In Singapore's Cultural Oasis, East Does Meet West

by William Littler / thestar.com (July 12, 2008)

SINGAPORE—A visitor soon realizes that no place symbolizes the coming together of geographically distant cultures better than Singapore.

Situated at the tip of the Malay Peninsula, the city state, less than 600 square kilometres in area, was a regional nexus of trade long before Sir Stamford Raffles set up shop on behalf of the British East India Company in 1819.

It was nonetheless Raffles who not only gave his name posthumously to what became one of the best-known hotels in Asia but gave voice as well to the dream of a multiracial society working in harmony to establish a great crossroads of commerce.

Today's highrise Singapore represents the fulfilment of that dream and the effective refutation of Rudyard Kipling's poetic assertion that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, till earth and sky stand presently at God's great judgment seat."

East and West meet constantly in Singapore, where Asian cultures dominate while English remains the official language of business and Great Britain the primary model for law and government.

So what better place to mount a cross-cultural festival bringing together art and artists from around the globe, including Canada?

For the past three decades the Singapore Arts Festival has been a flagship event of the National Arts Council and as a recently published history of the event declares, "has served to transform Singapore from a 'cultural desert' to an oasis of creativity."

Part way through that journey of transformation, when Gunther Herbig led the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on its Pacific Rim tour in 1990, the orchestra had to perform in a multi-purpose facility of dubious distinction. Were the orchestra to return today, it would probably find itself accommodated in one of the finest concert halls in Asia, part of an architecturally distinctive waterside complex known as Esplanade: Theatres on the Bay.

Russell Johnson, the head of Artec Consultants Inc. of New York until his death last August, presided over the acoustical design of this complex, as he did the acoustical renovation of Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall, and it was a pleasure to return to Singapore, six years after witnessing the Esplanade's grand opening, and experience how fully the city has incorporated the 2,000-seat theatre-opera house, 1,600-seat concert hall and 245- and 220-seat recital and drama studios into its daily life.

During the recent festival I watched an extraordinary Australian one-man band perform free in the concourse fronting the Esplanade's main entrance before I entered the theatre to attend The Architecture of Silence, a choreographed setting by Edward Clug of music from Mozart's Requiem and Zbigniew Preisner's Requiem for my Friend, performed by the Slovene National Theatres' operas and ballets of Maribor and Ljubljana and the Singapore Arts Festival Orchestra.

Had I arrived a week later, I could have watched La La La Human Steps from Montreal perform Edouard Lock's Amjad, a deconstruction and reconstruction of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty or, by arriving a week later still, I could have heard the London Sinfonietta perform concerts of 20th-century music by the likes of Steve Reich, Toru Takemitsu and Gyorgyi Ligeti.

Like Toronto's Luminato Festival, the Singapore Arts Festival celebrates cosmopolitanism as the way of the future. It is nothing less than a fact of life in both places and is fast becoming one in much of the rest of the world.

As the premier festival in Asia, Singapore's annual month-long culture binge also acts as a showcase for Singapore to the world and the world to Singapore, demonstrating that on a planet in which interconnectedness has become an inevitability, the arts can show us how to get along with each other.

In a promotional video presented by the National Arts Council, the cutting-edge Canadian director Robert Lepage describes Singapore as "one of the great crossroads internationally." Stamford Raffles could hardly have put it any better.