Thursday, October 05, 2006

Opening

Some photos from the official opening ceremony of the festival held at the Royal Palace, Ubud. (Right) The gateway.








(Left) Roswidiana, greeting guests. She works at Indus and also met us at the airport.










(Right) The guests arrive. Anita Desai chats to Ziauddin Sardar.











(Left) Gamelan - of course. There was a really magical moment when the orchestra launched in Ravel's Bolero!








(Right) After the speeches, there was an excellent dance performance.







(Left) A tribute to Pramoedya was held at the Lotus Stage, Puri Saraswati. This was the first tribute for Pak Pram held since his death last year. There were film excerpts, readings and a keynote address by Goenawan Mohamad. There was a pretty big crowd crammed into a very small area, most standing and we happened to be at the back. We had to leave before the end but I heard that it got pretty emotional when Pramoedya's editor and publisher Joesoef Isak got to the concluding remarks.

Postscript:

This in Sunday's Jakarta Post :
Malaysia editor and writer Dina Zaman was one of the first to take her seat and enjoy the ambiance of gurgling water and an amphibian orchestra croaking and chirping from among the lotus fronds surrounding the stage.
Poetic, huh? But it doesn't mention the wonderful Sharon Bakar sitting next to her! We were only early because we got the time wrong, and then wandered off again, got delayed by a restaurant order that took an age to come and came back too late to get a seat.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

welcome back sharon! left a message on your phone. will be sending you the ubud photos now!

Ted Mahsun said...

Good to see they had a tribute to Pramoedya.

Anonymous said...

Sharon, Dina,
Welcome back, sounds like you both had a ball! Dina, I'm especially proud of you up there with the Greats (in Sharon's previous post).
I'm sure you both made them feel all Malaysians are intelligent, mature, liberal and most of all very very charming.

Anonymous said...

hehe animah you are too kind. don't know about making an impression on anyone but we had a ball. though we lacked sleep - why did the dogs, chickens, cicaks and geese have to play and howl from 2am to 5am - every night?, we learned a lot from everyone.

i really do think malaysians should use the festival as a platform for their wares - books, films etc. good international crowd, and friendly too! so next year it is!

Anonymous said...

selamat pulang, babes! i'm sure both of you did us proud at the festival, toilet incident notwithstanding hahaha.

thanks for sharing with us your stories and photos! :)

bibliobibuli said...

thanks for the pics ms d. the one with the dog is best.

ted - yes, indeed. how sad it is so many months later ... and still no official recognition by the govt. of indonesia

animah - sure we did. and we are the greats ourselves ...

marisa - can see we're not going to live the toilet incident down