Sedih // Sunno

The Next Wave Festival commences this Thursday, 5 May and features a wide array of thought-provoking and reflective, art and performance. The eighteen-day festival is built on the ethos that the concept of learning is a fluid state – it does not have a fixed beginning or an end point – and it is through this transition Sedih // Sunno will take you. Milk Bar Mag was lucky enough to catch up with award-winning artist Rani Pramesti to chat about her life journey, inspiration and her latest show.

Sedih // Sunno is described as a confronting, intimate and immersive experience that blurs the lines between performer and participant, offering the audience an opportunity to listen and reflect on the artist’s personal histories and the hidden legacies of their families. When asked to explain the title and offer some snippets about the show that’s close to her heart, Pramesti explained that sedih means ‘sadness’ in Indonesian and sunno means ‘to listen’ in Fijian Hindi; Sedih // Sunno is therefore a gentle invitation to listen to sadness. ‘In particular,’ she elaborates, ‘it is sadness inspired by my mother’s experiences of having been sexually abused as a child, which has coloured her life with sadness ever since.’

Audiences can expect traditional Indonesian family heirlooms to adorn the space, acting as visual cues and adding to the transformative journey, while Javanese-inspired vocals drift in the background, heightening your sensory experience. We asked Pramesti to share what she hopes the audience will take away from Sedih // Sunno and simply put, it is beauty. Despite the provocative narrative, the audience ‘can expect a lot of beauty, informed by the cultural backgrounds of our very multicultural team, hailing from Australia, Indonesia, Japan and Fiji. [The audience] will be taken on a journey that is at times very dark but ultimately will be uplifting’. Pramesti promises that she and the other artists – Ria, Kei Murakami and Sivanjani Lal – will be with the audience every step of the way.

The challenges? Incorporating her professional and personal moments into a cohesive structure. ‘We started with quite a broad theme of inter-generational legacy,’ she explains. ‘The unpredictable journey in specifying that theme into detailed creative decisions was definitely very hard,’ Pramesti discloses. ‘The other hard thing has been how emotionally challenging it has been for me to repeatedly listen to my mother’s stories, which are at times so sad. But I have a supportive counsellor, friends, family and some emerging self-care habits to help me manage the emotional weight of this,’ she adds.

On a lighter note, Pramesti reflected on her youth and has some poignant advice for her 16-year-old self: ‘it’s cool that you don’t fit in. It takes time to realise this, so be gentle on yourself as you grow’. Looking at Pramesti’s vision to inspire social change for culturally diverse women through self-reflective and insightful stories is beautiful and truly admirable.

The Next Wave Festival is in partnership with Creative Victoria and welcomes a new generation of artist: artists who can draw from social and cultural diversity, environmental sustainability and inclusion and take a creative risk to create something unique and magical.

Sedih // Sunno
Next Wave Festival
Wednesday–Friday 6:30pm, Saturday 3:00pm & 6:30pm and Sunday, 5:30pm, May 5–15
2016.nextwave.org.au/