This year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) is presented around the theme of potentialities. Focusing on potential instead of actuality feels like a good plan in a year that brings economic volatility, an El Niño that seems to herald intensified global warming (with hotter days and more extreme patterns of precipitation) and no respite from the relentless destruction of humanity and nature, in our region and beyond.
Potentiality nurtures hope and inspires imagination. The process of art-making is a game of creating, prolonging and extending potentiality. Things always get tricky at the point of realisation, but even when potential has been actualised in performance, art creates room for further potential to be generated and recognised in response. Unpredictability is an important and beautiful part of potentiality, and to embrace this, one needs to be broad-minded, generous and courageous. There is just as much potential in art that one’s aesthetic senses might be assaulted, values questioned and beliefs subverted, as there is that one’s senses might be titillated and expectations fulfilled.
The art of an arts festival is the knowing of potential when potential is discovered, fearless of the actuality, and revelling in the unpredictable. For two editions now, SIFA has been on the hunt for potential, asking performers as well as audiences to actualise their potential on this annual platform. This year, SIFA seeks out the new potential in the old. For instance, it celebrates the longevity of Shakespearean potential in Sandaime Richard, itself a 25-year-old work by Hideki Noda, now actualised in a Japan-Singapore production. That is, after all, the definition of a classic: Four hundred years after the death of the playwright, the potential in his works remains inexhaustible. Through an endeavour of love by Checkpoint Theatre, The Last Bull: A Life In Flamenco ignites the potential in Antonio Vargas, the 75-year-old flamenco dancer who continues to dance in Singapore, a most unlikely context, and takes us on a wonderful journey of discovery and adventure. The spirit of potentiality leads the 20 shows in SIFA 2016, and we hope you will enjoy and find fresh insights in this Festival.
This spirit of adventure forms the backbone for us at the Arts House Limited, where the second life of SIFA flourishes since it was re-organised in 2013. We focus on the potential, rather than the challenges that punctuate our work, combining the fostering and nurturing of art-making with such other forms of businesses as events organising and property management.
If art can give individuals a sense of empowerment, it must be that art heads in the direction of potentiality. We want as much for you to enjoy the arts as to find in the arts your own potential to hope and to aspire for greater and better things.
– Lee Chor Lin (Arts House Limited CEO)
(Source: Arts House Limited Programme)