1 Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports,
Prof Tommy Koh, Chairman of the National Heritage Board,
Mr Goh Kee Nguan, CEO of the Singapore Youth Olympics Games Organising Committee,
Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen, Good Morning.
2 The Singapore HeritageFest turns six this year. Over these past five years, the festival has reached out to more than 5.5 million people from all walks of life and all age groups. Our commissioned surveys show that Singaporeans are now more interested in finding out about their own heritage and that of others. They also feel very strongly that our multi-cultural heritage should be preserved and celebrated.
3 This is a very encouraging finding and is testimony to the close partnership between the NHB and all our partners in the private, public and people sectors. NHB has been building on traditional methods of outreach and trail blazing new outreach through new media. For example our Heritage TV or HTV launched on You Tube has achieved about 40,000 hits over five months. Our annual festivals such as Singapore HeritageFest, the recently concluded Night Festival, and the Museum Roundtable campaign called “Explore Singapore” have been generating larger audiences and garnering strong community support. Our travelling exhibitions, Heritage On The Move and our Community Heritage Trails are developed through a grounds up approach. Such travelling exhibitions and trails provide the community with a platform to understand their shared heritage better. This in turn nurtures a stronger sense of pride in the places they live in and ultimately strengthens our bonds to Singapore. We hope more communities and individuals will step forward and design their very own heritage trails with us.
4 What to Expect for SHF 09
Let me now quickly summarise what we can all expect for this year’s Singapore HeritageFest. I need to break my Chairman’s three point rule here and bring you five points.
a) First, Why the Tagline, Who’s Your Neighbour?
Singapore has long been a multicultural country. Many of us have lived next door to neighbours who may not necessarily be from our own ethnic community or religious community. We embrace each other as fellow Singaporeans and as one big family. This mutual understanding has been achieved through our willingness to learn more about each other and realise that our destiny is shared as one
Singapore. However, with today’s fast pace of life and many busy commitments, some of us may not have taken the time to know one another even better. This year’s theme for SHF strives to reinforce the neighbourly spirit, where our doors are always open and we go beyond a casual hello to be able to easily approach our neighbours to borrow eggs, sugar, hold a joint gathering or ask our neighbour to babysit our children. We felt we should all make a greater effort to get to know our neighbours even better, not only our next door neighbours, but also those in our immediate neighbourhood, workplace or even our new family members from the region and beyond. Hence the tagline, “Who’s Your Neighbour?” and a concerted effort this year to explain the commonalities we all share.
b) Second, we have boldly ventured into Six New Satellite Festival Hubs
In line with our neighbour theme, we have brought the SHF this year into the neighbourhoods. We have expanded the festival to include not only the one main festival hub here at Suntec City but to 6 satellite hubs in North, South, West and North-east and central Singapore. Our outreach events have also expanded from 12 last year to 19 and we now have over 250 partners and 1,400 performers just performing at our various hubs. This year, about 20% of the 1,400 performers are new citizens.
Each of the 6 satellite hubs come with their own related themes, exhibitions and stage programmes. Do pay a visit to North Point, Compass Point, Causeway Point, Centre Point, Jurong Point and VivoCity for the different multi-cultural exhibitions and celebrations. Our main festival hub here at Suntec City will have weekday and weekend programming and exhibitions from today till 26th July. We thank ARA Trust Management (Suntec) Limited for being such strong supporters of the festival from the inception of SHF and for being the venue sponsor over all these years. We also thank Frasers Centrepoint Malls for offering us venue sponsorship in all their heartland malls and for kindly helping us with advertising costs. Thanks also to the management of Jurong Point and VivoCity for their venue sponsorship as well.
c) Third, we celebrate multi-generational bonding
Our SHF programmes and events are an opportunity for families, neighbours and friends to come together to relax and learn in a fun way, for example through music. This year we introduced two new vernacular concerts and expanded two existing concerts. For the first time, we are presenting full-fledged Malay and Indian Concerts and we have bigger English and Mandarin concerts. We hope all will be crowd pullers as we will be showcasing music veterans like Rahima Rahim and Linda Elizabeth together with current favourites such as Wendy Koh and Jack and Rai. They will be singing side by side and will also jamming together. Each of them will be sharing their own stories about neighbours and growing up experiences. We hope this multi-generational musical approach will bring together multi generational families. In this way older audiences can bring back their nostalgic memories, share them with their families and friends, and discover new musical experiences with them.
d) Fourth we have actively Engaged New Audiences and Partners
This year, we have stepped up our engagement with new audiences such as the silver-haired community, school children and the Netizens through our various programmes. I am especially pleased with the multi-ethnic puppet production of Runaway Dog which will tour primary schools this year into next year. You will see a snippet later on. We engaged post-secondary youth in the pre-festival
roadshows which they conceptualised and executed themselves, and the students blogged on their experiences. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Temasek Polytechnic, ITE West College, Nanyang Polytechnic and all the students who worked with us on this project. We worked with other schools to hold story-telling competitions on neighbourly experiences and history, and also SAFRA on a photo competition on neighbourly scenes.
e) Fifth, we developed new ways of community outreach e.g. CLOSE – Encounters of the Nice Kind
We also introduced an outdoor media campaign called “Close {Encounters of the Nice Kind}” which will start from 23rd July right till December this year. This media campaign features neighbours sharing their stories about their close friendships and their neighbourhood communities. The stories were sourced and photographed by award-winning photographer and former journalist Tay Kay Chin. Thanks to the generous sponsorship of SMRT Media, we will be able to see all these neighbours smiling at us in all SMRT stations for the next 5 months. Thank you SMRT Media for being our official outdoor media partner once again for the Festival and for partnering us on the “Close” project. We hope to document these neighbourly tales in a book in the future.
5 Thank Sponsors and Partners
Let me now thank our other important sponsors and partners in addition to those
already mentioned earlier.
6 We thank the SHF 2009 Steering Committee members for their strong support, advice and ideas. We also wish to thank our main and long-standing sponsors, Singapore Totalisator Board and Philip Morris. Thanks also to our Official Printer, Metro Graphics Pte Ltd and our Official Radio Stations, MediaCorp Radio, Gold 90.5Fm and Capital Radio 95.8. Thank you People’s Association, Nexus and new partner SAFRA for all your kind collaborations. I apologise that the list of our other partners and sponsors is too long to mention them individually, but I would like to register our heartfelt thanks to all of you – from our sponsors to event partners to the many schools and performing groups that took part in our various competitions as well as stage performances and Project H – the youth roadshows.
7 Conclusion
We are especially proud to present the Singapore HeritageFest this year and we can feel the buzz and anticipation for it. There is something old, something new, something for everyone. For this, I have to thank our festival partners who have been helping us create the buzz through their own channels and publicity efforts. Thank you members of the Media for your very strong support of the festival with so many wonderful stories about what to expect for the festival this year. Without all your concerted efforts and energy working hand in hand with us, we would not have been able to put on our biggest Heritage Festival ever!
8 We hope that all of you will participate in the many programmes and events lined up. Please do get together with your neighbours, family and friends and visit a festival hub or event near you. Help us spread the word and achieve a new record breaking target of 2 million people this year!
9 Thank you.