Seoul Performing Arts Festival interview: Mark Teh

A Notional History will be performed at the Seoul Performing Arts Festival (SPAF), South Korea, SPIELART Das Theaterfestival in Munich (Germany), and the OzAsia Festival in Adelaide (Australia) in October and November 2023.  Ahead of the tour, we are sharing here a conversation between SPAF artistic director Kyu Choi and performance maker Mark Teh, which was first published in Korean on SPAF's blog.

In this exchange, Mark speaks about the motivations behind his diverse creative works and how he works with and interprets historical, archival and research materials.  He also provides an insight into the process of co-creating with different collaborators and social actors across multiple projects.   

Kyu Choi (KY):  A Notional History is a continuation of questions and themes around history, independence, and diverse perspectives that can be traced in your works from Fahmi Reza's documentary 10 Tahun Sebelum Merdeka in 2007 to  Baling presented in Gwangju, Korea in 2015.  What are the most important aspects, questions, and inspiration in your artistic works?

Mark Teh (MT):  My projects walk around the entanglements of history, memory, subjectivity, and the political.  They begin as open-ended and durational research projects and often take shape as documentary performances, and sometimes as video essays, participatory or curatorial projects.  

One thread that emerged early on in my work as a performance maker was an interest to excavate art histories in Malaysia and Asia, focusing on the conceptual ideas, trajectories, and questions of important but under the radar artists or cultural workers – shadow puppeteers, performing artists, musicians, and people in contemporary art.  These have often been realized as documentary performances or lecture performances.  

Over the years, I’ve also collaborated on and made projects that deal with the performative structures of protests or demonstrations in public spaces – often in playful or unusual ways.  These have involved carrying  a traditional wooden Malay house with 300 people in the middle of Kuala Lumpur; recirculating old protest materials from the Museum of London’s historical collection back onto the streets during one of the largest ever protests in the UK, while simultaneously collecting new placards from that protest to be placed in the Museum; taking an extensive private art collection in KL out into public using an open air truck during the pandemic; as well as projecting a series of texts onto buildings during the height of Covid-19.

A major thread in my work circulates around the afterlives of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) – which the projects you mentioned and A Notional History relate to.  These projects investigate how this period of history continues to influence and infect our lives in profound and not always rational ways.  The ‘Emergency’ is actually a British misnomer to publicly describe and conceal the 12-year undeclared war against the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM).  They used this term so they could claim insurance compensations for their profitable tin and rubber industries in Malaya, which would not have been possible under the conditions of war.  Nevertheless, for the CPM guerillas, they saw it as an anti-colonial revolutionary war, and after Malaya achieved independence in 1957, it transformed into a kind of civil war.  Our Emergency projects look at how technologies introduced during this period – spatial, legal, psychological – continue to mark our contemporary society in hysterical and deep ways.

This mode of long-term, generative inquiry into what appears hegemonic or ‘common sensical’ has been employed in other projects – investigating the spectacular failure of Vision 2020, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s ambition (launched in 1991) to transform Malaysia into a ‘first world nation’ by the year 2020; deconstructing the mythic figure of Hang Tuah, a 15th century warrior of the Malacca Sultanate beloved of right-wing ethno-nationalists and conspiracy theorists; and unpacking the spatial, performative and historical layers that are embedded on the ‘padang’ – a flat, green lawn that was introduced to Malaya by the British, and which can also be found in many contexts across the former British Empire.

KC:  Edward Hallett Carr wrote in his book What is History?, "It is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past".  However, in reality, history is the record of the victors.  Can you share the background of A Notional History and what does it say about the records of history?

MT:  A Notional History is inspired by a recent conjuncture in Malaysia.  In 2020, new, official history textbooks for secondary schools were produced – two years after the 2018 general elections, when citizens finally voted out the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), which had been in power ever since Malayan independence in 1957.  The anticipation leading to and the subsequent publishing of these history textbooks generated a lot of public anxiety and controversy – partly manufactured by politicians, historians, and groups with links to UMNO.  These anxieties were particularly acute over how the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) might be represented in the textbooks – which was interesting given the CPM had been outlawed since 1948 and most of their surviving members live in exile in Thailand.  Our team was interested to consider what remains unchangeable even as times, governments, leaders, textbooks change.

In the performance, we attempt to friction the new and old history textbooks together with some interviews with CPM members that our team had shot in 2008 – for a documentary we never completed.  Some of these interviews make their way into our performance – frictioning against the history textbooks, as well as the perspectives of three social actors onstage: the political activist Fahmi Reza, the performer Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri, and the journalist Rahmah Pauzi. 

The title is obviously a play on the idea of a ‘national’ history.  A history that is notional perhaps suggests a way of working with the past which is more subjective, speculative, and poly-perspective.    

 KC:  The confrontation between colonialism and ideology is still an important issue in Asian modern history and contemporary society.  In Korea, a country divided into North and South Korea, the ideological confrontation between communism/socialism and capital/democracy still remains strong.  Is there anything you would like to share with Korean audiences through the work?

MT:  The period of the Malayan Emergency (1948-1960) overlaps with the Korean War, and both took place simultaneously in the context of the larger Cold War.  In Baling – which we performed in Gwangju in 2015 using transcripts of a failed peace talks in 1955 between nationalist and communist leaders in Malaya and Singapore – the leader of UMNO specifically refers to the division of Korea and Vietnam to emphasise his rejection of Communists in Malaya.  The CPM would retreat into the jungles of Southern Thailand bordering Malaya, and only ended their insurgency in 1989.  This means that they were in the jungle for 41 years.      

The complexities of colonial and imperial legacies on the civil population, as well as historical revisionism, justice and trauma, are certainly not alien to people in Korea.  I hope that with A Notional History, we can reflect together how violence, erasure and the ‘unforgetting’ continues to return, morph, and haunt our societies – even decades after the ending of wars.  

KC:  Historical facts always exist, but interpretations and truths about them are different and diverse.  I believe that the process of collecting various facts and interpreting them during the research process is very important.   What are your perspectives and standards for selecting and interpreting the facts and research material during your creative process?

I am constantly collecting materials – from our fieldwork, our travels, our other ongoing projects, as well as wandering around the internet.  This is often not driven by specific logic, but a kind of instinct or latency about particular materials – which could be useful for this or that other project in the future.

At a particular point in our research, after we’ve gathered and read a lot – we like to put all the materials we have found and which we feel resonate with the subject matter we are investigating on the studio floor.  Like a giant map of documents, books, images, songs, objects, keywords.  It’s from here that we often make constellations and connections between different things which speak to us as a team.  Often we are intrigued by the things that trouble us, or where we see productive gaps or tensions which compel us to conceptualise and investigate further. 

In our performances, the performers or social actors share, dissect, and manipulate historical documents, images, and footages, as well as archival, autobiographical, and personal materials, bringing in their own perspectives and experiences.  The audience is witnessing these different subjectivities at play in the production of truth effects.  We often describe our performances as making visible a poly-perspective editing machine onstage.  

We could say that your work is documentary theatre, and we understand that you have been co-creating in a collective devising process with various artists, activists, and producers.  It would be nice if you could share the co-creation process, and the roles of each creator.  And what is the most important element in the co-creation process?

We’ve all got our own projects and day jobs – some of which have nothing to do with performance making at all – and we get together to make a new project every 2 years or so.  In many ways, we work very much like a band – there is a pattern of coming together to make an album so to speak, and a temporary parting of ways after that.  An oscillation between interdependence and independence.  

Each time we come back together to embark on a new project, we always check each other’s temperature – to pay attention to what has changed or moved on since the last project, to see what is of current concern or urgency to each individual, to consider how people’s circumstances may have evolved.

The team has collaborated over a long time – some of us in the group such as our production designer Wong Tay Sy, producer June Tan, Fahmi Reza and myself have worked together for 20 years.  I’ve known our multimedia and lighting designer Syamsul Azhar and the other two performers, Faiq and Rahmah – in different capacities for at least 10 years or so, collaborating initially on media and online projects.  All of us have worked on performance, activist, video, and community projects together, and worked for each other in different capacities – so there is a great deal of collective intelligence and trust that has developed over time.  It’s like an ensemble of social actors – who come together to realise projects wearing multiple hats as citizen historians, amateur detectives, or social seismographers.  At the same time, on a very simple level, what sustains the collaborations are that we are old friends and have been witnesses to each other’s lives.