Front Row

The 32-year-old Five Arts Centre recently received a very prestigious grant presented by the Japan Art Foundation. The grant not only recognizes the arts collective’s community engagement in the past, but provides the resources for Five Arts Centre to continue to engage and involve young people in the arts. We find out what lies ahead and how far this grant of 5 million yen (over RM200k) will reach in the company’s activities.

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Our guest thinks the world of Adele, the singer. And she has written a musical--a one-woman musical--to tell her story. We find out from Ms Price where she got her information from beyond what’s in the public domain. We get her to sing a few songs and find out if Adele’s spirit resides in her.

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Our guest describes the sound the choir makes and points out why an academically competitive institution like the University of Cambridge could nurture so many choirs. Graham Ross underscores why in the competitive race to recruit undergraduates to his choir, what it offers and what distinguishes this choir from others. The choir, after its recital, sings with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra this weekend.

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The recent brouhaha precipitated by the award for the Best Malaysian Film has provided the context for the present festival to celebrate diversity in local films. Our guests tell us how these local films were selected to be produced and then to be screened at the festival which will be bookended with a forum at the start and at the end of all the screenings.

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Four young people got together to sing but is passion enough to sustain them. The guys tell how they have to market themselves in  order to get paying gigs, and how for a spell must literally sing for their supper.

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Adibah Noor tells about her life as an artist on Front Row and about her upcoming show at a jazz club.  Here is a performer who has left her mark in music, films and television shows, not counting her presence in TVCs and point-of-sale collaterals. Michael Veerapen places Adibah in the context of singers in the country.

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Shakespeare in English and set in England is to be expected. But locally we have seen the Bard staged in Chinese and in China; in Malay and in Malaya or some imagined country in Nusantara. Now the Bard travels to Bollywood. Our guests tell us what shakes this Shakespeare into saris and salwar kameez.

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Our guest tells us about speaking from the centre of our voice in order to communicate authentically with others and to allow others to be comfortable with us.  He also shares what he has discovered about Shakespeare, and will be sharing this information in his performance which he sings songs based on the Bard’s works, like ‘West Side Story’, and ‘The Lion King’, including some sonnets put into songs.

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Our guests tell us about the Chinese Jazz movement  in the country, the trials and tribulations.  With more venues available for live music performances, opportunities open up for singers in the vernacular to find their audience and to find collaborators.

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In-your-face performances of poetry take centre stage in ‘100 Thousand Poets for Change 2016’. Our guest tells why the written word can be persuasive, more so when it is performed often by people who are not necessarily performers but who are honestly trying to share an ideal.

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