More merlion than ever
If there’s one thing we’d like to see at the forthcoming Singapore International Festival of Arts, which kicks off mid-May with the theme “More than ever” and runs for a couple of weeks until the first of June in the island state, is my friend Ludwig’s old car up and running again.
You see, the hatchback Mirage model 19-forgotten was left to me by the street cartoonist in the mid ’90s when he went to Singapore for employment as illustrator at the Straits Times, where a number of Filipino artists worked and in fact some still do, though most likely nearing retirement. The car was a beauty and a headache, registered under the name “Choi Wai Bun,” which sounds Singaporean though that may be slightly racist.
Every year when I registered the car at the Land Transportation Office, the clerk at the counter would call out “Choi Wai Bun! Choi Wai Bun!” and I would walk forward with my peso bills or my smoke emission certificate or whatever to do my business to allow the barely serviceable vehicle in Manila’s chaotic streets again.
Yet I digress. It was Ludwig, after all, who took me around Singapore where he was based for more than 20 years, first in 2006 then again in 2013, right after my mother died but that’s another story. Both times not a mirage in sight. In 2013 was the Art Stage Singapore, where one night from Gillman Barracks gallery had to walk every which way trying to find the MRT back to the hotel, and for some reason kept those train ticket stubs inserted in one of the countless notebooks in the unruly apartment at home.
The SIFA is on its 48th edition, coinciding with Singapore’s 60th anniversary of statehood, meaning the country’s entering senior citizenship. By all accounts Singapore has matured in aspects from cuisine to art, a melting pot of cultures and also cutting edge, technology-wise. There have been a few notable collaborations between Singapore and Philippines, not just its gaggle of artists at Straits Times, but also a book of love poems by Filipino and Singaporean poets, Love Gathers All, co-edited by Rayvi Sunico and Alvin Pang and released at turn of the millennium, now long out of print and in need of an updated version or at least sequel, maybe with the working title, Viva Hate (insert smiley here).
Festival director Natalie Hennedige, of the local-based Cake Theater, who wraps up her stewardship of SIFA including through the difficult COVID years, once said in a five-question interview (viewable online) that not a day goes by that she doesn’t think of art, nature and the ordinary. She also emphasized the importance of intuition in going about her tasks—surely a daunting one considering the depth and breadth of the artists on hand either alone or in collaboration with other artists from within the region or other continents.
“Just go for it,” she said, underscoring how risk-taking is what drives art and such festivals forward.
Last year there was a collab featuring music based in caves and other subterranean environment, and we could only imagine Brian Eno-like aural experiments, while starting third weekend of May is the new subway-site video installation “Lattice,” featuring Karyn Nakamura, described in a press kit as “a Tokyo-born, New York-based artist and visual forensics researcher.”
Also in the program are two reworkings of classic, more or less familiar works found in the syllabus of most college literature courses: Orwell’s Animal Farm told via puppetry, and Shakespeare’s King Lear, this time a collaboration between Glasgow-based Singaporean artist Ramesh Mayyapan and Raw Material, in association with National Theater of Scotland for a rendering of bathos befalling every strongman caught in a moral tale.
Another work making its Southeast Asian premiere is Home, the 2018 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Production by Philadelphia-based Geoff Sobelle, commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New Zealand Festival and Edinburgh International Festival.
Not to forget Told By My Mother, a dance ode to everyday heroines and subtle tug from the matriarchy of the subconscious. Or Vampyr by Chilean Manuela Infante, a mockumentary where South American shapeshifters struggle to survive.
On the last weekend of May is the dance suite Colony, a True Colors project that weaves live dance, music and unscripted behind-the-scenes footage, featuring 13 dancers from diverse countries, including Pia Angela Custodio of the Philippines though now based in Singapore.
Umbilical is apt highlighting the aftermath of Singapore’s break from Malaysia in 1965, while also making its inaugural is the SIFA Pavilion at the Bedok Town Square, “a transient art space in the heart of the community charged with multidisciplinary artistic expression and public engagement,” site of The Sea and the Neighborhood by various Singapore artists.
And where you might see a familiar beaten-down mirage up and running, from Bedok Town Square to the Newton Circus. Is it a bird, is it a plane? No it’s Choi Wai Bun waking to senior citizenship and back in the island state again and its manicured streets and parks — art not only for its own sak.
