Wayang Buku to Bangkok!

We're very happy to announce that Wayang Buku - one of the forms developed in 2006 as a means to investigate the performance and performativity of books - has just been invited to the Jim Thompson House: Live Arts Bangkok festival.

Azmyl Yunor and Fahmi Fadzil will be performing Wayang Buku 17-19 August 2007 at the Jim Thompson House Library in Bangkok.

Details to follow.

NST Review

A review of Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari by Lim How Ngean of the New Straits Times! Enjois.

The Running Puppeteers

We've recently completed Mark Teh's Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari (Five Arts Centre), a documentary theatre performance that presents the lives of Malaysia's two most important dalangs (shadow puppeteers) - Pak Hamzah Awang Amat and Pak Dollah Baju Merah (or Abdullah bin Ibrahim) - alongside cheeky takes on the Betara Kala story from the wayang kulit Siam performance repertoire. It was toured in several colleges and universities within the Klang Valley as well as a 3-night public performance at The Annexe @ Central Market.

While not directly a Projek Wayang endeavor, this project marked the successful collaboration among KL art practitioners from various fields in an attempt to engage with the wayang kulit Siam tradition. More will surely come out of this!

While waiting for reviews, we serve you an array of wonderful photographs of the production when it was performed at Taylors University College, Subang Jaya, taken by Myra Mahyuddin.

Ucap Mula - a Beginning

Over the last few years, a group of young arts practitioners - visual artists, stage performers, musicians, graphic designers, writers - have been working towards understanding the Wayang Kulit Siam performance, the Kelantanese variant of the South East Asian shadow puppetry form.

This understanding is then translated into new performance forms - experimentations, really - that help to consolidate our findings or to articulate certain questions we have about what we have found so far. Working from form and traveling inwards into the narrative structure of the wayang form, we have had to attend to questions as elementary (though not simple) as "Why the use of leather?", "Why electric bulbs and not an open flame?", to "What does it mean to improvise?", among many others.

We hope that through learning this wayang form as a point of departure, we can eventually acquire some measure of performance sensibility and a degree of understanding of why wayang developed like it did in Kelantan (and also its sister forms in Java, Cambodia, Thailand, et al), and how a city like Kuala Lumpur (where most of us are currently based) can tell her stories through her own form of wayang.

This blog is a collection of exploits, thoughts, and articulations of our adventures in wayang.