For a whole month from 2 September to 2 October 2022, the Singapore Management University (SMU) Arts Festival entertained over 3,800 audiences via featured art forms which included music, dance, theatre, and visual arts from six productions.

Themed LOST & FOUND, the annual festival marked the return to live performances, a platform which was once lost due to the pandemic and is now found again as life is retuning back to normal. The theme was also a provocative call to reflect on what we may have lost and inevitably gained as a community or as individuals, and perhaps, what we needed to give up to move forward in these times.

This edition of the Festival revived, rediscovered, and restaged lesser-known stories, vanishing traditions, and trailblazing trends which were once the talk of town into relevant works of art that we hope would live on in the hearts, minds and conversations of audiences.

Featuring close to 300 student talents from 15 Co-curricular arts clubs and mentors from the industry’s best, all six productions looked at Lost & Found from different perspectives. re:site (literary and choral arts), re:play (music) and re:turn (dance) ruminated on displaced landmarks, disappearing artforms, and forgotten tunes of the collective consciousness. On the other end, re:collect (visual arts), re:frame (media arts) and re:act (theatre) examined the hopes and dreams of individuals, taking to heart that what is lost can always be found.

This year, we were honoured to have SMU President, Professor Lily Kong contribute an original poem titled Remembered Places, specially written and recorded for the Festival. The poem was presented at re:site, as the foundation of the students’ creative responses. re:site was also SMU’s first site-specific experimental choral presentation, on the memories of lost spaces such as the old Stamford Road Library.

There was also a sustainability-themed visual arts exhibition of 20 creative works at re:collect, including some by guest artists from Pathlight School, as well as a media arts project documenting life-changing stories at re:frame.

Festival director, Seah Wee Thye, who heads the Office of Student Life’s Arts and Creative Experience team shared that the team had deliberately scheduled one performance on every weekend of September to bring people back to physical venues in SMU and our precinct. “Programming it this way also allowed our student performers in the SMU Arts and Cultural Fraternity to attend and learn from one another’s productions.”

“We also continue to position SMU Arts Festival as a commercially accessible and attractive event in the calendar of Bras Basah.Bugis Precinct. And we persist with providing a meaningful platform for student artists to be mentored by our industry’s best, and experiment with inter-disciplinary collaboration and integration. On behalf of SMU, I would like to express our deepest gratitude to all our creative directors, music directors, choreographers, coaches and the students for the months of searching and creating,” added Wee Thye.

A festival survey revealed that the month-long festival gained an audience satisfaction score of 97% (up from 93% last year) and 73% of audiences were attending the festival for the first time (up from 56% last year)! The Festival also saw 17 sold out live performances, a great achievement for the team indeed.

Congratulations, once again for a successful run of the SMU Arts Festival and we look forward to next year’s edition. In the meantime, you can relive the experience through these videos.