Hands Percussion Team from Malaysia
Drumming Up a Storm!
Special guests: Kenny Endo Taiko Ensemble

Sat., Sept. 18, 8:00 – 9:30 p.m.
Sun., Sept. 19, 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

Kennedy Theatre

Combining mesmerizing theatrics with dynamic, multicultural rhythms, the renowned Hands Percussion Team drum ensemble from Malaysia has been creating quite a sensation at performances around the world since it was formed in 1997 out of its founders’ desire to bring new creativity to Chinese-Malaysian drumming traditions. Since then, the troupe has received stellar critical acclaim for its approach combining respect for cultural tradition with innovative, contemporary performances on instruments drawn from a diverse range of percussion cultures.

In recent years, Hands Percussion Team has thrilled audiences at numerous international performances, ranging from Southeast Asia and China to Europe and the Middle East. According to the ensemble’s website, “the sound of a drum is part of a universal human bond, interconnecting cultures and peoples.”

The ensemble’s Kennedy Theatre performances will feature a dozen of the troupe’s energetic young drummers, whose rigorous training includes intense physical and mental discipline in addition to musical development. Also performing will be the acclaimed, Hawai‘i-based Kenny Endo Taiko Ensemble.

For more information on Hands Percussion Team, visit hands.com.my. This event is co-sponsored by the East-West Center and the University of Hawai`i’s Kennedy Theatre. The performances are part of the EWC’s 50th anniversary year celebrations.

Ticket Prices:
$16 Advance Super Saver until Sept. 5;
$20 Regular; $18 Seniors, Military, UH Faculty/Staff; $12 Students; $5 UHM Students with ID. (All service fees included.)

Tickets are now available online at ETicketsHawaii.com; beginning Sept 13, tickets will be also be available at Kennedy Theatre Box Office (M-F 10 a.m.-1 p.m.; Sept 18 from 5:00 p.m., Sept. 19 from 1:00 p.m.), or by phone, 944-2697.

The Hands Percussion Team will also perform Sept. 23 at Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Sept. 27 at Kahilu Theatre, and Sept. 29 at BYU-Hawaii.

This July, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies remembers Malaysian filmmaker, storyteller, and humanitarian Yasmin Ahmad.

[Source: malaysiana1] Yasmin Ahmad (January 07, 1958 – July 25, 2009) was a critically-acclaimed multi-award winning film director, writer and scriptwriter from Malaysia and was also the executive creative director at Leo Burnett Kuala Lumpur.

Her television commercials and films are well-known in Malaysia for their humour, heart and love that cross cultural barriers, in particular her ads for Petronas, the national oil and gas company.

Her works have won multiple awards both within Malaysia and internationally.

A graduate in arts majoring in psychology from Newcastle University, she worked as a trainee banker in 1982 for two weeks.

She then joined IBM as a marketing representative.

Yasmin began her career in advertising as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather in the same period.

In 1993 she moved to Leo Burnett as creative director and eventually became executive creative director.

Her first film was Rabun (Failing Sight) in 2002.

Yasmin’s films have won many international awards and praise from critics and public alike.

Most of her films have been screened at the Berlin, San Francisco, Singapore and Cannes international film festivals.

Her films were featured in a special retrospective at the 19th Tokyo International Film Festival 2006.

They were also featured in a 2007 retrospective by the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawaii, and the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

Yasmin passed away of a stroke at 11.25pm on July 25, 2009.

She fell unconscious in her chair at 3.30pm on July 23 at private television station TV3 in Petaling Jaya.

At that time she was having a meeting with the TV3 management and Malaysian pop queen Datuk Siti Nurhaliza Tarudin for a coming project.

Yasmin was hospitalised at the Damansara Specialist Hospital a short distance from TV3 and underwent neurosurgery on the same day.

She never regained consciousness.

She was buried in Subang Jaya, where she lived.

Yasmin made six films in her short but illustrious career.

They were Rabun (2003), Sepet [Chinese Eyes] (2004), Gubra [Anxiety] (2006), Mukhsin (2007), Muallaf [The Reverter] (2008) and Talentime (2009).

She also acted in the films Rain Dogs and Susuk, among others.

She won several awards for her television commercials that promoted national unity and humanitarian values, in Malaysia and Singapore.

Sepet won best film in the Malaysian Film Festival 2005. Gubra won best film the following year.

Sepet also won the Asian Film Award at the Tokyo International Film Festival 2005.

Mukhsin won Best Feature Film at the Berlin International Film Festival 2007 and Best Asean (Southeast Asian) Film at the Cinemanila International Film Festival 2007.

Muallaf won the Asian Film Award – Special Mention at the Tokyo International Film Festival 2008.

Yasmin was the eldest of three siblings from Muar, Johor. She was of Malay and Japanese ancestry.

She is survived by her parents, a brother and a sister, and her husband Tan Yew Leong, the creative director of Leo Burnett.

flickr | imdb | 2007 UH Yasmin Ahmad Retrospective (twitch)
yasmin blogs project | yasmin the storyteller | yasmin the filmmaker

The course will cover art and architecture of tribal groups from island Southeast Asia. Topics include bronze age prehistory and indigenous cultures from Indonesia, Malaysia, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

Course information: Summer Session II: 6 July – 13 Aug 2010, M-F 10:30 – 11:45am, 3 credits

Jerome Feldman teaches art history at Hawaii Pacific University. His specialization is in the arts of tribal Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. He received his Ph.D. in tribal art history from Columbia University and has conducted field studies in remote islands of Indonesia and Polynesia. He has studied museum collections in Europe and America and has aided in several important exhibitions including The Eloquent Dead at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Nias Tribal Treasures at the Volkenkundig Meumeu Nusantara in Delft, and Beyond the Java Sea a Smithsonian sponsored traveling exhibition. He has also written books and articles and lectured extensively on tribal Southeast Asian, Micronesian and Polynesian art and architecture. In fall 2004, he was the Slade Visiting Professor at Cambridge University, England. between distribution patterns of human knowledge of biodiversity and actual biodiversity.

Looking for a place to listen to radio from across southeast asia? The CSEAS staff recently discovered radiotime, a free streaming radio program online called radiotime! All the major southeast asian countries are listed, in addition to other countries across the globe. Some countries are even further categorized by locality! Check out the site and be sure to let us know what you think!

Until today, the Muslim Societies in Asia & the Pacific program (MSAP) only had a facebook presence online, so we are very excited to announce their new website: http://www.msiahawaii.com!  We hope our readers enjoy the site as much as we do!

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies would like to recognize the incredible efforts of graduate assistants, Nezia and Effendy, who were instrumental in the building of the Muslim Societies in Asia program.  The quality and success of the current MSIAP is a testament to their hard work and the CSEAS wishes them the best of luck on their future endeavors.

Thank you for supporting the Southeast Asia Film Series over the past year! Our final film of the spring semester will be a Director’s Choice. We would like to thank everyone for their support, and we look forward to screening more films for you in the fall! Don’t forget to check out our film listings and upcoming screenings at cseashawaii.com.

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe me.”
Look what happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

-Hafiz of Shiraz, The Gift

The First International Conference on
HUMAN RIGHTS in SOUTHEAST ASIA

Organized by the Southeast Asian Human Rights Studies Network and the Center for Human Rights Studies and Social Development (CHRSD), Mahidol University, Thailand.

14-15 October 2010
Bangkok , Thailand
www.seahrcon.org

Human rights in Southeast Asia are at a critical juncture. There are a number of positive developments in the promotion and protection of human rights, such as, the institutionalization of the ASEAN Inter-governmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), formation of national human rights commissions or institutions and the development of a dynamic human rights discourse within the region. These occur, however, alongside a significant amount of human rights violations in a wide variety of areas. There is still much work to do in the promotion and protection of human rights of ASEAN peoples.

The First International Conference on Human Rights in Southeast Asia intends to bring together academics, researchers, graduate and post-graduate students, civil society organizations and government agency representatives who work on the research and greater understanding of human rights in Southeast Asia . It seeks to explore the ways researchers and civil society have begun to make more critical contributions to deepening the understanding of human rights-based framework and actual issues through in-depth engagement with localized sites within the Southeast Asian region. Likewise, as human rights is an emerging area of study at universities and academic institutes in Southeast Asia , the conference also aims to provide a venue for the increasing body of research work being done by academics and graduate students on Southeast Asian human rights.

Possible Panel Themes will include:
1. Universality and particularity of human rights
2. Individual and collective rights
3. Gender, sexuality and women’s rights
4. Rights of vulnerable and marginalized groups
5. Peace, conflict, security and human rights
6. Challenges to human rights in Southeast Asia
7. Media, advocacy and popularization of human rights

Paper Submission Details
Those who wish to present a paper at the conference are invited to submit an abstract of 300-350 words and a short biographical paragraph of 150 words in English by 30 June 2010 to Ms. Saksinee Emasiri at seahrcon@gmail.com. Please indicate to which proposed panel you think your paper would best fall under. The full paper should be about 5,000-6,000 words.

Successful applicants will be notified by 15 July 2010. Full papers are due on 30 September 2010.

Photo taken from flickr user j l t under creative commons license

The Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) offers special publication packages for only USD$50 on topics like Ageing, Environment and Gender. For more information or to place your order, please fax to 65 67756259 or pubsunit@iseas.edu.sg. Each book in these themed publication packages ranges from $30 to $40 individually so this special offer provides an excellent bargain on key titles in Southeast Asian scholarship today.

Ageing includes:
- Older Persons in Southeast Asia: An Emerging Asset
- Ageing and Long-term Care: National and Policies in the Asia-Pacific
- Ageing in Southeast and East Asia: Family, Social Protection and Policy Challenges

Environment includes:
- Working with Nature Against Poverty
- Governance, Politics and the Environment: A Singapore Study
- Managing Natural Wealth: Environment and Development in Malaysia
- Clean, Green and Blue: Singapore’s Journey Towards Environmental and Water Sustainability

Gender includes:
- Gender Trends in Southeast Asia: Women Now, Women in the Future
- Muslim/Non-Muslim Marriage: Political and Cultural Contestations in Southeast Asia
- Gender and Natural Resource Management: Livelihoods, Mobility and Interventions

HIFF and AsiaPacificFilms.com present a special opportunity to sample the site for one month totally free. AsiaPacificFilms.com offers a film festival experience by streaming a growing collection of over 250 feature films, documentaries and short films from established and emerging across Asia and the Pacific including Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Choose to subscribe for a second month, and proceeds directly go to support the Hawaii International Film Festival.

Here’s how to do it:
1. Simply visit AsiaPacificFilms.com and enter this exclusive HIFF coupon code to redeem your free month trial: HIFFohana2010
2. Stay the second month and support HIFF while continuing to watch great movies from Asia and the Pacific Islands. You can cancel at any time.

This offer expires April 15, 2010 so we hope you’ll take some time to visit http://asiapacificfilms.com and take advantage of this opportunity! Mahalo to HIFF for their

sample now

Rickshaw Stop, San Francisco, CA, USA
8:00 pm, Thursday, 25 February 2010

Zee Avi uses very few ingredients to cook her food, but she chooses her flavors carefully. Sometimes it’s ukelele and words. Often, it’s just her guitar and her warm, unaffected voice. For rhythm, it’s brushes on a snare, and that’s about it.

Avi’s is a story of overnight success, and it shows the upside of quick discovery: she made it to our ears before anyone got in the way and encouraged her to sully the stew by adding more instruments. Growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, young Izyan Alirahman listened to music from the 1920s, and the straightforward, unadorned lyricism of those songs appealed to her. At that time, her aspirations were in the fashion world, so she moved to London and pursued a design degree.

Avi passed through listening phases, at times enjoying British indie pop, dance music, and hard rock, but kept returning to that older music’s honesty and simplicity. After falling out of love with the fashion world, she returned to Malaysia and began songwriting. First up was “Poppy,” a beautiful and vivid song about heroin addiction. The night after her first public performance as a singer, she flipped on her webcam and strapped on a call-center headset to record “Poppy,” intending to share it with a writer friend for feedback.

That recording was not intended as a star-making vehicle, but the editors at YouTube found this home recording and featured it on the site’s front page. The next day, admirers and record company reps started flooding her inbox. Soon thereafter, she changed her stage name to Zee Avi and went out on tour opening for Pete Yorn. The 23-year-old played at the Outside Lands Festival this past summer, and her new Bay Area fans have been awaiting her return ever since. (From NoisePop.com)

2010 NoisePop schedule | music | website