By Jo Kukathas
One of these is not like the other.
Yes, Teater Garasi are from Indonesia.
The others are Malay…sian.
The George Town Festival (GTF) 2024 has an exciting programme, and I hope the recent controversy has made people look at the programme rather than the political and professional ****stirrers.
GTF is an international arts festival. Always has been. Malaysians are represented at this festival not Malay/Chinese/Indian/Dan Lain-Lain. Just as Indonesians and Taiwanese and Spanish and Thai and Vietnamese are ‘represented’. Although they were not chosen based on their nation (this isn’t the Olympics) or their race (this isn’t Pesta Raya). They were chosen because the artistic director felt they had something interesting or profound or joyful or beautiful or well made to share with audiences in Penang.
You can talk or disagree about certain artistic choices. That would be an interesting conversation. Instead, people chose to talk about race. Which is why the conversation in Malaysia is never a conversation. It’s never dialogue. It’s threats and I’ll share your photo on social media and encourage people to harass you if you disagree with me. This has happened to the staff of GTF 2024 already.
This creates an unsafe environment for everyone.
Cyber bullying recently resulted in the death of a young woman. She couldn’t stand the threats and committed suicide. But that didn’t lead to any soul-searching. The bully got off with a RM100 fine.
This is like KK Super Mart all over again. They, too, were forced to apologise.
This is like Mentega Terbang. The director, the producer and the writer are fighting the accusations in court. Not before their homes and cars were vandalised and a young actress attacked.
This furore has led to GTF sponsors being spooked. At least one has asked that their logo be removed. This doesn’t bode well for support for the arts.
The people who make these kinds of threats should not be supported, yet people think it’s OK to do so. But they are just pawns in an ongoing proxy culture war.
A single promo video for GTF has been the latest political punching bag in this war. It features mainly three performers: Aida Redza, a contemporary Malay dancer; Ling Goh, a Chinese traditional Chinese puppeteer and opera practitioner who tells contemporary stories; and Kumaran Rajangam, a traditional Indian tabla player. Together they represent modernity, hybridity and tradition in art.
Its critics have said it doesn’t feature Malay culture. By that, I think they mean it doesn’t feature the pesta raya version of Malay culture. The fact that it features nationally and internationally renowned dancer Aida Redza, whose work is deeply grounded in Malay traditional dance, seems to be unimportant to them.
The problem seems to be not that the video doesn’t feature a Malay artist but that her Malay identity isn’t one simplified into cliches of identity. Cliches that, as local social scientist Por Heong Hong has pointed out, were handed down to us by our British colonists.
I quote Por Heong Hong in full:
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Musealising differences, especially racialised/ethnicised differences, is the very act of performing white colonial modernity and hierarchy of differences through widespread visual display in the museums across Europe beginning from the 19th Century. Sadly, many decades of post-colonial racial politics have effectively conditioned many Malaysians into thinking of differences only along ethnic lines, rather than reflecting and unsettling these musealised differences.
Perhaps part of the problem lies in our understanding of what the arts are. We have equated the arts with tourism for so long that we expect a Citrawarna, dance programme for tourists, our cultural heritage commodified into digestive bites – M/C/I/DLL blandly checked – often devoid of meaning. It’s an outward show of diversity but it’s often hollowed out. You won’t see main puteri there or any other art form that defies simplification or is more than simple entertainment.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with entertainment but there’s a difference between making art and making entertainment. And I think Malaysians are hungry for art. Witness the lines that formed outside Ilham Gallery for their Ilham Art Prize show. Time I think for arts to be decoupled from tourism so that we delink it intellectually and emotionally.
I think GTF gives you honest diversity and Malaysians working across ethnicities is evidence of that.
Some critics have said Malay culture should have been better “represented”.
That says more about those critics’ ignorance than anything else. Aida Redza is a classically trained dancer and hand movements are from Malay dance. The fact that these hand movements have antecedents in Indian classical dance doesn’t make it less culturally Malay. Ask Dr Anis, Malaysia’s foremost exponent, researcher and maker of Zapin, and he will tell you of the Hadhramawt influences that went into making this now Malay art form.
All art is hybrid. Artists are curious creatures and we borrow and steal all the time.
But actually, it’s not important. These batu api are not interested in the facts. Tell them that four of the programmes are spearheaded by Malay artists and they don’t care. That’s numerically larger than any other.
Someone wrote that Aida Redza was a token. They also accused the festival of only having ‘orang putih’ (white).
I replied:
Why is Aida Redza token? She’s a brilliant artist. Not a token cultural dancer but an artist grounded in Malay dance who has been practising her art for decades despite the hardship of being an artist in Malaysia. You can see her training in her hand movements. It’s disrespectful to her to call her a token.
There are four programmes in this international festival spearheaded by Malay artists. Numerically, that’s more than any other. There are also other Malay artists working alongside their artistic partners of every race.
They are programmes from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore… there is an Asian Producers Platform running alongside. What is so orang putih about all this? And so what if artists from Lithuania and Bulgaria are also invited? It’s an arts festival. It invites artists.
There are cultural festivals at other time of the year that highlight boria, mak yong and wayang kulit. The sad thing is that hardly anyone goes [for these festivals]. Hardly anyone wants to study these forms. These performers are hardly supported by their own ethnic communities. Yet suddenly people are insisting they be involved. That’s tokenism.
Rather than jump on the politically motivated name-calling bandwagon, maybe stop and think that the people behind the festival are people, are artists. They are trying to create a programme that is diverse, ie that will appeal to different ages, different interests. Some people like Coldplay. Other people like Rossa. Others love Bjork.
The GTF organisers have no political agenda to gain power. They certainly don’t have a racial agenda. The race-baiting and the pitting of races against each other has, as usual, come from the outside and it’s politically motivated. Why else take on an institution like GTF that’s growing from strength to strength and try to rip it to shreds? Why harass and bully the festival arts makers?
Anyway, it’s got the festival some publicity. Both here and internationally. The international artists are having to make work in the face of intimidation. And the Asian Producers Platform are holding an Asian producers camp in George Town so they are getting a front row view of just how impossible it is to make art in Malaysia. It’s a story they’ll take home with them.
Just like the stories of last-minute cancellations of concerts, like the introduction of a “kill switch”, like the shutting down of a concert because of one act of one performer, Malaysia is going to be a place that other people avoid.
This is such a pity because historically the thing we had going for us is that geographically, we were a crossroads. Goods, ships, ideas came from all over. Penang and Malacca, in particular, were those ports which opened their arms to the world. Because of this, they thrived. They were global port cities and the rich mixed heritage of Penang is an indication of its open-mindedness, fearlessness and curiosity. No frogs under coconut shells in Penang.
But now everything is fear-mongering and parochial froggy mentalities. Suddenly, coconut shells are the preferred housing.
Go check out these programmes by Malaysian and Indonesians artists. They look fantastic. Some, like Ridwan Saidi’s, only have a few tickets left. So hopefully, this means the festival this year will be well attended.
But the repercussions are going to extend way past the festival. This is just part of a constant effort to undermine the idea of a Malaysian Malaysia. It looks like despite the promises of Pakatan Harapan pre-election, being yoked to Umno and living in fear of Pas has made we, the people, a nation of fearful frogs.
Rather than belittle the GTF artists and question their motivations, I think we have to stand up to the troublemakers and question their motivations. Artists just want to make art. Political troublemakers just want to make, well, trouble.
So it was good that Penang’s chief minister opened the festival, addressing the social media attacks with diplomacy and dignity. And boria.
I’m reminded of an incident which happened in 1999. My company was doing a show, a political satire critical of Dr Mahathir’s arrest of Anwar Ibrahim, the black eye incident and the sodomy trial that followed.
The show was reported to the police and Special Branch, and consequently they paid us a visit at the MAS Auditorium where we were performing. They watched the show but did not record it. They seemed to enjoy the show and laughed uproariously. But the next day they called the MAS Auditorium office and asked them to secretly film the show.
The people in charge asked why and the officers could give no reason. So, they refused. We were not doing anything wrong, they said, merely expressing what many people felt. Moreover, we were the clients, not the Special Branch. We were paying for the venue and they had no right to film us secretly or otherwise.
I think the Special Branch did not expect this show of defiance and bravery. They capitulated.
If we want to have a good future, we need to stand up against troublemakers whether government or opposition-led. To create a brave new world, we all need to be brave. – Jo Kukathas/Facebook
Jo Kukathas is a theatre maker – a writer, director, dramaturg and actor – and artistic director of an established theatre company.
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I was trying to turn my head around this, but #Jokukathas hit the nail on the head with this well thought out point of view. It is not an easy task for the festival organisers to make GTF fresh and relevant every year, this being the 16th iteration. If art is about provoking people, ideas and such, GTF has succeeded in an unimaginable way. The show must go on and there is no way you can placate people who are unlikely to attend the programs anyway but feel slighted because some 90 year old guy saw a promo video that didn’t appeal to his world view.