In Conversation: Theatre in Southeast Asia – Shared Histories & Contemporary Differences

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 ILHAM Gallery KL, OzAsia Festival Adelaide, SPIELART Festival Munich, Seoul Performing Arts Festival, Bangkok International Performing Arts Meeting, Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting (YPAM), 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, Haus de Kulturen der Welt Berlin, and the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre, amongst others.  

Five Arts Centre is a dynamic collective of Malaysian artists, activists, and producers, dedicated to generating alternative art forms and images in the contemporary arts landscape. They are known for cutting edge performances in theatre, dance, music, and young people’s theatre, and incorporate aspects of visual and digital arts as well. Since its formation in 1984, Five Arts Centre has been committed to articulating the complexity of Malaysian culture and identity through explorations and fusions of local vocabularies, forms, and traditions – in relation to the global, modern, and cross-cultural.

Five Arts Centre has been involved in capacity building for the arts with previously managing Arts Network Asia, an organisation supporting regional exchanges across Asia; managing the Krishen Jit Fund (launched together with ASTRO) to support the work of arts practitioners; and being serving as the secretariat for the ReformARTsi coalition, made up of arts organisations, practitioners, and academics to build consensus and advocacy on policy reforms for the performing arts. Five Arts Centre has also been recognised for its contributions by receiving the inaugural “Most Inspiring Award” at the 2015 Boh Cameronian Arts Awards, and the 2016 “Praemium Imperiale Grant for Young Artists” award from The Japan Art Association.

Charlene Rajendran is a theatre educator, writer and dramaturg. She is interested in issues of difference, interdisciplinarity, play-based pedagogy and thought-leadership in urban multicultural contexts. Her work as dramaturg includes interdisciplinary and community arts projects such as AIR (2024), ItSelf TerJadi (2023), Kepaten Obor (2022), In the Silence of Your Heart (2018) and Both Sides, Now (2013-2018). Publications include (Asian) Dramaturgs’ Network: Sensing, Complexity, Tracing and Doing (lead editor, 2023) Changing Places: Drama Box and the Politics of Space (lead editor, 2022). She works as Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education – Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Kathy Rowland is the Co-Founder of and Head of Research at ArtsEquator. She has worked in the arts for over 30 years, in the areas of critical writing and arts advocacy, with a special interest in artistic freedom of expression. 

Through ArtsEquator, Kathy has promoted critical discourse in Southeast Asia, designing programs such as the Asian Arts Media Roundtable and Critics Live! and the ArtsEquator Writing Fellowship. She has written and presented on arts censorship and artistic freedom in Southeast Asia since the early 2000s. In 2022, she launched the Southeast Asian Artistic Freedom RADAR (Research and Documentation Resource) which researches and documents challenges to artistic freedom in Southeast Asia.

In Feb 2025, Kathy was a guest speaker on the “Artistic Freedom: The Road Ahead” panel, organised by the Permanent Delegations of Norway and Sweden at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris as part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the UNESCO 2005 Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.