FESTIVAL DIRECTOR’S MESSAGE SIFA 2022 reflects a dissolution of categories or labels; to invite, instead, and adopt artistically fluid collaborations and collaborators, gathering within individual creations a range of artistic disciplines, practices and perspectives. The festival invites practitioners of vivid cultural hues from different walks of life to embrace a blending of genres, artistic disciplines and internationality – in performances made by artists with strong and unique perspectives – in the poly-dynamic and universal language of art. This echoes the ways in which contemporary performance is being made in the world. Also, importantly, it reflects how our dialogue with each other on a human level requires nuance because we live in systems of such complexity, within a world having gone through serious bouts of illness and faced with pertinent social and political movements that continue to test our passions and challenge us. The performing arts, therefore, needs to be upheld as space for reflection, openness and nuanced creative articulation to be freely expressed. It was important for me too that SIFA be a platform for originality, propelling artists and performance creation coming from Singapore, while imagining what a meaningful international dynamic looks like within our city’s pinnacle performing arts festival. The next three editions of SIFA will see a recurring title The Anatomy of Performance, accompanied by a changing subtitle. 2022’s is Ritual. Ritual can be distilled into the conditions of time, artefact and gesture. In performance, we adhere to these conditions. Time (is duration), artefact (is costume, installation and prop) and gesture (is expressive movement and charged stillness). Rituals are evolving.
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