LAB: Live Arts Bangkok

Very Thai performs as a puppet in ‘Wayang Buku’ by Fahmi Fadzil.

18 August 2007, at Live Arts Bangkok, Kukrit Pramoj Heritage House, Bangkok

Very Thai performing as a ‘Tree of life’ puppet with another book playing another character in the Ramayana, in a staging of Wayang Buku by Malaysian performance artist Fahmi Fadzil in LAB.

Live Arts Bangkok (aka LAB festival) featured Malaysian performance artist Fahmi Fadzil. He staged one of his Wayang Buku performances, which vary depending on the country and time. In Bangkok he held a monologue with the audience that fused the Ramayana with contemporary events. It had multiple layers of metaphor and commentary, because each character was played not by a shadow puppet, but by a book, with its cover representing an interpretation of the character. Very Thai, with it multiplicity of common images on the cover, represented the Tree of Life (Kalapapruek in Thai), which is in shadow puppets depicted as a tree canopy adorned with multifarious aspects of life.

The characters’ interaction in the plot thus gets re-presented by the books playing those roles in those plot interactions, which puts those books into a new relationship and context. As in wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) in Malay (and Thai) culture, the narrator/puppeteer known as the dalang (talang in Thai) voices each character, relates the story and also comments in humorous, satirical ways upon current events. Fadzil did this with books related to contemporary issues in Thailand.

The performance was held in the performance Sala of Kukrit Pramoj Heritage Home, where the late politician, dancer, writer and publisher used to stage performances of Khon masked dance.