How About An Age-Old Malaysian Fable Done in Traditional Wayang Kulit (with a Modern Twist)?

After an outstanding response from the first Yayasan Sime Darby Arts Festival (YSDAF) held last year and an overwhelming attendance of 15,000 people, the second installment of YSDAF is back!

YSDAF2016 will kick off this August with its first Satellite Show entitled Main Wayang: Hikayat Sang Kancil under the direction of ever-so-talented multimedia artist Fairuz Sulaiman, Creative Director of DAM Interactive.

With this upcoming production, Fairuz takes his passion for multimedia, fuses it with the playfulness of traditional wayang kulit (a.k.a shadow puppetry), then incorporates this into the well-known Malaysian fable of Sang Kancil.

To encourage creative innovation and interpretation of the arts among new generation Malaysians, the theme of the 2016 edition of YSDAF, Arts Education + Future, will feature DAM Interactive working with children from Yayasan Chow Kit (YCK) – an NGO working with at-risk youths in Malaysia.

Urbanisation and modern entertainment has contributed to a decline in the popularity of wayang kulit, and there’s a recent surge in efforts to bring the traditional art form back. This is where DAM Interactive comes in: getting youths involved and  adding a fun spin to wayang kulit by combining this form of shadow play with digital animation, live acting and audiovisual effects.

Fairuz and team organized Main Wayang workshops at secondary schools across the country under the Rakan Muda Mentorship Programme . The reinterpretation of Wayang Kulit continued growing until there was a platform created for children called Sekolah Main Wayang.

Main Wayang: Hikayat Sang Kancil will be performed entirely by children and teenagers aged between 14-17 years old from YCK.

With its grand outdoor setting across KLCC and performed under the moonlight (true to the tradition of Wayang Kulit), Hikayat Sang Kancil promises to take storytelling to a whole new level with its mash-up of the old and the new.

And we haven’t even gotten to the best part: the show is open to the public and is free of charge. Now how cool is that?

---

Supported by Standard Chartered Bank Malaysia, Main Wayang: Hikayat Sang Kancil is scheduled to be performed on 22 August (Saturday), 8.30pm at Laman Standard Chartered Kuala Lumpur. For more information on YSDAF 2016 , log on to