Despite its high prosperity and, latterly, an attempt to develop the arts, Singapore is socially repressive and reminiscent of the Ireland of half a century ago, writes Michael Dervan.
SINGAPORE IS AT once obvious and mysterious. It's a thriving international hub of commercial activity, a tiny island city-state in south-east Asia with a modern, high-rise skyline and a level of prosperity that matches the highest in Europe.
Four decades ago it was a newly independent Third World state with negligible natural resources and a recent history of race riots. Today, the rate of home ownership is more than 90 per cent. Infant mortality is among the lowest, and life expectancy among the highest, in the world. And the country is ranked among the world's least corrupt states.
Yet Singapore's international reputation is tainted with accusations that it is a tightly controlled, repressive, nanny state. There's a mandatory death sentence for possession of drugs (for as little as 15g of heroin) and more than 300 people were hanged between 1991 and 2000. Caning is still mandatory for a range of offences, and a ban on chewing gum has come to epitomise the notion of state intrusion in a country where the locals like to joke: "Singapore is a fine country. We have a fine for everything." (A first jaywalking offence can set you back up more than €200.)
Part and parcel of what the world perceives as Singapore's nanny-state behaviour has been the government's attention to the development of culture and the arts. A National Arts Council was set up in 1991. The Singapore Art Museum opened in 1996. The Esplanade arts centre - a 2,000-seat theatre and 1,600-seat concert hall, with two smaller theatres and an exhibition space - opened in 2002. A former parliament and courthouse was reinvented as the Arts House in 2004. The National Library, incorporating a drama centre with two performing spaces, was rehoused in a new two-tower, 16-storey building in 2005.
The National Museum was renovated, and acquired a modern wing in 2006, the same year the first Singapore Biennale was held. The Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music awarded degrees to its first graduating class last July. A Peranakan Museum, celebrating the cross-fertilisation between Malay and other south-east Asian peoples, opened last April. A school of the arts for second-level students moves into its custom-designed new home - with theatres, recording studios, a recital hall and dance studios - next year. A design by France's Studio Milou Architecture and Singapore CPG Consultants has just been chosen for the conversion of the former Supreme Court and City Hall buildings into a new €149 million National Art Gallery by 2013.
It's all part of a strategy to turn Singapore into a "global city for the arts". The country has an eye on the economic benefits of making these investments and is also responding to growing domestic demand - 33 per cent of the population attended at least one arts event in 2005, as opposed to 11 per cent in 1996.
Yet in spite of the upbeat picture this presents, there are ways in which modern Singapore is reminiscent of the Ireland of half a century ago. The banning and cutting of films is routine. The TV series Sex and the Citywasn't allowed a free-to-air terrestrial broadcast, and the over-18 release of the recent film has cuts. Last April StarHub Cable Vision was fined for showing a commercial on MTV's Mandarin channel which showed two girls kissing; gay rights are still being fought for, and such a fine for such a transmission is by no means a new phenomenon.
In true Singaporean hands-on style, the National Arts Council runs an annual four-week Singapore Arts Festival. The festival favours work that "bridges disciplines, cultures, language and geographical boundaries", and the three shows I caught at this year's festival certainly met those criteria. The biggest show, The Architecture of Silence, choreographed by Edward Clug, brought together the Slovene National Ballet and Opera Chorus with the Singapore Festival Orchestra for a large-scale dance spectacle, to music by Mozart and contemporary Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner.
I caught it at the end of a long, sleep-deprived day of travel, and found myself resisting its attempt to level the ground between the genius of Mozart and the altogether second-rate Preisner. I found myself marvelling at the imagery of the chorus - shown as rows of isolated heads at the back of the stage - almost as much as the fluid athleticism of the dance, with its successful, if sometimes too repetitive, evocations of movement in water.
Sonos e memoria(seen at last year's Dublin Theatre Festival) combines silent documentary film footage from Sardinia and a jazz fusion score led by trumpeter Paolo Fresu. It was as if the early 20th-century silent footage captured by Mitchell and Kenyon in, say, Cork had been overlaid with a Riverdance-type wall of sound for local colour. The most memorable musical moments were all provided by the reedy-toned and exotically tuned male vocal quartet, Concordu 'e su Rosariu.
For All the Wrong Reasonswas a choreographed play by Belgian director Lies Pauwels, with an international cast (British, Greek, Australian), its subject matter mostly rooted in British experience, full of explicit and precise points of reference and expressed in a range of regional accents. Blackly surreal and consistently provocative, it seemed designed to get under the skin. The questions from the floor in a post-performance discussion cast and director showed a fascinatingly diverse fragmentation of responses, not only from the multicultural south-east Asian audience but also from the multicultural performers themselves.
