The Singapore International Festival of Arts returns this month to refine the art of listening with a stage where small voices and undercurrents upgrade their thin slice in the noisy domain of discourse.
This year’s “They Declare” edition completes the three-part overarching theme, “Anatomy of Performance,” which, since 2022, has been laying out a parade of solid work about our relationship with each other against the backdrop of historical, mythological, ancestral and futuristic ways we occupy the world.
“[‘They Declare’] is about the multiplicity of narratives. The title reinforces a state of mind, invites a way of thinking about how we commune with each other through the language of performing arts,” festival director Natalie Hennedige told DAILY TRIBUNE.
“I believe that art is a way to bring us together without destroying each other.”
Where it’s hard to get a word in edgewise because ideas have become impenetrable fortresses, the collaborative carnival brings to the fore the virtues of connection and understanding by aggregating different belief spaces and artistic disciplines to deconstruct the creative process, an unlikely cocktail of the most svelte of contrasts that moves away from the silos of what’s strictly theater, visual arts, dance.
“It’s a more democratic [stage] — a microcosm where different artists can work together and become key collaborators. What happens when a visual artist works with [the ones who use dance as medium]; a fashion designer with a thespian?”
Hennedige dissolves the conventional hierarchies where the director and the playwright sit on top to orchestrate all the work, liberating collaborating artists from the script to tell a story in their own artistic vocabularies while internalizing everything they put in the anatomy of their creation.
