Choose your food and art journey at Esplanade’s Studios season

SINGAPORE – The Esplanade’s new Studios season offers a buffet, both literally and metaphorically, where audiences can choose their level of participation in three food-focused productions. 

The annual season returns from July 18 to Sept 14. Early-bird tickets are now on sale. 

This is the final instalment of the Studios’ pilot trilogy of programmes centred on Land. The theme of Sustenance explains some of the food focus for 2025.

Senior producer Shireen Abdullah notes that in the past two years, the Studios seasons – Landings in 2023 and Fault Lines in 2024 – have opened up conversations about the complexities of land and its meanings.

“The seasons proposed ways to rediscover, to contextualise and also to reclaim some of the narratives connected to land, some of which were unseen, undocumented or generally ignored.

“In the final instalment, we look upon land as providing sustenance for the body, mind and spirit. We’re also hoping to critically imagine paths to a more gentle and sustainable future that emotionally resonates with us.” 

Hence South Korean artist Jaha Koo’s Haribo Kimchi, in which he sets up a pojangmacha, a traditional night street food stall which can accommodate two lucky audience members up close; American theatremaker Geoff Sobelle’s Food, where audiences can choose to be part of a more intimate 30-member dinner table party or sit back to observe the goings-on; and local group The Theatre Practice’s (TTP) Pickle Party, a hands-on session where audiences will learn to make, and taste, pickles.

Koo and Sobelle will be familiar to arts audiences. Koo brought two shows to 2024’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa), while Sobelle is staging one of his older productions, Home, for Sifa in May. Both Haribo Kimchi and Food are new works. 

TTP has been conducting Pickle Parties at its home in Waterloo Street as an evolution of its food rescue programme, which started in 2017. This production is “multi-species” and “an acknowledgement of the microbes that are playing a part in the cooking process that’s happening on stage”, says Ms Shireen. 

More conventional theatre pieces are also on offer. The season kicks off on July 18 with Singaporean Ellison Tan directing Australian playwright David Finnigan’s Scenes From The Climate Era.

This quirky piece looks at climate change through scenes including a couple discussing the ethics of having children and the last surviving frog of a species calling futilely for a mate.

Tan and Finnigan have collaborated to localise the scenes and dialogue. Actress Claire Teo has also contributed to this Creative Access production that features embedded narration – descriptive lines blended into the dialogue – which allows for more inclusive appreciation of the piece. 

Checkpoint Theatre’s Escape To Batam, co-written by the home-grown group’s founders Claire Wong and Huzir Sulaiman, will be staged aptly enough in August after National Day. The story is inspired by Wong’s father Ming, who fled to Batam to escape the Japanese Occupation. 

In keeping with the Studios’ directive to explore, the ancillary programmes in 2025 will extend the thematic inquiries with linked workshops and excursions. 

Ms Shireen says of the multi-year arc: “There have been a lot of learning points and very encouraging feedback from artists and people who have attended the seasons. We will be looking at doing a three-year thematic exploration again.

“For now, we’re working at what this could possibly be, as well as who are the artists. We’re also trying to refine the approach to make it more interesting or more progressive from year to year.”

Book it/The Studios 

Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive
When: July 18 to Sept 14, various timings
Admission: From $40 
Info:

www.esplanade.com/thestudios