Anticipation of One by SA x NADA x Brandon Tay

4 & 5 May FRI, 9PM SAT, 10PM

Play Den, Festival House

1h 10m, no intermission

BY

SA X NADA X BRANDON TAY (SINGAPORE)

MESSAGE FROM THE FESTIVAL DIRECTOR I grew up looking forward to the Singapore Arts Festival every year.

Watching shows across different genres from around the world played a big part in shaping my artistic sensibilities. Shows such as Ninagawa’s Macbeth (1992), for example, entirely changed my perception of how Shakespeare could be performed.

In 1996, I acted in Singapore Repertory Theatre’s Sing To The Dawn; it was the first time a Singaporean musical opened the Singapore Arts Festival. Given this history, I was delighted and honoured to be asked to helm the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) for the next three years.

What is SIFA’s role? Where does it fit in the cultural landscape, both at home and internationally? Who does it serve?

Where would I like it to be in three years?

As I was thinking of how to shape the festival, what I did know was that I wanted to programme a festival that would inspire young people in the same way that I was impacted 25 years ago.

With the support of the phenomenal team at SIFA, I aspired to curate a season that would showcase different art forms and perspectives from Singapore and around the world. We also strove to programme a spectrum of shows that would appeal to a variety of audiences, from the first-time festival-goer to the seasoned art lover.

We believe we have programmed artists who are game-changers in their fields.

In parallel, discussions commenced with several of the game-changers in the Singapore arts scene. One of SIFA’s roles is to commission and facilitate the creation of new Singaporean work – giving artists the time and resources to develop shows over a two- or three-year horizon. We look forward to presenting the culmination of this process in SIFA 2019 and 2020.

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Two memorable experiences from arts festivals I have attended around the world have been the free outdoor performances, and a festival ‘village’ — a place where artists and audiences can meet after a show and discuss what they’ve just seen. Both these elements can be found in SIFA 2018. The free outdoor programmes on the opening and closing weekends have some sensational performances to be enjoyed with family and friends. Over these three weeks, The Arts House will become Festival House.

It will be the heartbeat of SIFA with performances, lectures, readings, music salons and, of course, a place to just hang out and chat. Artists will give talks, conduct masterclasses or host Q&As, and hopefully we will build relationships with them that last beyond the festival.

A key initiative that I introduced this year is the $10 front-row student ticket. I want the next generation of Singaporeans to know that they matter to SIFA. My hope is that they will fall in love with the arts in the same way I did at their age.

I would like to thank Sarah Martin and the incredible team of people I work with at SIFA and at Arts House Limited. Despite the tight six-month runway to programme this festival, they have been nothing short of amazing and have worked tirelessly to produce a festival that we hope resonates with you as much as it does with us.

Most of all, thank you for your support. The scope, breadth and reach of shows in SIFA will continue to grow over the next three years. We look forward to taking you on this exciting journey with us.

Gaurav Kripalani Festival Director

MESSAGE FROM THE CEO

Festivals bring people together to celebrate causes or to mark momentous occasions. Arts festivals allow us to not only appreciate the arts, they allow us to experience and form lasting and transformative memories. It is through shared experiences that we come to form communities.

The inaugural Singapore Festival of Arts began in 1977 as a national showcase of the vibrant art forms found within Singapore’s diverse communities. In its many evolutions over the last four decades, the Festival has touched countless hearts, created invaluable experiences for many, and inspired even more to embrace the arts. From a time when Singapore was widely perceived as a cultural desert, the Festival has played an instrumental role in developing Singapore’s arts landscape and shaped the city-state into one of Asia’s leading cultural capitals.

This year, SIFA 2018 marks the 41st year and kicks off a new era with Gaurav Kripalani at the helm as Festival Director for 2018 – 2020. Condensed into 17 days of artistic adventures, it is our hope that

this exhilarating three-week format will create robust artistic engagement for a spectrum of diverse audiences. The Arts House will be transformed into the Festival House, and within its intimate spaces, there will be meaningful discourses on the various themes presented in the festival.

Built upon the foundation and achievements of those who came before, SIFA is the sum of many parts made possible by a team of many talents who has worked tirelessly and passionately to deliver the Festival Director’s vision.

I thank everyone who has had a hand in shaping the Singapore International Festival of Arts into a tradition for both new and existing audiences and making it the stalwart of Singapore’s dedication to artistic excellence.

Gaurav and the team have put together a festival of multiple layers allowing you to make up your own artistic adventures.

It is my hope that you will walk away with unique memories of the Festival.

Sarah Martin CEO, Arts House Limited

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MESSAGE FROM THE CREATORS Work on Anticipation of One can be said to have begun one evening in February 2017, when the artists asked me out for ice cream. “We have something to propose,” they said. “Let’s work together.”

From the beginning, we all agreed that it would have to be something that looked, felt and sounded different from what many of our audiences may have come to expect of SA, NADA and Brandon Tay, in any order or combination. It’s been nearly 15 months of working to develop a different shared audiovisual language between the artists, cycling through sessions of jamming, composing, devising with prompts and triggers, trying to create cracks from which glimpses of new worlds and energies could emerge.

Anticipation of One is as much about reaching into the future as it has been about histories going much further beyond the past 15 months. Each of these artists explores identities, meanings and sounds in their own ways, enacting contemporary questions about received traditions and assumptions. With each performance, they enact their own responses to their view of the world and to the views the world has of them.

After a good period trying to claw away at the old, familiar walls of SA’s and NADA’s sounds, there was one session in December last year when it felt like we had finally broken through. As the sounds flowed forth in response to the visual worlds Brandon had created as triggers for the musicians, something in the air shifted, and we all felt it then. Even after the music stopped, we sat quietly for a while, nodding in shared acknowledgement of what had just passed.

Later that night, Safuan (Johari, of NADA) sent a message to the WhatsApp chat group: “Anticipation of One, that’s what tonight was about.”

Mok Cui Yin Producer

PROGRAMME NOTES A collective audiovisual performance by six inventive local artists exploring the convergence of multiple selves. elves don’t exist firmly in the present; they are “just coming into life in the S flow of time” by virtue of their dependence on future loci of interpretance – future semiotic selves – that will come to interpret them. All semiosis, then, creates future.

— Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: An Anthropology Beyond the Human Six artists, each a point of convergence between multiple pasts, presents, and futures, entangled in a web of collaboration and co-existence. Anticipation of One is the inventive collective result, an ensemble audiovisual performance by SA x NADA x Brandon Tay that explores the amalgamation of these multiple selves.

In Anticipation of One, rather than facing the audience, the artists surround them, the room collectively looking forward at the sight of what is to come. The distinct boundaries of the sound-worlds of SA and NADA fall away, as we thread through the spaces and worlds of each individual artist instead.

The audience travels as both voyeur and voyager, indexing and making meaning of the sounds, images and worlds as they come to life in the flow of time.

Brandon Tay plays co-composer and conductor, using media as both stimulus and accompaniment to the music, engineering and manipulating all of these worlds as they first unfold, before accumulating and folding in on each other into an expansive cosmos of whirrs, hums, strums, beats and howls.

THE CREATIVE TEAM SA

Andy Chia Cheryl Ong Natalie Alexandra Tse

NADA

Rizman Putra Safuan Johari

Visual / Media

Brandon Tay

Producer

Mok Cui Yin

Sound Engineer Rong Zhao

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THE PERFORMERS

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2

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1 SA Music may be time and culture-specific but sound knows no limits. The trio of SA(仨) create their own soundscapes, exploring all possibilities not bound by time or culture.

For SA(仨), their exploration of sound begins with each instrument, and every original composition is a bold experiment that combines traditional elements with modern techniques, such as live looping. Spontaneous at every turn, each performance is a risk that the band takes as they delve into the question of identity.

Founded in 2010, (仨), meaning “three” in northern Chinese dialect, is a tribute to the band members’ Chinese roots and represents the universal tripartite of heaven, earth and human, as well as the mind, body and soul in the being.

2 NADA NADA is a visual arts and sound project that specialises in conjuring lost eras through music, particularly the golden period of Malay and Southeast Asian traditional and popular music from the 1960s to the 1980s. Consisting of Rizman Putra and Safuan Johari, the duo celebrates these forgotten sounds from the past through contemporary musical lens. NADA fuses fiction with reality and creates vintage allure with refreshing modernity. Since 2014, NADA’s brand of music has gone beyond Singapore to Paris, Beijing, London and New York.

3 BRANDON TAY Brandon Tay is a media artist based in Singapore who explores the uncanny and the sublime through a mediated lens. His practice spans the moving image, mediated sculpture and audiovisual performance with a background in film and animation informing his multifaceted approach. His work has been shown in the National Museum Singapore and the Singapore Art Museum. As an audio-visual performer, he has worked with the Singapore International Festival of the Arts, the M1 Fringe Festival and da:ns festival.

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ABOUT SIFA Into its 41st year, Singapore International Festival of Arts 2018 presents diverse and distinctive work from Singapore and around the world that ignites the imagination, inspires myriad audiences, and provokes reflection and dialogue.

Get ready for a plethora of theatre, music, dance, literary and visual arts at the pinnacle national arts festival that will happen over three weeks from 26 April to 12 May, and across ten performance spaces, including the Festival House, located at The Arts House.

ABOUT ARTS HOUSE LIMITED Arts House Limited (AHL) is a not-for-profit organisation committed to enriching lives through the arts.

AHL manages two key landmarks located in the heart of Singapore’s Civic District – The Arts House, a multi-disciplinary arts centre with a focus on literary programming, and the Victoria Theatre & Victoria Concert Hall, a heritage building that is home to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. It also runs the Goodman Arts Centre and Aliwal Arts Centre, two creative enclaves for artists, arts groups and creative businesses, and performing arts space Drama Centre. AHL presents the Singapore International Festival of Arts, the annual pinnacle celebration of performance and interdisciplinary arts in Singapore commissioned by the National Arts Council.

AHL was set up in 11 Dec 2002 as a company limited by guarantee (CLG) under the National Arts Council and was formerly known as The Old Parliament House Limited. It was officially renamed Arts House Limited on 19 Mar 2014.

AHL BOARD Chairperson: Christine Ong Members: Chong Yuan Chien, Deborah Ho, Kelvin Ang, Lynette Pang, Madeleine Lee, Maniza Jumabhoy, Mok Wei Wei, Ong Chao Choon, Ong Choon Fah, Paul Tan, Sarah Martin (Ex-Officio)

SINGAPORE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF ARTS THE SIFA TEAM Chief Executive Officer: Sarah Martin Festival Director: Gaurav Kripalani Chief Financial Officer: Yong Yuet Mei Advisor: J P Nathan Head, Programming: Jobina Tan Head, Production: Cindy Yeong Head, Marketing: Jasmine Gan Head, Communications: Carolyn Tay Head, Partnership Development: Payal Michelle Parekhji Assistant Head, Event Services Management: Emma Izzabella Tagoe PROGRAMMING Producers: Sara Joan Fang, Rydwan Anwar, Ye Junmin Senior Manager: Lisa Marie Lip Senior Manager, Place Making: Natalie Tan Managers: Kong Yen Lin, Shridar Mani, Pang Su Li Assistant Manager: Alicia Chong PRODUCTION Production Managers: Christopher Chua, Natalie Lim Production Co-ordinators: Celestine Wong, Melissa Chin Technical Co-ordinators: Huang Xiangbin, David Li Production Assistant: Chong Wee Nee MARKETING Senior Managers: Elizabeth Wong, Winnie Chan Assistant Manager: Koay Yi Ling Senior Designers: Muhammad Hakim bin Rahim, Md Firdaus bin Wari Executives: Diana Othman, Juliana Tan Interns: Clara Janssen, Lim Yi Shuen, Michelle Chia COMMUNICATIONS Assistant Manager: Willy Beh Wei Hong Intern: Rifdi Jaffar TICKETING Executive: Nor Limah binte Ja’ffar PARTNERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Manager: Norita Senin Executive: Tan Yanru EVENT SERVICES MANAGEMENT Frontof-house Hospitality Manager: Dorothy Neo Front-of-House Manager: Mohd Afham bin Abbas Back-of-House Hospitality Manager: Nursheehana binte Akbal Ahmad Event Services Manager: Johnson Kee Secretariat Manager: Carine Lee Transport Manager: Syafiq Zulkepli FINANCE Manager: Vivian Gan Executives: Mandy Choo, Lai Zhi Ying, Priyasini D/O Balachandran HUMAN RESOURCE Manager: Noraliza Ramli Senior Executive: Elaine Neo ADMINISTRATION Manager, Arts: Liza Mustapha Executive: Norhanim binte Mohamed Tayib 6

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