ARTS BEYOND DISTANCE SEASON 2
Ridhwan Saidi
INXO Online Talk Series
Guest Speaker:
Ridhwan Saidi
About him:
Ridhwan Saidi is a Malaysian novelist, playwright, leftfield theatre maker and co-founder of indie publishing house, Moka Mocha Ink (mokamochaink.com) which focuses on contemporary Malay fictions and drama. He is a part of the LiteraCity research team, a literary mapping project of Kuala Lumpur. Teater Modular is his series of short plays consisting 13 offbeat playlets, whilst Teater Normcore is his series of full length plays, both with the intention to illuminate poetry and heightened appreciation towards deadpan humour. In 2019, he co-curated Pesta Playlet, an artist-run non-profit common ground for performance-based initiative through community building, research, workshop, discourse and publications.
Host:
Tan E-Jan (CEO of INXO Productions)
Date:
04/05/2020 (Monday)
Time:
8pm – 9pm
Language:
English
Key Takeaway:
- Ridhwan thinks that beauty is important in arts, but for him, beauty is more about truthfulness. You will define beauty from the position where you stand in time and space.
- Inspiration for Ridhwan is about open up all his senses to feel what comes to him.
- Art for him is about freedom and imagination. He shares about his thought when we live in this reality, its part of other people’s imagination. As a human being, to break free from that imagination, we can have our own imagination through art. He enjoys creating his own but not living in it.
- Ridhwan wants to break free from the specialization in the modern era, which differentiate every role into very specific role. (such as playwright, director, theatre maker …)
- He thinks that scientific thinking in art is important because arts is usually very sentimental, but when there is too much feeling, it has some sort of danger. It is important to be able to detach from the situation and analyse it with scientific reasons.
- Although acting is important in theatre, for Ridhwan is more about aesthethic and atmosphere in a particular space. He wants people to feel the ambience when come into a theatre. To compare live performance and digital production, he thinks that live performance gives the more alive feeling, and there is ambience where digital production could not translate and duplicate.
- Art form is diverse, whenever the changes happened, we need to learn about the new form and how to manage it. We need to know how to handle the new medium.
- He thinks that his work is ever changing. They transform in different spaces and medium, which he uses different ways to do it. Whenever he does a re-stage, it is a new thing. When he creates, he focuses well and do it right. He never pushed himself to do things, so he does not regret for what he did in his projects.
Podcast download:
Podcast Intro & Outro Music Credit:
ACOUSTIC BREEZE | ROYALTY FREE MUSIC
Composer: Benjamin Tissot
