Front Row

Our guests tell why--besides celebrating the Belgian King’s Birthday and the 60th anniversary of bilateral relations between the Kingdom of Belgium and Malaysia-- a world renowned conductor is here and what he hopes to achieve with the young musicians performing under his baton. The conductor tells also about his part in “Star Wars in Concert World Tour.” He informs why Belgium wants to support the arts.

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Our producer Lim Soon Heng goes to the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas to talk to the puppeteers and one of their puppets to find out what they will be doing this weekend in The Great Chipmunk Picnic’. The Talking Tree and Leopold the Leopard will be storytelling and entertaining with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of the resident conductor Naohisa Furusawa.

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Flamenco seems to be in the air--the traditional music, the music infused with jazz, the dance in a recital, the dance in a story. The Embassy of Spain brings to Kuala Lumpur an artist who is described as one that enables the audience to see “those little things that touch our soul and move us.”

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In a rare treat, Malaysians will get to attend a performance by Tinariwen Live in KL. This Tuareg group of musicians are from the Sahara, in an area that encompasses parts of Libya, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Bukina Faso. Grammy award winners. As a people, Tuaregs are nomadic. The Tinariwen is a Grammy award-winning group of musicians. Our guests tell us about this group and the culture it belongs to.

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Another Japanese arts production comes to town and this time a performance based on Shichiro Fukazawa’s a novel ‘The Ballad of Narayama’ which was published in 1956. Two films have been made and now a live performance by Theatre Moments. The artistic director and co-founder tells of his organization: its birth, theatre approach and philosophy of performance.

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There has been no bigger influence on contemporary poetry than hip hop. It’s difficult to see where hip hop begins and spoken word poetry ends. But despite all their similarities, academics still argue whether rap is poetry. This month on Speak Easy, Elaine Foster speaks to Malaysian hip hop artist, Jin Hackman, and spoken word poet, Sheena Baharudin, about poetry and hip hop.

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In 1967, early in the history of Malaysia, several artists came together and held a group exhibition appropriately titled 'GRUP'. Ilham Gallery has organized an exhibition titled 'GRUP 1957 - 1973', extending the scope of the works covered and to situate these artists in the context of modern art in our country. The co-curators tells not only about the artists and their works but also the kind of infrastructure that aided or obstructed their growth.

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After a play on damaging corporate HR policies, Theatre Sauce takes on clinical depression in” 4.48 Psychosis” a work by British playwright, Sarah Kane. It was her last work. Our guests tell how to present a play that has “has no explicit characters or stage directions.” Kane herself suffered from clinical depression. She died at her own hands.

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The guests share on a family-friendly play--based on a “wittily written”book by Anna Kemp and “cheerily illustrated”by Sara Ogilvie--about a dog, a ballerina. Or more precisely, a dog that thinks he’s one for ballet. Biff like “moonlight and music and walking on his tiptoes.”

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Taking the host of phonetic and linguistic slippages provided by M (Malaysia, Merdeka, Malaya, Malay, and of course, Mama) as entry points, Tan Zi Hao mulls over the delicate relationship between language and nation, between his mother-tongue and mother-nation. The curator, Vincent Leong, points to those slippages and unravels the tensions.

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