When world famous director Ong Keng Sen changed the name of the annual international festival of arts from Singapore Arts Festival (Saf) to Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa), he presented the National Arts Council with his three-year plan for a trilogy of general themes. “Legacies” in 2014 investigated the past while “Post-Empires”, which coincided with the country’s 50th anniversary last year, looked at the present. Now Sifa is looking to the future with “Potentialities”.

“The overall perspective is to attempt a more optimistic look at the world,” says the festival director in our phone interview.

“As an adult, my life has been filled with 9-11, terrorism, migration issues, and so on – the world is dark. So this edition aims to unearth the potential in this less innocent and very grim time of our life. At the present, many things look negative, but I’m wondering what seeds are growing and what can create civic transformation.”

Ong cites as an example Xinjiang-born rocker Perhat Khaliq and his band Qetiq, who showcased their contemporary interpretation of traditional Uighur and Kazakh music last weekend as part of The O.P.E.N. (Open, Participate, Engage, Negotiate), a pre-festival of ideas.

“I don’t see him as a government ‘hat’ in China’s fight against terrorism. His entry in [reality TV show] ‘Voice of China’ bridged millions of diasporas all over the world. He’s not someone to be stereotyped but someone with a specific identity because of his history and content. At the same time, he’s a role model for young people with his music composition and lyric writing. We’re living in a culture of fear, which is creating more and more borders, surveillance and anti-terrorism measures. I’d like us to live in a culture of openness so that we can see that these people are more than stereotypes. We follow the artists, rather than the immediate works that they’re doing,” Ong say.

“The pre-festival has increasingly become an interdisciplinary space. We’re not limited to just performing arts, but instead we’re following the artists’ different modes of communication.”

This Thursday’s fashion show proves Ong’s point. “Dances and Ceremonies: Spring/Summer 2017” is a fashion show by fashion designer and cultural historian Carla Fernandez who puts together the craft and ideas of 11 different indigenous and Mestizo tribes around Mexico and incorporates five carved totem sculptures and dancers, not just models, with choreographed movements.

“By patenting and copyrighting these weaves, she brings her perspective to the stage but not in an NGO kind of way. It’s almost like ‘fashion with ethics’,” Ong says.

On the following days, Fernandez will also give a talk and conduct design and tailoring workshops, as Ong again stresses, “We’re following the artists, rather than the immediate work that they’re doing.”

The pre-event is also screening award-winning films from around the world. Last Saturday, audiences flocked to watch Miguel Gomes’s three-part epic “Arabian Nights” at Singapore’s arthouse cinema The Projector. The closing film at the newly restored historic cinema Capitol Theatre, Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea”, winner of the Golden Bear award at the recent Berlin International Film Festival, will definitely sell out.

Another highlight is “Models Never Talk”, a unique performance designed by Olivier Saillard, director of the Palais Galliera, Fashion Museum of the City of Paris in which professional models recount memories of the structure of clothing for which their bare flesh served.

Sifa itself will open on August 11 with seminal Canadian director Robert Lepage’s “Hamlet I Collage”, featuring veteran Russian actor Evgeny Mironov. Other Sifa highlights include Egyptian playwright and director Ahmed El Attar’s “The Last Supper”, a hit at Festival d’Avignon, and the new music-theatre work “Paradise Interrupted”, a Chinese composer’s adaptation of “The Peony Pavillion” directed and designed by visual artist Jennifer Wen Ma with vocalist Qian Yi and Singapore’s own T’ang Quartet.

Audiences are also looking forward to the Asian premiere of “In the Mood for Frankie”, in which choreographer Trajal Harrell links butoh and Harlem voguing, and “The Return of La Argentina”, in which Harrell reinterprets butoh pioneer Kazuo Ohno’s “Admiring La Argentina” whose director, and another butoh pioneer, Tatsumi Hijikata was inspired by Antonia Merce. Another American dance legend is also returning to Singapore, Bill T Jones, and he will perform his latest work, the lecture-performance “Making and Doing” and also work with Lasalle College of the Arts dance students in “A Letter/Singapore.”

Sifa will also present the largest ever retrospective of highly revered Indonesian dance master Sardono W. Kusumo, featuring not only his dance works but also his paintings and films.

Ong too has staged a work at every edition of Sifa and this year is no exception. We can really look forward to “Sandaime Richard”, his collaboration with internationally acclaimed Japanese playwright and director Hideki Noda, whose “Akaoni” two decades ago brought together Thai theatre artists and led to the foundation of Bangkok Theatre Network. As the title suggests, the new play was inspired by Shakespeare’s “Richard III”.

“I’m trying to marry my signature style of working with traditional artists from different perspectives and his style of breaking down social norms which for me makes his plays more than just comedies,” Ong explains.

“We’re putting Shakespeare on trial – and the prosecutor is Maachan of Venice, or Shylock -and questioning whether he depicted history accurately and whether he sensationally created his cripple. In the end, we’re asking what the positions of creative writers are, leading us to rethink how history has been written, like the founding fathers or images of Japan during World War II.”

To further prove this is not just another Shakespeare 400 celebration, Ong has cast famous kabuki onnagata (female impersonator) Kazutaro Nakamura in the title role, one of the world’s most famous villain characters.

In preparation for next year’s The O.P.E.N. and Sifa, his last under the current contract, last month Ong flew in to Bangkok and met with contemporary theatre artists and producers from B-Floor, Democrazy Studio, Thong Lor Art Space as well as Nophand Boonyai and Wichaya Artamat. Although this is not confirmed, he says, “it’s clear that I cannot present just one work,” and mentions “a Bangkok weekend without traffic”.

And so we can assume that our AEC neighbour will get to watch what we’re watching here, and not what our Ministry of Culture thinks they should watch.

In the meantime, we can fly to Singapore to enjoy many new works from various arts genres as we reflect on “Potentialities”.

The writer wishes to thank Eileen Chua, Jacqueline Cai and Mervyn Quek for all assistance.

FOR EYES, EARS AND MINDS

-“The O.P.E.N.” runs until July 9, and Singapore International Festival of Arts 2016 is from August 11 to September 17 at various venues in the island state.

– Single entry for an “O.P.E.N.” is SGD 10, and admission for Sifa events range from free to SGD 80 (20-per-cent discount for students and seniors).

– For reservation and more details, visit http://www.SIFA.sg.