When arts hog the limelight
KAUSALYA SANTHANAM
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Music, dance, theatre… it was revelry in Singapore.
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PHOTO Courtesy: Singapore national Arts Council
Soulful devotional music: Moscow State Chamber Choir.
The Singapore Arts Festival is an event that envelops the city every summer. A variety of music and dance performances as well as miscellaneous events — modern, exciting and avant garde — are showcased in auditoria, on the streets, in shopping malls and on the riverfront.
As many as 26 core productions and 400 free outreach programmes, exhibitions and special events made up the month long Singapore Arts Festival 2009 which was held from May15 at 32 different venues.
An exciting effusion of Western classical music was one of the highpoints of the festival. Violist Yuri Bashmet and the 30-member Moscow Soloists, of which he is the Director, performed at the Esplanade Concert Hall joined by the Moscow State Chamber Choir (Conductor: Vladimir Minin). They played to a packed auditorium, to rapturous ovation. The Director returned for an encore to the audience’s delight.
Western classical notes
The programme included selections from Stravinsky, Mozart, Brahms and Schubert and well-known film scores.
The choir came in for the second half. The vocalists’ voices rose strong and clear and the fabulously constructed hall with its excellent acoustics reverberating to the soulful devotional music.
Shoppers in Chinatown on the morning of June 12 looked a little bemused as a small group straggled behind a man who looked like a modern Pied Piper. Earphones in place and audio sets in hand, they were following the artist who helped them access the performance of “Dream-Work/Dream-Home” by spell#7 (Singapore) and Bodies in Flight (the U.K.). The event was co-commissioned by the SAF and the Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue (Bristol, the U.K).
The ambulant performance was a novel experience. The visual and auditory images that greet us as we commute to work both morning and night, were captured. The performance traced the transition we all undergo from our individual world to the public and back again. The slender blonde actor strode up the stairs, walked to the coffee kiosk, then met a young woman of Asian descent and interacted with her — all the time followed by the audience. After she reached the Buddhist temple and prayed, the “Pied Piper” raised his clear tones to join her in singing about each day’s blessing.
As a production, it had patches of the cliched and the sentimental and seemed rather pat. But as a celebration of life and a hymn of thanksgiving it had a special quality and lifted one’s spirits. The interactions and the contacts that enrich our lives came through in this production. One would never walk to work complacently again.
A spectacular end to the festival came with “Crackers?” a dazzling display of fireworks by The World Famous (the U.K.).
The efforts that go into the exercise of organising the Singapore Arts Festival are formidable though some of the performances may seem too esoteric to attract the general public. Singapore is being showcased at the Edinburgh International Festival this year through a variety of performances — at the mainstream, fringe, book and jazz festivals. Perhaps this speaks for itself on how successfully Singapore has fashioned itself as a global city of the arts and is making its presence felt on the world’s stage.
The selection proccess
“In May- and June, you can’t get away from the festival. You eat, live and breathe the festival,” says Goh Ching Lee, Director of the Singapore Arts Festival, who along with a committed team ensures the event is conducted with great attention to detail.
“We are now in the 32nd year of our operations. We seek out collaborative ventures and are more connected internationally with a global network of artists. We see ourselves stepping into new territories and opening up new experiences for our audience.”
As for the criteria for selecting a programme, “It should be something recent, current and original, with issues that are relevant such as identity and migration,” she points out. “To be an authentic festival it should reflect us and what we are — multicultural, multiracial — both what we are and what we want to be. We try to find meeting points between cultures and faiths — through productions such as “Sutra” and “The Magic Flute” this year. We make history — we bring together various elements — English, Mandarin, Italian… Every year we learn. We also have a platform to develop a new generation of artists – to create and if necessary to fail. We are not just an event but a developmental tool to serve our artists, winning new audiences and to showcase our artists abroad. We see ourselves as the leader of the pack.”
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