By Christian Adriel Tan (26S07B) and Gregory Ng (27S05A)
At 10.30 am, finding a seat in the canteen can feel like a competitive sport. Students weave between pillars carrying plates of prata, friends wave frantically across crowded tables, and latecomers resign themselves to whatever seat remains.
For twenty years, this has been the rhythm of breaks in RI. Soon, however, one of the school’s most familiar spaces will look very different.
Continue reading “The Canteen Reborn”
By Lerraine Neo (26A01A) and Koh Shin Robbie (26A01A)
The Singapore Chinese Orchestra concert hall, RICO’s chosen venue for this year’s ArtSeason concert, has a maximum capacity of 750 people. That’s by no means a small number; 750 hours is about a month’s time, $750 can buy 150 McDonald’s value meals, and 750 metres is only 78 metres short of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world.
It takes a certain confidence to book such a large external venue. To believe in the support of your friends, the effectiveness of your publicity materials, your own ability to draw crowds and sell tickets. RICO’s confidence did not stop at the size of their concert hall—their setlist, consisting of duets, solo concertos, medleys and ensembles on top of the usual orchestral pieces, posed challenges in both logistics and performers’ skill.
All this from an orchestra which—until as late as March—was struggling to recruit enough members to pad out their ranks. Where, then, had they gotten the confidence to plan such an ambitious concert?
Continue reading “A House, Full: The Odyssey 2026”
By Rebekah Yew (27S05A) and Saadhana Kalimuthu (27A01C)
All photos courtesy of Daniel Lo Kai Ngee (Lu Kaiyi) (27S03F), Edward Tham Ming Hong (Tan Mingkang) (27S07B), and Khoo Zheng Yuan Orlando (27S06F) of Raffles Art and Photographic Society (RAPS)
The PAC had never looked so prim, so proper, so formal. On 28 May, the 45th and 46th Students’ Councils gathered for the much-anticipated investiture. But beneath the stiff collars and ceremonial gravity, something warmer was already happening: councillors slipping notes and small gifts into one another’s hands, quiet exchanges of gratitude for the past year and before the weight of responsibility fully settled in.
Continue reading “Setting Sail on a New Voyage: 46th Students’ Council Investiture”
By Lee Yi Ning Megan (27A01B) and Tran My Linh (27A01B)
All photos courtesy of Raffles Art and Photographic Society
From nostalgic 2000s hits to energetic Bollywood numbers, Raffles Street Dance’s (RSD) latest showcase, Timeless: A Journey Through the Eras of Dance, proved that dance transcends generations.
Held on 6 May at the Performing Arts Centre (PAC), the showcase brought audiences through different musical and dance eras from the 1980s to the present day, blending genres, styles and cultures into one cohesive performance. Inspired partly by the concept of different “eras” popularised by Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, the idea for the showcase emerged spontaneously during a practice break.
What began as a casual conversation gradually evolved into a full-fledged exploration of how dance styles and music have transformed over time. For the RSD Exco, the theme Timeless also reflected a broader cultural nostalgia.
“A lot of old songs are coming back,” Riddhi Pradhan (26S06C), Secretary of RSD explained. “People are yearning for the 2010s and the 2000s, and I think our CCA shares that same feeling. We enjoy both old music and new music, and we wanted a theme that could cohesively bring all these songs and styles together.”
Rather than restricting themselves to a single genre or aesthetic, the dancers embraced the diversity of street dance across decades. Each item was carefully crafted to embody the identity of a particular era while ensuring it still flowed naturally into the overall programme.
By Koh Shin Robbie (26A01A) and Tok Kai Xue Traven (26A01B)
In 1959, Singapore saw the first of many key developments to its education system: a bilingualism policy. Its premise was simple—English, as the language of international business, would be mandated to be taught in all schools. Alongside this, the study of one’s mother tongue (namely Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil) would also be made compulsory to ensure students did not lose touch with their cultural roots.
In an instant, dialect languages were taken out of official usage. Radio stations switched to purely official languages, and an entire Speak Mandarin Campaign was launched with vigorous dissuasion of dialect use.
For Mandarin, however, this line of reasoning proved rather ironic. In the face of institutional pressures to adopt Mandarin as their home language, what would happen to the dialect-speaking households which relied heavily on Hokkien, Teochew or Hakka to communicate on a daily basis? How would the precious, dialectal tongues which served generations upon generations of ancestors manage to maintain their relevance?
Continue reading “To Speak the Language of Home: Raffles Dialects”