Commissioned by Brisbane Music Festival for its program bloodpaths. Friday 29th November, & Sunday 1st December, Alex Raineri (piano) and Katina Olsen (dancer).
Born in Malaysia, I am yet somehow more literate in things French than Malay. I adore the exquisite pantoums made by Maurice Ravel and Charles Baudelaire – but I also know a third world poetic form got ransacked in the process. Writing Pantun was almost an act of reverse colonization, a thirdworld-born firstworlder reminding Western/French art of its Eastern/Malay source. My Pantun begins with a nursery rhyme and then a child suddenly grows up, very fast.
