Front Row

With its focus on education, in particular arts education, the festival will not only showcase the variety of performing and visual arts available but also point out the evolution of the local arts industry. The artistic director will share how the events and arts offerings are curated while the artist underscores the part her installation plays. The chairman of YSD, YB Tun Musa Hitam has underscored that education is important as the springboard to develop new creative talents, aside from bridging the existing gaps in the arts industry.

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When numbers appear, they suggest just by their placement a context. The number 2057, points to the future, beyond the sacred 2020 when Malaysia is supposed to attain ‘developed’ status, leaving behind notions that it is still becoming. A group of artists have been challenged to imagine 2057, some forty years into the future and 37 years beyond 2020. Echoes of Zager and Evans ‘In the Year 2525’.

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‘La Boheme’ an opera by Puccini premiered in 1896, and notwithstanding its early subdued responses, became very popular.  Even today, the composer’s name ranks very high and ‘La Boheme’ ranks in the top three of most performed operas in the 2014-2015 season. Worldwide. Our guests answer if our local opera audiences are ready to go beyond the La Bohemes and the La Traviatas.

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Our guests introduce us to two different strains of Indian music--North Indian Classical and South Indian Carnatic--and meld them for us in preparation for an upcoming concert. They will be playing the violin and the sitar to give us a taste of what the combined ‘sounds’ of these two different strains of music would create, although the other musicians (tabla and mridangam players) who will be at the concert are not in the studio.

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The London-based guitarist, Robin Banerjee, who has accompanied Amy Winehouse is in town. He is playing  with Dasha Logan. He relates his 20 years as a professional and about embracing different genres to create his own style and feel.

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Last year, KataKatha brought together 10 principal Southeast Asian cultural figures--distinguished names from various fields of the arts--from Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Singapore, and Malaysia to participate in a series of conversations around the theme of ‘Shared History, Shared Culture, Shared Traditions’. This exhibition reflects what they discussed and then explored, to make manifest the influence of the environment, climate, history, movement and myth that compel the creative process.

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Our guests tell about keeping traditional dances relevant to the audience when the latter may not be aware or even care about ‘the old’. But changing and evolving traditions poses a different set of questions about change and continuity. Using their past and present dances as examples, Ajith Dass and Ramli Ibrahim discuss the nature of choreographing dances with roots in old cultures and religions.

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The young artists point out that the essence of their theatre company is to examine the space between living and breaking away from tradition. This examination compels them to question what’s ‘good’ and what’s bad’, who is the saint and who the sinner.  But is there a way of knowing if it is as they claim, “Life is nothing but a view through a kaleidoscope, where a single picture is portrayed through different facets and shades of meaning.” The director talks about its production of ‘Ulek Mayang’.

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Exploring the past and questioning if it is fixed or something malleable, constantly reshaped by the backward-casting eye. Our guests, the Wei Ling Gallery owner and curator, point to our penchant for glamourizing the past, harkening back to “the  good old” days. They underscore that glorifying the past perhaps reveals more about how we feel about the present and the future. 

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A rare treat to have throat-singers on-air, an ancient art-form that is almost lost to the world. More special when these are from the Inuits of Kangiqsualujjuaq, Nunavik, Canada. The sisters, who make up Nukariik, demonstrate and explain what ‘throat singing’ is and if theirs differs from that practiced by Tibetan singers and the Ainus of Japan. They will also share their perspectives on their traditional dances, like the drum dance, including games and songs.

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