The SMU Arts Fest 2024 kicked off with an exuberant display of creativity and collaboration, embodying the spirit of "PLAY." This year's festival, which runs from August 30th to September 13th, promises a dynamic array of performances and activities, offering something for everyone.
Students from the Singapore Management University (SMU) in collaboration with participants from Republic Polytechnic and Ngee Ann Polytechnic, have put much effort into making this event a reality, showcasing their talents as performers, skilled organisers and marketers.
Bakchormeeboy online interviewed Festival Director Seah Wee Thye and members of his team. The article published 5 September 2024, is enclosed below:
An Interview with SMU Arts Fest 2024 Festival Directors and producers on student development and the power of collaboration
While most students in Singapore are better known as hardcore bookworms constantly preparing for exams to hit their elusive 4.0 GPA, students at Singapore Management University (SMU) are able to do all that and more. Being management students specifically, there’s that careful balance of work and play, the latter of which takes centrestage at this year’s SMU Arts Fest, aptly dealing with the theme of, well, PLAY.
Taking place over three weeks on and off campus, in the heart of the city around the Bras Basah.Bugis precinct, SMU Arts Fest 2024 presents a series of performances and activities during this year’s programme, from immersive theatre acts, to concerts featuring your favourite film music, to simply having a great night out watching student performances on the SMU Campus Green, alongside tasty food and drink. All of this is made possible thanks to the 470-odd students taking part in this year’s programme, as performers and organisers, and the mentors leading them.
“This year’s SMU Arts Fest takes place in the second week of the semester, after they take about a week to get used to their classrooms, catching up with schoolmates and finding their way around,” says Weetz Seah, SMU Arts Fest Festival Director and Head, Arts and Creative Experience. “This also marks our second year collaborating with the Singapore Night Festival (SNF) programming on the SMU Green, providing F&B services, introducing visual and performing arts, all to create a complete experience, not just for audiences but also to give students a platform to perform for and organise events for the public.”
For the students, SMU Arts Fest isn’t just a space to show off their artistic chops, but also a chance to build up their portfolio and gain valuable experience in fields such as marketing, production and event organisation as a whole. “SMU has always positioned itself as a holistic education provider, and so, we’re introducing the idea of parallel transcripts, which reflect the out-of-classroom, real-world activities and experiences that students get involved in,” says Weetz. “Students develop skills in communication, problem-solving, teamwork, and personal mastery, and because of their public nature, there’s no room for mistakes. By the time they graduate, they leave SMU with two transcripts: one academic and one that reflects this exposure, and we’re the first university to do this. And with the SMU Arts Fest, it’s always exciting to see how each batch of students do it their own way, even if we do have to train and guide each batch from scratch.”
The collaboration with SNF wasn’t a decision made on a whim either – beyond the two festival taking place during the same period, SMU positioned itself as the experts on the youth audience, becoming the youth hub of the SNF. “The National Heritage Board (NHB) is still overall in charge of the SNF, but on our end, we come in as people who deal with students 365 days a year, and an opportunity to help NHB plug that gap and connect with the youths better during the festival,” says Japheth Ng, SMU Arts Fest Co-Festival Director. “It makes sense to collaborate and pool our resources, and continue building this partnership from how we started last year.”
“We did a lot of the leg work last year, with plenty of teething problems and an uphill climb because it was the first time we collaborated on such a scale, and we were aiming to create a template for success for future editions, by setting an example,” adds Weetz. “We proved we knew what we were doing, and NHB gave us more funding this year and more leeway to organise things, like how we took ownership of the festival village on the Campus Green. And in the future, we’re being even more ambitious, and plan to get all seven universities in Singapore involved and working together.”
If anything, SMU’s big plans all have strong foundations behind them, all rooted in the idea of efficiency and effectiveness at proving the capability of their students and the legacy of their institution. “Already, students do their own producing for their own societies and extra-curricular activities, but it’s only at big festivals like these do they get this level of involvement,” says Weetz. “Students need to be responsible and our students, in particular, must learn how to manage. We set a standard – productions must sell 80% of tickets, and if they can prove their worth at handling such events, they will continue to receive funding. So of course when an opportunity like SNF and SMU Arts Fest comes around, we need to leverage on it even more to prove we’re experts in this field.”
“SMU has very strong resources in its students, who are always willing to take on the challenge,” says Aderyl Tan, producer of visual art installation FREE PLAY, and manager. “We come up with strategies, narratives, and marketing approaches, and we leverage all connections to market even the Campus Green better. The result is a more cohesive effort. We cross-market, create content for SNF, and manage healthy sign-ups, while heavily involving our students from all these different backgrounds and activating them across the festival in one big campus effort.”
Of course beyond management, plenty of students are involved in the actual performances on campus as well, from SMU’s Samba Masala, who recently returned from performing in Coburg, Germany, to getting involved in theatre piece Dungeons & Distractions, led by professional theatremakers Jo Tan and Edward Choy. “You have students who are so into Dungeons & Dragons, they even wrote an entire thesis on it, or you have students who aren’t usually actors, but successfully get a role and expand their horizons, adding their own unique skills to it,” says Japheth. “And then you have the collaborations with the other institutions as well, like Republic Polytechnic and Ngee Ann Polytechnic – all these opportunities are so that students can collaborate with each other and learn from each other, a unit of individuals coming together to form a cohesive whole.”
And as SMU approaches its 25th anniversary next year, one thing’s for sure, the team is ready to continue leading the students and ensuring that they get the development and experience they need to go on to do even greater things when they graduate. The managerial team’s role then, is to create fertile ground to let these seeds bloom. “The core mission has always been student and community development, and we hope to maintain that standard in both areas,” says Japheth. “As we slowly move to explore new grounds, we do want to continue finding more opportunities to collaborate, assuming they want to with us, and more fully integrate the industry into our education. If anything, little things like seeing students become aware of the SMU Arts Fest X SNF branding are proof that we’re coming into our own and really making a name in the local scene.”
“When I took over as Festival Director, I said that SMU Arts Fest cannot look like a school event. It must look like a commercial event – in all aspects: production, performance, management, branding etc. That’s why we paid attention to everything from brand marketing and activating the space, to even studying traffic flow to create the right vibes,” says Weetz. “We’re focused on community building—not necessarily creating the best performers but the best managers. Not many will choose to enter the arts industry, but many will become very good audiences who understand the work involved. We’re building an audience; we’re not a performing arts school. Then, those that enter law and banking will reinvest back into the arts. It’s not just about book smarts; it’s about developing interpersonal skills that employers want. That is our mandate as an institute of higher learning.”
SMU Arts Fest 2024: PLAY runs from 30th August to 13th September 2024. Tickets and full programme available here