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INTRODUCTION

Festival Commission

DEVIL’S CHERRY

HOUSE PROGRAMME

By Kaylene Tan & Paul Rae
(Singapore/Australia)


3 – 5 Jun
Fri – Sun, 7.30pm
Pasir Panjang Power Station

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Message from ED

Message from the Executive Director

It seems almost obvious that in the face of the incredible uncertainty of this current moment– that reclaiming and reaffirming the rituals of our daily lives has become ever more important as a bulwark against the shifting sands of contemporary existence. The constancy, history and repetitiveness of social rituals seem almost a comfort and source of solace.
 
For many of us, the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) is an annual ritual we all look forward to. This year, celebrate a long-awaited return to whatever new normal awaits us, the SIFA team will deliver bold new artistic experiences for everyone to enjoy,  safely of course.

AHL as the festival organiser is proud to have with us Natalie Hennedige to helm SIFA as Festival Director from 2022 to 2024. As a recipient of the National Arts Council Young Artist Award in 2007 and the JCCI Singapore Foundation Culture Award in 2010, Natalie is known for presenting progressive, cross-disciplinary work exploring contemporary issues.

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Tan Boon Hui

MESSAGE FROM FD

MESSAGE FROM THE FESTIVAL DIRECTOR

SIFA 2022 reflects a dissolution of categories or labels; to invite, instead, and adopt artistically fluid collaborations and collaborators, gathering within individual creations a range of artistic disciplines, practices and perspectives. The festival invites practitioners of vivid cultural hues from different walks of life to embrace a blending of genres, artistic disciplines and internationality – in performances made by artists with strong and unique perspectives – in the poly-dynamic and universal language of art.
 
This echoes the ways in which contemporary performance is being made in the world. Also, importantly, it reflects how our dialogue with each other on a human level requires nuance because we live in systems of such complexity, within a world having gone through serious bouts of illness and faced with pertinent social and political movements that continue to test our passions and challenge us. The performing arts, therefore, needs to be upheld as space for reflection, openness and nuanced creative articulation to be freely expressed.
 
It was important for me too that SIFA be a platform for originality, propelling artists and performance creation coming from Singapore, while imagining what a meaningful international dynamic looks like within our city's pinnacle performing arts festival.
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Natalie Hennedige

ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

About the Production

Two lost Singapore souls cross the Devil’s path in Australia. As they reckon with personal demons and the ghosts of the landscape, will they be an easy catch, or has the Devil met his match?

Set where urban life meets the Australian Bush, Devil’s Cherry is a fantastical tale of ordinary desire, the escape it promises, and the dreams it damns.

Debbie and Mo are a couple in search of themselves and on the run from each other. Lured by the Singapore dream of Australia’s wide open spaces, they’ve been on the road for months now. When these lost souls stumble across the Devil’s path, they seem like an easy catch. But maybe this time he has met his match, and it’s the Devil’s cherry that’s ripe for the picking.

In Devil’s Cherry, SIFA is proud to announce the return of Kaylene Tan and Paul Rae, formerly of cult Singapore performance company spell#7. Bringing their trademark everyday poetry and bare-bones theatricality to the atmospheric environment of Pasir Panjang Power Station, they will stage a hallucinatory collision of beauty, banality and terror.

Featuring some of Singapore’s most charismatic actors – Lim Kay Siu, Neo Swee Lin and enigmatic new-generation actor Elizabeth Sergeant Tan – and mohiniyattam-trained Indian-Australian queer dancer Raina Peterson, the experience blends striking visuals by Andy Lim, Brian Gothong Tan and Wong Chee Wai with immersive spatial audio by Darius Kedros and the gothic Outback blues of fabled Australian songsmith, C.W. Stoneking.

As personal demons collide with the ghosts of the landscape, Devil’s Cherry is an intimate epic about our careworn past, uneasy present, and necessary future.

Message from Creators

Message from Creators

LOST SOULS

The Devil is an invasive species: the name we give to the spreading effect of a million human actions, few unambiguously evil, which accumulate to create malign outcomes and cruel behaviours. 'Devil's Cherry' is an invasive species too, brought to Australia and other parts of the world by the settlers and traders of the past. Better known as Deadly Nightshade, in tiny quantities, its purple-black berries are medicinal and hallucinogenic. Any more than that, and it'll kill you.

The seeds of Devil’s Cherry were planted in 2020. We were commissioned by Natalie Hennedige and Cake Theatre for Life in a Cloud, a series of artistic responses to the unusual times we were living in. The result was a short film, Double Life. Yearning to escape lockdown, life partners Debbie and Mo (Neo Swee Lin and Lim Kay Siu) imagine going to Australia, where the skies are blue and there are wild kangaroos just hopping around. “Wouldn’t that be great?” says Debbie.

As the play opens, Debbie and Mo have realised their dream. They've been on the road for months, “at home anywhere and everywhere.” But the land is charged by the energies of the past: strange residues of memory and meaning in almost-human form; one hungry for souls, feeding off their prey's inmost desires, the other beaten down over centuries, but nurturing an epic capacity for love.

What is the result of this encounter? The triumph of good over evil? The replacement of one dominant power by another? Or something else? Visited by past losses and new vulnerabilities, our characters find in each other the resources for different ways of being in – or leaving – the world. 

Enjoy the show.

Devil's Cherry was conceived and developed in Melbourne on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. We acknowledge and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.

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Paul Rae
Writer and Director
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Kaylene Tan
Writer and Director
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Paul Rae
Writer and Director
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Kaylene Tan
Writer and Director

Quotes & Inspiration

Our history is written in the land - deep in the land - and transmitted via the Songlines . The deep history of this continent is in that black soil beneath the white soil. It lies in the millennia before white settlers started laying down their stories only a couple of hundred years ago, a mere skin that tells nothing of the people who were here up to 65,000 years before them...This knowledge carried in the Songlines decrees that humans are equal with all things animate and inanimate. Together we form part of a web, in which each component sustains the land and keeps the archive alive. Every single thing has a place and a kinship with humans: the wind, the dirt, the rocks, and even shit...If it exists, it has a place. It is a fact of life, not a value judgment, so it does not need an explanation. But it does need a place to belong.
Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly, Songlines : The Power and Promise
The colonisation of [the Australian state of] Victoria by diseases, humans, sheep, cattle, horses, dogs and eventually roads, railways and the telegraph, must rate as perhaps the most rapid and devastating colonial dispossession of the nineteenth century... As the European invasion advanced over water and land, at the sharp end, walking rather than astride horses, were convicts and ex-convicts. They were the infantry of the invasion - horseless men, known as 'crawlers.'
Janet McAlman, Vandemonians: The Repressed History of Colonial Australia
The earliest Indian jugglers, acrobats and magicians came to Australia around 1863 with an American company called Rowe's American Circus. The Gold Rush had attracted many performers to Australia, which had been witnessing a growth in population, disposable income and a longing for some form of entertainment. These troupes included magicians, dancers, nautch (dance) girls and even children, and snake charmers from India.
Kumud Merani, 'The Indian jugglers and magicians in Australia in the 19th century', SBS Hindi
The Australian bush is both real and imaginary. Real, in that it grows in various unmistakable bush-like ways, and dies, rots, burns and grows into the bush again; real, in harbouring life. Imaginary, in that among the life it harbours is the life of the Australian mind. It is, by many accounts, the source of the nation's idea of itself. The bush is everything from a gum tree to any of the creatures that live in it or shelter beneath it, and it is the womb and inspiration of the national character.
Don Watson, The Bush
Explore a contemplative perspective on Kaylene & Paul's creative stances and strategies.
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VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS

Highlights

Explore SIFA 2022 with Festival Director Natalie Hennedige
Locating Ourselves: Devil’s Cherry as a Negotiating Ground for Histories, Positionalities and Daily Life

CREDITS

Credits

Written and directed by
Kaylene Tan
Paul Rae
Associate Producer
James Jordan Tay

Performed by

Kiki
Marlanie Haerewa
Mo
Lim Kay Siu
Debbie
Neo Swee Lin
Marlene
Liz Sergeant Tan
Rain
Raina Peterson
Guitarist
Paul Rawson

Creative Team

Composer and Sound Designer
Darius Kedros
Lighting Designer
Andy Lim
Multimedia Designer
Brian Gothong Tan
Set Designer
Wong Chee Wai
Sound Engineer
Varian Tan
Make-up and Hair
The Make Up Room
Costume Coordinator
Theresa Chan
Camera Director
Teh Yeesheng
Designer for Publicity Image
Charli Lin

Production Stage Management Team

Stage Manager
Juraidah Bte Rahman
Assistant Stage Manager
Alethea Koh
Multimedia Operator
Nursyahirah Bte Zulkinia
Crew
Caitlyn Salter
Daniel Tham
Dresser
Tan Jia Min

Special Thanks

Claire Devine, Song Chai Khim, University of Melbourne, Ashley Hair Salon, BCube Live Sound & Production, GOH SENG LAI, Media Variants, Joyce Gan, Noorlinah Mohamed, Drone Pilots: Chua He An, Richie Lim from Drone Flying Academy, The NeokeleLims for the use of the song, Thank You for Taking My Hand.

The Production would like to thank each and everyone who has contributed and helped us in this production but whose name we were not able to include at the time of this creation.

BIOGRAPHIES

Biographies

Paul Rae
Writer and Director
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Paul Rae co-founded spell#7 with Kaylene Tan in 1997. They went on to create 21 performances for the company between 1997 to 2016...
Kaylene Tan
Writer and Director
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Kaylene Tan has created performances, audio and site-specific works as a writer, director and performer with the Singapore theatre company, spell#7.

Lim Kay Siu
Performer
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Kay Siu met his wife Swee Lin while working on a Singapore Arts Festival play, “Dragon’s Teeth Gate” by Stella Kon, in 1986. Since then, he has acted in plays...
Neo Swee Lin
Performer
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Neo Swee Lin trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She also has a law degree from NUS.

Liz Sergeant Tan
Performer
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Liz Sergeant Tan graduated from the Intercultural Theatre Institute in 2016, and has been freelancing ever since.

Raina Peterson
Performer
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Raina Peterson is a classical Indian dance and queer performance artist. One of Australia's very few professional practitioners...

Marlanie Haerewa
Performer
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Marlanie Haerewa is a proud Aboriginal and Māori woman from the Nyikina nation and Ngāti Porou iwi. She was born and raised in Western Australia in a small town...
Darius Kedros
Composer and Sound Designer
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Darius Kedros is a sound designer, composer, and music producer working across theatre, screen, immersive installation, virtual reality and audio works...
Brian Gothong Tan
Multimedia Designer
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Brian Gothong Tan is one of the leading creatives in Singapore and is best known for his cutting-edge and highly engaging works in theatre, film and installation art...
Andy Lim
Lighting Designer
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With his minimalistic approach and dramaturgical integration of source material, Andy Lim roots his process in design concepts based on research and a keen sensitivity to the history...
Wong Chee Wai
Set Designer
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Chee Wai is a full-time freelance set designer. He has designed for and worked with various performing arts companies in Singapore. Some of his recent works are Nine Years’ Theatre’s Between You and Me...
James Jordan Tay
Associate Producer
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James Jordan Tay started his career as an events and theatre production manager with Orangedot Productions in 2002. Since then, he had managed various commercial, artistic productions, festival openings...

ABOUT SIFA & AHL

About SIFA

As Singapore's annual pinnacle performing arts festival, the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) presents captivating and diverse works across theatre, music, dance, film and visual arts. First launched as the Singapore Festival of Arts in 1977, the festival has gone through several evolutions and inspired generations of arts lovers and practitioners.  
 
Under the helm of Festival Director Natalie Hennedige from 2022 to 2024, SIFA will focus on performance and creation in the physical and online space, around the theme The Anatomy of Performance.
 
Today, the highly anticipated festival is a high point on Singapore's arts and cultural calendar. SIFA continues its festival mission to champion the creation and presentation of Singaporean and international works.

About Arts House Limited

Arts House Limited (AHL) is a not-for-profit organisation committed to enriching lives through the arts. AHL is the cultural place manager of Singapore’s Civic District. It manages two key national monuments – The Arts House, a multidisciplinary arts centre with a focus on literary programming, and the Victoria Theatre & Victoria Concert Hall, a heritage building that is home to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. It also runs performing arts space Drama Centre as well as three creative enclaves for artists, arts groups and creative businesses - the Goodman Arts Centre, Aliwal Arts Centre and Stamford Arts Centre.

AHL organises the Singapore International Festival of Arts – an annual pinnacle performing arts festival; as well as the Singapore Writers Festival – a multilingual festival presenting the world’s leading literary talents. In addition, AHL manages Our Cultural Medallion Story – the showcase on Singapore’s Cultural Medallion recipients at The Arts House.

AHL was set up in 11 December 2002 as a public company limited by guarantee under the National Arts Council and was officially renamed Arts House Limited on 19 March 2014. For more information, visit https://artshouselimited.sg/

Special Thanks To

Festival Sponsors
Official Hotel

Official Logistics Partner

Official Outdoor Media Partner
Official Airline

Official Technical Sponsor of Pasir Panjang Power Station Programmes
Catering Partner for Opening Reception
Festival Donors

Jeremy Lee
Mr & Mrs Victor & Michelle Sassoon

FESTIVAL PARTNERS

Organised By
Commissioned By
Supported By
Matched By

RECOMMENDED

Recommended Shows

Delicate Spells of Mind

Delicate Spells of Mind

Available on VOD
Ceremonial Enactments

Ceremonial Enactments

Available on VOD
Bangsawan Gemala Malam

Bangsawan Gemala Malam

Available on VOD
MEPAAN

MEPAAN

Available on VOD

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Management
Executive Director:
Tan Boon Hui
Festival Director:
Natalie Hennedige
Senior Director, Strategy and Planning:
Yeow Ju Li
Senior Director, Programming & Producing:
Ken Tan
Director, Marketing and Communications:
Jasmine Gan
Director, Placemaking and Partnership Development:
Lee Mun Ping
Director, Human Resource and IT:
Isniati Ali
Director, Asset Management and Leasing:
Rachel Chu
Director, Finance:
Oh Boon Ping
Director, Corporate Facilities Management:
Saburulla S/O Abdul Gani
Corporate FM
Security Manager:
Shri Ram
Asst Manager:
Ahmad Adli
Finance
Managers and Executives:
Amanda Koh
Chris Tay
Huang Shuncong
Jill Lau
Lyn Yeoh
Samantha Chua
Siti Nur Jazeerah
Programming & Producing
Senior Producers:
Christie Chua
Mervyn Quek
Ye JunMin
Producers:
Fezhah Maznan
Hoo Kuan Cien
Senior Manager, Programmes:
Lisa Marie Lip
Intern:
Ai Honda
Production & Technical
Senior Production Managers:
Mohamed Fazil Bin Sulaiman
Cindy Yeong
Production Coordinators:
Celestine Wong
Melissa Chin
Alexandra Chan
Technical Managers:
Kailash
Muhammad Hannan Bin Mohd Khusni
Technical Coordinators:
Huang Xiangbin
Iswadi Bin Razle
Executive, Administration:
Izyan Nooraini