Singapore - This year`s Singapore Youth Festival (SYF) opening ceremony on Friday will feature two firsts - an indoor parade led by a woman commander.
To be held at the Singapore Indoor Stadium, it will kick off the month-long festival which aims to showcase the talents of youths in performing arts, sports and uniformed groups.
Parades used to be held every alternate year in the outdoors when the opening ceremonies were staged at the National Stadium. But with the stadium now closed, organisers have decided to move the ceremony to the Indoor Stadium.
Miss Sum Chee Wah, Ministry of Education`s education programmes director, said: `There are constraints working indoors... one of them is space.
But we decided that we should have a parade because one can do things differently within constraints and come up with up with creative ideas that allow us to overcome the constraints.`
Commandant National Cadet Corps (NCC) Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Khoo said to overcome space constraints, the number of parade participants has been cut from the usual 1,300 to 667 this year.
Some highlights of the opening ceremony will include a mass dance segment featuring light effects and magic and a gymnastic routine performed by Southeast Asian Games gold medallists Nicole and Tabitha Tay on a platform which is suspended in air.
The festival will see school groups perform in the malls and heartlands. Foreign groups from neighbouring countries like South Korea, Thailand and Brunei and Hong Kong will also be joining in. By Amelia Tan
Source: http://www.straitstimes.com (June 25, 2008)