M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2025 grapples with displacement

SINGAPORE – The shows presented at M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2025 are united by a sense of displacement, an unexpectedly prescient theme for an experimental platform

now facing an uncertain future

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Running from Jan 8 to 19, the slate of seven theatre shows runs the gamut of topics of violence and unease. Tickets from $38 go on sale from Nov 5.

From war and migration to climate change and the mental health of freelancers, all the offerings coalesce around “a sense of compelled movement that is not due to factors of one’s own doing”, said Ms Melissa Lim, general manager of organiser The Necessary Stage (TNS).

The reveal of January’s line-up comes as TNS begins looking for a new title donor and crowd-funding $50,000 for its 21-year-old festival, after telco M1’s decision to end its $100,000 annual sponsorship.

The festival is one of the few ports in Singapore for productions tackling topics outside the mainstream, and costs $230,000 to put on each year.

Four of the shows curated for 2025 are home-grown works, while a trilogy of monologues is being imported from Australia, India and South Africa.

Among the Singapore offerings is The Troupe by Fringe 2023 alumnus migrant worker company Birds Migrant Theatre. The multilingual production in English – with some Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali and Burmese – sees actors put on skits of refugees, students, farmers and aid workers affected by the global migration crisis.

Its two playwrights, A.K. Zilani and Deni Apriyani, are migrant workers of Bangladeshi and Indonesian descent. Both their communities have been affected by the Rohingya crisis, which has seen more than a million of the persecuted Muslim people fleeing Myanmar into nearby territories.

Ms Lim said: “Their experience allows them to ask, ‘What is the moral imperative? Is it to save lives or to maintain social integrity? What is the cost of compassion?’”

By TNS is Eclipse, a fresh staging of a script by Singapore playwright Haresh Sharma. First staged in a truncated form in 2007 in Scotland, the play is performed by award-winning actor Shrey Bhargava and Hindustani classical vocalist Sveta Kilpady and follows a young Singaporean man’s journey to his father’s birthplace in Hyderabad, Pakistan, with his ashes.

Dancing With The Ghost Of My Child explores healing through choreography, and is devised by students from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts with former The Substation artistic director Noor Effendy Ibrahim and movement artist Ruby Jayaseelan.

Finally, the absurdist I Am Seaweed by young theatremakers Cheryl Ho and Rachel Lee takes a stab at emotional resilience and hustle culture.

Though it debuted at Melbourne Fringe Festival 2023, Ms Lim promises Singapore audiences a more multimedia experience. The show integrates live audience feedback and, in a first for the festival, deaf interpretation.

As for the imported plays, three actors will put on works inspired by social issues deeply personal to their respective communities.

Australian actress Jane Phegan reaches for stories personal, literary and scientific to imagine a dystopian world without winter in The End Of Winter, created amid Australia’s raging bush fires.

South African actor Tony Bonani Miyambo was last seen as a grunting and snuffling ape in 2023’s racism play Kafka’s Ape. He returns as a government official archiving documents from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up to heal the fissures wrought by apartheid.

This will be Commission Continua’s first time playing to a live audience after the performance commissioned by South Africa’s national arts council was relegated to live-streaming during Covid-19.

Finally, Bangalore-based playwright and performer Nisha Abdulla’s WePushTheSky weaves food, song, myth and history in an urgent elegy of contemporary India.

The interactive solo show draws from real-life events such as the unexplained disappearance of those who have voiced their opinions, and asks how friendships can be lost, gained or maintained in an era marked by the politics of hate.

Donors who wish to contribute towards the Fringe Festival Fund can do so at donate.necessary.org or giving.sg/thenecessarystage

Tickets are available at m1sff.bigtix.io/en

Book It/M1 Singapore Fringe Festival

Where: Esplanade Theatre Studio, 1 Esplanade Drive; Nafa Studio Theatre, 151 Bencoolen Street; Practice Space, 54 Waterloo Street
When: Jan 8 to 19, various times
Admission: $16 for The Troupe, $38 for the other productions. Go to m1sff.bigtix.io/en
Info: 2025.singaporefringe.com