Baling

On 3 April 2016, our class went for a theatre performance titled 'The Baling Talk' at Five Arts Centre in TTDI, Petaling Jaya. It is a performance about a historical event, a meeting of Malayan Chief Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, Chief Minister of Singapore David Marshall and Chin Peng from the Communist Party of Malaya in a school classroom in Baling, Kedah in 1955. The main goal of the talk was to ask Chin Peng to give up his ideology and surrender but it was failed at last. This performance is to iterate the situation to let the audiences to feel what happened in the classroom during the talk.

On the first session of the talk, we goes upstairs where it is a small space without air-conditioner. The reason they perform it there is to allow the audience to know exactly how was the ambience in the classroom during the talk. Three performers will be performing on each session, each of them represent a role and the most obvious role is Tunku Abdul Rahman, because of the songkok. The other two, we have to find out their role through their script. In this session, the wall is full of papers sticked on it. The papers are actually the transcript of the Baling Talk. The performers tear down the script and read it out loudly.

After finished the first session, we went back to downstairs, the dark room. In the dark room, there are a map of Peninsular Malaysia (West Malaysia) that are created by books that have contents about Baling Talk or Chin Peng, and hanging photos of Chin Peng. The characters are remained in every session but the performers will change their role in every session. The one who wear the songkok is the session will sure be Tunku Abdul Rahman. The audiences are asked to move around as the performers perform. I think this is to let the audiences to see in different perception maybe? Or they are just want us to stay awake? There are one session that the performers take the books to form something individually. I think this is to tell the audiences that history can be presented in different ways.

Lastly, as we can see in the picture, the performers are taking papers which are the transcript of the talk. They are reading it out instead of memorise it to perform. The director told us why in the Q&A session. He said that he wants to show the audiences that the transcript is a THING, it is the history and history is a THING.

In my opinion, this is a worth watching performance as we can understand more about The Baling Talk in a different way, instead of just by reading books. The performers are performing well throughout the performances and the message that they want to tell the audiences is clear.