Help Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? Reach Edinburgh Fringe 2023

We are Khai & Faizal, a couple of Muslim-Malay-Singaporeans, and a theatremaker and a producer respectively. We're taking our solo lecture-performance Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? (Who Took My Malay Away?) to THE Edinburgh Fringe this year and we're raising funds to help us stage the show.

Faizal and I met while heading the Singapore theatre collective, HATCH, where Faizal was the artistic director and I was the general manager for the collective. Working in such close proximity sparked a friendship that led to romance, quickly followed by love and culminating in marriage in 2015. Three years later, we decided to pursue our postgraduate studies in London, where we have remained for the past 5 years.

Earlier this year, I produced Faizal’s solo performance Siapa Yang Bawa Melayu Aku Pergi? (or SYBMAP? for short) at the 2023 VAULT Festival to an almost sold-out crowd, receiving rave reviews from audiences and critics alike & 5* from Fringe Biscuit, who called it ‘an eye-opening & genre-bending piece’. SYBMAP? began during Faizal’s time on his MA and has grown from previous work-in-progress iterations that were presented at Barrel Organ's LIVE 10, Battersea Arts Centre’s Homegrown Festival and the Park Theatre's Prism Project.

SYBMAP? is Faizal’s love letter to Singapore; a lecture-performance that investigates Faizal's Muslim-Malay-Singaporean identity and his relationship with each noun, especially the latter two. The show addresses themes of colonisation, identity, indigenous displacement, and the loss of culture, heritage and language. It was nominated for Show of The Week at VAULT Festival 2023 and an OFFFest 2023.

The show will be going to the upcoming Edinburgh Fringe and has been programmed by one of the Festival’s premier venues, Summerhall. The show is also a recipient of the Eclipse Award, which supports work by artists from the Global Majority. Edinburgh Fringe has a long and illustrious history as a breeding ground for ground-breaking and genre-pushing work. It is also a vibrant marketplace for artists and performances looking to tour and be programmed internationally.

"Summerhall - One of the world’s great arts venues”
(Mark Cousins, The Guardian)

For Faizal and the work, this is an excellent opportunity to be part of an exciting line-up of shows and to showcase his work to an international audience. He will also be participating in the Horizon Nova programme, a curated week allowing participating artists to network with international artists and venues.

How YOU Can Help

Taking a show to Edinburgh Fringe requires a significant financial investment. We are putting our own money and the cash support from the Eclipse Award into remounting the piece and paying our team, that makes up about 38% of our total production cost. We are approaching charitable foundations, private companies, and individuals in Singapore and the UK to raise another 41% of what we need. This leaves us - and this is where YOU come in - to raise 21% of what remains, or £2800 (approx. SGD4,720)

Your contribution will cover part of the cost of our logistics (i.e projector and screen rental) ,outreach activities (researching and contacting community groups in Edinburgh) & tech support (operators and technical manager) at Summerhall.

Why YOU Should Help

After SYBMAP’s run at VAULT, we see that there is an appetite for the stories that we want to tell and the work(s) that we want to create. The audience resonated with the show and even though it is a deeply personal story, they were able to connect with the themes and reflect upon their own experiences.

We see this show as the start of a journey. We want to continue to tell stories that are true to who we are; Muslims, Malays and Singaporeans. Moving forward, we also want to support other Singaporean and South East Asian artists tell their stories. We aspire to build an eco-system that will support and uplift the Malay diaspora in The UK.

Those of you who know Faizal and myself personally will be aware that we are passionate about telling minority stories and shining a light on voices that might be unheard of otherwise. Those who may not know us, or are new to our work, please know that we are working very hard to make this show a success so that it will hopefully open the doors for more opportunities and space for works by theatremakers and producers who look, think and sound like us - because those are the significant barriers to getting our voices heard. And just like with Hatch in Singapore, we are now working hard to create those opportunities and space for our voice - and the voices of others like us - to be heard in the UK

Sincerely

Khai & Faizal

Faizal is a theatremaker, director, actor, and facilitator, who is interested in devised and collaborative work and his works often explore themes of faith, roots, language, racial identity and politics, and the decolonisation of mind and body. In London, Faizal devised and performed in Deciphering (4* from The Guardian) by Norwich-based curious directive, at the New Diorama Theatre. He was also one of the artists in NO BORDER’s Feast on the Square, a political theatre-making incubation by the Royal Court. In 2023, he was one of the commissioned artists on Camden People’s Theatre’s Starting Blocks Programme and created A Couple of Strangers - a hybrid digital-live-durational performance. He is currently mentored by Paula Varjack and Louise Orwin for his ACE (Arts Council England)-funded DYCP grant, looking at digital performances to expand his practice.

I (Khai) am a theatre Producer. I care a lot about representation in the theatre ecosystem; on and off stage & especially in leadership positions. While still on my MA, I was awarded a grant to be on the British Council and Fringe Society's Emerging Producer Development Program in 2019. I then curated RUMAH Fest - highlighting UK artists from a diverse Asian diaspora - which was supported by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Arts Council England and Metroland Cultures. I also produced the OFFFest award-winning one-woman show Patricia Gets Ready, for a run at VAULT Festival. The show then went on to win Pleasance’s Generate Fund and had a run at Edinburgh Fringe. I then received an ACE's DYCP (Developing Your Creative Practice) grant to produce a regional tour of the show. In 2021 I received a Stage One Bursary to support my training in to commercial producing. And in 2022, I was nominated for the Asian Woman Achievement Awards, in the Arts and Culture category.

I was previously the interim creative producer at Midlands-based In Good Company curating their annual Departure Lounge Festival in 2021, an Assistant Producer at Complicité, leading the community screenings of Can I Live? by Fehinti Balogun and assisted in Simon McBurney’s adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. I am currently a freelance producer supporting the programming team at Brixton House and a guest curator at Migration Matters Festival 2023 in Sheffield.