4 posts tagged “singapore arts fest”
Letter I got through ArtsCommunity. Food for thought.
First, I would like to congratulate all those involved in this year's Singapore Festival of Arts for a very successful season.
Today's Straits Times Life! (Thursday 28 June 2007) says that "the quality of local productions did not match up to the foreign ones." This is a perennial complaint, and must be taken seriously.
To rectify this problem, Alvin Tan, an experienced theatre practitioner with The Necessary Stage gave some valuable advice. He suggested "commissioning the works earlier and even having platforms to develop works-in-progress, to improve the quality of commissions." He added that "the festival could also work with incubatory programmes offered by arts groups here, so that works can be played to small audiences before heading for the big time in the Arts Festival.
However in rebuttal, Ms Goh Ching Lee, the Festival director, said "the festival budget, at $6 to $7 million a year, does not permit such (incubation) schemes. And she adds that "Giving a longer lead time does not solve the problem (of improving the quality of works)."
I do not think she should dismiss so summarily the recommendations made by Alvin Tan. They are sensible, and are not necessarily expensive to implement. I believe they will help raise the standard of local productions.
To underline my support for Alvin Tan, this is what I think:
1. INCUBATION PROGRAMS
Set up a separate incubation fund, if this is not already available. TheatreWorks already has a fund from Singapore Press Holdings for their Writers Lab incubation program, The Necessary Stage has playwriting workshops, and The Musical Theatre Ltd has received some funds from Creative Community Singapore for incubating new musicals.
Moreover, there is no reason why the Ministry of Information Communication and the Arts and the National Arts Council cannot source for additional funding for incubating new works. It is absolutely vital for the future of Singapore art that greater impetus is applied to generate more original works.
2. LONGER TIME
Give a longer lead time for developing new works. Different playwrights and different creative teams need different amounts of time for developing new works. It is manifestly untrue that "giving a longer lead time does not solve the problem." We at the Musical Theatre Ltd have noted that those musicals that seem to take only a few short months to complete, have actually been in the creative team's backburner for several years. There is no absolute figure as
to how long a piece of art needs to take. I believe that the current lead time is too short, resulting in works that do not achieve their optimal quality.
3. DEVELOPMENT WORKSHOP PRODUCTIONS
We at Musical Theatre Ltd have found that producing no-frills Development Workshop Productions to a panel of invited guests is a very important part of the creative process. This year, we showcased five new musicals to a panel of experienced musical theatre practitioners that included Dick Lee, Ivan Heng, KK Seet, Tan Kheng Hua, Gaurav Kripalani, Beatrice Chia, Ferlina Khong and Jobina Tan. They selected Ng Yi-Sheng's musical, Georgette. They also made valuable suggestions as to how to improve the musical. Georgette was performed at this year's Singapore Festival of the Arts Esplanade program (a "fringe" event) to critical acclaim. By showcasing these works to a panel of judges, and to the NAC, there can be greater quality control.
4. VARIETY
There is considerable heterogeneity in the audiences attracted to the Singapore Festival of Arts. I think that rather than limiting the types or genres of art, the Festival should attempt to give a balanced diet. I subscribe to the philosophy that variety is the spice of art. For more conservative audiences, there can be the more traditional or classical performances. For the more adventurous, the Festival can include more experimental cutting edge performances. The last thing that should happen is to restrict the program to, say, purely avant garde shows, or to non-commercial shows. Such restrictions are counter-creative.
5. MUSICAL THEATRE
There have been no musical theatre productions in the main program of the Singapore Festival of Arts for the past 11 years. This is scandalous. Musical theatre is a legitimate art form and can be as cutting edge and experimental as any other forms of theatre. There is a fear that musical theatre productions are prohibitively expensive. This is patently untrue, and we have demonstrated that musical theatre productions need not be exorbitant. But it seems incredible
That an entire major genre can be omitted from the Singapore Arts Festival for over a decade. After such a long drought, surely it is high time that a musical theatre should be brought back into the main program of this Festival.
Finally, I suggest that there should be greater openness and more dialogue with all the theatre groups in fashioning the local component of future Festivals.
Congratulations once again to the organizers of this year's Festival of Arts!
Thank you,
Kenneth Lyen
Musical Theatre Ltd
27 June 2007
I found out the song that's been stuck in my head since Sunday: Bic Runga's Sway.
(The only good thing that has arose out of the DJ "kids" at SAF.)
These few days have been good:
1) SAF Day 4 was quite good, will elaborate further if I have time later.
2) I actually look forward to coming for Math class now. Thanks Ms Ng.
3) I got my SAF tickets. Thanks Andy. :) And Atiqah isn't about to kill me over waking her up last Sunday. Phew.
4) I got a Hershey's dark chocolate bar for scoring 22/30 for Mrs Leslie's quiz on foreign phrases in English. I whacked my way through some of it (those I got wrong, lah). I feel quite proud of myself.
5) Haven't heard a good female singer like Bic Runga since Corrinne May.
I can't believe myself - I went for SAF one hour earlier, and on purpose. Maybe I should stop being so calculative. I must've mixed up my numbers and even thought I was going to be late. I ended up calling Atiqah and the poor girl just woke up, I think. I could have stuck one of the green paintbrushes down my throat. Thus, I set out on a journey to the National Library to return my cookbook, which was weighing me down. I counted the time I took to get there, trying to get my mind off the ridiculous blunder I made. 10 minutes there and back. Too bad - if it were 10 more minutes, I would have started to burn fat, according to the sister.
Collected the keys early and had the same trouble closing the doors once again. I still have pink dots on my hand attempting to jab the key into the front door. What an absolute pain indeed!! Then I tried to open the back door. I don't know if it was my weak arms, but it failed to jerk open yet again. Thank goodness Maggie came later (albeit half an hour late) and rescued me by flicking on the TV screen facing the street (another major source of irritation) and somehow opening the door. Phew.
It was a pathetic crowd today though. I don't know why the churchgoers at the nearby St. Andrew's Cathedral didn't come today, might be a wedding or something, for I heard some bells tolling. It was miserable standing there behind the desk looking at green and white toiletbrushes and listening to the deafening silence.
Outside there was a Caucasian man who was doing a chalk mural on the floor. They had built a tent just for him to do his artwork. Often when I got bored I leaned against the door and watched him work. He would rest his stomach on a foldable chair and make invisible lines on the ground with his hands. Suddenly he got up and left with his wife and baby in a red stroller and came back only in the late morning. There went my entertainment.
That first shift, I clocked a pathetic 24 people. Last week there were over 80. Ugh. I even exhausted myself thinking about the Chem PT, the handout of which I brought along. I annotated the things like crazy but didn't actually get anything done. I tried reading Stiglitz, but to no avail. I did have one interesting visitor though, an ex-"MarComm" Officer from the NAC. She told me about how someone she knew was very hardworking, that her ex-colleagues were still in the league, and that Goh Ching Lee (the Festival Director) was Goh Chok Tong's niece. She told me she quit, because, as she leaned in closely, "it was boring". Note to self.
It rained.
I met Grace, who came in a cute floral umbrella, which I liked very much. She had shimmery blue eye shadow, which looked a bit strange because it didn't quite match her red top. She's quite nice though, and talks more than Maggie does. Or maybe it's the gen gap between us. We chatted a bit about what I'm doing in school now. She's, on the other hand, taking a "long" break from her job in "an advertising company".
Later the technician guy - I need to find out what his name is - came after the Ngee Ann Poly "kids" had left. He explained how he had rushed here from a funeral. Later he continued talking to Grace and I for quite a while, expounding on educating children. He advised me to try a few options before picking one, not only in the area of education but also when it comes to boys. Grace laughed. I nodded in all seriousness. He talks a lot, but not in an annoying way. One has a lot to learn from him. He's the first lifelong learner I've met after my dad. He only has his PSLE cert, but he went on to ITE and later did carpenting. However he found it wasn't his thing, and for some time worked at Senoko doing electricity. Of course, he then switched to audio-visual. It's his last job, he says. I'll talk to him again next week, I think.
This morning got off to a crappy start, period.
It was good to be at Project : Eden, I talked some to Kelvin and Vicki. Maggie was somewhat on her own, but she carves a fascinating personality; she's from Hong Kong and has been travelling around the world for the past three years. I love her notebook.
This is the lovely counter on the table. It was fun to click each time a new visitor came in. I love silver and black things. Later in the shift, when it was raining and no one came, Vicki entertained herself by resetting and clicking it repeatedly. From 10 to 5 we had 150 visitors, which was 103 for my shift. :)
In the background are cacti. One little girl- Megan was her name, I think- asked us, "Why did the flower become a brush?" Of course, really, the brush became the flower.
1) Children (and their parents)
2) Couples (with nothing better to do)
3) Tourists (mostly Caucasian, but there was a Thai group and a man from Australia with an Oxfam bag who sailed for 6 days to Singapore and is sailing back tmw)
4) Curious young people
Thank goodness I had the mind to bring my Trigo III.
