SIFA 2024: Smart, daring, eclectic works take centrestage

WHEN Sun & Sea was staged at the 58th Venice Biennale, the queues were so long that many people gave up all hope of seeing it, settling instead for the rave reviews they heard from friends or read in the papers. The climate change-themed opera, sung by sun-tanning beach-goers on a fake beach, went on to win the biennale’s top prize, intensifying that FOMO (“fear of missing out”) sensation for those unable to witness it themselves.

Well, good news for Singapore-based art lovers – and anyone else willing to travel to Singapore in May. Sun & Sea is one of the headlining shows at the upcoming Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) 2024, alongside other spellbinding performances that defy easy categorisation.

They include a multimedia performance by Singapore’s experimental band The Observatory, which had spent months in the caves of Malaysia to seek inspiration in subterranean surrounds. There’s also iconoclastic African-American choreographer Trajal Harrell, who only last year had his body of work celebrated in a Paris retrospective, staging a vogue-dance-theatre piece titled The Romeo. Then there’s Susanne Kennedy, a widely-acclaimed German director, bringing a pandemic-inspired work delving into our psyche in sickness or health.

The biggest surprise of all, however, is a smattering of puppet shows designed not just for kids but also for adults.

For SIFA festival director Natalie Hennedige, this may be the weirdest and most wonderful of the three editions she’s helmed since 2022, in part because the first two were planned during the pandemic. She calls this year’s edition a “culmination of many things that I’ve always wanted to do for the festival”.

“Every festival takes at least 18 months to plan,” she says. “So the first two were very much impacted by the pandemic. But those two have also allowed me to take in the feedback from the audience. And I’m learning how I can create a smart and edgy festival that takes risks, while at the same time reaches out to people who don’t normally gravitate to the arts.”

This year’s curtain raiser is a puppetry production of Moby Dick, which is expected to draw throngs of students and young families. Compared to previous opening shows, which tended to be envelope-pushing spectacles catering to serious-minded art lovers, Moby Dick is a far more accessible and crowd-pleasing production.

Hennedige says next year’s festival might make even more inroads into the public consciousness, as it marks the 60th anniversary of Singapore’s independence. She says: “2025 gives me a lot to meditate on, such as what it means to celebrate and commemorate something, what it means for a country to turn 60.”

Not-so-secretly, though, she looks forward to the end of her tenure after the 2025 edition. She will return as founding artistic director of independent theatre company Cake, a position which had been put on hold since she took up the festival job. She says: “I’m really bursting with ideas for my own productions. On weekends when I have time, I’ve been working on a script, creating my own world to escape to. I look forward to being an artist again.”

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Running from May 17 to Jun 2 at various venues, the festival is organised by Arts House Limited and commissioned by the National Arts Council. Here are our top picks for the festival:

Sun & Sea

May 30 - Jun 1

The Esplanade Theatre is transformed into a fake beach, where dozens of beach-goers appear to be lounging under the scorching sun. One by one, they start to sing about seemingly mundane things. But these topics – such as sunscreen, airplanes, the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef, and the exotic fruits that are flown thousands of kilometres just to get to your grocery store – quietly touch on issues such as pollution, global warming and the degradation of natural habitats. 

Never has a show about climate change been delivered this gently and disarmingly. By the time it trills its final notes, you’re convinced you’re watching an apocalyptic scenario disguised as an ordinary day at the beach. The opera is conceived by three Lithuanian artists: filmmaker and director Rugile Barzdziukaite, the writer Vaiva Grainyte, and the artist and composer Lina Lapelyte. 

Moby Dick

May 17 - 18

SIFA 2024’s opening show sees the classic Herman Melville novel rendered in beautiful puppetry by French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire. Published in 1851, the novel about a ship captain and his maniacal quest to capture a giant whale has thrilled readers for years. Yet, several Hollywood attempts to capture the story on screen have largely failed to elucidate the book’s central theme of the struggle between humans and nature.

Director Yngvild Aspeli and award-winning puppet theatre company Plexus Polaire have defied the odds by creating an almost cinematic telling of the story with seven actors, 50 finely-crafted puppets, live music and immersive video projections. Puppets of varying sizes are used to create the effective illusion of distance and nearness; sometimes, they’re tilted to their sides to conjure an aerial view of the action. The result is an utterly magical production that’s better than any Moby Dick film you’ve ever seen.  

Refuge

May 31 - Jun 1

Singapore’s most enduring experimental band The Observatory is back in SIFA with a boundary-bashing sonic adventure. This time they’ve holed themselves up for months in the caves of Ipoh and Sarawak to extract the sounds and sights of the subterranean world. Returning to the human world, they’ve woven these sounds with live music, moving imagery and stage lights to create a singular experience for the audience.

As with other offerings in SIFA, Refuge is an attempt at investigating the very roots of who we are, our relationship with the natural world, and, in this case, the hidden beauty embedded within earth’s ancient structures, from living organisms to cave art. 

Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About A Terrible Monster

May 24 - 26

Ever read a storybook to a kid and wondered how you could have done it better? Wonder no more. American artist collective Manual Cinema has created a thoroughly charming theatrical piece for kids (and adults) centred on Mo Willem’s popular children’s book Leonardo, The Terrible Monster. The artists use hundreds of hand-drawn paper puppets, two-dimensional props, furry hand puppets and catchy new songs to animate Willem’s story, which is about a monster who is “terrible” at his job because he cannot scare anyone. 

Watch as puppeteers, singers and performers create the images in real time, which is then projected onto the big screen behind them so you can enjoy the action as if you’re watching a movie. Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About A Terrible Monster is the perfect show to introduce young kids to the wonderful world of multimedia theatre.

Angela (a strange loop)

May 23 - 24

During the pandemic, many people found themselves trapped in the confines of their homes, repeating a monotonous pattern of existence, with each day blending into the next. Angela – conceived during that socially isolating period of time by German director Susanne Kennedy and visual artist Markus Selg – is an individual who is struck by an illness and starts to discover her physical and metaphysical vulnerabilities. 

As her symptoms begin to project themselves onto her living spaces, she begins to question her own existence and fantasises about transcending her corporeal limitations. In her surreal journey, the boundaries between reality and illusion blur, leading her to confront profound existential questions about identity, mortality and consciousness.

Kennedy’s previous works include a futuristic version of Einstein On The Beach and Medea. Angela (a strange loop) is one of her most intimate co-creations yet. 

The Prose And The Passion

May 31 - Jun 1

Fans of the influential English writer EM Foster (A Passage To India, Maurice, A Room With A View) would not want to miss this. Singapore playwright Haresh Sharma, an ardent reader of Foster, has taken all manner of his writings, from letters to novels, to create this stirring multimedia mash-up that explores Foster’s life and work. Working with director Chong Tze Chien, Sharma weaves together multiple genres and timelines, intricately linking characters from Foster’s literary universe, as they grapple with the loneliness of existing outside societal norms and prescribed narratives. 

The Prose and The Passion is a fluid and lyrical treat that invites audiences to contemplate the enduring relevance of Foster’s work and the universal human quest for connection and meaning. 

The Romeo

May 18 - 19  

The Romeo is unlike any dance you’ve ever seen. Red-hot choreographer Trajal Harrell works from the basic idea that dancing is derived from a primal impulse to move rhythmically and aesthetically. He then takes the roots of voguing (a catwalk performance that asserts one’s gender identity) and splices it with postmodern dance vocabularies and various music genres, as well as a range of cultural references from butoh to fashion. His dancers walk, pose and frolic freely and instinctively, as if they were given complete rein to be themselves and nothing but. Even their costumes appear to have been made by themselves – or at least in close collaboration with the costume designer.

While it’s hard to make out anything from The Romeo at first, the audience gradually learns to appreciate and enjoy each performer’s quirks, gestures and personality. Like Shakespeare’s romantic hero Romeo who carves his own destiny despite societal objections, each of the show’s performers seem to have created their own movement vocabulary out of their unique kinesthetic. Harrell is often regarded as a dancer’s dancer, whose intellectual depth and strong engagement with dance history resonate strongly with those who understand dance as an art form.

For more information, visit sifa.sg