The Public Forum, Panic Buttons: Culture and Crisis in Malaysia and the Region
The forum took place this afternoon, Sunday June 11, 2006 at the Actors Studio in the Bangsar Shopping Centre, KL, Malaysia. It's a studio theatre with a thrust stage and some very efficient air conditioning which had participants shivering through the first hour of proceedings. It's on the third floor of a shopping mall. Such is the nature of carving public space out of the private/corporate sphere. The session was moderated by Sharaad Kuttan, and began with short presentations by seven panellists, all of whom had participated in the previous two days of roundtable discussions at Valentine Willie Fine Art. The seven on the stage were Goenawan Mohamed, Kathy Rowland, Lee Weng Choy, John Pang, Yap Sau Bin, Chumpon Apisuk and Jennifer Lindsay.
The roundtable participants also reconvened after the close of this session to feed back on and critique the work of the three day event as a whole and to revisit some of the thoughts about continued activity which had been initiated in the closing session of the previous day's roundtable. That the group should meet again, that it should think about how to extend participation more widely (that language must be an issue in considering how to do this) and that the fact of meeting had a value as action in itself seemed to be broadly agreed. More thoughts on what was said will follow.
2006-06-06