8 must-see highlights of Singapore International Festival of Arts 2023

Co‐directed by Asian American composer Huang Ruo and Singapore performance maker Brian Gothong Tan, this music theatre piece examines America’s earliest racist immigration legislations through the stories of the Chinese immigrants—their poems carved on the wooden walls—of the immigration station on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay area between 1910 and 1940. The work, performed by the Del Sol Quartet and Taipei Chamber Singers, brings history into the reality of our modern times by tackling issues such as xenophobia and sexism, as well as systematic racial and gender discrimination.

May 19 and 20. Singtel Waterfront Theatre at Esplanade.

With silk as the chrysalis that harbours metamorphosis, and the silkworm a metaphor for transformation, Canadian multidisciplinary artist Sougwen Chung reflects on the possibilities of human and non‐human collaboration with her latest work. Joining Chung on stage is Singaporean master cellist Leslie Tan, who unravels new musical dimensions within the work, which exists at the intersection of visual art, performance and technology.

May 20. Victoria Theatre. 

Polystyrene, the most common form of plastic, is at the centre of this object theatre by Italian artist Andrea Salustri. The work offers a look at how we engage with objects, allowing them to “perform” and tell their own stories, thus creating their own magic. The audience will also project their own interpretations on the performance on stage.

May 20 and 21. Studio Theatre in the School of the Arts, Singapore.

With the stage set in the city’s iconic nightclub Cé La Vi, this display of burlesque and vaudeville by Singapore’s burlesque queen Sukki (formerly Sukki Singapora), as well as rope performance installation by artists Daniel Kok and Luke George is set to delight and astonish audiences.

May 26 and 27. Cé La Vi.

Taking inspiration from the lives impacted by the sudden destruction and rediscovery of the city of Pompeii, this multimedia theatre performance by Australian‐born artist Edith Podesta and Singaporean filmmaker K Rajagopal tells the stories of an imagined apartment building’s inhabitants. A catastrophe has reduced them to the inanimate, with their lives existing only as object and memory. Pompeii looks at how the objects and spaces we leave behind in death represent who we were, or betray our true nature that was denied in life.

From June 2 to 4. Drama Centre Theatre in the National Library Building.

Led by playwright and director Toshiki Okada, Japanese theatre company Chelfitsch is known for its innovative Eizo-Theater style, featuring an interplay of life-size projected images within a physical space, blurring the line between reality and fiction. In New-Illusion, the projected images of a man and a woman begin talking about a play that was performed in the theatre, a play set in the room where they had lived together. But are the two talking about fiction or reality?

June 3 and 4. School of the Arts Studio Theatre.

Australian circus performance company Circa, one of the leading companies in the world, pushes the boundaries of what circus and acrobatics can be. With Humans2.0, artistic director Yaron Lifschitz, along with 10 of Circa’s talented ensemble members, explores what it means to be human—finding redemptive power in strength and bringing a message of hope as the world returns from the brink of the pandemic.

June 3 and 4. Esplanade Theatre.

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