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Borneo has always been well-known for her distinctive culture and art, biodiversed wildlife and flora and fauna, due to her strategic geographical location, historical identity, luxurious rainforest habitats and indigenous groups living in the province. Borneo is the third largest Island in the world, covers an area of 743,330 square kilometers, with the population of nearly 18million people, where Sabah and Sarawak contributed 35% of the population, equivalent to 6million people.
With such a huge population, rich ethnic color and beautiful natural resources, we never lack of physical wealth, as well as spiritual contentment. We are cultural rich and we leave in a country full of poetry and astonishing surprises. What separate us from many other places are the harmonious between ethnic and the integration of customs, that will eventually develop into a unique civilization. The successful of Sarawak’s yearly activity ‘Rainforest Festival’ has proven that Borneo has everything it takes to become the International cultural focus. Whether or not we neglect the fact that Borneo has her own potential to absorb every cultural cliché and being filtered into our life, the ‘culture’ of Borneo plays an important role in our daily life, language, activities or habits.
Many scholars have realized that we can actually enhance our culture to something more magnificent and present them to a higher platform. Way back in 1990s, some of the senior antecessors whom have succeeded in their individual fields, came out with the ideology called ‘the Borneo Culture’. ‘The Borneo Culture’ here carries a totally different vision, where the main purpose is to cultivate the art performance, either through literature, dance, photography, handicraft or music, to repackaging our culture by using a modernized method. All performance methods are classified as a ‘tool’ to exhibit or enhance the artistic level of primitive culture, which the core value of natives’ characteristics would be suffered from minimal disturbance.
As a result, as one of member of Borneo people, we feel our responsibilities and obligation to become part of this historical torrent, not from the view of the audience, but within the stream of transformation. We present you the ‘Primitive Bond Art Festival’，where the focus is no more on cultural exchanged, but emphasizes more on local talent, and the manner of integrating primal culture with modern art performance. The development of local culture and civilization are closely related, without the emergence of inner wisdom, the cultural growth can only be distorted. While nurturing our local culture, we believe in vitality and endless creativity in the youth of whom are perfectly capable in opening up new fringe tradition thus creating new trend. Fringe tradition is not anti-tradition, but a means to explore new possibilities to transforming existing traditional culture to a new yet unique cultural characteristic, to what we call ‘the Borneo Culture’.
‘Primitive Bond Art Festival’ is a mindset revolution for the community, especially amongst youngsters, which involves the paradigm shift of our own tradition.
We have been asking ourselves, does all the performing art, which always being misunderstood as contradict with traditional culture, has local identity (localization)? Since our cultural individuality needs to be differ from global identity (globalization), obviously we understand the importance of localization, because it is one of the measures for national characteristic. Our culture represents who we are. Rich cultural characteristic records the role status and value of a nation (state, province or tribes), when presenting in the international stage, our origins and traits are quickly understood. On the other hand, culture is also the precipitation of wisdom in the flow of time. The so called local culture is like a kind of gears in history, stacking into what it is now, lifestyle. Within which, of course, includes chance.
Innovation of cultural characteristic is equally important as the preservation of it.
At the age of globalization, the formation of direction and idealism for culture shouldn’t be limited. The new trend created by the mindset of innovative youth, may one day intermingle with our historical heritage and stimulating an unexpected chemistry and hence developing a brand new trend in line with the pace of globalization.
‘Primitive Bond Art Festival’ intends to open up a brand new vision to the youth, creating new opportunities, markets and possibilities. 21st century is the most important phase in the history of mankind, where information flows and grows rapidly at the exponential rate. Technology advancement has made the impossible possible for matters, and getting to learn new knowledge has never been easier. Undeniably, human nature has evolved to be more independent as the world become more and more challenging. People anticipate but not participate, many have forgotten the means of tradition, let alone preserving one.
‘Primitive Bond Art Festival’ brings the core value of tradition and performing art to the society, within the society, and nurtures the values of our future generation.
‘Primitive’carries a meaning of “not derived from something else; primary or basic”, while ‘bond’ means the uniting force that links different things. Art exists in our daily life and culture is what we live in everyday. All the while people have misconception about what art is really about. ‘Primitive Bond Art Festival’ is a concept not only limited to audience, but to allow public participate in the art performance. Art Performance is being introduce to the street, or any public place, where the audience become part of the performance, either they volunteer themselves to join the performance, or solely stay as the audience, they will undergo totally different experience.
The first contemporary dance Theatre, Synergy Dance Studio , will be the frontier for this glamorous event.
‘Primitive Bond Art Festival’ consists of dance performance, contemporary music, workshop, photography installation, theater performance, short films, etc. The art festival will introduce a brand new concept called experimental street art performance to the people of Borneo, which integrating art performance from different fields, composite into irregular ever-changing circumstances. Performer will either play a role as performer at a particular place, or within the audience at a random yet organized spot. Vice versa, audience can be part of the performers, or they are the element in the art performance. In short, the project itself is a piece of art, where technically everyone involved is a small piece of the puzzle to complete the masterpiece.
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