Front Row

Experimental staging of a scaled-down opera work in a theatre built in a shoplot. The artists are from Korea and Spain, performing a popular opera, ‘La Traviata’. The music director and the soprano tell about the rising above the challenges of not only staging an opera but also staging it in an unusual space where acoustics might pose its own set of issues.

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A locally written and produced English-language musical by a company that describes itself as offering a platform for ‘Soul-Based Creators/Energisers to showcase/exercise their creativity while simultaneously building a holistic and diverse Community.’ It has a mission to ‘inspire rapid Change amongst the world’s population towards a Better Way of Living’ and add to that, to be ‘an avenue for these powerful Creators to step forward/up as the new Leaders of this New World’. A tall order for art and art practitioners.  The director and team tell how the musical, ‘Sand’ fulfills this mission.

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  Orang Orang Drum Theatre took its first production ‘Hidup Ini Senget’ on the road to smaller townships in the country. Through its engagement with its audiences, it reworked, re-imagined, deconstructed and reconstructed a new production called ‘LaguKu’.

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The Young KL Singers have organized a concert and appear to be testing and experimenting with its audience: to engender sight through their singing. The choir if off to test test its audience (its mind’s eye) through sound; to test how and emotions wash over the audience through organized auditory impulses.

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Pusaka has invited a group of performers from the Congo, the Bayaka Pygmies, to perform here in town. As a culture the Aka (or sometimes called Bayaka) have been dubbed ‘the best dads in the world’ by an organization, Fathers Direct. Will nurturing fathers engender a different kind of music? A different kind of sound?

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The conductor, David Chin, situates the monumental Bach’s St John Passion in its historical context and points out its significance today in the collection of sacred works. The soloists tell about singing sacred music in modern times.

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The Digital Art and Culture Festival made its first appearance in 2011. That three-day event took place at Suffolk House, Penang, and on display were works from animation, video, design, computer programmers and music. After a hiatus of several years, it’s making a comeback with installations, mobile film screening and more. But what is digital art and how does it intersect with culture?

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Ben Stock, here in KL to teach a young group of would-be musical-theatre performers the skills required for the genre, tells about life on the road for a performer who has to cross not just international borders but also time zones. He tells about the process of putting his show together and the ingredients to make it successful, and then what’s next to follow the earlier success. He is in town to perform in two separate shows over two weekends.

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The artist talks about his work in a Singapore exhibition titled, ‘After Utopia’. His specific visual work is called ‘Block B’ (a film, a documentary, but not your everyday film/documentary), with all the connotation and preconceived notions the title suggests. Chris Chong describes the process and points to the overt and covert impulses that drive his art and the role of the artist in a mercantile culture. That is, if that culture gives the artist the space he/she needs.

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He's back from Taiwan and now readying for his second solo concert in the country since graduating from Singapore's Yong Siew Toh Conservatory.

Bryan Lee has been described as ‘so talented it’s also intimidating’, but he humbly shares his reasons for the selected repertoire and explains the harp--the sounds it makes, the mood it creates and its place among other instruments.

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