They are some of the many stories that will mingle and intertwine at this year’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA), which begins on Friday and runs until June 2 at multiple theaters across the city-state.

One of the biggest arts festivals in Southeast Asia, SIFA has been hailed for its inclusion of international acts that add more perspective to the already multi-disciplinary arts it showcases.

This year’s edition of the annual festival, which has been held since 1977, will end a three-part thematic arc that started in 2022, titled The Anatomy of Performance. The festival will follow 2022’s theme, “Ritual”, and 2023’s theme, “Some People” with this year’s “They Declare”.

The overarching concept came from festival director Natalie Hennedige, who has helmed the event since 2022 and whose tenure was recently extended until 2025.

“The cultural tone of the day – what’s currently happening in the world and the conversations of the day – is very important as we position each festival edition,” Hennedige told The Jakarta Post ahead of the event’s opening.

Each festival took over a year of planning, she added, and “They Declare” was programmed to be about voices, particularly the diversity that the festival seeks to champion.

“Diversity is very integral to how we live in contemporary society. We need to let [ourselves] be challenged by different ideas and thoughts,” Hennedige added.

One main example is the SUARA / Oro Rua performance, a collaboration between Singaporean musical artist Safuan Johari and Maori choreographer Eddie Elliott from Aotearoa, the indigenous Maori term for New Zealand. Not only are the artists’ disciplines mixed, but so are their cultures and histories.

“The work draws on a mix of influences from Māori and Malay ideas and cultures, [...] and it feels like we have created a world where this combination [birthed] its own culture or language,” the pair told the Post.

The cross-cultural performance, which will premiere at the festival on May 24, also revealed to the artists that they had much more in common than they realized.

That sentiment, in which differing cultures highlight similarities among people, will appear in other performances that deal with ecological and human nature, including in the award-winning opera Sun & Sea.

The opera explores climate change issues that its creators encountered in their home country of Lithuania. But its message resonated far beyond, winning the opera the top award at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The opera has continued to tour the world since.

“We feel privileged to bring our work into many places. However, we intentionally aimed to make this singing beach feel global rather than local,” the opera’s director, Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, told the Post.

Rugilė said the performances would often incorporate local context, from a country’s food to its language, which furthered the point that ecological disaster affected all cultures. The opera’s showing at the festival, on May 30, will adopt some Singaporean aspects.

SIFA will present five newly commissioned productions and seven invited international acts throughout its run.

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