Singapore International Festival of Arts shape-shifts again

YOU never can tell what the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) will look like, with Natalie Hennedige as its festival director. Now on the second of her three-year term, she’s taken the festival in another direction, with its eschewing of the grand for the intimate, a deployment of 14 words – 14! – as sub-themes, and an unexpected focus on mid-career artists instead of marquee names.

Long before she founded her own company Cake Theatrical Productions in 2005, she was already marching to the beat of her own drum. And now as festival director of the country’s biggest performing arts platform, she’s suffused the entire festival with a sense of transiency and unpredictability, unravelling and rebirthing.  

If her previous festival was grandly themed around “Ritual”, this year’s edition is themed more intimately around “Some People”, with 14 verbs acting as sub-themes linking each of the 15 main productions to each other. These verbs include “remember”, “grieve”, “linger”, “prevail”, “observe”, “endure”, “reclaim”, “dare” and “shimmer” – which, taken together, feel like a road map for personal transformation.