Happenings

The Share Your Story, Shape Our Memorial is a travelling exhibition that features a public call for artefacts. The exhibition will kick off at Gardens by the Bay on 28 April 2022, before travelling to various locations around the island, including shopping malls, community hubs, libraries and schools, till February 2023. An online version will be available on the Founders'

Memorial website go.gov.sg/shapeourmemorial

Photo courtesy of Founders' Memorial, NHB

Image credit to Founders' Memorial, NHB.jpg

The Wellness Festival Singapore, the city-state's first national effort to promote holistic wellbeing, will take place from 3 to 12 June 2022. There will be a new Wellness Sensorium attraction at Gardens by the Bay together with masterclasses, as well as wellness programmes at Jewel Changi Airport.

The Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) returns on 20 May with The Anatomy of Performance - Ritual, a program that invites audiences to reflect on the rituals in performance through art.

For more information, visit https://www.sifa.sg

‘Rituals are really at the center of creativity. Performance embodies rituals, and rituals are actually a way to organize performance. Rituals can be the conditions of time. Gestures and artefact guide rituals.’

'These conditions can be paralleled in our daily life, in our daily ceremonies. So, for instance, the grand matriarch’s 100th birthday celebration; time is duration, and gestures are the respect we are called to the guests. Artefact is what the grand matriarch is wearing or costumed in, which eventually becomes another layer of artefact that's captured in the family picture that then gets passed down for generations.'

‘Rituals are also evolving. We create our own rituals; while they might be influenced by custom and tradition, they're not bound to it. And we can define our own rituals, not only to shift our lives and our immediate surroundings, but also to create powerful performance,’ Natalie Hennedige, festival director for SIFA 2022 to 2024, said during a media briefing.

Highlights of SIFA 2022 include project SALOME by Ong Keng Sen, and starring Singaporean actor Janice Koh and Berlin-based performance artist Michael Daoud. By drawing reference to Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Ong adopted documentary filmmaking as his approach to reflecting upon the ritual of social projection and self-mythologising.

'How do we express ourselves, and remain free, during the challenging restrictions of the pandemic? As our bodies are locked down, can we find the imaginative freedom to roam the wildest fantasies in our apartment? This was the beginning of the project to transform my apartment in Berlin into the world of Salome. Two, juxtapose that with a live performer in Singapore. Three, harness social media as the site of performance which have long superseded our theatre buildings. It’s necessary to assert performance with the limited resources available, as we become debilitated by regulations and our theatres continue to be under threat. The rest as they say is history. We know we are now in a new world of reimposed barriers, in a precarious future where we are struggling to regain our imagination of the possible,' Ong said.

Photos courtesy of Arts House Limited