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On the evening of 11 April 2023, Five Arts Centre (FAC) members Mark Teh and Lee Ren Xin were invited by the Ministry of Culture to give a talk at Taiwan Contemporary Culture Laboratory (C-Lab), introducing how they have been involved in the art practices of FAC and how FAC has played a important role in the development of arts and culture in Malaysia. FAC was founded in 1984 by Krishen Jit, Chin San Sooi, Marion D’Cruz, K.S. Maniam and Redza Piyadasa. Their works includes theatre, literature, video, dance, performance and various interdisciplinary experiments. Mark has been a member of FAC for over 20 years since he was a student. He has presented his work at the Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting (formerly T-PAM) in Japan three times, and has directed the Baling and Baling (membaling) series, based on the transcripts of the Baling Talks, which has been running for ten years since 2005 (including tours) and has become one of FAC’s most iconic projects in recent years. The conversation begins with the trajectories of theatre in Malaysia and Taiwan and the ideological divergences of post-war Asian countries, and moves on to explore the theatrical approach drawn from historical documents. In addition, we discuss the Hauntology, the fading of the Communist Party of Malaysia and the unresolved crises, beliefs and political situations that are slow to change.
Rikey Tenn: It’s really an honour to meet you. You must have noticed the significant differences in language and culture between Taiwan and Malaysia. Indeed we have also heard of a past like that of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), and I have noticed a tendency towards Verbatim Theatre in your approach to the subject of the MCP, so perhaps we can start with the similarities/ differences between your theatre practice and the people’s theatre of the 1990s in Taiwan.
Mark Teh: I’m still learning about the history and development of theatre in Taiwan. The recent publication, Where are the People?: People’s Theater in Inter-Asian Societies, co-edited by Zikri Rahman, Qi Li and Joyce C.H. Liu was valuable in allowing me to understand some resonances between the Tent Theatre and People’s Theatre movements in Taiwan and their contemporaries in Southeast Asia.(註1) My own perspective is that a People’s Theatre movement never really took root in a deep way in Malaysia – certainly not at the scale that was found in India, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan or Taiwan. Of course, we had figures such as the theatre director and critic Krishen Jit(註2) who came into contact with many of these groups as he travelled across the region in the mid-1970s and 1980s, forming informal networks and sometimes lifelong relationships with some of them because they were often also pioneers in experimental theatre.
It is really in the work of children’s theatre director and arts education specialist Janet Pillai where a more clearly pedagogical and community-engaged theatre practice can be discerned in Malaysia. From the mid-1980s Janet established long-term relationships with “theatre of liberation” groups such as PETA in the Philippines, MAYA: Art & Cultural Institute for Development and Makhampom in Thailand, as well as KUNCI in Indonesia later on – I have written a little bit about this trajectory elsewhere.(註3) My collaborators and I were influenced by Janet’s work – many of us had attended workshops that she conducted in the early-2000s as young performing and visual artists, filmmakers and designers. Later on, I observed the projects Janet and Arts-Ed were doing in inner-city George Town, Penang where young people conducted field research in their own communities and interpreted their findings through a wide range of creative outputs: performances, exhibitions, documentation projects. I realised that over time her conception of the “child” at the centre of her projects had evolved in radical ways – the young people had moved from being actors in performances, to participating in Theatre-In-Education projects as Boalian spect-actors(註4), to more recent place-based projects where they assume the responsibility of “social actors” in their own communities. Now, these young people “perform” as citizen journalists, community anthropologists, cultural mappers – as documentarians and “experts” of their own everyday environment.
This had an important impact for my own practice – on how and where research and fieldwork takes place, on who can and should be represented onstage, and on how we approach the making documentary projects as social actors rather than as a conventional theatre ensemble.
RT: In an interview, You have attributed Malaysian monolithic perspective towards society and history in the 1990s to” the trappings of aspirational Western modernity,” but if we look at other Asian countries in the post-Cold War period (especially in the 1990s), we see similar themes like the political struggle for economic growth or historical justice in Taiwan after the lifting of Martial Law. In fact, the Enlightenment ideology (of Western modernity) also brought democratization. So what are the reasons behind our oblivion (instead of forgetting) to history (e.g. the Emergency in your case or White Terror in our case) and why is it unacceptable to forget history?
MT: To put it simply, the manufacturing of apathy, ignorance or obliviousness is the successful work of the state’s education and propaganda apparatus. Especially states governed by one party for a long time, which is something that Taiwan and Malaysia share. While each context has its own specific complexities, there are parallels between the democratic struggles of many Asian countries. The lifting of Martial Law in 1987, the 1998 Indonesian Reformasi, the electoral defeat of UMNO-Barisan Nasional in Malaysia in 2018 – these events broke the hegemonies of political parties or coalitions that had controlled Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia for many decades and governed public life and discourse in deeply authoritarian ways. What follows these changes of power are periods of liminality, uncertainty, anxiety, and flux – where the old regime is fighting for their political survival, deploying chaos and sabotage, plotting their return to power. This is certainly what we are experiencing right now in Malaysia, with the recognition that these political transitions are full of compromises, fragility, and the potential of failure. But the hard, necessary work remains: introducing overdue legal and democratic reforms; unlearning, decolonising, and repairing institutions and psychologies from decades of systemic rot; creating and maintaining spaces for new articulations, possibilities and reimaginings of the futures and histories of the ”nation-thing.”(註5)
In these moments of change, historically traumatic events that had been repressed or suppressed often emerge in public. This is what the historian Thongchai Winichakul characterises as ”unforgetting”(註6), a condition where one is suspended in a liminal state – simultaneously unable to forget and to remember – because their experience does not cohere to articulating a socially meaningful or acceptable memory under existing regimes of truth. Thongchai uses the term to reflect critically on the collective silence in Thailand around the October 6 1976 massacre, but the ”unforgetting” could also be applied to events such as the May 13 1969 violence in Kuala Lumpur, and the mass killings of communists, alleged sympathisers and other groups in Indonesia between 1965 and 1966.
Over the past decade, a younger generation of artists, researchers, journalists, and other social actors have been excavating these ”unforgettings” – traumatic, difficult, or inconvenient histories – in their own contexts across Southeast Asia. In parallel, we can also see the growth of bottom-up initiatives in collecting oral histories, citizen tribunals, alternative education models, and the proliferation of community or independent archives. These can be read as acts of protesting against forgetting as attempts to make history more complex, meaningful, participatory, and poly-perspective.
RT: Does this mean that if we understand the past better, our “present” will not be haunted by the “ghosts of history”?
MT: Perhaps one way to address this question of hauntology is to speak about the reception in Kuala Lumpur to our most recent performance. A Notional History was a response to the changing of official history textbooks in Malaysia after the 2018 change in government, as UMNO-Barisan Nasional was democratically voted out after 61 years in power. It frictions together old and newly-published history textbooks with previously-unseen video interviews of 11 members of the outlawed Communist Party of Malaya, living in exile in Southern Thailand, most in their 70s and 80s. Through the perspectives of three social actors onstage (a journalist, an activist and a performer) the performance attempts to investigate what remains unchangeable even as times, governments, generations, and textbooks change.
I guess implicit to the concept of hauntology is the idea of lost futures – of things which never happened but could have, of paths not taken – what-ifs. For audience members that were 40 years old and above, witnessing the footage of the old revolutionaries, most of them Malay Communists, was visceral and emotional. To hear people who had been portrayed as enemies of the state and terrorists speak freely for themselves, to articulate why they went into the jungle in 1948 to fight for an independent Malaya and did not resurface until 1989, was moving and powerful, but also created affective and cognitive dissonances in many.
On the other hand, for younger audiences, their entry point was through the recently ‘expired’ history textbook produced by the previous regime that we dissect onstage. This was the history book that this generation (under 30 years old) had to go through in secondary school, so it brought up more immediate questions about objectivity, subjectivity, truth-effects, and the relationship between propaganda and education. For them, encountering the Communists was more abstract, more about how these old people could be the most extreme examples of how narratives and lives can be effaced, erased and manipulated in official narratives. The appearance of the Communists had less impact on the younger audience’s responses and psychology; there was more distance. I am talking in general terms, but it was interesting for us to notice these differing generational reactions.
One of my favourite historians is Carolyn Steedman, whose book Dust: The Archive and Cultural History remains important for me to think about historiography. In the book, Steedman writes beautifully about how history is ‘that which will not go away’. She uses the metaphor of dust; there will always be some of dust that remains. It’s impossible to get rid of dust – it returns. She also makes the point that human beings are constantly producing dust, from our literal being.
I also like very much that the English word “haunt” contains the exact letters that make up the Malay words hantu (ghost), as well as tuhan (god). The word “haunt” can also refer to a favourite place – a location that one revisits frequently.
RT: You have said that you never planned a series of Baling performances, but how did the symbolic meaning of The Baling Talks change with the historic appearance of Chin Ping and the recent incident of his ashes not entering Malaysia?
MT: Viewed from today’s perspective, we can consider the failure of the talks to end the Malayan Emergency in terms of a lost future(註7), but at that moment in 1955, the words of these three leaders could be interpreted as performative speech acts – conjuring the new nation in their imagination. The British, while not participating directly in the talks, were very much present to record it – this is the primary reason we have these textual, photographic, and filmic documentation of the event. I think these various factors – the content and implications of the talks itself; the conjuncture of colonialism, competing ideologies, and impending ‘independence’; the tools of documentary, propaganda and myth-making at play; and the awareness that the talks were a huge media spectacle: the “most wanted man in the British Empire” emerges from the jungle to meet two leaders of soon-to-be new nation-states! – these have made it plausible for my collaborators and I to return to the transcripts at different points over the last 20 years.
When we found the transcripts of the failed 1955 Baling Talks between leaders of Malaya, Singapore, and the Communist Party of Malaya in 2005, we couldn’t have imagined we would go on to make different projects with the text as a central spine. I guess we’ve used the text, essentially declassified documents, to tease out other subtextual meanings (political and performative) at different times over the past 18 years. Baling (membaling)(註8), made in 2005, leapt between three first-time performers’ depiction of excerpts from the talks, and their own families’ differing experiences of the Emergency. We also included perspectives taken from Said Zahari’s memoirs. He was a young leftist journalist at the Baling Talks, and would later be imprisoned in Singapore for 17 years under the Internal Security Act. We toured Baling (membaling) as an agitprop physical theatre performance to local universities, colleges and futsal cages – where people playing football in neighbouring cages wondered what the hell we were doing 🙂
There were a couple of other iterations where we organised participatory readings of the entire transcripts of the talks. These were durational events which lasted 5-6 hours where we invited activists, journalists, human rights lawyers, sociologists and progressive politicians to take turns to read publicly the words of Tunku, Marshall and Chin Peng. These public readings were attempts to consider how performance and politics are about representation. For example, there was a session which featured all female readers, and we also used the tactic of inviting strong critics of the government to read as Tunku Abdul Rahman, later the first Prime Minister of Malaya in 1957. The readings were done in 2008 in Kuala Lumpur, and 2011 in Singapore – the year of general elections in both nations. There was also another version which I made in several London libraries, rewriting the transcripts by hand directly into books which referenced the Baling Talks. This was more about my interest in marginalia as acts of defacement in old, rare books, and writing back to Empire.
The last version, simply titled Baling (2015), was made after the death of Chin Peng in 2013. It was significant that he had published his 492-page memoir My Side of History in 2003, and for the remaining 10 years of his life, fought to return to Malaysia. It was his final wish to be buried in the cemetery where his parents are in Sitiawan, his hometown. But this was ultimately denied by the Malaysian government on the grounds that Chin Peng could not produce his original birth certificate, and so could not prove that he was born in Malaya. Having exhausted all legal avenues, Chin Peng said in an interview that perhaps when he died, his friends could return his ashes to be dispersed in the cemetery. As you can imagine, when he passed away in 2013 in Bangkok, Malaysian police and military personnel were stationed at the Thai-Malaysian border to make sure nobody was returning with his ashes. This incident stayed with me, and I interpreted this as Chin Peng’s final poetic, political gesture: he would not be denied a return, even in death. Of course, there were all these other symbolic meanings related to the return of his ashes – dust, pollution, ghosts, hauntings, dematerialisation.
This provided the impetus to revisit the Baling transcripts again, and to confront the question of how public enemies are created in Malaysia. In Baling, the performance goes between scenes where the performers read out the transcripts of the Baling Talks, and moments where they share their own subjective experiences of ‘encountering’ Chin Peng in one form or another – coming across black and white images of him reproduced across our history; attending his funeral in Bangkok; and interviewing him in 2010 when his memory was no longer so reliable. We investigated this strange paradox where Chin Peng had been physically absent from Malaya/Malaysia since the Baling Talks in 1955, but his image and persona – the phantom (hantu / tuhan) of him – had been made present within the nation, reproduced, transformed and dispersed across various media and forms. In this particular version, the performance could be interpreted as making something that is absent present, in order to deconstruct the hysterical symptoms of our history and deal with it in a more human way.
This version of Baling toured internationally between 2015 to 2018, and we learned a lot seeing how it resonated in other contexts, raising questions about nation-formation, hauntology and lost futures, as well as how public enemies are created in post-colonial, post-independence states. I should mention that in 2019, Chin Peng’s ashes did eventually make their way back to Malaysia. His friends brought the ashes to visit his childhood home in Sitiawan and the cemetery where his parents are buried, and were eventually dispersed in the sea as well the jungles of Perak, which had served as a home and shelter for the guerrillas.
RT: What can we (artists, writers) do if society cannot reach a consensus and reconciliation? When you say “Malaysia seems to be in a permanent state of crisis” (註9), do you imply the contradiction of citizenship in Malaysia is the colonial legacy of British Malaya and its ethnic policy after WWII? If it is impossible to reach consensus and reconciliation, what can we (artists, writers) do?
MT: Since 2018 the distinctions between different political coalitions have gotten very muddied. This is particularly after former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad collaborated with the Pakatan Harapan coalition (with many long-time critics and opposition politicians he had imprisoned in the 1980s and 90s) to oust the Najib Razak-led UMNO-Barisan Nasional regime. The contradiction everyone had to live with was that it was Mahathir who had led UMNO-Barisan Nasional previously for 22 years, and the systemic corruption Najib’s regime symbolised had in fact been constructed during Mahathir’s time in power.
Without getting into all the complicated details, every major leader and party in Malaysia has ended up working with their political enemies over the past 20 years – through forming electoral pacts, or enticing opponents to cross the divide through calls to ‘save’ the nation from this or that coalition, or the recent phenomenon of forming coalition or ‘unity’ governments. The political friend-enemy distinction is extremely tenuous in contemporary Malaysia, and citizens are still getting used to navigating these political polarisations. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to call them bipolarisations given the amount of cognitive dissonance. The optimist in me would like to think this points to a maturing in our politics, where a concrete two-coalition system is replacing the previous hegemonic model which witnessed UMNO-Barisan Nasional’s stranglehold for 61 years. To put things into perspective, for the first 22 years of my life, I had the same Prime Minister. My son, who is now 4 years old, has had four Prime Ministers already!
More seriously though, while we adjust to this new landscape of realpolitik expediency between former adversaries, we should be alert to compromises and consensus amongst the political elite. Many smart, talented, progressive people have been drawn into party and electoral politics in the past decade, and I can understand the seduction of the narrative to ‘save’ the nation, of ‘national service’. But I am uncomfortable with how often that lapses into nationalist service. My old friend and former FAC member Fahmi Fadzil, has today become the Minister of Communications and Digital under the Anwar Ibrahim government. As some of our friends and allies take up positions vertically in government and attempt to reform institutions, we must continue pressuring and working to horizontalise these state institutions, to decentralise decision-making processes, and resist neoliberal strategies to corporatise culture and society, whoever is in government. I am more interested in an agonistic model of politics, of having a lively democracy without hoping to achieve some illusory reconciliation or unity. As cultural workers, we are a part of civil society, and we need to ensure that civil society – a space for difference, dissensus, plural representations and complex imaginings – remains strong.
RT: From Article 19 to Five Arts Centre, you have never gone through an academic theatre education. Some other collaborators of yours are not from professional background, either. Does this make you work more often with visual material? Or, what does the Verbatim Theatre mean to you? Finally, will you consider collaborating with local artists after your visit to Taipei?
MT: While I never studied theatre formally, I’ve been associated with FAC for more than half of my life. In many ways, being introduced to the experimental theatre scene in the late 1990s in central Kuala Lumpur, which was also the site of the Malaysian Reformasi protests, provided me with a visceral, organic education in art and politics. There were many times in 1998 and 1999 where I was attending underground theatre shows and overground protests at Dataran Merdeka (Independence Square) on the same weekend – this was where I was first exposed to the work of FAC and others as a student. What drew me to their work was the insistence on creating original, contemporary work as opposed to directing interpretations of existing Western or Taiwanese plays. It was more the ethos of conceptualising projects and devising your own works that was inspiring and urgent for me. When I joined FAC, I just continued making my own work with my collaborators. There was a lot of space, and the fact that it was a collective rather than a company with a singular artistic director meant there was a lot of diversity, debate and disciplinary promiscuity in the questions they were asking. I learned a lot sitting in rehearsals, asking lots of questions, and watching videos of older experimental works – being a hungry nerd basically.
In my own work, there have been several trajectories. As a way to teach myself about art history in Malaysia and the region, I’ve made a series of documentary portraits that investigate into the work and practice of artists and cultural workers who I feel are super interesting but somehow under-the-radar. There was Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari, created from interviews between Awang Hamzah Mat and Dollah Baju Merah (two shadow puppeteers who had contrastive trajectories in relation to notions of form, tradition and nation); Gostan Forward which zoomed in and out of choreographer Marion D’Cruz’s personal history, dance history, and Malaysian history; Something I Wrote, an anti-musical based on the lyrics, scholarly writings and interviews with folk singer-songwriter Azmyl Yunor, and Jalan-jalan di Asia which featured long-serving Japan Foundation exhibition coordinator Furuichi Yasuko in a lecture performance that reflected on her work facilitating artistic, cultural and curatorial exchanges between Japan and Southeast Asia. Many of these projects featured non-performers, and were devised from the autobiographical materials, archival documents and personal memories and experiences of the subjects.
Another series of works are more related to subject matter that haunt the contemporary Malaysian landscape culturally and politically; these include the works around the Malayan Emergency (the Baling series, Emergency Festival, A Notional History); Version 2020 where we reflected on and deconstructed the afterlives of Mahathir’s Vision 2020 (launched in 1991) of turning Malaysia into a high-income, first-world nation by 2020, and the video essay fragments of Tuah which investigates into the many origins of Hang Tuah, a literary, fictional figure from 15th century Malacca who is a beloved symbol of Malay nationalists, right-wing people and conspiracy theorists.
We’ve never used the term “verbatim theatre” but I can understand why people do, to refer to our work. We are not particularly fussed about labels. I guess our work is more broadly derived from the areas of devised theatre and documentary performance because of how we approach materials, fields of research, and disciplines. We often think of what we do in performances as presenting and making visible an editing machine onstage, in front of an audience, where they can see the performers share and manipulate historical documents, images, footages, autobiographical and ethnographic materials as well as their own subjectivities.
Yes, it’s too early to have any concrete ideas but after having some great conversations with artists and researchers in Taipei, I would be very happy and curious to find ways to initiate research, curatorial or performance projects together.