Mark Teh, Best Director nominee
(Mark Teh in Bunga Manggar, Bunga Raya (Five Arts Centre 2007), photo by Philip Craig)
Mark Teh’s no stranger to the theatre scene by now - after all, he’s been around for years, and involved in many shows, as part of Akshen! and Five Arts Centre. Kakiseni published an interview with Mark 2 years ago (Questioning Mark), he’s the first winner of our Most Promising Artist Award, and this time around, Mark’s been nominated as Best Director for Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari in the Theatre category (a play he co-wrote).
Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari is also nominated for Best Group Performance and Best Original Script (Bahasa Malaysia).
Mark took some time recently to answer some questions, here they are -
1. On top of acting and writing, you’ve taken on directing a few plays since being the first winner of the Most Promising Artist Award in 2002, what else have you been up to?
2002 feels like a long time ago. We’ve had 2 elections since then, and on a personal level, I suppose that was when I began collaborating very closely with a group of multi-jugglers – designers, filmmakers, performers & visual artists – on a whole series of projects dealing with community and history.
So there was Taman Medan and a number of shorter-term community arts projects, and in 2005, we organized the Asian Youth Artsmall exchange, which brought together very diverse community artist-activists to share and reflect on our practice across the region.
Also there’s been more and more teaching, which I enjoy immensely – I’ve been tutoring and subsequently lecturing at The One Academy of Communication Design since 2002, and more recently I’ve been co-teaching a Theatre Project class with Leow Puay Tin at Department of Peformance + Media, Sunway University College.
Recently, along with a lot of other people, I worked on Sivarasa Rasiah’s successful election campaign as MP for Subang. And I still try to earn my keep as member and publicity manager with Five Arts Centre.
2. Your plays with Five Arts Center (Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari, Baling Membaling) have shown similar interest in physical theatre – why this form? Any specific influences?
My entry point to physical theatre is through sports actually. I was heavily involved in team sports at school – basketball, football, rugby, softball, anything that involved running around and passing a ball back and forth with a group of people, heh. My favourite athletes were always those who were creative passers, who got others involved in the game – people like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Jason Kidd, Dennis Bergkamp, Cesc Fabregas – the sports term for them is ‘playmaker’, which is apt.
As an audience member, I brought a lot of the sports fanatic’s ways of seeing to the theatre, so on a visceral level, there were some physical theatre performances, such as Charlene Rajendran’s My Grandmother’s Chicken Curry &… (1998), that really engaged me. It’s that very immediate feeling of “Damn, I want do that too!”, which is how young people react to Cristiano Ronaldo’s dribbling moves.
So I use of lot of sports and games structures in my rehearsals and performances, and in something like Baling (Membaling), we just replaced throwing a ball around with throwing a stool, and to have Yoong Chia under the flying stool. It’s really a game of Monkey, but with very high stakes, which is actually what the Baling talks were!
And of course, I was very inspired by Marion D’Cruz’s philosophy as a choreographer who works with non-dancers. Rather than imposing a strict, dancer’s vocabulary on these bodies, she elicited and challenged these people’s existing physical vocabularies to create performances. So these were strategies that were adopted for projects with young people, as well as with the first-time performers in Baling.
3. The work you’ve been involved in have a very politically-aware tone to it – not exactly what Malaysian youths are known for. Is touring the colleges (eg: Baling Membaling) part of your effort to change that?
Touring unis and colleges is a very important part of what we do, and it’s about engaging young people, including those who are not going to the arts spaces because it’s considered expensive, transport problems, no interest, etc. We did this with Baling and Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari, and of course it was a huge part of the Sepuluh Tahun campaign.
Also in-built to that is many of these unis and colleges have theatre clubs or societies, and we’re interested to plant the idea that theatre does not have to mean big budgets, costumes, Grease or all these dead, white playwrights. In many places, we’ve gone back to do workshops and maintained relationships with the students. In a sense it’s about building and educating audiences, but in some cases, we’ve also found people who want to participate in our projects, which is great.
And I don’t think young people are politically unaware. They’re just aware in a different way, or their politicisation is manifesting through channels that are most relevant to them – blogs, YouTube, SMS, online social networks – I’m talking about those who are not already regular demo types. I think the recent elections have shown us that for quite some time, we’ve been underestimating the youth as apathetic and uncreative. Over the past few years the DIY ethic, from its origins in the local underground music scene, has mushroomed and is very visible amongst designers, artists, filmmakers, etc. Many young people are taking charge of organizing and distributing their stuff on their own terms.
(Mark Teh giving a talk at Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari (Five Arts Centre 2007), photo by Edwin Sumun)
4. How did you settle upon the themes of Malaysian history in the plays you have worked with so far? What made you choose the stories behind the Baling talks, the dalangs in wayang kulit?
Basically I’m a history nerd lah – and I am most interested in issues of the authorship and ownership of local history – who gets to write our history, what is left out and why, why do young Malaysians seemingly not care about history, where is the line between history and fiction, etc. And I am very grateful that I work closely with a bunch of history nerds as well.
Baling came out of stumbling upon the transcripts of the Baling talks of 1955 between Tunku Abdul Rahman and Chin Peng. At that time (2005), a lot of memoirs by the leftist leaders were coming out, and Chin Peng was applying to return to
Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari used newspaper articles, interviews and audio recordings to create a performance around the 2 dalangs – Hamwah Awang Mat and Dollah Baju Merah. Fahmi Fadzil had already begun experimenting with his many wayang manifestations for a couple of years, and we were engaged in a lot of arguments about tradition, censorship and survival, ways of ‘seeing’ with the wayang – arguments about art and art history, really.
5. What is your view of activism and the arts? Are you still involved in anything like the Taman
I was drinking with some friends the other night and we talked about the need to juggle multiple, overlapping roles in Malaysia – being an artist, critic, organiser, activist, educator, day job, etc – basically the artist as social engineer, because the support systems are not there, we are still a young nation, etc. I feel it comes with the territory.
On a personal level, I don’t prioritise between the arts work, education and the community work. I see them primarily as projects that provide spaces for different question to be asked, different problems to get worked out, and engaging with different participants and audiences. And I have to learn and take on different imaginations, strategies and vocabularies to deal with these projects, so it’s very educational and challenging for me. But I do get angry at activist-oriented work that carelessly use the arts as a tool, or arts-oriented work that position ‘message’ as ‘dealing with issues’, because the engagement is usually skin-deep and main hantam. What you then get is bad art from activists, and bad activism from artists.
(Wong Tay Sy and Fahmi Fahzil in Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari (Five Arts Centre 2007), photo by Edwin Sumun)
6. Dua, Tiga Dalang Berlari employed a few different languages – is that your attempt to bridge language divides in the arts?
Not really. Of course, language is very political in
I’ve always written or made performances with multiple languages – on a practical level, most of the people I work with are at least bilingual, but feel more comfortable performing in a particular language or dialect. There has been criticism about this strategy, especially in Baling – from Five Arts people, no less – but I think the fact of it is as Malaysian, we are always surrounded by languages we don’t or only partially understand, and we are able to negotiate these ‘slippages in language’ in our everyday lives, to pinjam Kathy Rowland’s term.
7. You’ve worked with quite a lot of interesting people – Leow Puay Tin, the late Krishen Jit, Marion D’Cruz – anyone out there you would like to collaborate with in the near future?
I’m very boring in that I find the greatest satisfaction in working with the same people, and this includes the two Fahmis, Hari Azizan, Wong Tay Sy, Lim Chung Wei, Imri Nasution, Tan Kui Lan and several others. Over the years, this informal collective has worked on many projects together, and we’ve developed a shorthand vocabulary and understanding. Of course, we’re generally passionate about the same things, but we are able to bring a great deal of criticality and curiosity to each other’s work. They’ve been very important in my work and personal development.
I want to work with Azmyl Yunor! We’re looking at doing a one-man musical extravaganza sometime late this year or early next year. There has been all these musicals on the ‘great men’ of Malaysian history, so we also want to do. But we don’t want to do great men lah. Or women. Azmyl is a fantastic performer, storyteller and musician – of course he is in 650 very different bands in addition to his own stuff, so we’ll see what we can do. Also, Nam Ron and I bump into each other on and off and we talk about working together on something, so we should, finally.
8. What other arts productions caught your eye in 2007?
I really enjoyed Tanda, which was a collaborative project by ASWARA theatre students artistic directed by Nam Ron, and/chaos, directed by Kok Man – the use of space and design elements were particularly innovative. Hands Percussion’s Chaos In Unison was also very good, but those guys always are.
I really liked That Was The Year, directed by Chee Sek Thim, and Ronggeng Merdeka up in
9. How well represented are the different aspects of Malaysian community in the local arts scene to you?
Huh – say what?
10. What should we be looking out from you in the near future?
I’m collaborating with the usual suspects on a 2-week project to look at the first Malayan Emergency from 1948 to 1960. This year is the 60th anniversary of the start of that Emergency, so there will be new performances, Fahmi Reza’s new documentary, screenings and an exhibition of researched materials. And next year is Five Arts’ 25th anniversary, so there will be some fun stuff to look forward to as well.
Interview (and confusing questions #9) update brought to you by Lainie, who just met Mark a few days ago at Jerome Kugan’s album launch.
