art lovers

6. Lush Life

Few voices are as closely associated with Singapore’s jazz scene as that of singer-actress Jacintha Abisheganaden. In Lush Life, a cornerstone of the 2025 festival’s “Legacy” theme, the 68-year-old performer revisits a career that has taken her from local stages to international acclaim.

Directed by the formidable Ong Keng Sen, the production unfolds as an intimate and revealing documentary performance, blending personal stories, archival material and a live four-piece band. Adding a touch of intrigue is a guest appearance by musician Dick Lee – Abisheganaden’s former husband.

Part concert, part theatrical memoir, Lush Life promises an evening steeped in memory and music, running at Victoria Theatre from May 29 to 30.

7. Salesman

Written by Jeremy Tiang and directed by Danny Yeo, this Singapore production has its roots in one of theatre history’s great improbable episodes: In the spring of 1983, American theatremaker Arthur Miller directed his play Death Of A Salesman in Beijing with an all-Chinese cast, despite not speaking a word of Mandarin. 

Tiang’s play takes that collision of cultures, languages and political realities (China was freshly out of the Cultural Revolution; America was in its brash Reagan-era confidence) and spins it into a multilingual comedy of errors and genuine pathos.  It runs at the Victoria Theatre from May 15 to 16.

8. Lacrima

Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s sprawling epic of nearly three hours is performed in French, Tamil, English and French Sign Language. It traces the labour behind a single haute couture wedding dress commissioned for a fictional royal wedding. 

The stage becomes a Parisian factory floor, a family dining table, and a Mumbai embroidery workshop, as dozens of craftspeople across continents obliterate themselves in pursuit of perfection. It explores invisible labour and it arrives from France trailing serious acclaim to play at Singtel Waterfront Theatre from May 15 to 17. 

9. Planet [wanderer] 

This collaboration between French choreographer Damien Jalet and Japanese contemporary artist Kohei Nawa is one of those pairings from which you expect a certain quality of visual astonishment, and Planet [wanderer] does not disappoint. 

Eight dancers confront the materials and textures of Nawa’s scenography, their bodies moving in what the production notes describes as “a fragile balance between power and vulnerability, harmony and survival, destruction and evolution”.

Non-verbal and carrying an Advisory 16 for nudity, this is expected to be one of SIFA’s most purely aesthetic event – 60 minutes of striking visual and physical poetry, running at Esplanade Theatre from May 29 to 30.

10. Hedda Gabler 

Performed in Korean with English surtitles, the National Theater Company of Korea’s Hedda Gabler is precisely the kind of production that reminds you why theatre must be experienced live rather than streamed.

Carrying Ibsen’s 1890 classic play is acclaimed screen and stage actress Lee Hye-young who reprises the role that earned her Best Actress honours at both the Korea Theater Awards and the prestigious Dong-A Theater Awards.

As Hedda – the proud, aristocratic woman trapped in a suffocating marriage – Lee delivers a performance Korean critics describe as razor-sharp and hypnotic. It runs at Drama Centre Theatre from May 28 to 30.

For more details on SIFA’s programme, visit sifa.sg