Visual treats for all

Five years ago, the George Town Festival in Penang was an ambitious project designed to put the bustling island on the arts and culture map. The idea was to give Penang a solid platform to grow through arts and culture and to find a voice on the regional scene. 

It has steadily grown from its modest beginnings of heritage trishaw treasure hunts and street performers along Armenian Street into an international event that features a month-long programme filled with theatre, music, art, dance, opera, films and more.

“I have to be frank. The festival started in 2010 and I was given six weeks to plan it. How do you do that? So, what we did was put together a series of events,” says festival director Joe Sidek, 55. “The road map we took was to position and brand the festival as an event that people would recognise and want to participate in and attend.”

This year’s festival, which began on August 1, comes with bigger names and acts and boasts more than 100 performances and activities.

Celebrating the culture, heritage and history of George Town, which was listed as a Unesco Heritage Site in 2008, the festival’s venues include historic mansions and landmark streets as well as the Penang Performing Arts Centre and other places.

“More importantly, we want to inspire local creative talent by bringing in international acts to nudge them to say ‘I can do that’,” Sidek explains.

Many of the performances, exhibitions and workshops, are free while others have ticket prices as low as RM20 to RM200 (Bt200 to Bt2,000).

Upcoming acts include Friday’s Circus Circus, with performers from Finland, Japan, China and Thailand doing acrobatics, dance, magic and clowning. On Thursday and Friday, Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui stages “Play”. On Friday and Saturday, it’s the turn of “Rising” by British-Indian kathak dancer Aakash Odedra, while on August 22 and 23, it’s Roysten Abel’s musical theatre “The Kitchen”.

But while these shows draw the crowds, the George Town Festival is still, by and large, for the local audience.

“The first step is to give culture to our own people. There is no point putting on cultural shows for foreigners when our own people don’t appreciate it. If we keep producing shows for the foreigners, we are on the wrong track,” says Sidek. “You don’t have to be cultured, rich, intelligent or belong to a certain social class to appreciate the arts.”

For instance, there’s the V&A Project, which is held on August 31, the closing day, and is a free festival on Victoria and Armenian streets.

Some of the highlights of the V&A Project are kuda kepang and mak yong performances, a handicraft market and “Trolleys”, an Australian production that mixes a street-dancing flash-mob with five shopping carts.

Sidek also believes Penang has interesting stories to offer and this is where the specially commissioned works come into play.

“By commissioning a work, especially about the people in George Town, about a special house, about a special people, it makes it your own. You take ownership of the festival and this is very important. There is no use buying big acts because any festival can do that. I feel the direction of our festival should be about owning it,” he says.

This year, the local works are filmmaker Saw Teong Hin’s “Hai Kin Xin Lor” (“Hokkien Play”) and “2 Houses”, written and directed by Singaporean Lim Yu-Beng.

Taking place in Soonstead Mansion, the site-specific “2 Houses” has World War II and the post-war “Emergency Years” as the backdrop.

“This play is a collaboration between Singapore and Malaysia and it’s about two blood brothers who grew up together. It’s also about wealth, power, women and the strength of women,” Sidek says. “The playwright has managed to layer all of this in a story about the houses and layer it more around Merdeka, pride and brotherhood.”

“Hai Kin Xin Lor”, meanwhile, centres on a filmmaker who returns to Penang to film his family without their knowledge.

Other noteworthy local productions are “Boria Fest”, a parody theatre rooted deep in Penang’s history, the “Obscura Festival of Photography” and “Unpack-Repack: A Tribute to Ismail Hashim (1940-2013)”, honouring the late influential Malaysian lensman.

For Sidek, one of the most memorable acknowledgements he has received for the George Town Festival was when a woman contributed a sizeable donation to the festival.

“It happened about a month ago. I saw this lady buying a ticket for the festival and I thanked her for her support. Moments later, I was told that she was looking for me and when I met her, she gave me RM1,000. She could have bought the most expensive ticket but she decided to contribute it to the festival itself. That shows appreciation,” Sidek says.

 

On the Web: www.GeorgeTownFestival.com