Ong Keng Sen directs Jacintha and Dick Lee at Sifa 2026; plus Jeremy Tiang’s Obie Award-winning play

SINGAPORE – Cultural icons Jacintha Abisheganaden and Dick Lee sharing a stage in a biographical performance. A meta-drama harking back to landmark stagings of an Arthur Miller play 40 years ago. The return of the festival village of the 2000s, complete with pre-show makan and post-show chatter.

Expect a serious throwback at theatremaker Chong Tze Chien’s first outing as festival director of 2026’s Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa), happening from May 15 to 30.

Billed with an overarching story arc of Let’s Play spanning his three-year tenure, the latest edition of Sifa kicks off with the theme of Legacy and features 12 festival commissions.

Tickets go on sale at sifa.sg from March 12, 4pm. Early-bird savings of 20 per cent are available from March 12 to April 13, and audiences can use their SG Culture Pass for five events.

Running the festival village at Empress Lawn, Chong says, is like running a second festival – all in the hopes that it will create the “festival vibe” he remembers fondly as a young theatremaker. Ninety per cent of festival village activities – which include late-night programming from 9.30pm curated by Hothouse and performances by The Theatre Practice – are free.

It is not just a festival for night owls – early risers can make the sunrise sojourn to the festival village at 6.30am on May 28, 29 and 30 to catch The Observatory’s two-hour site-specific sound installation and performance Rupture, which draws from the sounds and histories of volcanoes.

“I want to create a culture of going to a festival to not just watch one show or do one particular thing, but also to feel like you can actually do three, four or five things,” says Chong at a media preview on March 6. Sifa is organised by the Arts House Group and commissioned by the National Arts Council.

Highlights of the main festival stage include Lush Life, a documentary performance that will see veteran singer Abisheganaden, 68, get vulnerable and tell her life story beside her long-time collaborator and former husband Lee, 69.

It plays on May 29 and 30 at Victoria Theatre and features 15 songs, including jazz numbers she recorded in Hollywood and tunes written by Lee that have not been heard.

It is directed by T:>Works’ artistic director Ong Keng Sen, whom Abisheganaden has known for over four decades and is the artiste she has entrusted to interview her for this verbatim work.

Abisheganaden, referencing her storied career and three marriages, says: “It’s surprising what came out of my mouth verbatim.”

New York-based Singaporean playwright and translator Jeremy Tiang’s Obie Award-winning play Salesman之死 will receive a brand-new staging directed by Danny Yeo. The Chinese-English title references American playwright Arthur Miller’s classic Death Of A Salesman and a post-Cultural Revolution moment in 1983 when Miller went to Beijing to direct a Mandarin production of the play.

It plays on May 15 and 16 at Victoria Theatre, a venue which Yeo says is significant as it was where the late theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun also staged Miller’s play in 1986. Tiang has written new scenes that will reflect this Singapore connection.

Dance lovers will want to catch Strangely Familiar – directed and choreographed by T.H.E Dance Company’s founding artistic director Kuik Swee Boon – a performance co-commissioned with Hong Kong’s Asia+ Festival. It plays three shows at Victoria Theatre from May 22 to 24.

In Last Rites, relish a rare opportunity to see five veteran performance artistes from across Asia on stage. Averaging 74 in age, they have been invited by director Liu Xiaoyi to envision and stage their final performance. The artistes are Singaporean actor Yang Shi Bin, South Korean actors Jung Dong-hwan and Nam Geung-ho, Japanese Noh master Kanji Shimizu and Indonesian dancer Didik Nini. It plays three shows on May 22 and 23.

Highlights of international productions include the National Theatre Company of Korea’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler from May 28 to 30, with veteran actress Lee Hye-young playing the titular Hedda – often nicknamed the “female Hamlet”.

Then, from May 21 to 23, catch Shakespeare’s Hamlet by Peruvian theatre company Teatro La Plaza, reimagined by a cast of professional actors with Down syndrome. It is a work that Chong says is “shifting paradigms internationally”.

The fashion-inclined will want to catch the three-hour multilingual epic work Lacrima, which begins with the making of a royal wedding dress in a Parisian haute couture fashion house and fans out into a world of global labour. The work by French theatremaker Caroline Guiela Nguyen has toured internationally since 2024 and plays three shows from May 15 to 17.

After the success of former Sifa director Natalie Hennedige’s Sifa Pavilion at Bedok Town Square in 2025, Chong is now moving the neighbourhood arm of the festival to Nexus at Punggol Digital District, harking back to the 1990s and 2000s when the festival fringe toured neighbourhoods.

On the second and third weekends of Sifa, expect a soaring aerial performance, Noli Timere, which features a voluminous net sculpture almost 8m high in the air, and a festival parade, A Light Between Rains.

Chong acknowledges that, compared with its founding decades, the festival is now crowded out by a packed arts calendar and has to establish its unique edge.

Embracing the buzz of a festival and with multiple strands of programming that make this one of the more sprawling editions in recent memory, he hopes audiences will hang out, be spontaneous and meet people.

Chong – who sees his three-year tenure as a three-act play – calls this the first chapter in an “anniversary arc” that will see Sifa turn 50 in 2027. The 2027 edition is sub-themed Roots, which will culminate – in 2028 – in the bold theme of Renaissance.

Book It/Singapore International Festival of Arts 2026

Where: Various venues
When: May 15 to 30, various timings
Admission: Ticketed events range from $20 to $88; free admission for others
Info: For a full list of programmes, go to sifa.sg