A beach bathed in perpetual sunlight. The pursuit of a puppet whale across stormy seas. A woman caught in an endless loop. A multiverse of E.M. Forster’s characters coming together. These are just a few of the highlights revealed yesterday at the launch of the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) 2024 programme.

Organised by Arts House Limited (AHL) and commissioned by the National Arts Council (NAC), the festival is helmed by Festival Director Natalie Hennedige, now in the third year of her tenure, and runs from 17th May to 2nd June 2024. Following SIFA 2022’s Ritual and SIFA 2023’s Some People, this year’s festival will revolve around the theme of They Declare, an evocative call for audiences to make space for the coexistence of different beliefs and ways of being, by reflecting on their relationship to the natural environment as well as the other voices and existences that surround them. 

The programme was unveiled against a radiant sunset on the rooftop bar at 1-Altitude Coast, at the Outpost Hotel on Sentosa. The reason for that was clear, with a major highlight of the festival being Lithuanian artists’ Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė’s Sun & Sea. First presented in 2019 as part of the Venice Biennale, Sun & Sea is set to transform the Esplanade Theatre into an artificial beach, with actual sand and light that sees vacationers relaxing in colourful bathing suits. As we watch from above, these beach-goers break into song, where seemingly frivolous micro-stories slowly give rise to broader, more serious subjects and grow into a global symphony, a universal human choir addressing planetary-scale climate breakdown, forming an eco-opera. Local audiences are also encouraged to get involved, with an Open Call now open if you’d like to be a part of the performance.

Also on that same note, SIFA 2024 is set to sweep audiences out to the oceans, with their opening show – Plexus Polaire’s Moby Dick. Adapted from Herman Melville’s novel of the same name, Moby Dick is brought to life through Plexus Polaire’s signature puppetry, with a cast of seven actors, fifty intricately crafted puppets, live music and immersive video projections, for a sensory feast of a production invites you to journey into the unfathomable depths of the ocean and Man’s perpetual battle with the forces of Nature.

The Festival is also set to present five newly commissioned productions and seven invited international presentations, as well as an engaging event that celebrates Singapore’s vibrant theatre scene and an all-new programming pillar catered for families and children. Conceived by Singapore music artist Safuan Johari in collaboration with Māori Choreographer Eddie Elliott, SUARA / Oro Rua features original compositions centred on and driven by a choral unit comprising singers from diverse musical practices and backgrounds, with string and electronic music and a cast of New Zealand dance artists to imagine a post-Anthropocene future. With ‘suara’ meaning ‘voice/sound’ in Malay, and ‘oro rua’ in Māori, meaning ‘to resonate’, the work brings the Māori concept of Te Kore, the ‘void’ that exists beyond the world of everyday experience, together with the sonic history of the Earth — which tells us how hundreds of millions of years of evolution and communication happened in silence before living creatures found their voices.

Wilful Machine, a performance-installation work by Singapore visual artist Genevieve Chua, which presents a playful take on artificial intelligence, examining humanness in a world of data and algorithms, where touch becomes the focal point. Exploring the interaction between our methods of touch, we train and have a dialogue with an algorithm, as together, we navigate a new user environment and the potentials and limitations of our digital interactions.

Celebrated Singapore theatre-makers Haresh Sharma and Chong Tze Chien come together for The Prose and the Passion, which draws from the works, letters and life of one of the greatest English novelists of all time, E. M. Forster, to create a play where fictional characters from Forster’s novels traverse space and time and interact with characters from Sharma’s imagination. Inspired by his letters, his life, and his novels A Passage to India and Maurice. Multiple timelines converge and diverge, bound together inextricably by the characters that populate Forster’s novels, and consumed by the loneliness that is inevitable in bodies that exist outside of the prescribed narratives.

After spending months in the caves of Sarawak, iconic Singapore band The Observatory presents REFUGE, an interdisciplinary live performance project combining sound, live music, moving image and light that takes audiences on a metaphysical sojourn into the subterranean to examine the relationship between the self and the natural world in the face of profound and constant change. REFUGE subverts the conventional narrative of darkness as mere privation, and instead embraces the descent into obscurity with hope, seeking to unearth concealed wisdom from living organisms, ancient cave art, and the histories and stories of the under-land.

Other highlights of SIFA 2024 include other international invitations, as they continue to gather the voices of prominent and promising artists from across the globe, demonstrating the multiplicity and scale of SIFA as a contemporary international arts festival. Encompassing a range of mediums and genres, these include The Romeo by American dancer, choreographer and SIFA 2016 alumni Trajal Harrell. The work presents a fresh take on the Shakespearean archetype of Romeo by combining a speculative style of dancing incorporating fluid, wavy and undulating movements and bizarre outfits, to allow for a multitude of protagonists to emerge. 

Germany-based artists Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg present the Asian premiere of ANGELA (a strange loop), a multimedia stage production that sees the character Angela go through various everyday experiences and narratives in an endless loop, struggling to make sense of her existence. Join her in a thought-provoking journey as she navigates everyday situations: illness and recovery, waking and sleeping, giving birth and being born, ageing and death, zooming in closer and closer until we blur the lines between the virtual and the real. 

In Una Isla, Spanish theatre company Agrupación Señor Serrano presents an experimental inquiry into the meaning of ‘coming together’ and how it relates to humanity, especially in today’s context, in search of new ways of living together. Through a fusion of choreography, live video, AI-generated music, and holographic sculptures, Una Isla prompts contemplation on the complexities of our interactions with AI, and the ever-elusive quest for meaningful connections in an increasingly automated world.

Elsewhere, Tomorrow and tomorrow comprises of two weekends where our local theatre companies come together in a showing of works-in-process opening up vistas for future presentation and unearthing Singapore’s fertile ground for contemporary theatre making at Stamford Arts Centre and 42 Waterloo Street. Take this extraordinary opportunity to witness the diverse practices of Singapore’s theatre groups on a single platform.

Writer, editor and producer Hong Xinyi returns with two projects – FL(U)ORESCENCE and URL TO IRL: SIFA DIGITAL. Fl(u)orescence brings together diverse contributors offering creative responses to SIFA 2024’s lineup. Beginning in 2022, SIFA introduced a virtual venue and creation platform hosted on the official festival website. URL TO IRL: SIFA Digital showcases a selection of digital as well as creative responses to SIFA performances spanning three years in an installation where digital explorations find new life in real life. 

Festivalgoers can also encounter the Festival in the digital space through Singapore film editor Natalie Soh’s the light gleams an instant. A SIFA 2024 digital commission, Soh’s experimental short film, available for free, explores the intersection between art, music and nature, delving into the rich collection of specimens from the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum and casting new light on artist-jeweller Shing of Argentum and the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music.

As part of the Festival’s enduring efforts to nurture new audiences, SIFA 2024 will feature a special series of family-friendly programmes. Designed to facilitate memorable art encounters for children, Little SIFA was conceptualised to introduce young audiences to the vast world of the performing arts. Audiences of all ages and anyone young at heart are welcome to enjoy the The Dancer’s Fair at Cathay Green, where a larger-than-life ballerina and an old-style fair comprising seven of Antigua i Barbuda’s fascinating machines await. Presented as separate installations, audiences are invited to interact with and breathe new life into these sculptures made up of repurposed materials. Antigua i Barbuda is on the lookout for those interested in being involved in the magic of The Dancer’s Fair.

Just across the road at SOTA Drama Theatre, Manual Cinema invites little SIFA-goers to delight in Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About A Terrible Monster. Using hundreds of illustrated paper puppets, book pages, two-dimensional props, furry monster puppets and songs to bring Mo Willems’ books to life, audiences have the option of approaching the production as a traditional movie on the screen, or peer down at the artists below as they create the story in real time. 

Adding onto the unveiling of what can be expected at SIFA 2024, Hennedige is set to spearhead the Festival as Festival Director for a fourth year in 2025. Known for driving dynamic transnational co-creation between local and international artists as well as her bold approach to programming artistically diverse, progressive and challenging creations, Festivalgoers can anticipate yet another edition of SIFA that persists in pushing the boundaries of what performance can encompass, positioning SIFA and Singapore in the arena amongst the most inspiring performing arts festivals in the world. 

“In the last two years, Natalie has undoubtedly left her distinctive mark on the direction that the Festival has undertaken, bringing audiences on uncharted paths and unexpected adventures,” says Sharon Tan, Executive Director at AHL said. “She continues to awe us with fresh perspectives and many firsts for the Festival — from the multiple regional premieres to a special strand of programming dedicated to young audiences — that address a multitude of themes and issues explored through the Festival subtitle They Declare. We hope that audiences will be inspired and find personal resonance in the myriad of remarkable and innovative artistic experiences by outstanding artists from and beyond Singapore’s shores, further enriching their lives through the arts.” 

“We would like to extend a heartfelt congratulations to Natalie on the extension of her tenure as Festival Director of SIFA. The team at Arts House Limited and I are excited to continue working closely with Natalie for another edition of the Festival,” she adds.” “With her invaluable experience steering SIFA for the past three years, we are confident that our combined efforts will continue to bridge the arts and audiences, transforming ideas into reality through the dynamic programming that makes SIFA an exceptional performing arts festival in the region.”

Festival Director Natalie Hennedige says: “The intent to illuminate how performance can be approached as a dynamic arena not only for artistic innovation and expression, but also to gather and be moved by shifting perspectives has been the driving force behind each edition of the Festival. With clear Singapore identity and international presence, we continue to build a Festival that responds to the now, encouraging all present to embrace difference, and different ways of being in these testing times.” 

SIFA 2024: They Declare runs from 17th May to 2nd June 2024 across various venues. Tickets and full programme available here