M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2020 - call for proposals

M1 SINGAPORE FRINGE 2020 will be organised on the theme: MY COUNTRY AND MY PEOPLE, taking the iconic poem by Anne Lee Tzu Pheng with this title as the inspiration.

What truly unites a people or a country? What is the cost and the process of this unification? How much of it is embedded in shared trial and tragedy?

Anne Lee Tzu Pheng’s iconic poem, “My Country and My People” (1976) invites us to consider the costs and cruelties of imperialism and colonisation, the compromises of national development and the sacrifices of economic ambition.

Singapore Fringe Festival invites you to consider Anne Lee Tzu Pheng’s iconic poem, and respond to the call for proposals for Fringe 2020: My Country and My People. We look forward to your responses to our call and to see the shaping up of a dynamic international programme that speaks sensitively, boldly and imaginatively to our times.

Deadline: Friday 1 March 2019, noon Singapore time.

The poem featured in her first collection of poetry, Prospect of a Drowning (1980) and was banned from performance on radio, with no official explanation given. More than four decades on, the themes in the poem continue to resonate in our world today—perhaps even more urgently than before.

How are artists engaging with a planet that has often occupied itself with national identities and borders, but is finding that there are millions who have neither home nor security? More people than ever experience forced displacement. Even for many who are not suffering the plight of a refugee, they are struggling with loneliness and disembodiment as they no longer recognise the world around them.

In an era of Trump, Brexit, and other manifestations of social and political fissures, how are connection, security and solidarity found and protected in times of such upheaval, turmoil and erasure?

My Country and My People.
8-19 January 2020.
Get involved.

Find out more about the curatorial brief, application process and download the application form here.

To access a copy of “My Country and My People”, please view page three of this PDF Some Views of Singapore: An Instant Sing-Lit Reader.