Propose Your Show
Overview
CFA oversees many arts programming opportunities on campus.
Everyone has a story, and we can help set the stage for you. Members of the NUS community (students, faculty and staff) as well as arts industry professionals are eligible to submit proposals to CFA for consideration. Read on to find out about CFA’s selection criteria as well as platform-specific edibility criteria.
Primary selection criteria
All works proposed must have a demonstrated benefit to the NUS community.
Values of being Generative, Responsive, Collaborative, Self-Reflexive, and with Agency are important to CFA, both in the artistic work we programme and our everyday operations. Below are some suggestions to assist in developing your ideas:
Generative: How are you contributing to an environment that is generative? If you are an NUS student, we are looking for a desire and drive to produce, create, and originate – an energy that outweighs tangible resources. If you are an external artist, how can you support this energy on our student-centric campus? Our guest artists should want to work with CFA not just to access resources, but to mutually grow from this generative environment with our students.
Responsive: Is your work relevant and engaged? Are you responding to the world at large or changing social patterns? How is your performance responsive to its site or place? Does it consider the context it is in, with peoples, histories, or cultures?
Collaborative: Are you exchanging resources and skills with others, pooling strengths? Are you generating ideas and creating works through collaboration, allowing you to achieve levels of innovation and depth that you would not be able to reach on your own? Does your process question and transform collaborative structures?
Self-Reflexive: How is your practice sustainable and self-reflexive? Are you demonstrating a constant negotiation of the self, with a willingness to grow, shift, change, and open yourself up to critique?
With Agency: Effective agency requires forethought, intentionality, and awareness of the self, the social and your resources. How can you take agency on the action that you wish to create?
Additional selection criteria specific to our presentation platforms can be found in their respective sections below.
third space supported by ExxonMobil Asia Pacific
third space is a new platform for experimentation and outreach-focused programmes on campus.
third space was conceptualised as a reimagination of the ExxonMobil Campus Concerts, as a response to shifting needs and desires of the NUS arts community. Through third space, we hope to create regular arts gathering spaces on campus and provide more opportunities for arts encounters. We also wish to support long-term processes of experimentation, gathering, blue-sky thinking, creation and play.
1) Four Blank Walls: Experiments in Sound
Four Blank Walls: Experiments in Sound is a programme that teams up three to five NUS student musicians with a professional sound artist every semester on an eight-week workshopping process to create a genre-defying collaborative sound performance. In AY 2024/2025, students will work with Syafiq Halid.
For more info and to apply for the upcoming edition of Four Blank Walls, please visit our application form.
2) Living Arts Lab
The Living Arts Lab is envisioned as an inspiring and generative hang-out space for our students, just outside the CFA office (UTown SRC Level 3), that can also be used for casual arts activities, projects, and open dialogue with staff in the CFA office.
As part of the upcoming launch of the Living Arts Lab, a puppetry workshop will be held for students, where your final puppet creations will be put up on display as part of the Living Arts Lab exhibition. For more info and to apply, please visit our application form.
CFA is interested in working with scenographers and set designers in the rejuvenation of the Living Arts Lab on a yearly basis. If you are interested, please reach out to cfaprogrammes@nus.edu.sg
3) Choreographing the Campus
Choreographing the Campus is a series that encourages NUS student dancers to create site-specific and site-responsive dance performances in unconventional spaces on campus.
If you are interested in being involved, please email cfaprogrammes@nus.edu.sg.
4) Interactive Visual Installations
CFA is interested in putting up visual installations that students can interact with and build on. Such installations should be long-term projects that students can continually contribute to for a full semester.
Eligibility criteria:
- Engagement: Capture the attention of the NUS community, fostering a sense of engagement and interaction
- Creativity and expression: Provide a platform for expression, allowing the NUS community to voice their thoughts, creativity and beliefs
- Community building: Create a shared experience that promotes a sense of unity and connection with the campus community
If you are interested in being involved, please email cfaprogrammes@nus.edu.sg.
Application is open to both professional artists and students, however, students who are interested to apply must have demonstrated knowledge or experience in putting up large scale, long-term interactive installations.
If you would like to propose a new programme for third space that fulfils CFA’s primary selection criteria, as well as has a focus on experimentation and/or outreach, you may write to us at cfaprogrammes@nus.edu.sg with your proposal.
Eligibility:
- We encourage proposals for repeatable programmes that can take many forms – for example, art workshops or a performance series that can house many programmes with one objective or theme (e.g. Choreographing the Campus) as proposed above.
- If you are proposing a one-off project, benefit in terms of artistic development and experimentation must be demonstrated.
- We will prioritise programmes that are presented in unconventional spaces that allow the NUS community to encounter the work organically.
- Proposals for standalone shows will be rejected (e.g. a one-night concert in an indoor theatre)
NUS Arts Festival
Presented every year in Semester 2, the NUS Arts Festival is largest arts event on campus, with collaborative practice at the heart of its programming.
Working with local and international practitioners, our student artists are encouraged to avail themselves to the content-rich environment within the University, grounding their work in deep knowledge and using it as the basis of the development process.
Each iteration of the Festival is crafted with a core theme that responds to contemporary issues and facilitates the integration of research and learning as part of the artistic process, in addition to showcasing performances with mass appeal.
- The NUS Arts Festival welcomes applications from most genres of the performing arts
- Proposals that demonstrate interdisciplinarity will be prioritised
- The performance/production needs to be of a professional level
- Originality and experimentation in theme, artistic form and/or performance venue are encouraged
Supernova (Open to NUS students only)
Supernova is NUS' annual campus music and dance festival. Supernova: Rising Star 2024 is co-presented by the Office of Student Affairs and University Campus Infrastructure, in collaboration with NUS Students’ Union.
Visit the Supernova event page for more details.
Student Life Fair (Open to NUS students only)
The Student Life Fair (SLF) is an annual event aimed to showcase the vibrancy and diversity of student bodies in NUS.
All performing arts groups will be informed of performance opportunities at SLF leading up to the fair.
Other platforms
If none of the platforms above are suitable for you, you may also self-present your show with various forms of funding support available from OSA, or seek out other presentation platforms offered by NUS. Do note that other presentation platforms will not be under the purview of CFA.