Celebrate creativity and connection with family-friendly performances, interactive installations, and engaging activities at Singapore's pinnacle arts festival.
Venue: Various locations including Empress Lawn & Bedok Town Square
Date: 16 May to 1 Jun 2025
Time: Event times vary by programme – check sifa.sg for details
Fee: Free & ticketed programmes available
Family Fun at SIFA 2025: Where Art Meets Heart
This May, the Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) returns with its biggest celebration yet, marking Singapore’s 60th year of independence with the theme “More Than Ever”. From large-scale performances to intimate storytelling sessions, SIFA 2025 brings the arts into everyday spaces – and offers a specially curated line-up just for families through Little SIFA and community-centric installations.
Whether you're introducing your little ones to theatre for the first time, or exploring interactive artworks together, this year’s festival promises unforgettable bonding moments wrapped in creativity.
Little SIFA at Empress Lawn
Returning for its second edition, Little SIFA offers two weekends of child-friendly arts experiences right in the heart of the city. Set against the greenery of Empress Lawn, families can look forward to:
Animal Farm (variation)
Venue: Empress Lawn
Date: 30 May to 1 Jun 2025
Time: 7pm (Duration: 30min)
Fee: Free Admission
Animal Farm (variation), presented by The Finger Players, is a site-specific performance adapted from an excerpt of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. This 30-minute presentation invites audience members to get up close with life-sized puppets, while immersing themselves in the dramatic tension shaped by speech, music, and movement.
The House Between The Winds
Venue: Empress Lawn
Date: 23 to 25 May 2025, 30 May to 1 Jun 2025
Fee: Free admission
Experience a talking installation paying homage to the glorious plantations that lined Orchard Road. Witness a magnificent sailboat travelling across the Empress Lawn. Touch, feel and create as you go on a pilgrimage of memories through whimsical and playful interactive kinetic installations that take you on a journey through time and space.
Many were once drawn to a place where the winds crossed, where the paths connecting East and West met. There, they traded, made a living, and learned—acquiring knowledge that stretched beyond the borders of their homelands. It was also a safe harbour, as they waited for the monsoon winds to change and carry them onwards to their destinations.
Soon, this place became home, and they reshaped the land to suit their lives. The nurturing trees fed their new ideas and ways of doing things, and with their insatiable and unceasing appetites, the trees made way for a landscape that would be forever changed.
SIFA Pavilion at Bedok Town Square
Make it a full family outing at the SIFA Pavilion, a vibrant community art space built right in the neighbourhood. Highlights include:
Beneath Tide, Running Water
Beneath the surface of our oceans, a quiet, extraordinary world thrives — a world teeming with life and vibrant energy. Inspired by the rich, intricate ecosystems of the underwater world - coral reefs, this interdisciplinary art installation Beneath Tide, Running Water invites you to dive deeper, to experience the symbiosis of nature.
Imagine this: within the depths of the coral reef, a remarkable partnership unfolds. Tiny, single-celled algae, like invisible artisans, harness the power of the sun, transforming light into nourishment for the corals. In return, the corals offer shelter, a home for the algae to grow and thrive. Together, they create the reef's magnificent structure — a living, breathing work of art.
This symbiotic relationship underpins the conceptualisation of Beneath Tide, Running
Water. It is conceived as a living, evolving creation of its own. From the distance, you will see the remnants of human impact — marine debris woven into the installation, assembled to emulate the movement of waves. These elements create an urgent call to action for environmental awareness. At the same time, the artwork is a "reef" offering a vibrant, oxygenated space where artistic expression flourishes - dance, music and performance move through the currents, initiating new forms of collaboration and discovery.
Beneath Tide, Running Water has a form, yet is formless. It is fluid, ever-changing, shaped by the interactions between artists, performers and the audience. Each moment is a new interpretation of the deep, symbiotic relationship we share with the natural world. The installation is not just something you look at — it is an interactive, living expression of the interconnectedness of all life, urging us to reimagine our relationship with the natural world.
Speculative F(r)ictions
Speculative F(r)ictions reimagines Bedok’s layered history through the dual lens of water’s paradoxical nature—as a force of connection and division. Projected across a diptych of LED screens, the work collides archival fragments, speculative CGI, text and glitch art to trace the neighbourhood’s maritime past.
By oscillating between memory and myth, Speculative F(r)ictions mirror the sea’s restless duality, inviting audiences to question how borders—physical, historical, and psychological—are drawn, erased, and redrawn.
The Sea and the Neighbourhood
Venue: Bedok Town Square
Date: 16 to 18 May 2025
Time: 7.30pm (Duration: 45min)
Fee: Free Admission
The Sea and the Neighbourhood is a multidisciplinary work encompassing Bedok's coastal heritage, neighbourhood charm and the modernity of its inhabitants. Populated by musicians and dancers, musical instruments and choreography, The Sea and the Neighbourhood captures notions of momentum and renewal, like the ebb and flow of the sea that shapes Singapore, and the pulse of a people knowing where they have come from and the paths they must continue to forge for a meaningful collective future.
A colossal installation by visual artist Wang Ruobing doubles as a performance stage becoming the visual icon of SIFA’s first Pavilion, an environment built to engender collaboration and gathering through the conduit of performance. Coming together as the collective strengths of a community of artists working in response to each other, The Sea and the Neighbourhood features music composition by Philip Tan, dance choreography by Christina Chan with Singapore Ballet and video, and spatial design and costume styling by Brian Gothong Tan.
Non-Verbal performance.
Ode to the Sea (performed as part of The Sea and the Neighbourhood)
Venue: Bedok Town Square
Date: 16 to 18 May 2025
Time: 7.30pm (Duration: 45min)
Fee: Free Admission
Embark on a captivating journey into the heart of Bedok, tracing its rich historical roots as a traditional fishing village where early Malay residents thrived in fishing and agriculture. Its once peaceful coastlines bear tales of early piracy, challenges from global warming, and the enduring aspirations tied to the sea—symbolising a gateway to endless possibilities and the boundless human desire to explore beyond the horizon. Bedok has evolved into a diverse and vibrant community, blending cultural influences and demographics.
Pact of Water (performed as part of The Sea and the Neighbourhood)
Venue: Bedok Town Square
Date: 16 to 18 May 2025
Time: 7.30pm (Duration: 45min)
Fee: Free Admission
Bridges of bodies of water.
Life, cycles, whales and waves.
Agreements of man and land and sea.
Kept and broken.
The flow of moving onward,
Of change.
A gentle stream, barely felt.
Sometimes a violent current.
Diverging paths,
Compelling return
To one ocean.
Don’t forget to water the plants.
– Christina Chan, choreographer
KAKOKI
Venue: Bedok Town Square
Date: 17 to 18 May 2025
Time: 8.30pm (Duration: 20min)
Fee: Free Admission
We are the builders of the land, shaping our own destiny. In the pulse of the earth, we seek grace, striving to find our place. Surrounded by rules and expectations, survival alone is not enough. A rising fall, a lifting struggle—what is our song? In the end, we are the deciders of our fate.
KAKOKI, an acronym for 'Kata Kota Kita' ("What Our City Says"), embodies the spirit, struggles, and complexities of our shared journey—as individuals, as a tribe, and as a community.
Nadi Singapura seizes every opportunity in their performances, blending intense drumming, movement, chants, and melodies drawn from the rich traditions and culture of the Malay community, both past and present.
Rindu rindu
Air yang mengalir,
bak hujan yang turun
Cahaya mentari,
membawa ku pergi
Biji yang ditanam,
dibaja disiram
Diharap tak layu,
mekar berlagu
Darah yang mengalir,
jasad yang menanggung
Alam pun berbisik,
menjunjung agung
Kisah dicerita,
membawa maksud
Gelora di jiwa,
kan terus terwujud
Rindu, rindu yang berbisikkan cinta
Rindu, rindu yang mendamaikan jiwa
Performed in Malay and Non-Verbal.
hello, is this working?
Venue: Bedok Town Square
Date: 23 to 25 May 2025
Time: 4pm to 7 pm (Duration: 3h)
Fee: Free Admission
Work is a huge part of our lives, but it is often not thought and talked about in public. What does work mean to each of us? What are our dreams and worries about work now and in the future?
Drawn from research and interviews with people from different walks of life, hello, is this working? is a participatory performance by Singapore theatre company Drama Box, that explores our relationship with work now and in the future.
Performed in English.
Starlight: A Symphony of Home
Venue: Bedok Town Square
Date: 30 May to 1 Jun 2025
Time: 7.30pm
Fee: Free Admission
Across three nights, Starlight brings together some of Singapore’s most beloved voices and brightest new talents—meeting on stage, exchanging stories, and finding harmony in the spaces between generations.
Curated and produced by NAC Young Artist Award recipient Ruth Ling—who also helmed Sing Love—Starlight invites you into an evening of songs shaped by memory, place, and possibility. Through original music and familiar favourites, these artists trace the quiet, everyday moments that make a home: the people we gather with, the stories we carry, the future we’re still writing together.
Guided by the visual imagination of Brian Gothong Tan, Starlight is less a performance than a meeting point—a space to listen, to remember, and to celebrate the voices that will carry us forward.
More Family Programmes
Animal Farm
Venue: Drama Centre Theatre
Date & Time:
- 15 May 2025: 4pm [School Exclusive]
- 16 May 2025: 4pm [School Exclusive]
- 16 May 2025: 8pm
- 17 May 2025: 4pm & 8pm
- 18 May 2025: 4pm
Duration: 1h 30min
Fee: $48, $68
It begins with a revolution. A group of downtrodden animals overthrows their owner, seeking to build a utopian society founded on fairness and equality. However, cracks soon appear when Napoleon, a power-hungry and manipulative porker, rises to leadership, using propaganda and violence to consolidate control. The animals quickly find themselves at the mercy of totalitarian tyranny, shackled by the very principles that were meant to set them free.
Based on George Orwell’s political satire Animal Farm, this theatrical adaptation by The Finger Players employs stunning puppetry to illustrate themes of brutality, conflict, and oppression. Written and directed by award-winning theatre veteran Oliver Chong, Animal Farm is a play of discordant harmony, adopting a darker, wittier, and more visceral treatment than the novel’s allegorical approach.
Performed in English.
