Not too long ago, the Singapore Arts Festival pulled in record-busting audience numbers with big-budget, high-profile foreign acts. Over the past decade, its roster boasted names such as Chinese composer Tan Dun, British pianist-composer Michael Nyman, Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato and Compania Nacional de Danza, and France-based theatre force Peter Brook.
Prestigious inter-festival co-productions also seemed the way to go, and mammoth productions - a Mahler symphony in 2004, for instance, involved more than 500 performers from Singapore, Beijing and Latvia - packed the houses and intoxicated the pragmatic masses of the Lion City.
But in its 35th year, the festival is a different animal - less that flamboyant, shimmering creature, more of an experimental yet down-to-earth being. This year's S$8 million (about HK$50 million) edition, organised by the National Arts Council (NAC), runs until June 2 - just 16 days, down from three weeks last year. Of the 80 productions this year, 66 are free, non-ticketed events, a sizing down from last year's 36 ticketed shows.
With the theme of 'Our Lost Poems', it is a carefully curated crop of mostly quirky, intimate shows, and just a few international big names - choreographer Akram Khan; director Stephen Earnhart adapting Japanese author Haruki Murakami - to hook your attention.
'These quirky projects do open up different doors for people to come and engage with the projects,' says Low Kee Hong, the festival's general manager since 2009, and the man mostly responsible for its changing focus in the past three years.
'We have very large projects, but we also have a lot more one-on-one experiential type things, because it just gives audiences a very different perspective on how they approach art and the festival. Gone are the days when you solely think of the usual festival-goer who goes to sit down in a concert hall. You're talking now about a whole range of individuals, whose daily existences are very different.'