It was another great year performing at one of my favourite festivals. Oz Asia closed on 10 November but before that I had a nice balance of music and acting gigs. I performed with Hyoshi in Counterpoint on the first weekend of the festival, then I shared my original songs accompanied by my band on 7 November. During the final weekend, I got to read for South Australian Playwright Theatre’s production ‘Rising Out Of Water’.
Thankfully, these beautiful moments on stage were captured by some talented photographer friends of mine – Kyahm Ross (7 November music gig) and Grace Liu (9 November acting gig). We didn’t have a professional photographer capturing this year’s Hyoshi in Counterpoint gig, so I’ve used a photo from last year’s festival as the featured image for this blog post, and image credit goes to Lester Wong.
It was so nice to be back on the Lucky Dumpling Market stage. That twilight vibe and warm crowd is so special. Thank you to my wonderful musicians: Emma Knights (keyboard); Amber Fibrosi (backing vocals); and LENI (guitars) for bringing my songs to life. I especially thank them for keeping me calm when the wind blew my music stand over 5 minutes before soundcheck and smashed the screen of my tablet.
I never bring my laptop to a gig, but I happened to bring it to this one as I had a couple of sheet music files to transfer across to my device before the gig. It wasn’t meant to be and my tablet was unusable, so now I have the memories of this laptop on stage reminding me of how impermanent things are. I’m sad about losing the device, but grateful that it wasn’t my guitar or accordion that got damaged.
Regardless of that unfortunate incident backstage, it was a beautiful night on stage and I really love performing with these gorgeously talented humans. Here are some great shots of the night captured by the clever Kyahm Ross, who is pictured backstage with me in the penultimate black and white image in this gallery.
I first read the play ‘Typhoon’ by Matt Hawkins in 2022 at one of SAPT’s Staged Readings events in Adelaide. It was an earlier iteration of the play, and this year under Valerie Berry’s direction, Matt presented an edited excerpt of his play for Tiffany Knight and me to perform.
I love being part of creative developments. It gives me great insight on other writers’ processes and what gets left on the cutting room floor. Matt had to ‘kill his darlings’ as the saying goes and, for the sake of the show’s running time, had to cut 7 pages from his script. It has been a joy revisiting the character of Rosa in ‘Typhoon’.
I look forward to further developing this piece in the future. Thank you to Matt Hawkins, Lucy Combe, and the team at SAPT for having me on this project. There were two other playwright/actresses featured in this performance and they’re both ones to watch: Elvy-Lee Quici and Danielle Lim.
Final thanks goes to the Oz Asia artistic and executive producer, Joon-Yee Kwok for producing such a wonderful program during her inaugural year at the helm. Thanks also to the entire Oz Asia festival team who worked behind the scenes to make this such a great experience for so many. I look forward to the next time I get to perform at Oz Asia.
Jennifer Trijo 