Celebrating their 20th edition, the Esplanade’s The Studios series takes on a newer, expanded format, responding to the ever-changing world and continuing to programme work that challenges our notions of what art can be and do.

Starting off this new version of The Studios, from 2023-2025, the programme will explore notions of Land. With works performed across various venues in the Esplanade, including the new Singtel Waterfront Theatre, these works revolve around the fundamental question of what we know of the land we live on.

Land, after all, is immediate and tactile. It is simultaneously our physical landscape and a symbol of our sense of identity and belonging. It encompasses a vast number of today’s pertinent issues, including global development, climate change, land rights, displacement and migration, duty of care and responsibility to our environment and the people around us. Yet, it is deeply intimate and personal, drawing our attention to our roots and history while inviting us to think about the future and what we have to do.

As Esplanade producer Lynn Yang puts it: “As the Singtel Waterfront Theatre was being built, we found photos of the Marina Bay area that showed how dramatically the landscape here had changed over the last 20 years. Between this visual reminder and the current local and global discourse, it felt urgent and fitting to look at land as our thematic focus for the next three editions.”

More specifically for the 2023 season, the Esplanade will zoom in on the theme of Landings, which explores our relationship with land, and what it means to us, across six works. Particularly for a land-scarce country like Singapore, so focused on urban re-development, what then is the cost of progress, and what have we sacrificed in the name of it?

This year’s season begins with a trilogy of works from The Mining Trilogy. Created by Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere, the trilogy begins with Mining Stories on 28th and 29th July 2023. In November 2015, a dam containing toxic mining waste collapsed a few miles away from Belgium theatre artist Silke Huysmans’ childhood home in the South of Brazil. A devastating flood of mud destroyed several villages below the dam. In the next couple of days, the poisonous sludge flowed into the river Rio Doce and eventually reached the Atlantic Ocean.

The ecological impact and environmental pollution was the largest ever recorded, and Silke and Hannes conducted a series of interviews with those affected, as well as experts in the field, bringing together multiple perspectives on the impact of the disaster through audio field recordings alongside multimedia projections.

From 2nd to 3rd August, the trilogy continues with Pleasant Island, where Silke and Hannes now present the tale of the island of Nauru, once called Pleasant Island by European explorers. Although its size makes it one of the smallest nations in the world, its history is both large and significant. Nauru is often seen as a parable for our current world. The island was severely impacted by the effects of colonisation, capitalism, migration and ecological distress of which the consequences still linger today.

In Pleasant Island, Silke and Hannes use their personal smartphones to navigate the spectator through audio and images from their research on Nauru. How does one encounter the limitations of a world that is intent on endless growth? What idea of the future is left on Nauru, and the rest of the world?

Finally, from 5th to 6th August, the Mining Trilogy concludes with Out of the Blue, where Silke and Hannes deal with deep sea mining, and how mining companies have exploited the ocean once depleting the resources on land. In the spring of 2021, three ships gather on a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean. One of them belongs to the Belgian dredging company DEME-GSR. Four kilometres below the sea surface, their mining robot is scraping the seabed in search of metals. On another ship, an international team of marine biologists and geologists keep a close watch on the operation. A third ship completes the fleet: on board the infamous Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace activists protest against this potential future industry.

From their small apartment in Brussels, Silke and Hannes connect with the three ships through satellite. Each of the ships represents one pillar of the public debate: industry, science and activism. How much deeper can mining companies dig, and what are we as humankind actually digging towards? The piece is an attempt to capture a potentially pivotal moment in the history of the earth, juxtaposing myriad perspectives by presenting visual media and audio recordings side by side.

Also in August, The Necessary Stage revives their 1994 work Three Years in the Life and Death of Land at the Singtel Waterfront Theatre. Written and directed by Haresh Sharma, the work follows Eric Lim returns home after studying abroad, and marries his long-time sweetheart and neighbour Shalini Mulchand. But a lot can happen in three years—especially when two families are united by love but divided by their pain.

First staged in 1994 as part of the Singapore Festival of Arts, Three Years in the Life and Death of Land is about the Lims, the Mulchands, a ghost, a cat and three mosquitoes—one big family, trying hard to be happy. The show stars an ensemble comprising Daisy Irani, Fahim Murshed, Ghafir Akbar, Joshua Lim, Julius Foo, Karen Tan, Nadya Zaheer, Rowena See, Sharul Channa, Siti Khalijah Zainal, Tan Guo Lian Sutton and Tan Rui Shan.

From 18th to 20th August, the Esplanade has commissioned a restaging of Joel Tan’s Mosaic. First produced and presented in 2013, and subsequently restaged in 2015, the play deals with what happens when an old playground in Ang Mo Kio is slated to be bulldozed. Three 20-something friends and a stranger gather to protest its demolition. What starts as a well-meaning but ill-conceived protest escalates quickly to a night of reckoning. Relationships are tested, convictions challenged and identities scrapped. Much like the playground itself, the lives of these four characters are sucked into an endless cycle of forgetting, destruction, loss and letting go.

An ode to the hang-ups and dramas of a generation coming of age, Joel Tan’s Mosaic is a funny and witty look at the rose-tint of nostalgia and the uncertainty of change. Directed by Tan Shou Chen, the play stars a young cast comprising Coco Wang Ling, Irsyad Dawood, Andre Chong, and Rebecca Ashley Dass.

The season concludes with Robert Zhao Renhui’s immersive performance installation work ALBIZIA. Zhao’s artistic practice revolves around humanity’s relationship with nature, and is characterised by a longstanding interest in investigating sites defined by the conflation of wilderness and urbanisation. With this work, Zhao takes inspiration from ecological research that reclaims “second-tier forests” and invites us to consider the potential for life and regeneration in these forests on the margins of our island.

Watch as videos, photography, and sound are woven into an immersive natural setting that recreates one of several secondary forests that fill Singapore’s landscape. Through an artfully choreographed journey into this surreal and evocative space, audiences will experience stories of the vivid inter-species dramas that unfold deep inside our secondary forests.

This season of The Studios will also be supported by artist talks, workshops and conversations surrounding issues of nostalgia, built heritage, and creative processes. Additional activities have also been programmed, including a walking tour that acts as an introduction to local wild edibles at Sungei Tengah, a nature walk at Gillman Forest, and birdwatching at Choa Chu Kang. How well do you know the land you live on? Let the Esplanade’s 2023 season of The Studios bring you a little closer, and leave you with plenty of food for thought for reflecting on nature, heritage, and the future.

The Studios 2023 runs from July to September 2023 at the Esplanade. Full programme and tickets available here