Wonderful Events So Far!

As an organiser of a small festival (that's why we called it FRINGE), I should be happy with the outcomes, especially the presentation of 6 mono/polidrama - Hamzah Tahir, Syahrul Fitri, Francis, Marlenny, Arif and my Gebu Gembira's reading. Actually, we did more than just reading for Gebu Gembira, so I am very happy. Some people reacted very positively towards all the 6 works. In fact two of the works were taken to Festival Teater Malaysia as part of the presentation. May be that's the positive attitude that I should take. Today, I got some messages from friends abroad and locally saying that we should continue and do it. Yeah, sure we have some problems with money, space, dates, food, t-shirt, leaftlet, banner, poster, logo, letter of invitations and our sole sponsor Galeri Tenaga. By the way, I decided to withdraw our application for sponsorship from Galeri Tenaga due to some technicalities. So far four officers from KEKKWA have been calling us regarding the funding and nothing is decided yet and we are about to end our festival by early August. Having said that, we are having 2 programmes that have been  absorbed to the KL FRINGE FESTIVAL 2008, The Day I Met The Prince and Malam 7 Drama 7 Duri. The Biografi, Dokumen Tari by Arifwaran is a series of talks, interviews, videos about dance, curated by Arifwaran. Festival is responsibled for the final presentation of Mural Jam, curated by Fathullah Lokman, featuring 6 bands and few guest artists.

We realised that things have been difficult for us with regards to media, due to the various situations, lack of arts writers as well as lack of interest for the arts among the newspaper. Having said that, we have a little listings from NST and Berita Harian, small column in Harian Metro. Yesterday, we got a very good review on Syahrul Fitri's play, Gugurnya Kopiah Putih. Some audience even suggested to us to expand the work to a full scale production.

Jo Kukathas, a famous theatre director, suggested that we should continue to do the festival and to bring the work to JB Arts Festival next year, what a good suggestion.

Though I am very sad with some of the comments given about our scheduling and so on, we are very determined that we could do better work next year with more people, organisations and media helping us. We really appreciate all our friends, who have been working and helping us day and nite - Zamri, Iswazir, Oteng, Ismaliza, Adi, and DBP staff (Wahab, Harun & Jai) to make all presentations successful!

Some people even call us "SYOK SENDIRI" with that little festival,  but I think it is important to have a little dream and make it big, especially to give the idea to the young people that it is possible to do things even in difficult times.