democracy discourse fellow
Jo Kukathas
Jo Kukathas is an award winning theatre maker and an API Fellow. She grew up and was educated in Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, India, and the UK where she studied Politics and Philosophy. Today she is Artistic Director of The Instant Café Theatre Company. She is a well-known actor and she has used that platform to be an outspoken public proponent of freedom of expression and human rights. Her provocative work often uses humour and storytelling to deal with social and political issues that affect all Malaysians. Her company’s infamous political comedy which seeks to speak truth to power through satire has won them both life- long fans and detractors who accuse them of being culturally incorrect.
Country
Malaysia
Categories
Theater
Minority Rights
This has not always made making art easy but she believes that ultimately the purpose of art is to heal whether through laughter or empathy or understanding through the telling of stories. She is a great believer in reaching large non-niche audiences and making democratic values part of popular culture. She is a regular guest on a radio program A Bit of Culture on BFM and has done educative and outreach podcasts. She uses social media as an extension of her work as an artist. She has also worked collaboratively and interculturally in almost all her work and often works across different languages and cultures to find new articulations of culture and new voices. Her work reflects her interest in issues of history, human rights, the environment and migration and the larger more human need for justice, identity and belonging which she believes is the basis for democracy. Her most recent project BLANK_ by Iranian writer Nassim Soleimanpour used actors from the refugee community as well as Malaysian actors and worked closely with Afghan Refugee company Parastoo and NGO Beyond Borders to reach out to refugee audiences.
The Bronze Lion
The project has many components related to theatre, literature, history, democracy and human rights. The most public outcome will be a piece of theatre mapping the inter-related lives of Malaysians and migrants and refugees or what can be termed New Malaysians. There will be other long term spin offs to this project. Specifically, the project seeks to tell the story of Migration. This project seeks to bring these themes and issues to the centre by making them part of an overlapping, inclusive narrative of Malaysia.
The purpose of this is so as NOT to situate them outside the main narrative framework but to see their personal histories as part of a natural continuum. This is in order to deconstruct the idea of what is Malaysian and not Malaysian and not fixate on the notion of New Malaysians as OTHER. By making their narrative part of the narrative of other Malaysians it situates them as being part of a historical movement – the ebb and flow of humanity that has been going on across the globe.
Visit Jo’s works on these websites:
