How did you get involved in theatre and the performing arts?
I got involved basically through assignments set by Mohan Ambikaipaker, who was my English Lit lecturer in Taylor's College in 1999 [when Teh was doing his 'A' levels]. Actually, I'd never seen any theatre shows before I went to his class. You know, I had no idea who all these [the late theatre director] Krishen Jit and [dancer choreographer] Marion D'Cruz and Instant Cafe? [Theatre] people were, at all.

So, part of the English Lit course was that we had to go, and watch, and write about theatre-lah. And I suppose what was very interesting in theatre at that time, ah, it's only because I wasn't so exposed to theatre, I wasn't exposed at all. The plays that I was watching, it so happened that they were all Five Arts [Centre] plays.

I missed out on Family, but I caught, apa ni, A Chance Encounter and I saw Charlene [Rajendran]'s My Grandmother's Chicken Curry &... and then Mergers & Accusations. So, it was just this whole bunch of Five Arts' plays. And in some ways, I was very interested in them because they were exploring things that were happening in the country and I hadn't had access to that before.

I went to international school-lah [Garden International School in Kuala Lumpur]. So, I had a very skewed adolescence which Mohan kind of helped to shatter. I mean, I was very arrogant when I first got to his class, and he was like, "Ya, ya, ya, you know you're very smart and everything but actually you don't know anything that's happening in the country. You can tell me what's happening in the UK or the US and all this European history, but actually you know very, very little about what's happening in this country."

So, one way for me to connect was to actually go and watch theatre-lah. So, that's how we got involved, actually. And from there, I formed a little group with everyone who was in his class. And we started doing performances every week in college.

So, instead of the usual let's-make-this-three-hour-extravaganza at the end of term, um, we thought very small. We thought, "let's just do something that is consistent every week, that we can open to 50 or 60 people and anyone in college can just come and watch." And they consisted of just monologues, poetry reading, some very simple dance things, but all original-lah. Coz Mohan kind of very much encouraged that, that whatever you perform, make it original. Don't use Shakespeare, don't use Arthur Miller, whatever.

Was there a name for this group that you set up together with your classmates?
Ya, it was called Article 19. And about half of Article 19 went on after college to form Akshen, the group which is now part of Five Arts Centre. Actually, maybe I should tell you the original link with Five Arts [happened when] Marion came to watch one of the performances in college, of Article 19.

I guess she was impressed with what she saw and she asked, "What are your plans after college? Are you guys going to stop doing this? Because you guys should continue-lah."

She said she wanted to form what she called a "strategic partnership" with us. So, we would basically be coolies for all the Five Arts productions, like carry stuff and be production people [chuckles]. And then, they would - you know, this was the Five Arts' Faustian sort of deal-lah - and then, they would give us workshops.

So, [playwright Leow] Puay Tin came and did workshops with us very early on. [Actor] Anne James came and did workshops with us. Marion came and did workshops with us. It's like bartering-lah.

Was it a good deal?
It was a very good deal! I mean, we started using this space [Five Arts Centre's studio space in Taman Tun Dr Ismail in Kuala Lumpur] for rehearsals and we staged one or two small workshop things here also.

Considering that you had no experience [in theatre] at all, was it difficult to have to prove yourself in the world of performing arts?
Not really, you know. I mean, I think a lot of it had to do with this ignorance-lah, in effect, of theatre history in this country, the personalities that we were receiving workshops [from]. You know, some people like, "Wah, Leow Puay Tin, Krishen Jit or whoever". And we, at least I, wasn't very conscious until, like, say, a year later [after] we started, who these people really were, when I started reading more and finding out like, "Oh, OK".

As far as training was concerned, I don't think it has been a big thing because a lot of the productions that I've been involved in, a lot of Malaysian theatre is about training as you are involved in a production. And I find that to be actually a learning process that I'm much more comfortable with.

I never did go to university. I think, at an earlier phase of that decision, not wanting to go to university, it was like postponing-lah, you know. I wanted to try and extend this theatre relationship a little bit more, another six months until I go to university and then, it became another year until I go to university, or maybe another year. Until a certain point, I think it was 2002, I realised that "OK, that's it." I realised that I wasn't going to go to university.

In a sense, because I felt maybe it was going to be like a second international school. You know, I had just come to a certain, ah, consciousness-lah, about theatre, about things that were happening - and quite a lot of exciting things were happening in the country at that point - so, I really felt that I didn't want to have to go away to university.

So, in a sense, that made me a bit more disciplined, a bit more focused with the type of theatre projects that I did.

Did you get a lot of flak for deciding not to go to university?
A lot [nods]. From everyone. And of course, it's to be expected. And the flak is very fair, actually. [Pause] Ya-lah, a degree is important... you could lecture, potentially, which is something I am interested in [Teh is a "Malaysian Culture and Society" tutor at The One Academy of Communication Design].

But also other things like the experience of being in university and being, if not in a different country, in a different, ah, mental sense of space, you know.

I got flak from Five Arts people, from Mohan, from my parents, obviously.

Do you foresee actually doing it [going to university] at some point in your life or have you just decided that the learning is going to happen for you in theatre?
Um, I haven't ruled it out. Most of my contemporaries in Akshen or Article 19, they graduated last year and/or this year. A lot of them have returned. So, that has given, I suppose, a sense of perspective about where I am. Because, over the past few years, I started working with people who were older than me, and in some cases, much older than me, so, I think when all my friends came back, I envied a lot of the things they gained from [a university] education. Some are the sort of very experiential things, like they got to see certain things, they got to go to certain places.

My friends took things like political science, or philosophy and psychology and those were also things I would have been interested in taking in university, I think. So, I suppose, just the way they structured their knowledge, or the things they were arguing with me about, struck me as, "Wow. That's very interesting. I would like to have that."

So, at certain points, ya, I was kind of, I was really considering, maybe I should go. It will help me organise my knowledge because a lot of my knowledge is all, like, self-induced.

But through building community arts work, because we are planning for teenagers, that's helped me to also think about planning my own knowledge. Being a bit more reflexive about the projects I'm doing and the processes that are involved in them.

Could you tell me something about the major projects you are involved in?
One is the [three-year-old] Taman Medan [Community Arts] project and that's a long project [of which Teh is project coordinator and facilitator].

How did this project come about?
The project came about actually in 2001. The Kampung Medan so-called clashes happened in March 2001. And that left, I think, six young people dead.

Now, at that time, a lot of NGOs [non-governmental organisations] started going in to work with the communities.

And PRM [Parti Rakyat Malaysia, now merged and known as Parti Keadilan Rakyat Malaysia] had asked, through [visual artist Wong] Hoy Cheong [if we were interested in doing something arts-based in the kampung for the kids]. 

And it was through the so-called PRM connection that we got into the Taman Medan area.

What was the objective of the project?
In the past, we had always worked with young people. But in KL, the Five Arts projects haven't really happened in the communities.  [Theatre director] Janet [Pillai] has started doing that, but that has happened in Penang. A lot of it was actually interest stemming from Janet's methodology of working.

So, we wanted to go to Taman Medan to see if we could work with young people, looking at their community issues and exploring those community issues through art work, through theatre, through the visual arts, through video.

Also, it's about capacity building, that's one of the aims. And that's one of the problems we identified earlier. We would like to train more facilitators whether they are artists or kids who have come through the project.

Was the first project run in Kampung Medan [one of the kampungs in Taman Medan]?
No. Because we figured that a lot of NGOs are working in Kampung Medan because that's the hot spot, that's the centre, and that's where all the action is. And everyone wanted a piece of Kampung Medan.

So, we said, quite clearly, we should work from the periphery. So, Kampung Pinang and Kampung Petaling Utama are actually on the periphery of that whole region. And then once you cross over, it's like Sri Sentosa already, a different area.

We just work with the surrounding communities that actually share very similar issues and tensions.

What's the profile of these kampungs you've been working in?
Kampung Pinang is about, I would say, 75% Malay. Working-class background, obviously. Kampung Pinang is half flats - very low-cost, low-rise flats, only about four-storeys high - and half squatter houses. The sepak takraw court divides the squatters and the flats in the community.

[Kampung] Petaling Utama is literally next door. And they are a community that used to be called Kampung Muniandy, which is about 80% Tamil who were all squatters. Kampung Muniandy was a squatter area that has moved into these new flats, and these flats are very high. They are maybe 20 storeys high. So, it's a squatter community that is adjusting to living in a flat situation.

So, one's a predominantly Malay kampung and one's a predominantly Tamil kampung. Was that a deliberate choice?
No, actually. [Pause] The first phase, as you probably observed, we didn't get any Indian kids. Partly because we were very inexperienced initially. So, we spoke to the ketua kampung, told him we wanted to do this project. He was very happy and he did the publicity for us, and unfortunately, he only publicised to the Malay kids-lah.

So, about two weeks into the project, because we were outdoors all the time, you know, all these people start coming to see the thing. And then suddenly, we were like, "There's quite a few Indian kids that we didn't get any word out to." So, we invited them all to the project but the Indian kids left after about a month in the first phase. One is that they were younger. They were like 11-, 12-, 13-[years-old]. So, there was like an ageist sort of bullying thing going on-lah. Add to that the fact that there are these sorts of tensions between Melayu and India.

But, I wouldn't blow them out of proportion-lah. They are the same kind of tensions that you would find in any sekolah kebangsaan nowadays.

So, these kids, after a month, they really felt that they didn't want to come because they have tuition, you know, they started finding excuses. So there was no conscious decision to, like, look for an Indian kampung but next door there was an Indian kampung, which wasn't there when we started doing phase one and two because when we started, those flats weren't around. Kampung Muniandy was somewhere else. So, they suddenly moved in here. So, well, [it] was very natural-lah for us to work just next door.

What about other projects that you are involved in?
OK, very much related to that is a project called Asian Youth Artsmall. That one is a two-year project and that's going to come to fruition at the end of this year as a workshop exchange. Basically, Five Arts over the past 2½ years has been the host of something called Arts Network Asia [ANA] which is a granting body for artists. ANA is funded by [the] Ford Foundation, and the hosting body gets a sum of money from Ford Foundation to do a regional project.

So, when [the hosting] came to Five Arts, we felt that Five Arts' strength over the past few years - not really so much to do with us, but much more traceable to Janet's work and Charlene's work with young people - has been the growth of these young people's work. And different methodologies within Five Arts to deal with young people's work.  We were really interested to explore that. So, basically the Asian Youth Artsmall project is to create a network of community arts groups that work with young people and work with youth issues, and to create this regional network. So, over the past five months, there's a very young group of facilitators that include people like Fahmi [Reza] and Gan [Siong King] and [Wong] Tay Sy, and these people who are involved in Taman Medan, and then, a more experienced group like Janet, [visual artist Liew] Kung Yu and Charlene. And we've been planning this thing and we've also been going to Thailand to look at community arts work, to visit groups in the Philippines, India, and Indonesia.

What else are you involved in?
There is this Directors' Workshop 5, which is the most immediate [project] right now. We should be having the show in exactly three weeks and one day [the four different shows ran from June 9 to 11 and 16 to 18].

You are not panicking yet?
I am panicking [chuckles]. There will be four pieces by [Teh, Fahmi Fadzil, Hari Azizan and Gabrielle Low], and this time, the Directors' Workshop is very different-lah, we think, from the other manifestations of the project so far.

I think, one, is because Krishen passed away [on April 28]. So... we had only one meeting with Krishen. Five Arts Centre member [Chee] Sek Thim is now the mentor. And he's [from] a previous Directors' Workshop. He knows the ins and outs.

Also, we are not performing in a theatre space. We are performing actually in [a] gallery [in Bangsar].

The idea is that all four plays are going to deal with issues related to CPM, to the Communist Party of Malaya. Just because a lot of material has been generated over the past year because of Chin Peng's book [My Side of History] and because of that book, a lot of other books have come out, and a lot of declassified documents have come out as well.

This is actually [part of] a three-year project involving basically the same group of people, like the Taman Medan facilitators who are also all involved in the Directors' Workshop [chuckles], who are all involved in Asian Youth Artsmall.

So, we've made a sort of three-year commitment to deal with, ah, the Communist history in Malaysia, and to look at, to sort of produce art works that question these histories over the period of three years. It started at the beginning of last year.

At the end of last year, I think in October, we took part in an exhibition in Singapore where we presented a work related to the CPM, and this work was also sent to the World Social Forum. They had a small side exhibition called "Borders" earlier this year. For that one, we created a monument selling toy soldiers, exactly 6,711 soldiers. I think that's the number of Communist soldiers that were killed between 1948 and 1960, the period of the Emergency [in then Malaya].

We bought the little green toys, 6,000-over of them, and we painted them red, and we repackaged them back into the plastic things they came in, except we re-branded them as Communist toys-lah. And these were sold at the exhibition. So, they were sold to Singaporeans.

And was it sold out?
No, I think we sold about one-third of the toys.

Your play Baling (membaling) is totally devised, is it?
It's all devised. All four [plays] actually are new plays-lah.

Which means you don't really know what the finished product is going to look like?
Um, I can tell you what it's going to look like. Basically, we are using the transcript of the Baling talks between Chin Peng and Tunku [Abdul Rahman] and David Marshall as sort of the trunk of the performance.

And it's non-linear. It's something that we will break away from and come back to. So, in between, four different sections that we've identified from the Baling talks, there will be other themes related to the actors' family experiences of the Emergency or stories that they have of the CPM. We'll also layer with things from Chin Peng's sort of anecdotes that have come up as well as some of our interviews with people we met when we were there [the team visited Peace Village, which is where the remaining former CPM members now live, in southern Thailand].

What do you hope to achieve by doing so much work on CPM and its history?
Actually, I am very fascinated by history, I am very fascinated by Malaysian history. All our earlier Akshen work were also essentially about Malaysian history, you know, Lebih Kecoh and Stadium.

Malaysians do not own their history. They are not interested, they don't want to. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the history is written or authored by the authorities and it's constantly repackaged, and re-condensed and remodelled as and when public policy changes.

Like, one instance that everyone knows about is how the sections on Japanese Occupation were very much shrunk when [former Prime Minister Tun Dr] Mahathir [Mohamad] adopted the Look East policy in the 1980s.

So, I think in the project that we have been doing so far, with Akshen or with this new group of people, we've tried to [pauses] represent history, but not necessarily to record history because that's a historian's job, I suppose, in some ways.

We are more interested in the facts of history being a starting point for conversations. Because the facts of history are often used as the full stop in a conversation, you know.

What kind of impact has being in performing arts had on you and on the children and the youth that you work with?
[Pauses] On me, it's very hard to quantify or qualify-lah. I think I'm still finding out. But it has been a very strong and steep learning curve over the past four or five years now.

And because the learning is experiential, you know it happens on the floor or in the kampung, I find that's very challenging-lah. You know, the whole problem-solving nature of being involved in theatre. Because I firmly believe that a lot of theatre, and a lot of facilitation work that we do with the kids even, is really about problem-solving.

And obviously, the people-lah. That has been fantastic. People like Marion, Janet, Krishen, obviously, Charlene, who are [all] very pro-young people, but not blindly so. Who really throw us off the deep end, whether it's doing production work or doing presentation work or theatre projects... and have really given me a lot of support over the past few years.

So, that sense of pedagogy and that sense of empowering young people is very, very honest and they challenge young people. It's not just lip service. It's not just this kind of coddling thing. And I think it sort of says something that so many of the young people that have come out of the Five Arts sort of situation are interested to work with the performing arts or theatre in functional or educational sorts of ways as well.

So, I find that very interesting. And that's why it's an environment that's been very, very hard to leave to go to university, you know. Like, "Why?" All the lecturers and the teachers you want are kind of like your members, ya.

As far as the kids are concerned, the impact on them, when you talk to them, I think they will say certain things. I think the frustration has been, for us as facilitators, the kids are very interested in the arts, obviously. But how do they extend or sustain that interest when a lot of these resources or doors are closed to them?

And, I think, over time, a few of our more senior kids have said, "You know, I'm interested in doing performing arts. Should I look at ASK [Akademi Seni Kebangsaan]?" So, I guess a few of them are considering those options, as well as doing theatre.

But, I'm also sure that there's a whole bunch of kids [for whom] it's really just an activity-lah, like football. You know, it's fun, these guys are kind of cool, they're nice.

Do you think there are enough spaces or artists or institutions that allow young people to be in performing arts as a way to empower themselves?
The obvious answer is, no. But, I've thought a lot about that lately, actually. I mean, I think one of the problems with the performing arts over the past, say, two years, you know has been the banjir [flood] that happened at Actors Studio, the old space [underneath Dataran Merdeka]. Because a lot of the more edgy work or the sort of younger artists as well as the more sort of independent groups-lah, you know the groups that are not attached to Actors Studio or in some way affiliated with Five Arts or DramaLab or whatever. They were doing the work there because the rental was very cheap. And so, there were some very experimental work, some that worked, some that didn't, going on there.

Since that banjir-ed over, most of the work has centred around Actors Studio, Bangsar, which has a very specific audience although it tries to project itself as being very open. It is open, but it can't help the audience that it gets - it's the Bangsar, Damansara, Taman Tun [Dr Ismail] crowd.

And people have complained that one, there are not enough shows. Second, the shows lack quality. I think a lot of it has to do with our imagination. You see a lot of younger groups or smaller groups who are pitching themselves on the Actors Studio, Bangsar stage when actually, they don't know how to deal with that space. They don't know how to deal with the large-ness of that space or the dynamics of that space. I mean, if I had to do a show there, I also would face a lot of problems because our imagination is not there yet-lah, I suppose.

And, ya, rental is high and so on and so forth. And so, the quality does suffer because you have shows that are, maybe, created for more intimate spaces, like a box [stage].

But, I mean, that's just theatre spaces-lah. [There are] all kinds of other spaces. Sort of another strand that we've been talking [about] in this group of people that I've been working with has been to look at an alternative space actually. You know, how does one create an alternative space? Where should an alternative space be?

When Gan and Hari went to Indonesia, they met a lot of groups where the community projects come out of the artists being born in that community, and living in that community, and his house is open 24 hours a day for the kids to come.

Coming back to the whole thing about space. I think it does have to be contextualised. I think here, as far as space for, like, young artists or young people [is concerned], I feel that if we talk about space in terms of, like, what we need in Taman Medan, we thought that if we got a nice community centre, if we get some kind of indoor space, "Wah!" things would be fantastic.

[But] that's not necessarily true because for this newer space, we work indoors all the time and the community stops seeing us outdoors. So, the work became, ya, more concentrated but also sort of less open-lah, in some ways.

Now, we are in a small tadika [kindergarten] in Kampung Petaling Utama. So, things are comfortable. We need to push that again-lah, you know, get a little bit more uncomfortable and then...

Five Arts has talked about running a theatre venue or space. A lot of people have aspirations like that. You know, a space where you can put on the edgier sort of work or put on the more experimental works in a sense like what Reka [Art Space in Kelana Jaya] is trying to do.

But, I think the problem with that is that you very quickly become managers. So instead of being creative, you become people who worry about bottomline and making sure things are filled.

One of the interesting things about Janet's project - this Anak-anak Kota project up in Penang - is she found a very good way of getting the community involved with her project. Her projects are heritage projects where the kids apprentice with the uncles who make traditional beaded shoes or rattan baskets, and so forth. So, there's that kind of inter-generational interaction.