British composer Michael Nyman, New York’s legendary experimental theatre company The Wooster Group and French choreographer and enfant terrible Jerome Bel are some big names to expect when the newly revamped Singapore Arts Festival — now the Singapore International Festival Of Arts (SIFA) — finally rolls into town next year.

But the most important person at the festival will be none other than you.

Before SIFA kicks off in August 2014, a pre-festival event of sorts will be held in June and July. Festival organisers, who met up with TODAY last week, have dubbed it OPEN. It will be a “public art academy”, which includes talks, films and public art projects that audiences can check out before the festival proper begins.

According to Festival Director and Cultural Medallion recipient Ong Keng Sen, OPEN stands for “Open, Participate, Enrich and Negotiate”. “The idea is that the public can enter this OPEN space and participate. All you need to do is get a pass and you can go for everything.”

Former National Museum of Singapore (NMS) Director Lee Chor Lin, who is now Chief Executive Officer of the independent company that runs the festival, Arts Festival Ltd, alluded to the popular Festival Village of previous editions: “In a way, this academy is our way of doing a Village. But it doesn’t coincide with or parallel the main festival, so it prepares the audience.”

LEGACY ISSUES

Details for OPEN are yet to be confirmed, including the events and venue, but some works have been confirmed for the festival proper. Expect some 12 shows to run over six weekends beginning in August, all of which will deal with the theme of Legacy.

“It could mean personal legacy, historical, political, art — or even 20th-century legacies. We’re dealing with issues like apartheid, Hitler, medical research for profit, race, discrimination,” said Ong.

Among these are Nyman’s Facing Goya and The Wooster Group’s production of Shakespeare’s Troilus And Cressida as festival opener and closer, respectively, as well as Bel and Theater HORA’s Disabled Theater.

Facing Goya is a music theatre piece that references the anecdote of the missing skull of the Spanish painter Francisco Goya. “One theory was that his head was hidden (after his death) because grave-robbers were taking the heads of important geniuses to study. It’s about genetics research and profit. It’s about greed, the financial crises and the bankruptcy of morals,” said Ong.

First staged in 2000, Nyman, who is perhaps most popularly known for his work on the film The Piano, has written new material for this co-production between SIFA and the Spoleto Festival USA. It will include five soloists from overseas and 15 musicians from the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, among others.

The Wooster Group’s version of the Shakespeare play, meanwhile, is tweaked from a co-production with the Royal Shakespeare Company for London’s Cultural Olympiad last year. It will first open in New York and Los Angeles early next year. The highly influential experimental group’s history stretches to the ’70s and counts Hollywood actor Willem Dafoe as one of the founding members.

Bel’s Disabled Theater will feature 11 performers with Down syndrome who will be dancing and talking about themselves. The performers were trained by Theater HORA from Zurich and the show premiered at Documenta 13 last year. There are also plans for the theatre group to hold workshops at special education schools in Singapore. “There will be something happening in the theatre and, at the same time, something happening intimately in special needs schools,” said Ong.

BUMPY RIDE

Barely half a year into their new roles, it has been a very busy time for new appointees Ong and Lee.

“I fasten my seatbelt all the time; it’s been a bumpy ride,” quipped the latter, good-naturedly.

While the two have worked together on the Singapore Night Festival and a number of shows at NMS, Ong admits that the festival is “a huge experiment”.

“It’s a very unusual situation. You have an artist (Ong) who’s now the curator and a curator (Lee) who’s now the CEO. Suddenly the whole thing has moved up one level.”

Ong added: “I’m thinking about programming, productions, the public events; Chor Lin is thinking of the master plan, the business plan. Both are dealing with sustainability. We can only sustain if there is a financial plan and if the art is thinking about what its responsibility to its audience is.”

While Lee has been mostly manning the fort so to speak (despite, technically, no office yet for the company), “(Ong) has been doing a thorough survey of what’s out there. What’s bad, what’s good.”

The past few months have seen the fest director visiting festivals. “We have to study the other models out there. There are festivals that perhaps are too ‘atas’ about art or are unfocused,” said Ong, who cited the Manchester Festival and Ruhr Triennial as some of the notable ones. “Many interesting things are happening in Korea, too.”

As for SIFA, their gameplan is already taking shape.

“We want to have a focused, streamlined festival and we’re trying different strategies. Too many works in the past? Let’s keep it to 12 works. There’s also this whole idea of the ‘festival fatigue’, which works against stressful Singaporeans in the end. You’re already working so hard and you’re trying to catch 10 shows in two weeks. We wanted to reduce that,” said Ong.

In terms of programming shows and themes, the international bent of the 2014 edition was to give more lead time for commissioning Singapore works, which will comprise the festival for 2015 (which will carry the theme of “post-Empire”). For 2016, which will be about “new trajectories”, they are planning to commission works from both Singapore and around the world, and remove the divide.

“Whenever we think about which theatre piece to bring in, we’re thinking about what art practice is existing now in Singapore and how we can inspire, provoke or cause a dialogue between the practices here and abroad,” said Ong.

And for 2016, added Lee, they’re looking for a possible new outcome from what has transpired in the previous editions. “We can ask them to think about new trajectories, perhaps think of making something from what they’ve seen.”