“‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at.”
Oscar Wilde

From October – December, CHAI (Instant Cafe House of Arts and Ideas) celebrates the theme of HISTORY.

With author Kam Raslan as co-curator, CHAI is presenting a series of public programmes, conversations, performances & film screenings all around the theme of history.

History is…
Once upon a time I was in a cemetery in KL that was filled with the graves of Japanese soldiers, each one marked by a small granite stone without a name. I had no idea that so many had died during the war. In this cemetery I bumped into a man who tried to sell me a cat and who told me a short history of Malaysia. He told me that Malaysia had been ruled by the Americans until the Japanese kicked them out, and then Mahathir kicked out the Japanese. I tried to tell him he was wrong but he wouldn’t listen, and he really wanted to sell me his cat. Nearby were many Christian graves including an untended one for a British policeman who had died in a car accident in the 1950s. Opposite was Dewan Bahasa where my father used to go after independence to attend a committee that was re-inventing the Malay language for the modern age. Perhaps there are words spoken every day that are his, but this knowledge is lost to history.

This story is not a history of Malaysia but perhaps it illustrates my belief that history is the story of lost moments, usually meaningless unimportant moments. A car crash or a man selling a cat makes no difference to the grand scheme of things but they mean something to somebody at that moment. And then they’re gone, but must they always be forgotten? Sometimes we deliberately forget because it seems safer. I would like to try to remember just some lost histories because each story was somebody’s life.

~

Kam Raslan is a writer, film director, author of the best-selling novel “Confessions of an Old Boy” and has a column in The Edge weekly. He has also worked extensively with Instant Cafe Theatre, writing for their comedy shows as well as co-writing with Jo Kukathas the play “Pulau Antara”, a joint production with Japan’s Setagaya Theatre which was performed in Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo. He is presently writing a sequel to Confessions and a non-fiction book on Malaysian histories.
All events and programmes organised by CHAI are entrance by donation.

~

Sun 11 October
10:30am

Historical Walking Tour
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=142929827829

The Padang, Sultan Abdul Samad building, Masjid Jamek, that stuff’s just for tourists, isn’t it? Actually, it’s ours, but what do we really know about them?

Kam Raslan wants to take you on a walking tour around the streets of old KL to rediscover and re-imagine these buildings and our past. No Knights Templar, no albino monks and no air-conditioning but there will be stories of power, intrigue, architecture and Empire.

~

Tues 20 October
8.30pm

All the World’s A Stage!
Global Playwrights Series (GPS): Japan

“The Yalta Conference” (30 minutes)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=142929827829#/event.php?eid=164496021881

Featuring Indi Nadarajah, Allan Perera and Doppo Narita
Directed by Jo Kukathas and Zalfian Fuzi

In The Yalta Conference, there’s a scene where the character of Roosevelt dressed in a cowboy outfit says, “Then we’ll go kapow!” — holding his arms aloft in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Stalin naughtily puts a thumbtack on Roosevelt’ chair when he’s not looking. Churchill wants Korea and more cake. It is Hirata’s interpretation of the famous Yalta Conference meeting between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin during the Second World War where the leaders met to determine the shape of the post war world.

Hirata first wrote this piece as Japanese stand-up comedy (rakugo) and then revised it into this larger than life three-person theater piece.

Followed by FIRSTWoRKS The History Conference Part I
An Interactive Play Making Session
With Jo Kukathas, Zalfian Fuzi and Shanon Shah – whose next play, TARING, based on the epic Hikayat Merong Mahawagsa was inspired by the tale of a tooth.

Make your own Malaysian play from a key or seemingly insignificant moment in Malaysian history. Participate or watch history being made from the sidelines.

~

Sat 24 October
5.30pm

The Official History of Malaysia –
The Motion Picture
(Abridged Live Version)
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=176908966256

Performed by Kam Raslan and Na’a Murad
(the not so famous brothers).

The entire history of Malaysia will be enacted in about an hour. All the bits you know, and some of the bits you don’t, with school text books as our source.

~

Sat 31 October
5.30pm

Our History, Their History, Whose History: Emeritus Professor Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim in conversation with Eddin Khoo.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=165441948034

In this conversation, Emeritus Professor Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim reflects candidly on the evolution of Malaysian history, his pioneering efforts at transforming perceptions and approaches to historical study and awareness and his personal involvement in the many events that shaped contemporary Malaysia.

Emeritus Professor Tan Sri Khoo Kay Kim is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost authorities in Malaysian history. Author of numerous books and essays on the subject, he is most noted for his seminal work The Western Malay States.

Eddin Khoo is Founder-Executive Director of the cultural organisation Pusaka. The son of Professor Khoo Kay Kim, he is presently collaborating to complete Khoo Kay Kim: An Autobiography in Conversation and is principal editor of the publishing project Khoo Kay Kim and the Writing of Malaysian History.

~

Sun 8 November
5.00pm

Heroes, Myths and Other Unimportant Things

‘Who needs history? Well everyone in fact! Farish Noor blathers away at the decline of history and its erasure in Malaysia, and reminds us that the keris is Hindu, Hang Tuah was a pacifist and that real men wear flowery batik. Bring yourself and he’ll bring his linen pants.

~

Tue 10 November
8.30pm

All the World’s a Stage!

Global Playwrights Series (GPS): UK

Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (40 minutes)

With Anne James, Joanna Bessey, Amelia Chen

Directed by Jo Kukathas & Zalfian Fuzi

Marlene, a career woman at the ‘Top Girls’ employment agency celebrates her promotion by inviting various ‘top girls’ of the world to a dinner party. They are Pope Joan whose gender is revealed when she has a disastrous public birth and is stoned to death; intrepid Victorian traveller and journalist Isabella Bird;  Dull Gret, the subject of a Pieter Breughel painting, who led a charge into Hell to fight devils yet went on to have ten children; the glamourous Lady Nijo, a 14th century emperor’s concubine who was loaned out to other lovers and who became a Buddhist nun; and Patient Griselda, the folkloric patient wife of Boccacio’s story and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Over dinner they become increasingly drunk and maudlin and we find out how much or how little history has changed…

Followed by FIRSTWoRKS The History Conference Part 2: An Interactive Play Making Session with Jo Kukathas, Zalfian Fuzi and Shanon Shah whose next play, TARING, based on the epic Hikayat Merong Mahawagsa was inspired by the tale of a tooth.

Make your own Malaysian play from a key or seemingly insignificant moment in Malaysian history. Participate or watch history being made from the sidelines.

~

9 November – 9 December
Opening Hours: Monday – Friday, 11am – 5pm

Title of the Piece: Photography & Installation Exhibition

Exhibition by Puah Chin Kok comprising 10,000 photographs to be displayed in the interior of CHAI including 9 photographs of VK Lingam’s family vacation in New Zealand.

~

Sat 14 November
5.00pm

Peta Patterns: Mapping Multiple Malaysias

Maps appear rigid, fixed, final.

But we often forget that mapping is a man-made process, an act of imagination.

Mark Teh charts the evolution of Malaysian maps and flags over the past 100 years, and wonders what a map of Malaysia will look like in 2109. 

Dr Gopal Krishna Rampal presents his project mapping Hindu Temples in Malaysia from 5th – 6th century to modern times.

Yap Sau Bin presents his long-term mapping project utilising Google Earth to document the history of Kuala Lumpur art spaces.

~

Sat 28 November
5.00pm

Sex, Violence & Religion in Pre-Independence Malay Movies

Amir Muhammad is the only person you know who has seen every single surviving Malay movie made before 1957. This is for his upcoming book 120 MALAY MOVIES that actually looks at a longer period (1948-72) and will be launched in April. He takes us through the earlier ones by showing how the world depicted in them might be different from our own.

~