Saturday, October 06, 2007

Beneath the Bali Moon

You'll probably recognise Ann Lee on the right in this picture, but who is this thoroughly obnoxious Malaysian government minister who wants to appropriate the Ubud Festival next year and have it happen in KL because, of course, the country does everything bigger and better?

This was once of the cabaret performances at the Jazz Cafe in Ubud last Saturday night. Other highlights of the evening were Indian author and contender Shashi Tharoor's stand up comedy with lots of UN jokes (the author was a contender for secretary general's post) , and Singaporean poet Cyril Wong's beautiful counter-tenor voice (he sounds like a cross between Andreas Scholl and Jimmy Somerville with not a note misplaced!).

A scene from Ann Lee's play Hang Li Poh: Melakan Princess being performed at The Yoga Barn on the first night of the Ubud Writers' and Readers' Festival. It was eerie and surreal ... but was this the way Ann intended it to be played when she wrote the piece?

I must confess though, that the full Balinese moon in the coconut trees did somewhat steal the show.

Postscript:

A much better account of the Writers' Caberet on Isman's blog.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Minister looks most familiar.
And to have him (?) surrounded by Ann and Kam, well that kind of gives him (?) away.
Did anyone in the audience guess, did you Sharon?

Anonymous said...

So what if we CAN do it bigger and better ? what if we can ? we have more money and better educated people (I mean, it's not as if Malaysians go to Indonesia to work as maids) -- we should be able to do better. It's going to be difficult to persuade your average 12-hour-working, Rm8000/month-earning Malaysian to sit down and read though. Maybe when there's another global depression.

bibliobibuli said...

you know what i was just saying about malaysians not getting satire? well ...

Isman H. Suryaman said...

I'm guessing it was supposed to be Malaysian Minister of Culture, Arts, and Heritage, YB Datuk Seri Utama Rais Yatim. But I haven't exactly been working in Malaysia as a maid (they rejected me saying, "You can't be a maid, you're a man"--how sexist!), so I might be wrong.

bibliobibuli said...

animah - oh yes, i knew. and nury did tell the audience afterwards "if you haven't met her yet, she actually is a very attractive young lady". but oh, i nearly choked laughing. jo was soooo cheeky. one of the reasons for shifting the festival to kl was "we also have plenty of unemployed australian women"! (a wicked dig at the festival organisers)

bibliobibuli said...

oh hi fool! lovely to see you here. and you're right about the character too. utterly wicked! (in both the old and new senses of the word)

Anonymous said...

How about that fool, they said the same to me, and I'm not Indonesian :P