Gathering playwrights, film directors and activists, Five Arts Centre is one of Malaysia’s finest artists’ collectives. The recent masterpiece Baling, by Mark Teh, one of the country’s new generation of directors, was a documentary performance that shone a light on Malaysia’s forgotten “history of nation building.” It garnered high praise all over the world (in Japan it was performed at the TPAM – Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama and Kyoto Experiment).
The departure point for this, the collective’s latest work, was the “Wawasan 2020” strategic plan introduced by the Mahathir administration in 1991. The plan was to develop Malaysia into an advanced nation – in terms of its economy, education, welfare and every other sector – by the year 2020; people across the nation were implicated in it. Since then, a quarter century has passed. The children of that time are now adults, and 2020 is fast approaching. The five performers live in “the past’s vision of the future”: the present, in which time is all out of kilter. Their bodies and voices waver between hope and its loss, between their collective history and their personal memories. As we in Tokyo approach our own national event in 2020, what will we make of the fragments of song and poetry that they perform?