Introduction, Staging History: Selected Plays from Five Arts Centre Malaysia 1984-2014
Anne James is a much respected actor who has performed extensively in Malaysia and internationally. She was a member of Marion D’Cruz and Dancers, and has worked with directors including Krishen Jit, Ong Keng Sen, Kee Thuan Chye, Richard Schechner, Joe Hasham, Ivan Heng, Claire Wong, Zahim Albakri, Jo Kukathas, Natalie Hennedige, Chee Sek Thim, Mark Teh, Kelvin Wong, Lim Kien Lee, Loh Kok Man, and Martin Blum. Recognition for Anne’s work in theatre and film include ‘Best Solo Performer’ at the 2003 BOH Cameronian Arts Awards (for Dinner for Two in the Best of Restaurants), ‘Best Supporting Actress’ at the 2013 Anugerah Majlis Pengkritik Filem Kuala Lumpur (for KIL), and ‘Best Group Performance’ at the 2016 BOH Cameronian Arts Awards (for Another Country).
In recent years, Anne has toured internationally with Five Arts Centre’s production of Baling (2015-2018), and performed as Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare Demystified’s Macbeth (2017-2019) across Malaysia. She also acted in Pentas Project’s trilingual production of The Tragicomedy of Errors (2018), and her film appearances include Pineapple Town (2015), Redha (2015), and One Two Jaga (2018). Anne was trained in acting at Universiti Sains Malaysia and Northwestern University, USA. She teaches voice and acting at several universities in the Klang Valley.
Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri is a performer, musician, and digital producer. With Five Arts Centre, he has performed in projects such as Something I Wrote, 2-minute solos - art meets politics, Baling, Version 2020, A Notional History, and Oppy & Professor Communitas, as well as in Lee Ren Xin’s B.E.D. series.
Faiq creates his own original music with the rock band Terrer. Their new EP Kaum Lelaki is available on all major music streaming platforms as well as on CD.
Ivy Nallammah Josiah is a Women’s Human Rights Activist, Gender Consultant and Educator. Ivy is the former President and Executive Director of Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO), where over 20 years she developed WAO’s shelter services and advocacy strategies. WAO opened Malaysia’s first shelter for survivors of domestic violence in 1982.
Ivy’s involvement in the arts began in the 1980s as a costume and wardrobe person for theatre productions, before moving on to produce performances for theatre companies. With Five Arts Centre she began as a performer with Marion D’Cruz and Dancers, and continues to contribute as a producer and fundraiser for the collective. Presently she is managing the Malayan-Malaysian digital performing arts archive MY Art Memory Project and acts as an advisor to the ArtsEquator Southeast Asian Arts Censorship Database project. Ivy is currently writing and podcasting stories about the women’s movement in Malaysia and remains active in civil society. She loves to dance, cook, and create.
Janet Pillai began her career in the teaching and practice of children's theatre in the 1970s. In 2007, Janet founded Arts-ED, a non-profit organisation which provides non-formal arts, heritage, and culture education for young people. Her pioneering work involved collaborations with Malaysian performing artists and young people resulting in more than 25 major productions and an online resource, the Arts Education Archive Malaysia.
Currently Janet is an independent consultant and resource person specialising in arts education and community engaged arts. She researches and publishes on community-based arts in the Asian region, designs programmes, and provides training for community arts workers in the region.
June Tan is a biologist, screenwriter, arts producer, and activist. Since 2015, June has produced international co-productions that have toured to Australia, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates. From 2018-2020 she was a Director for TPAM in Yokohama - a platform reflecting contemporary thinking in Asian performing arts - where she programmed several panels and projects looking into how artists are using performance in society. June has also presented her work on panels and events in Bangkok, Melbourne, Mumbai, Munich, Tokyo, Saigon, Seoul, Shanghai, and Yokohama.
Currently June is involved in climate activism and she is a member of the coalition to Defend the Kuala Langat North Forest Reserve and Gabungan Darurat Iklim. She is also a film and TV scriptwriter and has written for regional streaming platforms (Netflix, iflix, HBO Asia, and Viu), as well as terrestrial TV networks in Malaysia and Singapore.
Kubhaer T. Jethwani is a versatile film director, producer, and first assistant director who specialises in commercials and music videos. He has worked on projects of all shapes, sizes and budgets - from big Hollywood productions to local indies. Acting is Kubhaer’s first love, and he has yet to meet a role that he will say no to. He has previously acted and written for Five Arts Centre, and was part of youth theatre collective Akshen.
Currently Kubhaer is in the midst of opening mightyHUMBLE, a production house that champions ethical work principles with an eye on developing original local content and nurturing younger video-based creatives.
Lee Ren Xin is a dance artist interested in how the body carries, reflects, embodies, and co-creates with place and time. An overarching theme in Ren Xin’s work is how to share a space, or how (we want) to live together. Her works explore ways of inhabiting, as well as the spaces inhabited - how one shapes the other, momentarily or slowly over a long time. At other times, she works with ritual and repetition in public space.
Past works include ANGGOTA 2: Re-Member, ANGGOTA, #whoseneighborhoodproject, Where’s The Speficifisfety series (in collaboration with Lee Mun Wai), and the B.E.D. (Because Everybody Dreams) series. Ren Xin was awarded ‘Best Choreographer in a Feature Length Work’ and ‘Best Group Performance’ (alongside Tan Bee Hung) for ANGGOTA at the 2023 BOH Cameronian Arts Awards, and she was ‘Best Featured Performer’ at the 2019 BOH Cameronian Arts Awards for her performance in Soubi Sha’s Dead Bird. She has also received support from the Saison Foundation for her research project Body and Borders (2020), in exchange with director and playwright Kaori Nishio. Ren Xin graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore and Purchase College, State University of New York, USA. She trained with The Human Expression Dance Company and LeeSaar The Company, and performed with the DPAC Dance Company.
Photo credit: Bernie Ng
Mac Chan is an independent lighting designer. Since 1997 he has worked closely with many theatre and dance companies across Malaysia and Singapore. He was appointed lighting designer for the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games opening and closing ceremonies, and between 2009 to 2019 he was lighting designer for four National Day Parades in Singapore.
Mac has received many awards for his work in lighting design and technical theatre, including the 2006 National Arts Award in Malaysia, as well as an Arts Network Asia grant to research performing arts spaces in the region. He has been invited as a speaker to many international theatre architectural & engineering conferences. In 2006 Mac founded Stage Centre Line Associates (SCLA), a specialist technical design consultancy responsible for many major media and entertainment projects in the region, such as the KLCC Convention Centre, the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre (klpac), Performing Arts Centre of Penang (penangpac), Petaling Jaya Performing Arts Centre, Pinewood Iskandar Malaysia Studios, and more.
Marion F. D'Cruz graduated with a BA in Performing Arts and an MA in Dance from Universiti Sains Malaysia. She has studied traditional, modern, and contemporary dance in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, London, and New York. In 1983 she formed Marion D'Cruz and Dancers, who have performed extensively both locally and internationally. Marion began dancing at the age of six and started making dance at 16. One of the pioneers of contemporary dance in Malaysia, her work has gone through many phases – the search for a Malaysian identity in contemporary dance, the socio-political commentary, working with ‘non-performers’, the democratization of the artistic space. Marion continues to break many rules in search of interesting projects that empower performers and audiences alike. More recently, she has been creating unique performance structures that allow artists and non-artists to come into and tell their stories.
Marion has received numerous awards including the 2019 Hai-O Arts & Culture Grants Lifetime Achievement Award. Marion teaches part time in the Dance Faculty of the National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage (ASWARA – Akademi Seni Budaya dan Warisan Kebangsaan). She continues to produce, perform, and choreograph.
Mark Teh is a performance maker, researcher, and curator based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. His diverse, collaborative projects take on documentary, speculative and generative forms, and address the entanglements of history, memory, counter-cartography, and the political. His practice is situated primarily in performance, but also operates via exhibitions, education, social interventions, writing and curating. He graduated with an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Mark's projects have been presented at OzAsia Festival Adelaide, SPIELART Festival Munich, Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting, YPAM - Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting, Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum Chiang Mai, Salihara Jakarta, Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Fast Forward Festival Athens, MMCA Seoul, and Haus de Kulturen der Welt Berlin, amongst others. In 2024, Mark is a recipient of the Prince Claus-British Council Fellows Award for Moving Narratives, and is a participant in in-tangible institute's Pollination platform and Independent Curators International's Curatorial Intensive Indonesia.
Ravi Navaratnam began his involvement in theatre in the 1980s, performing in many of Five Arts Centre’s early productions. He then moved on to contributing his experience on financial and production matters to the collective, and currently serves as one of the selection panelists for the annual Krishen Jit Fund.
Ravi is the executive vice-president of Minconsult, an engineering and project advisory firm. He has over 30 years of work experience in the fields of investment banking, corporate and project finance as well as in general management. He graduated with a B.Ec (Hons) (Economics and Accountancy) from Monash University, Australia and a LLB (Hons) from the University of London. Ravi is a fellow of CPA Australia and also a Barrister of the Bar of UK and Wales.
Suhaila Merican is originally from Melaka, and her interest in theatre grew from her initial forays as an actor to supporting and producing numerous Five Arts Centre projects. Over the years, she has worked alongside and learned from figures such as Krishen Jit, Chin San Sooi and Marion D’Cruz, and retains a special affinity for good writing in theatre.
Suhaila was trained as a food technologist and worked with a single multinational organisation for most of her career. Her three decades at Nestlé Malaysia provided invaluable experiences in running factories, people and project management, as well as travelling. Suhaila served as an Adjunct Fellow at her alma mater Universiti Putra Malaysia, lecturing and providing expertise and resources. She also contributes to a charity organisation and home for adults with disabilities in Petaling Jaya - fundraising, providing skills training, and events support. Suhaila is married to actor Chew Kin Wah, and they are proud parents of their only son.
Syamsul Azhar works across theatre, film, and contemporary art as a multimedia and
lighting designer, often employing technology as a performative element in his work. He has designed
across diverse places and spaces, and collaborated on many projects with Five Arts Centre.
Syamsul is a member of sans, a loose interdisciplinary collective of artists creating works for
performance and exhibition. He is a graduate in Film and Digital Media from Deakin University,
Australia.