Poet Nyein Way: The Post-Modern Text Festival

Friday, September 28^th marked another brilliant, journalistic and performative conceptual literary festival. Nyein Way is a teacher, a father, a friend and most importantly, a poet. He’s been publishing “Classroomology,” open-ended educational techniques, poetry, essays and theory for over 10 years. Present  were journalists, poets, puppet masters, political activists, artists, writers, cartoonists and the like.

I flew in on the same day of the festival, so I was not able to attend. But NW was kind enough to show me a video and give me a catalog of the event. Every page contains poems, essays and commentary, many sprinkled with an English words, authors, and ideas. Some examples:

• Anwar Ibrahim and ‘A New Asia’
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• layer cake
• general consent
• Hermeneutic
• Derrida
• Feminism
• object art kiki smith
• knowledge diplomacy
• artithesis
• paramatic realism
• and my favorite,
• “My dear Watson, it’s just elementary,” quoth Sherlock Holmes.

Here is the one page in English, and more pages in Burmese (taken with my iPhone. Haven’t quite got my Burmese to level of translating…anything).

“Conceptual Puppet Theatre,” is it reflecting humanity?

Puppets are like ideas beyond conventional beauty but the one that shows the alternative beauty going through conceptual maps reflecting quotidian and socioeconomic issues under the sky of humanity-nature-environment relationship. Harmony, interaction and conceptual frames blooming in the conceptual puppet theatre,  are in the clearing from the semiotic forest, telling myths across borders across borders and creating constructive humanity across multidimensional  facets of think – good beauty.

“Human beings are like puppets but puppets are human beings who are constructing humanity with the hands of conceptual puppet theatre.”

How does puppet cultivate and curve spirit in puppet objects? Engagement with freedom in conceptual puppet theatre makes the viewers realize the moment-to-moment story of revelation upon spirit in the puppets in the theatrical setting of the human world, the simulacrum.

So, puppets become the story-teller or the philosophers without philosophy, that is, a kind of philosophy in conceptual puppet theatre is the one that is constructed and contemplated upon the realities outside and inside the viewers and puppet actions. This kind of conceptualization process happens while one is engaged with conceptual puppet theatre:

The question is that of “Is the world a conceptual puppet theatre which realities can be initiated only by engagement with spirits in puppets, actions of puppets and conceptual realization of viewers and puppet theatre art making system?”