Starting over with gusto
In this pandemic age, it’s no surprise that Leow Puay Tin's latest play is streamed online. Subhadra Devan finds out the challenges from actor Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri and production brains Syamsul Azhar
ACTOR Faiq Syazwan Kuhiri plays an ageing professor in Leow Puay Tin's two-man play called Oppy & Professor Communitas. "I actually enrolled into college and graduated with a diploma in performance. So the experience that made me take up performing was that of a college student learning from professors/lecturers — very much like the professor in the play," says Faiq.
Some may remember him in Five Arts Centre's Baling Talks as well as the B.E.D series created by dance artist Lee Ren Xin.
Faiq, who works as a digital producer for a radio station, is currently in the process of releasing his own original music with the band Terrer. Some of that music will be in Leow's play.
“The songs that I contributed to the performance are those which I've worked on with my band. Follow us on Instagram @terrerdoh!"
Oppy & Professor Communitas sees the two main characters encounter each other as participant and trainer.
Oppy (played by Iefiz Alaudin) is a happy-go-lucky young man who is feeling stuck as a freelance actor.
The trainer and professor break all the rules about being nice to people at workshops.
Oppy wants to give people like Oppy a disciplined approach to making great works of art.
He is also a compulsive storyteller who helps his students "makan teori" (eat theory) by bundling it into the real-life stories he tells in class.
Suspicious of anything that could make him lose his freedom as an artist and an individual, Oppy resists the older man's teachings.
But along the way, he also begins to wonder if he isn't missing out on something.
“What's not to like about the professor! Sure, he may come off as garang and intimidating but I think this only comes from a place where he longs for a connection.
“It could be a connection with an individual or maybe even a community that shares his frustrations. It could also be frustration about the state of art in his country or society," says Faiq about his character.
The play will be streamed via Cloudtheatres. As to whether doing an online performance is harder, Faiq says parts of it are harder.
“To be able to convey the intentions of the play and character is (to an extent) dictated by the technology you are working with.
“The greatest things about theatre is the immediacy and it being live. And in that context, the only tools that you can use (for an actor) are your voice and body. But this current reconfiguration has made it feel like I'm starting over."
Much of the production falls to multimedia designer Syamsul Azhar who has worked across the fields of theatre, film and contemporary art as a multimedia and lighting designer. He often employs technology as a performative element in his works.
Over the years, this Film and Digital Media graduate has collaborated on numerous performances with Five Arts Centre — particularly in the works of Mark Teh.
In 2017, Syamsul directed **2080 — a performance consisting of projection, sound, lighting and set, with no human performers — in collaboration with a team of designers and theatre practitioners.
He is a part of “sans”, a loose interdisciplinary collective of artistes creating works for performance and exhibition.
Most recently, Syamsul was the technical director for Di Situ: An Exhibition (2021), curated by Low Pey Sien at KongsiKL.
For this online play, he says there are two set-ups in terms of equipment.
“We started rehearsals during the Movement Control Order (MCO), so it was just all of us in our own homes, behind our computers and some software with the Internet.
“During that time we didn't know when MCO was going to end. Communication was the toughest during this time.
“Now that we are allowed to be at work and together under one roof, the set-up has add-ons such as audio and camera equipment.
“The equipment was planned according to the situation — allowing the performers to be in the same room but socially distanced.
“Around 70 per cent of the live performance are streamed, with 30 per cent prerecorded videos.
“Five Arts Centre now looks like a cyber cafe with all sorts of cables running around the floor and from the office!"
He feels the hardest part of designing and executing this production is sound design.
"As this is not my main area of strength, I had to do some research on dealing with sound engineering and the equipment to use.
“I've always been a visual person, dealing with camera, lighting and projections. There were initially a lot of technical audio errors like echoes and delays that had to be resolved during our rehearsal process.
“The other thing that is really hard is creating broadcasting cues for the performance. So far I have 230 cues for this play and they are not fun to operate!"
Syamsul got into the performing arts field in Sunway University back in 2007, where Leow and Mark Teh were his lecturers.
“I remember we had a class where we had to do wayang kulit and I was the dalang — that feeling as a performer has never gone away.
“I don't really like performing on stage with an audience because it is scary. But behind a screen is something a little different. The last performance I did in front of an audience was with Marion D'Cruz in Terbalik… mesti kena mata in 2017.
“I furthered my studies in film in Australia. I was fascinated by the amount of equipment that can be used to create movies. This was when I started loving the camera as well as lighting.
“However, that feeling of working together to create worlds and stories was not really the same as in the performing arts.
“When I graduated and returned to Malaysia, I got to work with a few lighting designers as an assistant. I also worked as a video content creator. My first lighting design work was for Something I Wrote, directed by Teh in 2013. I was both lighting designer and a performer in the antimusical. This play really pushed me to experiment and play with unconventional lighting. We used different technology to create moods and tell the story.
“From there I have been adding unconventional lighting designs in performances. Most of the time, it's actually because there is no budget to get the type of lights or equipment that you want to work with, so you just work with whatever you have at the moment — practical, lowtech lights.
“In 2015, I was the lighting designer for Teh's performance Baling which was invited to tour overseas. The opportunities to travel exposed me to different types of performances, experimental designs and other art forms.
“I was then inspired to create an experimental work called **2080. It was a performance without performers. For the show, the equipment — lights, set, projections and sound — ‘performed’ for the audience. That was in 2017.
“A year later, most of us in this production formed a new collective — “sans” — and we came up with a performance called 2068 for the 2018 George Town Festival. This performance also had no human performers.
“Why am I st in the field? It's because I believe Malaysia has so much more potential to create performances or art with technolso ogy and design.
“There's still many things to learn. New technology will always be popping out. I have gone through many performances wit really bad storytellin . But if you do th designs properly with knowledge of the technology at hand, you can make it wonderful. And that feeling of creating art together is an amazing feeling."