Arts Picks: Performances from Singapore Ballet and T.H.E. Dance Company, artist Chen Cheng Mei on show
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Christina Chan's Meeting Point.
PHOTO: SINGAPORE BALLET
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Passages Contemporary Season
Singapore Ballet’s (SB) annual showcase of contemporary works for 2025 boasts three international premieres from Australians Natalie Weir, Tim Harbour and Alice Topp.
Terra, Weir’s sixth work created for SB, is inspired by the film music composed by Hans Zimmer, including excerpts from Gladiator (2000).
Harbour’s The Bistro is a narrative piece set in a restaurant over the course of an evening as a married woman’s life changes.
Australian composer Graeme Koehne’s work provides the soundtrack of Topp’s Persistence Of Memories, a meditation on identity and memory.
Singaporean Christina Chan, who choreographed the opening show for 2025’s Singapore International Festival of Arts, is restaging the seventh piece she made for the company. Meeting Point will be reimagined with live piano accompaniment and for a theatre setting.
This programme is supported by the Australian High Commission as part of its celebrations marking 60 years of bilateral ties between Australia and Singapore.
Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive singaporeballet.org
MRT: Esplanade
When: Oct 31, 8pm; Nov 1, 2 and 8pm; Nov 2, 2 and 7pm
Admission: From $48
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liTHE 2025
Hawla by Klievert Jon Mendoza.
PHOTO: CRISPIAN CHAN
The Human Expression (T.H.E) Dance Company’s platform for emerging choreographers and young dancers returns on Nov 7 and 8. For the first time, liTHE will present offerings from all three branches of the company – the 10-month Training Initiative for aspiring dancers, the Second Company and the main company.
The centrepiece is a triple bill with two new works created by T.H.E’s full-time dance artists Billy Keohavong and Klievert Jon Mendoza in collaboration with dancers and apprentices from T.H.E’s Second Company. Keohavong’s Misfits draws from the dancers’ experiences and improvisations to explore difference, while Mendoza’s Hawla (Tagalog for cage) uses group dynamics to explore ideas of constraint and liberation.
Un-form by Kuik Swee Boon and T.H.E Dance Company at The Coronet Theatre.
PHOTO: MAYUMI HIRATA
Rounding out the programme is T.H.E’s restaging of Un-form, choreographed by founding artistic director Kuik Swee Boon.
Members of the Training Initiative will present excerpts and share their experiences as a curtain-raiser for the programme, so audiences will get to see how T.H.E supports dancers and choreographers through its platforms.
Where: Auditorium, Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre, 1 Straits Boulevard the-dancecompany.com
MRT: Shenton Way
When: Nov 7 and 8, 7pm
Admission: $40, eligible for Culture Pass credits
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As She Paints: In Memory Of Chen Cheng Mei
Untitled by Chen Cheng Mei is one of about 80 works on show.
PHOTO: MOCA@SINGAPORE
Chen Cheng Mei is best known as the woman behind the Ten Men Art Group, a loose collective of artists working in the 1960s. About 80 of her works – gathered together from private collections – are on show, some for the first time. This wide-ranging display spans the long practice of the artist who died aged 93 in 2020.
Often overlooked in favour of her male peers, thanks partly to her own reticence, Chen worked with a wide range of media and her works reflect the influence of both the Nanyang School of painters and Western art movements. She majored in Western art at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, where she was mentored by the Nanyang pioneers.
Toh Tuck Road by Chen Cheng Mei is inspired by the artist’s childhood home.
PHOTO: MOCA@SINGAPORE
The influence of Singapore artist Cheong Soo Pieng can be seen in her experiments in thickly textured works that layer on different media for effects. The stark lines and flattened colour planes of Plum Forest recall the landscapes of French painter Paul Cezanne just as the composition of grain stacks in Guangxi and the misty view of Sukhothai nod at French artist Claude Monet’s famous series.
The juxtaposition of so many of her works, inspired by her globetrotting, also harks back to a distinct 1960s sensibility. It was a period when Singapore artists looked to South-east Asia and other post-colonial societies for inspiration. And that sense of freedom and fresh camaraderie with other newly independent nations can be seen in her curiosity and engagement with the landscapes and peoples of other countries.
Her faux-naif style may not appeal to everyone, but she is representative of a distinct time period in Singapore’s art history.
Where: Museum Of Contemporary Art, 39 Keppel Road mocasingapore.com
MRT: Tanjong Pagar/Harbourfront
When: Till Dec 7, 10am to 7pm daily
Admission: $5 for Singaporeans, $8 for foreigners, free for seniors aged 65 and above, youth under 12, teachers and students
Info:
