Front Row

Professor Elizabeth Moore is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, who specializes in the connections between the past and present in the archaeology, cultural heritage and landscape of Mainland Southeast Asia during the first and early second millennia CE. We speak to her about Buddhist archaeology in Myanmar.

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We speak to documentary photographer Greg Constantine, who, for the past nine years, has been documenting the struggles of the Rohingya community from Burma. He will discuss his work, travels and upcoming exhibition of his project, Exiled To Nowhere: Burma's Rohingya.

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Why make fun of the funny? And where’s the originality of the take? The actors in Faulty Towers explains the raison d’etre of spoofing Fawlty Towers which starred John Cleese, Prunella Scales and Andrew Sachs. Adding to all this fun-poking, the actors will be serving dinner to the patrons who both come to dine and be entertained.

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 Digging into our local puppeteering tradition and borrowings from beyond, a small puppet-festival emerges with local and Thai performers. The guests unveil how they marry traditions and the process of creating stories for these puppets.

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 The musician and trainer of choirs gives a history of Christian sacred music, and explains why she feels compelled to modify the term for an Asian context which does not have deep European roots.

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Mah Meri (one of the 18 tribes of Orang Asli) of Pulau Carey under the organization of Pusaka Evenings at Publika performs ritual songs and dances, including its well-known mask dance called Mayin Jo-oh. Pauline Fan tells about the growth and struggles of Mah Meri in the face of modernity and challenges to its culture.

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A musical which tells the story of a Chinese artist Li Shu Tong, who gave up his artistic life for an ascetic one. The writer-director tells about the kinds of works she produces for the stage, underscoring the need for the arts to serve a larger cause beyond aesthetics.

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The company brings to the KL stage its fifth production of the Bard’s play, the Tragedy of Othello, but with its own abridged format. The guests tell about why this nearly 450 year old play continues to resonant even with a Malaysian audience.

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 A music theater/ cabaret plus comedy styled show, much like Forbidden Broadway or Broadway Backwards. The five of singer-performers--Joshua Gui, Kerry-Ann Khoo, Eunice Lew, Kellen Yau and Dennis Yeap--come together to share their awkward moments in life through songs and humor. The group gives pop songs and musical numbers a different spin, utilizing the group’s individual stories to give the songs new contexts.

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The young artist explains the impulse to paint animals and how even in this series of beastly beauty (or beautiful beasts) there is an evolution and a clarity of vision. His earlier works have white spaces, but details and color cover every inch of his later ones.

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