Synopsis:

8 art forms, 6 cities, 1000 years of history
A dialogue through time and space

As a theatre festival, Southernmost is conceptualised as Emergency Stairs' answer to the question, "How do you create an arts festival for the future?"

Presented by Emergency Stairs, the third edition of Southernmost features the best traditional and contemporary artists in Asia in a series of dialogues and workshops culminating in a new creation and public presentation: Journey to a Dream.

Southernmost features performing masters and Javanese Classical dancer Didik Nini Thowok (Yogyakarta), contemporary performer Makoto Matsushima (Tokyo), Kunqu Practitioner Shen Yi Li (Shanghai), and Classical Cambodian dancer Rady Nget (Phnom Penh), as well as emerging traditional and contemporary artists Amin Farid (Singapore), Nattapon Wannaun (Hat Yai) and Sabrina Sng (Singapore). It is helmed by Liu Xiaoyi (Singapore), artistic director of Emergency Stairs, who will also be co-directing Journey to a Dream with Danny Yung (Hong Kong), the Artistic Director of Zuni Icosahedron.

Embark on an intimate journey of cultural dialogue between yesterday and tomorrow, traditional and contemporary, in a dream of searching for the festival for the future.

***

"the seven featured artists of the festival... embarked on a performance research project, the main thrust of the festival, where they've had dramatic encounters and intense conversations with each other. All of them come from performance lineages that we might describe as the "traditional", but which I've come to realise is a reductive and monolithic term for performance forms that are ever-evolving, whose practitioners are experimental, irreverent, slippery, sinuous and extraordinarily powerful."
-Corrie Tan, review of Southernmost 2018

"Often lost and without direction as individuals, knowing neither about ourselves nor the future, Journey to Nowhere becomes a call to action for artists to collaborate and chart bold new paths together, its own form a demonstration of the possibilities intercultural exchange offers to imbue the arts scene with new dynamism and ideas."
-Bakchormeeboy, review of Southernmost Production 2018, Journey to Nowhere