Three directors, all Malaysian, creating three different pieces on language, presented in one theatre production. According to the labels bestowed upon us by officialdom, the first director is ‘Indian’, the second ‘Chinese’, and the third ‘Malay’. The first piece was primarily in English, the second mostly in various Chinese dialects, and the third entirely in Malay. The production was called Break-ing (Ji Po) Ka Si Pe Cah.

From this brief description, Break-ing (Ji Po) Ka Si Pe Cah could have been either: (a) an officially sanctioned, theatrical articulation of racialised Malaysia; or (b) an artistic attempt to address contemporary relationships -- either among individuals or between citizens and the state -- by looking at racialised language formations. Fortunately, Break-ing (Ji Po) Ka Si Pe Cah planted itself firmly and intelligently into category (b).

Jo Kukathas’s ‘Silence, please’ begins with three sisters (played by Anitha Abdul Hamid, Anne James and Sukania Venugopal), dressed in white, hovering around a living room with white walls and a white floor. They move and react in silence to an unseen, voiced-over narrator’s account of their mother’s illness and eventual death.

What starts as a story of family history and personal grief then becomes an encounter with the inexplicable: our narrator reveals that on the day of the funeral strangers arrive, tell the sisters that their mother was not whom she claimed to be, then take the body away.

Throughout this, two men (Caecar Chong and Lee Swee Keong) enter and exit the space, removing things and adding others, changing the landscape of the living room. A trippy, Portishead-ish riff plays in the background. Another man (Thiagu) enters and speaks in Tamil, his voice tense with indignation. The sisters, though Indian, do not understand him. Unable to comprehend that his tirade is about their failure to understand him. In the end, the stage empties, devoid of live human beings, filled instead with featureless and variously decapitated white papier-mâché infants.

Loh Kok Man’s piece, ‘Repot [Mind + Mine]’ is itself divided into three main sections. The first ‘report’ sees the performers (Gan Hui Yee, Lim Yeow Haw, Moo Siew Ken and Tan Chai Chen) onstage, copying in word and action a previously filmed discussion of theirs that is simultaneously projected behind them. They discuss their experiences of speaking Chinese and being Chinese in Malaysia.

In the second ‘report’, the performers shift characters deftly, presenting interviews they conducted with several individuals (mostly Chinese-speakers) on speaking and being Chinese. The often-hilarious, rapid-fire exchanges include a Hokkien-speaking housewife, a Cantonese-speaking Indian man, a Mandarin-speaking artist, and an English-speaking academic, among many others.

The third ‘report’ has the performers trying to copy, again in word and action, a series of scenes from a P Ramlee film projected simultaneously behind them.

In Nam Ron’s ‘VV (WIP)’, a semi-naked, blindfolded man (Nam Ron) tries desperately to connect with an assassin in a futile attempt to avoid death. He asks to share a cigarette, tries to find out his killer’s name and even recounts a recurring dream.

The assassin (played by the actor cryptically known as Where) hovers menacingly above his captive, smoking and putting on gloves. He appears unmoved, and warns: “I’ll still do my job, whether you know my name or not.”

My initial response to this production was to think about texts. About scripts. About how our lives are scripted in a certain way, and how our individual scripts are written both by us and onto us by the relationships and experiences we encounter. But when we try to articulate our lives through speech or writing, something always gets lost. And no matter where we go and with whom we communicate, we carry our own scripts along with us and we filter our experiences accordingly, consciously or not.

This is precisely how I identified with the piece by Jo Kukathas. The narrator’s voice carries on and over the women’s’ silence as their mother’s body is stolen from them -- clear and articulate, the way your thoughts continue in your head even after you’ve stopped speaking. In our heads, our consciousnesses sometimes speak with a poetry that we can never recapture once our lips start moving or our fingers start writing. The grief sings. The love burns us alive.

On one level, Jo’s piece was about this state: it just screamed Moorthy and Nyonya Tahir to me at some point -- but then again, it was more than that. Is it a blessing or a curse, that even when language fails you, you still resort to speaking to yourself in your own thoughts?

Loh Kok Man chose a different trajectory of thought. Some might argue that his piece was more rigid because it was confined to the issue of national language. However, it was still interesting: how he chose the device of making his actors imitate themselves, the people they interviewed and P. Ramlee. Because whenever you try to copy something there are moments when you could potentially fail, and there are bits of yourself that you can’t help but give away. So what happens when you are made to copy something that you are told should be your ideal? How do you stop from being yourself?

The production wisely chose to end with Nam Ron’s piece, which explores the ultimate reaching and yearning that is sometimes thwarted by language. The blindfolded victim wants to know his assassin’s name. What’s in a name? Was he appealing to a host of other memories and associations that the assassin had about himself, to his own humanity? And does the violence in this piece say something about what happens when language is just not enough to express oneself, anymore?

Despite these interesting layers, as one audience member pointed out after the performance, Break-ing (Ji Po) Ka Si Pe Cah could still just appear to be one Indian, one Chinese and one Malay director presenting three distinct pieces that do not interact. A failure to challenge the divisions that officialdom has created to separate us, perhaps? Historian Sumit Mandal, who also caught this performance, had an interesting view. "Cultural sharing, borrowing and crossing isn’t new. It's been taking place for hundreds of years," he told me.

But divisions have been created in such a way that we have come to feel that we exist in self-contained little boundaries -- and that any movement across these boundaries is new. There's a sense of history that has been lost, of cross-cultural experiences -- many of which have been mutually enriching and positive.

Sumit continued: "So, given the current racialised landscape that we have to deal with, it's important to go back and explore these histories. Artists can reclaim lost vocabularies and forgotten ways of seeing the world. And sometimes, to do this, we explore the contemporary formations that divide us. To look inside them and explore the spaces within and between these boundaries. Not with the intent to divide even further, but with the intent of seeing what we have in common, as well as our differences in constructive ways."

And this is pretty much what Jo Kukathas, Loh Kok Man and Nam Ron have done. At first glance, their pieces seem to conform to the official Melayu / Cina / India divisions that most of us have been socialised to accept as the norm: they even gave prime position to the ‘Melayu’ piece, situating it as the grand finale of the production, for crying out loud!

But not so fast: let’s also look at how they explored these spaces. External silence versus internal tumult in Jo’s piece, mimicking an imposed ideal versus asserting the markers of one’s own identity in Kok Man’s, and a violent power struggle that stretches the limits of language to breaking point in Nam Ron’s – all these issues surfaced themselves in three apparently separate, non-interacting pieces. And these issues are catalysts for deep and critical questions that are directed at themselves - about their relationship to their own language of choice, their own modes of communication and miscommunication - which overlap and cross over all three pieces in osmotic playfulness and symbiotic urgency.

This, I think, is the significance of Break-ing (Ji Po) Ka Si Pe Cah. It demonstrates that even as we live our lives divided from each other by officially imposed categories, we can still dig deep into our own experiences to understand and identify with each other, and still come together. These three pieces, as a whole, have challenged us not only in our thinking about language, but also in our thinking beyond language. It offers us not only different ways of experiencing and reflecting on language, but also the possibility that, even if language fails us, we can find other ways to kasi pecah the boundaries that divide us.

~~~

Shanon Shah won an Anugerah Industri Muzik for Best Male Vocalist and was recently selected for KLue Magazine's 20 Under 40 list for 2006.