Recent coverage in Kakiseni about\nthe phenomenon of censorship in private sector Malaysian arts may seem like a\nnew thing to some. But to a keen Kakiseni reader, these articles conjured up a\npast era of Malaysian arts, when the seeds of interference were sown and the\ntrend of individuals setting themselves up as cultural and moral guardians was\nrife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had arrived to take up a drama\nlectureship at the University Sains Malaysia in late 1977. USM had established\nitself as a thriving centre of theatre practice in the early 70s under the\nBelgian director Tone Brulin, whose play Naga\nNaga Dimana Kau? Naga-Naga Siapa Kau?<\/em> had critic Salleh ben Joned writing\nin Dewan Sastra in February 1974, “I could safely say that Naga Naga<\/em> is the first production of a\nmodern Malaysian theatre. But it is ironical to think that such a creation is\nthe product of a foreign theatre man.” Brulin also reworked Sophocles\nAntigone, inspired by the Vietnam War. That was a rare venture into politics for\nthe Malaysian theatre of the time, which was normally more private, often\nfocusing on absurdist theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the time, all the talk was of a\nnational culture policy, of the desirability or otherwise of implementing\nMuhibbah in theatre, with a decree that Malay culture would be the basis of\nMalaysia’s arts. Some dire dance productions resulted, featuring rojak\ncostuming where saris, cheongsams and baju kurungs adorned performers at\nrandom. But frankly, in those laid-back times, nobody took all that much notice\nand got on with whatever they were doing anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Send in the Clowns<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mind you, there were a few sinister\nrumblings. At the 9th<\/sup> Southeast Asian Games in Kuala Lumpur in 1977,\ndancer Zamin Haroon (now Chandrabhanu) and Ezane Azanin Ahmad wowed audiences\nwith their virtuoso dancing, while the late director Krishen Jit had a whole\narmy of kuda kepang galloping across the stage in an unprecedented spectacle. A\ntriumph, until a critic in the local press turned a critical eye on Zamin’s use\nof Balinese movement in this dance — un-Malay, it was charged. It was enough\nto send Zamin dashing back to Melbourne, where he finished off his Ph.D. on the\nTerinai. He then set up the Bharatam Dance Company, which attracted\nconsiderable Australian government funding and went on to achieve success with\nhuge productions like Buddha, The Light\nof Asia<\/em> in bharatanatyam style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shortly after, Brulin, who had\nreturned to his native Belgium in 1975 and founded Theatre of the Third World\n(TIE3), which performed a multicultural repertory of African and Asian theatre,\nreturned to Malaysia in 1979 to direct Paul Marr’s play Tak Kota-Kotak<\/em>. The production, which was undertaken at the request\nof the Malaysian Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports for the International\nYear of the Child, soon fell afoul of critics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One such was M Hanafiah A Samad,\njournalist for Berita Harian, who became a defacto critic of cultural practice in\nhis regular column. Hanafiah criticised Brulin for introducing elements likely\nto have dangerous effects on the young Malay children attending Tak Kota-Kota<\/em> performances in big school\nhalls, and kampungs from Genting Highlands to Ulu Selangor. The charges were\nthree-fold: Brulin’s main characters were two clowns dressed in motley — very\nun-Malay. “But wasn’t the pelawak raja a clown?” some countered. The\nsecond charge: a very unseemly inclusion of the clowns filling their mouths\nwith water and spitting at each other in an adversarial game. No Malay child\nwould do that, we were told. Finally, one of the clowns called the other\n“babi”. Impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Incidentally, Encik M Hanafiah\ncontinues to be a voice in the cultural scene, saying as recently as last year\nin his blog “I would like to think that I know about art and all the farty\npeople around it.” Indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Spiritual Geometrics<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But back to the past. 1979 was a bad\nyear for cultural paternalism. In my own production of Dinsman’s Ana<\/em> for Pesta Drama Melayu, the set\ndesigner, English architecture lecturer Dean Sherwin and costume designer Ben\nTan, opted for a Theatre of the Absurd interpretation, after I had consulted\nwith the playwright. We got a few decent reviews, including one from\nIndonesia’s Putu Wijaya representing the prestigious Indonesian magazine Tempo<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The set was a twisted geodesic dome,\nnecessarily made up of triangles. In a spirit of fun, the costumes also\nfeatured triangles and the telephone, the most important prop in the play, was\na series of triangles. Alas, a watchful journo from Utusan Melayu spotted what\nwe hadn’t — Christian symbolism in the triangles, which he claimed were a\nwell-known symbol of the Trinity. In all my childhood days at Sunday school\nclasses, I had never been told that. Happily, a correspondent to the letters\npage of Utusan pointed out that the Mesjid Negara also featured triangles.\nPhew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, performing artists have\nalways been more suspect than their less verbal counterparts. One of my many\nencounters with the Kuala Lumpur constabulary over licensing of productions\ninvolved the suggestion that Jean Paul Sartre may have been a Communist. I was\nthere as production manager for Anak Alam’s staging of Sartre’s No Exit (Pintu Tertutup)<\/em> starring Ahmad\nYatim, Faridah Merican and Rogayah Hamid. I managed a wide-eyed, innocent\nresponse to the desk sergeant\u2019s questions about Sartre\u2019s politics. After he\ntook a look at the script, he obviously decided it was a load of intellectual\nrubbish and stamped the permission papers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Catching the Conscience of the Dean<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But forget Sartre, there was “metal more attractive” to the cultural watchdogs of Malaysia — Shakespeare. In late 1979, Teater USM had embarked on the project of a lifetime — a massive Bahasa Malaysia production of Hamlet<\/em> to be launched in an actual fort – Fort Cornwallis and then to tour the peninsula. Armed with a published UM version which was based on an old Trisno Sumardjo version translated from Dutch (that led to some fun) and with Latif Mohidin, artist-in-\u00adresidence at USM at the time, as dramaturg, the production at first aroused nothing but positive comment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dean of the University Humanities\nFaculty, Shahnon Ahmad, took no offense. He even took Hamlet (Musa Masran) and\nme to lunch at Mak Minah’s kedai makan in Penang with the US Ambassador to\ncelebrate this mighty cultural event. Radio TV Malaysia representatives flew to\nPenang for opening night and started drawing up contracts for all artistic and technical\npersonnel to participate in a TV production. A huge opportunity for the students\nand the first time we understood that such an offer had been made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With a multi-regional, multi-ethnic\ncast, it was a working example of Muhibbah, and the only nay-sayers were a few\ncrusty English teachers from the nearby Malay College at Kuala Kangsar, who\ncame down on it for interfering with the sacred language of the Bard of Avon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That is until the USM Muslim\nStudents’ Association got hold of the matter, condemning the play for its\nimmorality, particularly in a scene where Hamlet is in the bedroom with the\ncharacter they assumed to be his stepmother. It is true that that scene and\nothers with Ophelia, were pretty racy but the critics might have stayed long\nenough to learn that Gertrude was Hamlet’s ibu not his ibu tiri. The\nassociation’s argument was that this production highlighted a negative and\nnihilistic play. The Dean, Mak Minah’s lunch forgotten, joined in, suggesting\nthat the words “to be or not be” must always be the preserve of the\nAlmighty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The University eventually withdrew its permission to televise the play. RTM, which had been advising on matters like the feudal titles in the play, pulled out. And disappointed theatre students held futile meetings at which angry Hamlet<\/em> cast members accused their opponents of being “clowns”. But then again, as we knew by then, there were no clowns in Malaysian culture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ~~~ <\/p>\n\n\n\n First Published: 21.02.2008 on Kakiseni <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recent coverage in Kakiseni about the phenomenon of censorship in private sector Malaysian arts may seem like a new thing to some. But to a keen Kakiseni reader, these articles conjured up a past era of Malaysian arts, when the seeds of interference were sown and the trend of individuals setting themselves up as cultural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":11,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7758,7781,7765,7770,7763,7762],"tags":[1583,4423,844,3344,3775,4414,712,4412,501,234,4419,4432,1319,4413,573,265,1459,4417,621,4430,3924,4428,4416,4418,4420,4429,4425,4228,1854,3846,274,4426,4421,46,2821,4415,1764,4427,3848,4422,4411],"language":[7785],"writer":[7846],"class_list":["post-27922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artikel","category-seni","category-penapisan","category-budaya","category-tarian","category-teater","tag-ahmad-yatim","tag-anak-alam","tag-arts","tag-ben-tan","tag-berita-harian","tag-bharatam-dance-company","tag-censorship","tag-chandrabhanu","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-dean-sherwin","tag-dewan-sastera","tag-dinsman","tag-ezane-azanin-ahmad","tag-faridah-merican","tag-krishen-jit","tag-latiff-mohidin","tag-m-hanafiah-a-samad","tag-malay","tag-malay-college-kuala-kangsar","tag-malaysian","tag-musa-masran","tag-paul-marr","tag-pesta-drama-melayu","tag-putu-wijaya","tag-radio-tv-malaysia","tag-rogayah-hamid","tag-rtm","tag-salleh-ben-joned","tag-shahnon-ahmad","tag-shakespeare","tag-teater-usm","tag-tempo","tag-theatre","tag-theatre-of-the-absurd","tag-theatre-of-the-third-world-tie3","tag-tone-brulin","tag-trisno-sumardjo","tag-universiti-sains-malaysia-usm","tag-utusan-melayu","tag-zamin-haroon","language-inggeris","writer-helen-musa-ms"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27922"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39003,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27922\/revisions\/39003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27922"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=27922"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myartmemoryproject.com\/ms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writer?post=27922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}