SINGAPORE,8June 2015 - The School of the Arts, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) will perform an original devised play, The Sound of Silence today at the 8^th Asia-Pacific Bureau (APB) Theatre School Festival and Directors’ Conference currently being held at the LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore.

Written and directed by Drama and Theatre lecturer Dr A.S Hardy Shafii, The Sound of Silence is an experimental piece that addresses and questions the concept of truth in texts, images and materials from various forms of media.

Loosely based on a couple of incidents that took place in Malaysia’s recent past, the performance presents a fictionalised rendering of different perspectives to interrogate the effects of power on ordinary citizens, in an open-ended reading of what constitutes ‘truth’.

Established in 2008 under UNESCO’s International Theatre Institute (ITI), the APB of Theatre Schools promotes interaction and exchange among theatre schools in the Asia-Pacific region through its annual festival and conference, in line with the larger purpose of this institutional body of the UNESCO Chair (ITI) which is to promote an academic mobility programme among the theatre schools in this geographical region, centred on mobility of students, teaching staff and information.

The venue of the APB theatre festival changes every year as the task of hosting is rotated among its members from Australia, Brunei, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

Membership in this network is limited to institutions of higher learning in the member countries which have established theatre departments.

With one of the oldest leading drama and theatre departments in the country, USM has thus far been the only Malaysian university invited to join the APB theatre festivals.

Besides showcasing various performances that experiment with different practices from the various countries and cultures, representatives from the participating institutions also run performance workshops besides discussing and exchanging ideas on pedagogy and the curriculum thereby enabling them to keep abreast with regional developments in theatre pedagogy and benchmark their academic programmes against other renowned theatre departments in the region.

The 8th APB Theatre School Festival is on from 5th-12th June 2015. This is the third consecutive year that USM is sending a delegation to the festival. This year’s representatives are Dr A.S Hardy Shafii (who also represented the Malaysia at two previous festivals in Vietnam and Shanghai) and students Wong Lay Chin (scenography), Rowena Selvarasan, Mohd Ednizam Fuarddy and Taufiq Sallehuddin. Music and vocals were arranged by Johan Othman.

Other institutions participating at this year’s festival include La Salle College of the Arts Singapore, Korea National University of Arts (South Korea), Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), University of Wollongong (Australia), Shanghai Theatre Academy (China), Ateneo De Manila University (Philippines) and many others. - Text: Dr. Nurul Farhana Low Abdullah