Staging Difference and Performing Sameness:
The Politics of Krishen Jit’s Theatre in Modern Multicultural Malaysia
Charlene Rajendran

 charlene.r@nie.edu.sg

 

   
    Profile   

Charlene Rajendran is a Malaysian teacher, writer and theatre practitioner who currently teaches theatre in the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She has been involved in young people’s theatre since she was a teenager as a performer, director and producer, working with Janet Pillai, Malaysia’s pioneer youth theatre practitioner. She gained exposure to traditional and contemporary theatre via inter-disciplinary and integrated arts processes developed by artists such as Krishen Jit, Marion D’Cruz, Leow Puay Tin and Wong Hoy Cheong, working with Five Arts Centre, Malaysia. She continues to examine improvisatory and experimental work that forges contextual fusion within a plural space.

Research Interests:

  • politics of difference in theatre making,

  • a semiotics of location in arts education

  • Southeast Asian performance practice.

Abstract

This research examines the theatre practice and cultural politics of Malaysian director Krishen Jit (1939-2005) in staging cultural difference in postcolonial multiethnic Malaysia. The work aims to examine how Jit negotiated issues of ‘otherness’ in his choices of content and form, text and context, generating enactments of ‘Malaysian-ness’ in the years after independence, that encompassed not only the dominant Malay culture but, importantly, politically significant minority cultures in a racialised society negotiating issues of nationhood and identity

The research will analyse how Jit broke the boundaries of monolingual theatre so as to better represent the cultural complexity of Malaysia, and also extended theatrical practice to include both the traditional and the contemporary, the various combinations of which were well suited to cultural production in a country open to globalization, while remaining largely Islamic in its official religious orientation. It will trace how Jit’s stagings of theatre and his contributions to theatre training and policy making engaged with what contemporary urban culture was becoming in post-independence and subsequently the modernizing Malaysia of the controversial former prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, a critic of – as the latter saw it – neocolonial western imperialism.

The research will articulate how Jit’s vision of culture was one that refused simplistic oppositions not only between ‘east’ and ‘west’ but also, in Malaysia itself, between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’. Jit’s work, therefore, was engaged with intercultural issues as they related to imagining ‘Asia’ in a global context that took into account the so-called East Asian Miracle of the 1980s and the 1990s.