SINGAPORE, Jan 25 — Conferences are exercises in stamina, mental and physical. When the subject of the conference is a beloved artist 10 years departed, a certain emotional fortitude is to be desired.
Last weekend, close to 100 people attended the Krishen Jit: Unfinished Business conference. Participants ranged from the pioneering art historian Kanaga Sabapathy, whose friendship with Krishen goes back to the 1960s, to a group of Singaporean theatre undergraduates with little more than a vague notion of the director before the conference.
Unfinished Business was convened by Nanyang Technological University (NTU) academic and playwright Dr Charlene Rajendran with Dr Ken Takiguchi of National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Theatre Makers Asia archive project, and dance dramaturge Dr Lim How Ngean, as co-organisers.
It was presented by Five Arts Centre as part of its 30th anniversary celebration. The conference set itself the task of exploring Krishen’s performance practice in relation to the extant work of artists and collaborators who worked with him in his long and illustrious career.
Programming sought to capture the academic and the performative, with keynotes and panels alongside performances, workshops and story dialogues.
Five Arts Centre’s practice is self-consciously critical and interrogative, in no small part influenced by Krishen’s own background in academia and critical theory.
Thus, there was an expressed desire for Unfinished Business to deal with Krishen’s legacy in a way that honours his place in our arts and cultural history, while being aware of the dangers of myth-making and grand narratives.
The conference opened with a performance by Checkpoint Theatre’s Huzir Sulaiman and Claire Wong.Carrot/Pantun/Dance was an act in brinkmanship. Appropriating the form of the ubiquitous post-show dialogue, they assumed the loquaciousness of actors eager to elevate their art through pseudo-intellectual theory-speak, with hilarious results.
Cunningly conceived to entertain as well as to skewer the participants of the conference, it was nonetheless a sober warning of the excesses these kinds of events can generate.
There were several speakers and performers who navigated the tricky terrain of celebration without aggrandisement. The opening keynote by Kanaga Sabapathy, Reading Krishen Jit, began with Krishen’s early exposure to both mainstream pop and the 60s counter culture, during his time in Berkeley.
Kanaga then discussed Krishen’s contribution to the early development of visual art writing in Malaysia. Respected Japanese director Makoto Satopresented the second keynote, Traditionalizing the Contemporary Arts and Contemporizing the Traditional Arts, delving into the larger issues of making art across traditions, regions and cultures.
In her analysis of Krishen’s challenging staging of K.S.Maniam’s Skin Trilogy (1995), educator and director Soo Choon Mee attempted to codify some of Krishen’s theatrical objectives and methods.
Dr Ray Langenbach, a researcher and performance artist, pivoted the discussion towards cognition and neurology and its possible link to theatrical methodologies. His own performance strategy as he delivered the paper kept the presentation firmly anchored to the human body.
Playwright Leow Puay Tin shared her frank, if fragmentary, thoughts about her sense of losing control over her words and stories in devising Ang Tau Mui (1994) with Krishen.
Actor and playwright Jo Kukathas captured the power-relations between performer and director in her staging of Krishen’s perplexing rehearsal processes.
Never did two words, “stop” and “talking” from K.S.Maniam’s The Sandpit, repeated ad nauseam, speak such volumes.
The methods and manipulations employed by the director in pursuit of raw material and emotional truth in performance was a recurrent theme, picked up by playwright and director Nam Ron, Rhythm in Bronze’s Artistic Director Jillian Ooi and dancer Anne James in their Story Dialogue 2 session.
Nonetheless, it seemed that despite the best intentions to engage critically, we lacked the emotional distance to apply these spikes of knowledge in a productive manner.
Instead, laughter, either raucous or nervous, allowed us to speak the truth but saved us from actually having to do anything with it.
Perhaps we lacked the critical strategy to build an analysis of Krishen’s work, logged in regional histories as well as in the political and social dynamics within which he operated.
A forward-looking perspective, one that moved us gracefully beyond the individual towards an examination of contemporary Malaysian theatre was largely a non-starter... a further disappointment.
Death is the most present of absences, Krishen’s wife, Marion D’Cruz said in her opening address. A decade without Krishen in our lives and as part of the arts scene is too long. But, is a decade long enough to give us the distance and courage to truly examine the problems in his practice, or the reasons for and ramification of his singularly powerful position within the Malaysian theatre community?
Loss and love veined the conference, as almost every speaker, and a majority of the audience, myself included, had a connection to Krishen. Characteristic of the way that Krishen lived his life, these relationships were professional and personal at the same time.
It’s not a stretch to say that our inability to engage with Krishen’s legacy in a more muscular way comes from a sense of loyalty to his memory, and his generosity as an artist and friend.
The humanity of the man, asserted in a series of stories about Krishen and food, sleep and mis-matched socks, made the act of replacing corporeality with pure theory seem crass. Further, what are the ethics of analyzing someone no longer present to defend himself?
In Malaysia, the personal is always extrapolated into the national. Krishen’s ostracization from Malay-language theatre in the 1970s by an incrementally ethicized state is a matter of record.
Our efforts to lionize him as one of the pioneering national figures of contemporary theatre is perhaps a corrective, an attempt to redress past injustices and return him to his “rightful” place in the centre of the artistic history of the nation.
Outside the conference, the odds may be stacked against him and his ilk, but inside, in our space, we can reconstruct our origin story as we damned well pleased.
Self-preservation was another obstacle. Within the specific confines of contemporary, urban based, experimental theatre in Malaysia, he is something of a founding figure, one of several, but a significant one nonetheless.
Hence building upon Krishen’s prestige and prominence reflects back on the arts community, such as one exists, giving us a founding myth and sense of history that is burnished by Krishen’s own regionally recognized position.
Unpacking Krishen Jit and dealing with some of the contradictions inherent in his position and practice could potentially dilute the legitimacy of the narrative we’ve constructed surrounding our location as boundary-pushing artists, valiantly occupying the margins of society.
A case in point is the reality that despite his indubitable sidelining, Krishen was never an outcast, enjoying several appointments within the establishment, culminating with his posthumous award of a Datukship in 2006.
Further, his cultural capital, accrued through his class, gender, education, international art networks (such as his links to Richard Schechner and Makoto Sato), his positions in academia and in the media, advanced his opportunities and power in the field of cultural production beyond that of many of his contemporaries in Malaysia. But, this complicates the linear narrative of Krishen as the victim of nationalist policies who made good.
These were some of the impulses behind the stop-start nature of the more interesting discussions during the conference, as I experienced it. As the conference progressed, there was a mounting sense of disquiet amongst some of us there, Five Arts members included.
While Krishen was, on the surface, the subject of the conference, we were really grappling with our relationship to his future form.
“Krishen is no more,” so writes Dr Charlene Rajendran in the conference booklet. It is a productive absence, as with his passing, Krishen has become literally, larger than life.
His writings, his words, his theatre practice, the networks he forged, his personality quirks and life experiences, are transformed into resources for excavation, inscription and projection by different players in the field of art and cultural production. Conferences such as these are part of this process of meaning making, and a risky one at that.
On one hand, Krishen’s theatrical practices, the networks he created and the scholarship he left behind are invaluable resources that deserve to be studied, utilized and celebrated. On the other hand, if our framing and deployment of Krishen Jit lacks integrity, we run the risk of fetishizing him, which in turn would have the twin effects of depleting our own cultural capital as trustworthy, rigorous meaning makers, and cheapening Krishen’s value.
The final panel saw a purposeful intervention by Dr Ray Langenbach, at the behest of Five Arts member Janet Pillai. Ray called out the fetizishing of Krishen into an icon, and challenged us to engage more robustly with the subject of the conference. Those present responded accordingly, but there was little time, and energy left to take the discussion deeper.
Nevertheless, it is to the conveners of this conference, and Five Arts Centre’s great credit that they created an open space for these contestations to begin. Krishen Jit: Unfinished Business was the first formal attempt to contextualize Krishen Jit’s position and discern the arts and intellectual ecology that he helped shape over his 40-year career.
It gave us context and history, it gave us room to express our sorrow and remember with joy a friend, an artist, a thinker.
Mostly though, it gave us a sense of the task ahead, the art of promoting his undeniable contributions, against the real danger of reducing him into our infallible patron saint.
