Out to Space

13-15 April is Songkran Festival, traditional Thai New Year. Thai community in Sydney has the celebration called Thailand Grand Festival in Tumbalong Park, Darling Harbour. Last year I explored the Buddhist ceremony and the entertainments on stage. This year is pretty much the routine with merit making and blessing in the morning then stage shows in the afternoon. No Aboriginal welcoming protocol has a presence here, just the Premier representative. Do we need a black fella to officially open every single event in Australia or, at least, just an acknowledgement?

The best improvement this year must be Singha Beer tent and the promotion girls are willing to table serve the customers while gulping some beer with her friends along the way. It feels like home. Of course, there are loads of food. Many of them you cannot find in typical Thai restaurants in Sydney. Other than that is largely tourism promotion.

The hi-light performance would be Joe Louis Traditional Thai Puppet Theatre. Unfortunately, the show has to stop due to the rain. The best Thai attitude is still applied here by stating it is the shower of the angels even though everything is on hold for a while. Nevertheless, when weather is clear, the event continues and the crowd is back again despite of the soggy ground.

I would like to use the word Songkran on this post which unofficially unannounced in the event. It is the best we can get on such a special occasion away from home in Sydney.

It’s dark, kinky and funny. The Fabulous Punch and Judy Show is the Aussie extreme adaptation of this classic puppet show. This medley of sex and murder scenes portrays the violence and turns into a cabaret as if out of this world. On the other hand, they could be found in the news everyday: wife beating, child raping, gay bashing and so on.

No wonder why I felt very intense after the first time visiting this play as a photographer on the final run-through. While I was concentrating on visions through the camera, the violence came straight into my brain without diluting with punch lines. It is comedy, anyhow. Once I saw it again as an audience on the opening night, I could laugh with its wits and outrages. Surreal tone went along perfectly with the wacky performances. Especially, the cover version of Aussie pop classic was the most adorable.

The Fabulous Punch and Judy Show is a part of Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival 2008 and currently playing at Cleveland Street Theatre until 29 February.

Have a closer look at some of the likay performers on the night I visited them.

Likay is the most popular Thai folk theatre in the country. Because the practice of likay is not confined to strict classical Thai performances, it has a long history of its adjustments to audience demands and technologies while maintaining the traditional integrity. Richard Barrow has a sample clip of a likay. In the old days, when it was their peaks, some hi-profile troupes had their own TV programs. However, since the popularity is going down, surviving the fierce competitions from modern entertainments is not easy.

Nok Krajib (นกกระจิบ), 11, is the youngest of 14 performers in Petch Jing Troupe (เพชรจริง), where she is being trained by her extended likey family from Sukothai Province in the north of Thailand.

After school tonight, she gets back home, putting on make up and dressing up to get ready for the show.

Her home is the theatre which is moving around Bangkok for the best deal to temporarily reside in the community. They have been here in the market of Chaeng Wattana Housing Estate, northern suburb of Bangkok, for a month.

Just a quick preparation before the show by the key performers while others are still dressing.

Petch Jing, the leader of the Troupe, is fixing the mixer. The audio system has been the mojor problem since the show started tonight.

Nok Krajib’s small appearance is while the market is closing down for the night. No one really pays attention to the performance except a bunch of local kids and a glue sniffer. The troupe shares electricity with the market therefore they can only use the full power after the market shut down.

Then she goes off the stage to sell garlands to the audience in the market. The only show income is from the garland selling to the patrons so that they can wear them to the favourite likay performers.

And she is back on the stage again as a dancer in the last half of the show which is just a sing-along with karaoke but it is the peak of the night when they can interact with the crowd and sell the most garlands. Unfortunately, the audio issue is getting worse. The noise is too hard to fix so they have to wrap up the night with frustration.

I don’t know why I go through the Opening Ceremony of 24th SEA Games almost the whole show, maybe because of my old profession when we did 13th Asian Games Opening and Closing Ceremony 9 years ago or just the unquestionable patriotism. It takes such a patience to download badly encoded videos from the official website. Since no one has put it on YouTube yet, giving the fact that Thailand has just recently unblocked the entire site.

Moreover, it takes quite a thick skin to watch it through with a number of points that severely embarrass me as a Thai. You know, every time while I am watching this kind of performances, I always want to smother the commentators from the network who try to give every details of every movements on the screen as if we could not see the things. Luckily, these videos have no commentator to annoy me. However, this ceremony, there are two presenters explaining the concept before each segment and the other two voice over narrators describing in between all through the show, both in Thai and English. Now we are not just blind but also dumb.

The show tries very hard to tell the world how amazing Thailand is by beginning every segment with Amazing with capital A. Hey, that is a tourist pamphlet and it is an old one that has been used up for over a decade. I am not going to complaint about the oversaturated loyalty to the King in the opening segment, The Amazing Great King. The narration tells it all and it goes on and on and on and on. At last, girls in silver cat suits come out in the final segment, The Amazing Celebrations. Those baby cat dolls bring the joy to His Majesty the King’s 80th Birthday Anniversary, 5th December 2007 Sports Complex with their playful chreography and seems to fulfil the night perfectly.

SEA Games is a biannual Olympic-like of South East Asian countries. This year the Game is held mainly in the north-eastern city of Thailand, Nakorn Ratchasima or Korat. It is clearly an indulgence that the host shamelessly uses the event to inflate nationalism rather than celebrate the sportsmanship of the nations. Of course, with no giants like USA, Russia and China, it is much easier to compete amongst ourselves and win, at any causes.