Singapore International Festival of Arts 2025 offers record 15 S’pore commissions, a pavilion in Bedok

SINGAPORE – The annual Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa) returns with a record 15 commissioned local works, including an ambitious 50m by 30m pavilion at Bedok Town Square that will take cutting-edge performances to a heartland crowd.

From May 16 to June 1, people can look forward to performances in festival director Natalie Hennedige’s recognisably post-modern aesthetic, blending theatre, visual art, dance and music. They delve into heavy-hitting topics on the occasion of Singapore’s 60th birthday, such as the country’s maritime heritage and the 1965 separation from Malaysia.

In a festival that celebrates “doing it our way”, classics like George Orwell’s Animal Farm and William Shakespeare’s King Lear will be given fresh spins by Singapore artists. A gigantic sailboat will traverse Empress Lawn near Victoria Theatre, the site for Little Sifa designed for families and children.

Themed More Than Ever, Sifa 2025 is the culmination of

Hennedige’s four years in charge

of the tentpole performing arts festival organised by Arts House Limited.

She says: “Why do we need the arts more than ever? More than ever, worlds open. More than ever, we need to raise wise children. I wanted something that was both open and emphatic at the same time.”

The opening performance The Sea And The Neighbourhood is in Bedok at a new Sifa pavilion – the first such space in the event’s 48-year history.

A coral-inspired stage by visual artist Wang Ruobing, big enough to accommodate up to 30 ballet dancers and musicians, anchors this multidisciplinary work, which also enlists composer Philip Tan, choreographer Christina Chan and video artist Brian Gothong Tan.

This pavilion will host performances during Sifa weekends and double as a kinetic art installation on weekdays.

Hennedige says: “It was a personal choice to go for it. You get all these people walking through – an aunty selling chwee kueh, her son who works at Shenton Way. His child might be studying at the Singapore Chinese Girls’ School.

“They will all be met with these artistic vocabularies. What I want to say is: I believe in the arts and the vitality and powerful presence of artistic encounters.”

In similar inter-disciplinary vein are works like Umbilical, which uses movement, projections and artificial intelligence to immerse audiences in the trauma of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia in 1965. This is created by multi-hyphenated artists Zal Mahmod, thesupersystem and Rizman Putra.

A Thousand Stitches, another group collaboration, combines performance, painting and live cinema to tell the story of an art student restoring a vandalised portrait of a Japanese woman.

This re-imagination of Japanese-occupied Singapore during World War II is by artist-curator Alan Oei, writer-director Kaylene Tan, Singapore performer Xuan Ong and Japanese actress Mihaya Shirata.

Hennedige, whose programmes have been marked by a willingness to break artistic silos, says: “I’m not esoteric. I’m just trying to communicate in the only ways I know how. I’m interested in how we look at a work and decide what it is, and not say ‘This is dance. This is film. This is theatre.’”

There is no continuation of the successful guerilla programme Tomorrow And Tomorrow at Stamford Arts Centre in 2024, where more than 10 home-grown theatre companies put on works-in-progress at no fee.

Instead, two of the 2024 works have a more complete presentation: Drama Box’s interactive Hello, Is This Working? that reflects on the future of work; and Nine Years Theatre’s Waiting For Audience, inspired by clowning, absurdist humour and Chinese cross-talk.

Hennedige wanted to prove it was possible to get behind works-in-progress and stage them at an elevated platform like Sifa.

In her final year, she is taking the longer-term view and setting precedents. “I’m optimistic that the future of the festival will continue to care about process. I don’t think I’m that unique.”

Other highlights include The Finger Players’ puppet enactment of Animal Farm; Glasgow-based Singaporean artist Ramesh Meyyappan’s interpretation of King Lear from the perspective of a deaf artist; and documentary and television producer Remesh Panicker’s directorial effort Colony, featuring differently abled dancers from South-east Asia and Japan.

Stand-up artist Hossan Leong takes audience members on a journey through Singapore’s arts scene from the 1980s in Hossan-Ah! In The High Arts; while composer and playwright weish presents a new body of work drawing from an ancient text and Hakka dying songs, titled Stray Gods.

There are also four international works, including Vampyr, a mockumentary by Chilean playwright Manuela Infante following the lives of vampires.

The 15 local commissions for 2025 are three more than the previous record of 12 in 2015, the year of SG50.

Reflecting on her tenure, Hennedige says she has been “true to what I set out to do”.

Sifa’s identity has always been about challenging artistic boundaries. “We need to look at our arts landscape and all these things happening in relation to one another. If it’s not the space where you still try to push, then I’m not sure where else to.”

Early-bird tickets are on sale from March 11 to April 14. The full slate of programmes can be found at

sifa.sg