The Rainforest World Music Festival last month took audiences – and this writer – to new heights of musical ecstasy.
Lightning provides firework in the sky: flash, bang. The Bornean rain whips at the audience, but they are not deterred. Instead, the storm appears to invigorate them as they dance to the Cretan lyra, with a backdrop of towering trees that provide no shelter from the rain. “Our first song is a prayer for the rain to stop,” announces Stelios Petrakis of the Stelios Petrakis Cretan Quartet at the beginning of their very wet set. The crowd doesn’t care; it is hungry for the sound of the strings and drums from an island half a world away. The music starts, and so does the dancing.
The Rainforest World Music Festival (RWMF) is an annual spectacle held at the Sarawak Cultural Village in the outskirts of Kuching, at the foot of Mount Santubong. With some 20,000 spectators from near and far staying from August 5-7, it is a huge affair. From its humble beginnings in 1997 it has grown beyond imagining, and is expected to generate RM39mil in spinoffs this year during which 25 bands and musicians from all over the world featured.
