Just before she left for Singapore five years ago, Malaysian playwright Leow Puay Tin was teaching part time at three places – ASK, UPM and UiTM. But still the money wasn’t enough. She needed a full time job. And more importantly, she wanted a teaching job that could allow her to research some of her ideas regarding performance. Her work with Krishen Jit had already resulted in some groundbreaking theatrical events like Three Children, Ang Tau Mui and Family. But as ever, she was ready for more.

She found the job she was looking for, teaching voice (the use of speech and text, and the performance of text) at the Theatre Training and Research Programme in Singapore, which was started by Kuo Pao Kun and T. Sasitharan. “I would be training contemporary actors who are themselves trained in four traditional Asian forms [Noh, Beijing Opera, Kuttiyatham, Wayang Wong]. It was a very exciting prospect.”

But thankfully for us, after five years of teaching and researching, she was ready to move back. She was immediately approached by Rey Buono to teach at Sunway University College’s School of Performance and Media. As it turned out, Rey eventually left the heading of the department to her and Ray Langenbach. Many of us are thrilled she is back and in such a vital role.

Even while she was away, Puay Tin managed to contribute to another theatrical event that is meaningful to Malaysia. Last year, Ivan Heng asked her to curate a series of Malaysian texts to be performed by Singaporean actors at the Singapore Writers Festival. This was Ivan’s reply to Riding the Nice Bus, a collection of Singaporean literature performed by Malaysian actors and directed by Krishen Jit at the KL Literary Festival in 2004.

Puay Tin called hers Tikam-tikam: Malaysian Roulette as it involves performing randomly the 35 excerpts she selected. Ivan staged both together, calling it Second Link. As it runs at The Actors Studio Bangsar this week, we talk to Leow Puay Tin about randomness, literature and responsible experimentalism. And in the spirit of tikam-tikam, I’ve also jumbled up the order of the interview. Feel free to skip around from section to section.

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On dancing with Singapore

Pang: How does randomness serve Second Link?

Leow Puay Tin: One of the reasons for doing this is it is completely egalitarian. I’ve chosen a lot of writings by a lot of people. I don’t want then to put them in a certain structure and create a certain meaning out of that. Or to make them yield a new meaning.

There are so many good bits I can never choose one over the other. But it is my responsibility to make sure that the selections are performative and they can stand alone. They all exist on their own, even that little bit on how to cook Hainanese chicken rice.

The exciting thing for me is this. To make people aware of the array of writings, of different subjects that have been treated to the written word. People don’t even think of recipe as a piece of writing, until I said, excuse me, a recipe is a piece of writing that can be performed. It’s so dramatic you know what you do with the chicken.

P: And Jonathan Lim makes a very cute chicken. Anyway, in the instances when some of the texts were coupled, why then?

L: For colour. It is like setting a small piece of diamond next to a ruby – the two will just stand out much more.

For instance, Syed Ahmad Jamal’s Lu Siapa[from an interview by Adeline Ooi and Bernard Chauly, from Off The Edge] was linked with Fadzilah Amin’s Dance. Syed Ahmad Jamal’s was about going to Singapore and being appreciated by Singaporeans when he did his exhibition in Takashimaya. It was only in Singapore he realised how Malaysians he was, through the questions the Singaporeans asked. And he felt the Singaporeans got the point much more than Malaysians.

And Dance, which is about a Ronggeng, is actually a poem about love. (Now I could be completely wrong about this, and when I go back and look at the text, and they are not about this, and they are very far apart… I don’t know ah.) Now this Ronggeng… because of social conventions, you got to go about your game of love, your game of communication, your game of desire, in a very different way – by using the conventions. Getting nearer, getting further apart, but always engaged in the same dance. And the game of desire can be played out that way.

P: How do these two texts enhance each other?

L: Two parties are involved. I was thinking about Singapore and Malaysia and the exchange…

P: As a dance…

L: As a dance. I was thinking about the male and the female. A text from a man, the artist, and from a woman.

I was also thinking about two different artforms. Visual art in Singapore and Malaysian literature. Fadzilah was my teacher in UM. There’s this whole literature reference that people might not get, but it’s a very big thing for me and for a lot of people who have gone through Malaysian literature and the English department of the University of Malaya. LIDRA [Literary and Dramatic Society] came from there.

And Fadzilah’s text didn’t reference itself, it referenced a dance, music, and it referenced a society and a culture. I thought it was very complex. And I felt that whatever Syed Ahmad Jamal had to say was put in a poetic way as well. I like the implicit poetic quality of the segment I had chosen, so I thought they belonged.

P: When you started, did you already decide it was going to be tikam-tikam style?

L: It did cross my mind. Very early on, when I collected a whole suitcase worth of books, I thought, oh my god. How? Of course it has to be tikam-tikam lah.

I had a very short time. Only a month to put all these together. I came to KL with an empty suitcase from Singapore. And when I returned to Singapore, the bag was so heavy I couldn’t lift it. I went by bus and I made the bus driver take it up for me, and he was, “Apa dalam itu? Batu ke?” I said, “Bukan batu, buku!” [laughs]

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On responsible experimentalism

Leow Puay Tin: I am not for doing an experiment for its own sake. Not in a public performance. I think a theatrical performance, once we get into a public arena, where we charge money, it shouldn’t be done for its own sake.

Now a lot of experimentations in theatre are really done out of the interest of the practitioners themselves. And I think those experimentations should actually be done in workshops, studio productions, until you have developed skill and content which may be new but which are relevant. If there is a quality to this new whatever, then you show it.

So I think experimentalism carries a responsibility with it. I don’t think anything experimental must be good. The most important thing is relevance lah. It must be relevant to the party watching it. Because of this equation that Peter Brooks has defined. Because of the watcher there.

Pang: Have you seen a lot of experiments for its own sake?

L: A case in point is the first project that I did with Krishen Jit, Tikam-tikam: And the Grandmother Said [1983]. Krishen described it as the only purely conceptual theatre thing he has done. And I would agree with him because it was done for its own sake.

We really wanted to find out what happens with time. What happens when you introduce the element of chance? What happens when you control time with music, an external element? And music too has its own structures, and how do you use that structure to interface with a performative structure that uses text that’s random.

That was an experiment that was done 20 years ago. I think that experiment was carried by me over and over in various works that I do until now we arrive at another tikam-tikam: Tikam-tikam: Malaysian Roulette, 20 over years later. I think I’ve done enough work with chance, random text and non-linearity, to say that we can now do it as a public performance.

P: From the first Tikam-tikam, what didn’t work about the experiment?

L: What didn’t work was it was extremely private to me. Because the stories were all drawn from my own experience and from my childhood. And because it was done in a very random sort of way, some were just two seconds, virtually: “And her grandmother said…” and that was the end of the story because the music ran out. It was a short cycle of just one lines.

It was interesting for me. It was interesting for Krishen. I think it was interesting for voyeurs like you, who just sit there and can piece together your own story about a childhood based on bits and pieces. But for a lot of the audiences – not that it is not useful – but that it’s very hard to string things together.

P: So then what worked?

L: Oh! It was a very unnerving experience and so very good for the performer. In a true sense, it really trains and demands the actor to use improvisation.

Let me say a little about improvisation, as related to traditional performance as I have come to understand it. In our modern sense we think that improvisation is spontaneity, just bla bla bla bla bla… Then we run the risk of it being good, bad and ugly. Or simply just not working. But the traditional performers also improvise a lot. Hokkien Opera. Oral traditions especially.

Oral traditions also encompass things like music. Things which are not encoded on paper. People have to learn through kinaesthetic means, and encode the knowledge in kinaesthetic means. You find that they are able to perform without a set score or a script because they’ve internalised structures which are patterns, motifs. The demands are already built into little modules or units. So when these people improvise, it is not random, it is not winging it, it is not jumping off the plane. It’s a construction based on ready made small units. It’s lego lah.

When I was doing Tikam-tikam with Krishen, it had that element. I didn’t realise it until 20 years later when I read up on oral traditions and the role of improvisation within oral traditions. I had structures, I had stories, big stories, small stories. I just didn’t know in what sequence to play these stories. And therefore in the true sense of the word I was improvising, but using stuff that I’ve already rehearsed. My skill was to respond as appropriately as possible to a given trigger. And I had a choice not to respond at all.

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On meeting Krishen

L: I met him because I was in University of Malaya and all my seniors were in awe of him. They had just done plays and they all pointed to him as the professor. They all waited very patiently in the arts concourse wanting to catch him to hear his views about a production they had just done. These very same seniors who had orientated us were so respectful of him. So I knew that was the man to watch because he was a theatre critic as well as an expert on Malaysian theatre and also a director. I was scared of him lah.

And then I did a performance, it was part of LIDRA. We had seven productions of local plays. This was late 70s just before I graduated. And Krishen came and he reviewed them seriously you know in his Straits Times column. And he mentioned me as very good. I was so PLEASED! I was acting in Stella Kon’s To Hatch A Swan. I was playing the surrogate mother. He affirmed me as an actor right from the time when I took my first public role.

And then I met him in person when he came to the Frances’s dance studio in SS2. At that time, Chin San Sooi was sharing a studio with Frances. And I was with San Sooi doing a devised play and he brought Krishen to see a rehearsal. And he asked me very difficult questions I couldn’t answer. Like, “Why did you do that?” I don’t know, director told me to do that!

After that I met him again between Petaling Street and Pudu Raya. One day, in the day time, I was walking and he was walking from the other direction and he said, “Ah, I’m doing a performance, do you want to take part?” I said, “Ya.” He said, “I’ll be in touch.” Or something like that. And I said, “Okay.” And then I left him. And then I said, how is he going to get in touch with me, he doesn’t know where I live. But he did. He managed to get in touch with me. And that led to Tikam-tikam lah.

P: Talk about randomness!

L: This thing about randomness, I like it very much. Because life is very… I really believe in the Chaos Theory lah. I think there’s a randomness, but if you let it play out, you see patterns. It is never totally random. It looks chaotic only in the moment. But if you just study it over time, if you are very patient, you let it grow, you’ll see patterns.

P: Fractals.

L: Yeah!

Without using the word Chaos Theory, we were interested in the same thing, without knowing what it was. So we called it Time & Chance.

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On performed literature

P: I wanted to get your opinion regarding Life Theatre Awards’ decision not to judge Second Link because it was “performed literature”.

L: Oh, I didn’t know that. [Laughs]

P: Well, they thought it was not theatre because it was “performed literature”.

L: Well, they can split the hair too finely you know.

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On egalitarian literature

P: Your curatorship seems irreverent towards the idea of literature. Do you think you were?

L: I don’t think there is a pantheon up there, where if you write well, then you write better, then you best of all, then only you get into literature. Perhaps my interpretation of literature is just much more loose lah, more egalitarian.

For me literature is synonymous with the word text. If there is any irreverence, it is only from my own use of writing as a theatre practitioner. I write for performance. I know the word dramatic literature is used. But I myself always used dramatic text. I don’t care if we are talking about Shakespeare, or the Greeks, or Huzir Sulaiman, I don’t use the word literature. I don’t feel it is appropriate to what we do lah. It is too limiting. Because of the notions which are encoded with literature.

P: Like what?

L: I think people expect a certain kind of quality. I mean, what is your notion of literature? Something grand, isn’t it? Something abiding. Something serious.

Do you see any literature department studying an article from Off The Edge for style? If something is well done lah, why not? I mean, a very good movie review, will it ever enter the canons of literature? I obviously don’t understand the notions of literature enough to respect it.

But I just think that I am not dealing with literature as such.

P: Or rather you are not dealing with a narrow definition of literature lah.

L: Let me put it this way. I am not dealing with what has been established as literature. Established and accepted and studied and analysed and criticised as literature. I think my idea of literature is just much more open. It is well done, it is relevant, there’s a lot of fun in it, it works.

P: How did you come to writing?

I started out writing poems. All English Literature graduates had to go through the writing poems phase. I love writing as a child. I wrote wonderful essays, I always did very well in my English language classes. I did badly in Science subjects. I always wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know lah. I didn’t know what was a writer. I kept a journal for many many years.

After working with Krishen then I knew what kind of writing I wanted to do. Before that it was literature lah – poems, short stories, maybe I can write a novel, I don’t know. But I was thinking along those genres, you see. Whereas, when I met Krishen, I thought my god this is better, I can perform my writing, I can speak it, I can move it, sing it!

P: Why is it different?

L: Because I love performance. When I was a child, I love Hokkien operas already. I love movies. But I didn’t relate that to writing, I thought it was a separate thing altogether. A different world. And because I didn’t know how to act, I could never do that. It was a world closed to me.

I read Shakespeare but it didn’t enter my mind that I could write a play because I was reading that as literature, something so good. I couldn’t write blank verse. I couldn’t write Arthur Miller’s plays because you need certain conventions and I didn’t know those conventions. No one taught me how to write a play. And then when I met Krishen I could just extemporise with it, dramatic literature, dramatic text for performance, that was wonderful, I said I can do this! The two came together, it was just right.

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On underpaid writers

P: I feel there is a need for more voices in Malaysia. And voices seem to be very much threatened these days. So is incumbent on us to make sure that voices don’t go extinct.

L: What are the rewards for writers? You used the word “incumbent”. So I assume there are responsibilities placed on them. So what are the structures of reward?

P: Naively, I think the reward for me is to create and reflect a society that welcomes voices.

L: It doesn’t go anywhere lah. It is “incumbent” for them to write and reflect, but I don’t see how are writers appreciated that they will write? I mean, are writers appointed? You can’t, right? There’s an impulse you know, so I think there’s a talent lah. There must always be some talent there. There needs to be an impulse for people to want to express themselves through writing and not through other ways.

You can have the impulse and the passion, the gift, but you must have some kind of structure that nurtures these talents and these passions materially, not just emotively or abstractly. It must have a real consequence in time and space. Right now we reward actors substantially. You see money. Actors can live on money.

P: But not writers.

L: Do you? I can’t live on my own writing as a writer.

You see, there’s no tangibility in that. You just cannot say you have to write because it is incumbent upon you. Right now, all the writers who are writing, we’ve been nurtured you know. If there wasn’t a Krishen Jit, and before that, Chin San Sooi, and after Krishen, the Five Arts Structure, my writing would go nowhere.

I need a body of people to know what I’m after. Appreciate my thoughts which are being expressed through the written word. And then I need a lot of people to actually collaborate, to bring it to life. Otherwise, where is my writing? My writing needs to be performed, you see.

It’s all very material. The same thing with Huzir. He himself has the ability to set up structures towards performance. Same with Jit. Same with any writer. So if we don’t give writers, young new writers, this kind of structure, you can be very sure they’ll come on and do one or two plays, even very good ones, and then we don’t see them.

P: What must we do towards that goal?

L: I think workshops are a very good way.

P: You mean workshops by existing theatre companies?

L: No, anyone can do a workshop lah. Come on lah. You are giving too much responsibilities over to a certain group of people. Why ah?

As I said, Huzir started his own company. Namron started his own. And Namron gets performed. Instant Café began as a group of young people, saying we want to do! And then they split off into Dramalab. If we’re just waiting for established theatre companies, we’re going to go nowhere. So whoever who has the drive, the resources – and it takes a certain organisational skills – go for it.

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On sensitif titles

P: I just heard that the title of the play had problems with the vetting authorities. “Second Link” is sensitif, they say.

L: [Laughs]

P: What do you think?

L: [Laughs and shakes head]

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Second Link runs from Wed 30 Aug - Sun 3 Sep 2006 at The Actors Studio Bangsar. Tel: 603-2094 0400/ 1400

For a complete list of the Malaysian and Singaporean texts performed, check out Wild Rice's website.

Click here for the Substation Magazine's interview with Leow Puay Tin.