FEAST story showcases often have a distinctive feel about them, and the second installment of ACROSS BORDERS, our series of collaborations with our Institutional Members, was a wonderful case in point. It featured a total of six tales - three told by five members of Ayo Dongeng Indonesia (ADI) interlaced with three stories told by FEAST members (from India, Singapore and Vietnam.)  Lavanya Prasad, our Institutional Member liaison, and Aisha Habir (from ADI) were the emcees and did an excellent job of stringing six disparate pearls into a single necklace of stories.

Watch it nowThe recording is next to information on Instittuional membership.

Two things were particularly remarkable.

Firstly, four of the stories were told as tandems (hence the ten tellers for six stories!) It was fascinating  to see how the four teams explored the mix of narration and character. the Indonesian tellers balanced music and song as well as narration and dialogue in their seamless transition from one teller to the next.  Meenu S and Parvathy Eswaran excelled in their comical portrayal of a couple cooking dosai ( and their trouble with a eco-friendlydemon!) using digital backgrounds to change location and costume/wig and facial hair to change their appearance. Diep Tran and Roger Jenkins told their Vietnamese story entirely in dialogue, with Diep using two cut-out figure pupets to represent her character's parents when they finally arrived in the story.

Secondly, it is a truth universally acknowledged (as Jane Austen might have said), that if you have a single story session possessing Indonesian and Indian tellers, you are going to hear good singing! Nurma and Alex in the first story had a boy who loved to play his drum (despite a sleeping dragon near by) which led to a very noisy boat race (with audience paddling participation). Both Putri Dewi and Anagha Prasad in their stories made extensive use of singing local folkssong, adding a charming and occsioanally haunting quality to their stories of family rejection and acceptance.  Vassilisa and Adelia also made good effect of singing and some dance too during their touching story of an abducted sister (and her seven brothers!) reconnecting with their parents. Distinctive flavours of of three regions of Indonesia and two from India were sprinkled throughout these stories.