Record turnout for M1 Fringe Festival

SINGAPORE- The annual M1 Singapore Fringe Festival, which ended on Sunday, celebrated its 10th anniversary with record-breaking attendances this year.

Organised by home-grown theatre company The Necessary Stage, this year's total turnout for both ticketed and non-ticketed events was nearly 14,000, a 44 per cent increase from last year's 9,755 audience members.

Attendance for ticketed events stood at 4,293, up from last year's 3,595 and 2012's 3,223, which meant that performance venues were, on average, nearly 93 per cent full.

Festival manager Melissa Lim, 37, was delighted with the turnout for the festival, which was themed Art & The People.

She said: "I think people enjoyed the various interpretations of the theme offered by the different works. The performances on offer were engaging without being overly esoteric.

"They dealt with real issues from the heart: everything from censorship to race, divorce among seniors, care-giving, prejudice, human blindness and the mob mentality, and so on."

Sold-out shows included An Enemy Of The People - a Chinese-language adaptation of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's work of the same name - by the critically acclaimed Singapore theatre company Nine Years Theatre.

Intimate performance piece The Mountain by local collective The Art Of Strangers was also sold out, along with Working On A Special Day by Por Piedad Teatro (Mexico) and The Play Company (United States), which looked at the relationship between two neighbours set against pre-war fascist Italy in the 1930s.

Peer Pleasure, which featured short plays by secondary-school students, was also sold out.

This article by The Straits Times was published in MyPaper, a free, bilingual newspaper published by Singapore Press Holdings.

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