But sitting in the audience watching Clug's dance opera revolving around the life of Maria Callas in Maribor, she was convinced there was more creativity in the small country - 'seemingly caught in the time warp of the end of the Hapsburg era', as she puts it - than meets the eye.

With a population of about 2 million people and a rich contemporary arts scene, and having been among the first of the former Yugoslavian territories to join the European Union, Slovenia is a juxtaposition of new and old - a state out gradually to reinvent itself.

'I think of Slovenia as the Singapore of Central Europe. A small, young nation, full of enthusiasm, at the crossroads of north-south and east-west Europe, and technologically advanced,' says the festival director, on the cusp of the opening of her 2008 season, which kicked off on Friday and will run until June 22.

'They pay their street parking fees on the spot with a mobile phone connection,' she says.

As a consequence of Goh's Slovene sojourn, this year's Singapore Arts Festival will see the Asian premieres of two productions involving Clug's Slovene National Theatre Maribor. One is Radio and Juliet, Slovene National Theatre Maribor's version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, set to Radiohead's music. Eschewing the MTV or Baz Luhrmann approach of pop-culture-meets-high camp, Radio and Juliet's action unfolds in reverse, as 'a retrospective of an unfulfilled love' and a distillation of 'the relationship between man and woman, seduction and rejection, hope and violence', as the festival brochure puts it.

The other is Architecture of Silence - a massive undertaking involving a live choir of 80 singers, 45 dancers and 68 musicians. Performed by the Slovene National Theatre's Opera & Ballet Maribor and Ljubljana and the Singapore Festival Orchestra, it features a flock of black-sheathed 'swimmers', thrashing and cutting through the air on the Esplanade Theatre's stage in a virtual water ballet.

'The company of dancers are technically very strong, and Clug's precise movements and hand gestures, when delivered by a technically brilliant company, are fascinating to watch,' says Goh.

Bringing Architecture of Silence to Singapore has been a logistical nightmare, owing to its huge scale. Schedules have had to be worked out, 150 people have had to be transported, and convoluted freight routes have had to be planned. Happily, says Goh, the Slovenian agent and artists have been very co-operative in ironing out the kinks.

Now celebrating its 31st year, the S$7 million (HK$40.17 million) Singapore Arts Festival has swung towards the original, avant-garde and challenging end of the spectrum in its latest offerings.

There are 25 main productions, up from 22 last year. Of those, 15 are by foreign artists and 10 by locals, roughly the same as last year.

There's No Direction, by Japan's Nibroll, which sees eight performance artists haphazardly inhabiting a grid on stage, absorbing one another's idiosyncrasies and urges in a continuous interplay of music, movement and images.

Singapore theatre doyen Ong Keng Sen directs Awaking, a project that started life when the Singapore Chinese Orchestra's Tsung Yeh mooted the idea of combining the musical periods of Shakespeare and the Ming dynasty playwright Tang Xianzu, regarded by many as China's Shakespeare.

The core programme's themes are Modern Mavericks, the Ancient Moderns - productions that bridge the past and the present and which contemporise tradition - Rebels In Theatre, A Class Above (virtuoso acts) and Family Favourites.

A classic gets reinvented in The King Lear Project: A Trilogy by Singapore's Ho Tzu Nyen and Fran Borgia. Grappling with Shakespeare's play through famous critical texts, the trilogy examines the process of creating Lear through an audition, a rehearsal and a post-show discussion, with some improvisation and audience participation.

There's also an absurdist vein to the theatre component of the festival. Australia's Back To Back Theatre, featuring six actors with mental disabilities, presents Small Metal Objects, in which two men engineer an intense personal drama in a moving crowd in the middle of Singapore's largest shopping mall, VivoCity. Bosnia and Herzegovina's East West Theatre Company stages Class Enemy, Nigel Williams' 1980s play about social misfits waiting and hoping.

Two Singaporean companies will stage works about stillness and confusion. Drama Box's Drift is a tale of three generations held together by old promises and memories. And in Cake Theatrical Production's Temple, seven people bolt themselves into an arena until an act of betrayal occurs.

The festival's direction can certainly be described as bold, but it's not to everyone's liking, and some Singaporean festival-goers have criticised the event. One letter-writer to The Business Times recently said he felt that the festival had abandoned him with its cutting-edge shows, which he said catered to 'only a handful of snobs'.

Another observer bemoaned the fact the line-up included lesser-known orchestras, pointing out that the Hong Kong Arts Festival offered big-names such as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, in contrast to the London Sinfonietta Orchestra, who play in Singapore this year.

Mention the lack of big names in this year's festival, and Goh says: 'A true mark of a worthy festival is not only to feature 'brand names' that are easy to sell to the public, but also to exercise the responsibility to talent-spot and support artists who could be the brand names of tomorrow.'

She cites theatre practitioner Haris Pasovic, from Bosnia, who was a leading figure in Yugoslavian theatre and is now trying to rebuild Bosnia's theatre scene, as an example of an artist marginalised from the mainstream international arts scene due to geographical and financial constraints.

His production, Class Enemy, will challenge Singaporean audiences, Goh reckons. Tickets for the show are selling slowly but surely, and she's optimistic it will do well.

Thanks to the festival's introduction of Pasovic to its associates abroad, Class Enemy has been invited to the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre and the Edinburgh International Festival.

The Singapore Arts Festival, under the National Arts Council, receives 40 per cent of its funding from the government while the Hong Kong Arts Festival receives slightly over 20 per cent. And although some might assume that a government-sponsored festival would be conservative in its programming, the Arts Council measures the festival's success by the impact it makes on the local arts scene rather than by box-office receipts, says Goh.

'Our aim is to play a leadership role in inspiring and developing both our artistic communities and audiences to greater heights,' she says.

Nevertheless, the gap between the festival's aspirations and audience members' expectations must be addressed if it wants to keep boosting attendance figures.

Last year's festival drew 718,542 people - up 37.5 per cent on the 522,685 the year before - thanks partly to large-scale outreach events. It was a rebound from falling figures in the two preceding years, but still short of 2004's record of 916,700 attendees. The National Arts Council expects 550,000 people this year.