Community Theatre in The Absence of Community: The Taman Medan Project

Abstract

In Malaysia, notions of community can prove difficult to negotiate, given the socio-political structure and framework within which most Malaysians function. As soon we begin to think of community in terms of broad social networks such as ethnicity, religion, nationality, class and language, we enter sensitive and deeply contested terrain. The Five Arts Centre (FAC), however, through its Taman Medan community arts project, has chosen to tread on this terrain. In this article, I will look at what the FAC tried to accomplish through this project in Taman Medan, a socially and economically marginalized area of Kuala Lumpur – an area where, furthermore, "community" is a deeply unstable, even ephemeral, notion. What are some of the obstacles against which the project facilitators and participants struggled, and how did working on such a project help to foster an idea of what community means? Were they, in fact, able to build up any sense of community within this fractured area with its transient population?