[EXCLUSIVE] Nine Arts Festival Wants Negeri Sembilan to See Itself Differently
Foo Mei Yi built her career playing Bach and Brahms across Europe’s most demanding concert halls. This week, she’s staging shadow puppets, wayang kulit and cinema in her hometown, and betting the town shows up.
- Nine Arts Festival blends nine art disciplines to build new audiences in Negeri Sembilan, rejecting the idea of importing classical music wholesale.
- Foo envisions a six-year plan to establish Negeri Sembilan as a genuine cultural destination, not merely a stopover before Kuala Lumpur.
“I want to be Zeus,” Foo Mei Yi said, mid-laugh, describing the moment the festival’s concept clicked. She’d been circling the nine Greek muses; daughters sent out by their father to infuse the land with artistic pursuits, and thought — why not send her own artistic daughters to Negeri Sembilan. The festival’s real structural spine, though, is closer to home. Navarasa, the nine principal emotions of Indian classical aesthetics, opens the programme as a night of dining, dance and music at the foot of Seremban’s granite hills.
Foo is the Negeri Sembilan-born, Britain-based concert pianist behind the inaugural Nine Arts Festival, running 14 to 16 August across Seremban. She traces the idea back roughly two decades, to a tour with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra that stopped at Istana Seri Menanti, the royal palace in her home state. The tour was a hit, and there was talk, briefly, of making it annual. Then, in her words, “lots of things happened politically and globally,” and the idea sat dormant for years, resurfacing only last year, when they held the soft launch at Istana Lama Seri Menanti.
Foo won’t take much personal credit for the momentum. “It caught fire because the idea was a good one, not because I made it,” she says, “because the idea was good enough for everyone to get on board. It’s like it has a life of its own.” She reaches, unprompted, for a birth metaphor — the support arriving felt like contractions, everyone telling her to push. The festival’s soft-launch weekend, she says, was the delivery.
Where past summers meant an actual holiday, this one meant a schedule that started at eight in the morning and didn’t end until ten at night, every day, for months. “Next day, repeat,” she says.
The emotional arc, as she tells it, ran counter to what you might expect. The scariest period wasn’t before anyone had committed to the festival — it was after. “The ironic thing is, when the support started pouring in, you doubt it even more, because there’s suddenly pressure to make it happen,” she says. “Without it, you’re very happy dreaming. And then when there is enough support, you have to make the dream come true.”
The programming logic behind Nine Arts Festival is a deliberate rejection of the assumption that a classically trained pianist should simply import her training wholesale. Foo is candid that this repertoire “is not attuned to their tastes”, which is why the Nine Arts Festival unfolds across nine disciplines woven together rather than kept in separate rooms.
That absence of inherited expectation, she argues, is precisely the advantage Malaysian and British-Malaysian audiences have over their European counterparts, who arrive freighted with centuries of classical-music gatekeeping. “They just haven’t paved the way for anything like that,” she says. “The mission for Nine Arts Festival is to be able to develop audience — for them to not just treat art like a sort of entertainment, but to be able to experience it the way they could experience science, or other important things in life.”
One thread of the programme has already toured internationally. Far East Sounds — Foo’s ongoing project blending Southeast Asian repertoire, Western composers influenced by the region, and Balinese gamelan — began, unglamorously, during COVID lockdown, when the composer Yii Kah Hoe started posting jungle soundscape recordings online. “I just heard the sound of my homeland,” Foo says.
Nine Arts Festival is explicit about not being a one-off. Foo describes an approximate six-year plan — the first three years focused on audience development, bringing in students, educators, families, building basic familiarity with the format, followed by a shift toward outreach, taking programming into schools rather than waiting for audiences to come to a venue. Somewhere past that six-year horizon, she hopes, sits a more tangible economic case for Negeri Sembilan as a cultural destination in its own right, not just a stopover en route to Kuala Lumpur.
Ask what she wants a young Malaysian audience member to take from the weekend, and the answer is modest for someone who just compared herself to a Greek god. “I hope they will feel the same as I felt when I was young, going to a concert,” she says. “If one person can feel that, then it would be successful.”
Nine Arts Festival runs this weekend, 14–16 August, across venues in Seremban, Negeri Sembilan, including Millennia Village, the Royal Sungei Ujong Club and Seremban Lake Gardens, under the theme “Origins” and the royal patronage of Tunku Zain Al-‘Abidin Tuanku Muhriz.
Full lineup, venues and tickets here.
