The Esplanade's Huayi – Chinese Festival of Arts takes on some heavy topics, with plays on dystopia and dementia among the offerings.
The 18th edition of the annual festival, which celebrates Chinese New Year, runs next year from Jan 31 to Feb 9. Tickets go on sale on Thursday.
Headline commissions include Seven Sages Of The Bamboo Grove by home-grown theatre company Toy Factory Productions, which celebrates its 30th anniversary next year.
It moves the seven sages, a group of scholars and artists from the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history, to a futuristic surveillance state in which all humanity is controlled through technology and artistic endeavours are forbidden.
Actress Sharon Au, who has been working in France, returns to Singapore for this show, which is directed by Goh Boon Teck and also stars Nelson Chia, Tang Shao Wei and Loh Jun Hong.
Taiwanese company Story Works presents The Long Goodbye, in which an author is diagnosed with dementia and can remember only the events of his best-selling book about being a father to his youngest son, who is now an adult learning to care for his father.
In Hong Kong Repertory Theatre's play Principle, a campus crisis unfolds when a new, authoritarian principal takes charge of a school and clashes with the compassionate, long-serving vice-principal.
BOOK IT / HUAYI – CHINESE FESTIVAL OF ARTS 2020
WHERE: Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, 1 Esplanade Drive
WHEN: Jan 31 to Feb 9, 2020
ADMISSION: Tickets go on sale on Thursday, various prices, from Sistic (call 6348-5555 or go to www.sistic.com.sg)
INFO: www.esplanade.com/huayi
Emerging Singapore theatre company GroundZ-0 challenges audiences to discern fact from fiction in Prism Of Truth, in which they take part as jury members confronted with testimonies of a bloody murder mystery.
Dance fans can look forward to Almost 55, an autobiographicRead More – Source
