Artistic Director: Tristen ZiJuin
The show blurb for The Fever Kinetic Theatre company’s Bayangkan Bayang (Imagine a Shadow) suggests that around 25 million people worldwide are stateless, including up to 300,000 in Malaysia. Mostly undocumented, they face intense hurdles accessing education, ID cards, driving licences and even healthcare.
Artistic Director Tristen ZiJuin’s interdisciplinary ensemble of cast and creatives, from seven nationalities, shines a light on one Malaysian family’s experience of statelessness through a co-operatively developed fusion of dance, animated projections, verse, music, and verbatim dialogue. The result is a raw and visually haunting piece that draws on and celebrates a range of diverse cultural influences to highlight the emotional and practical toll of being without citizenship.
Malaysian-born actor and dancer YY Yong leads the narrated verbatim dialogue sections, recounting the true story of an unnamed family that adopts a baby from a seemingly above-board health clinic. At the age of 11, the family attempts to obtain identity documents for the boy. The government refuses to issue them, citing concerns about the veracity of the clinic’s birth documents. The boy finds himself quite literally “trapped in a place I call home… yearning for a life that is normal”.
What follows is a seemingly unending cycle of unsuccessful legal machinations over the next decade aimed at gaining Malaysian nationality. The boy is left in limbo, unable to drive, find a job, attend university, get married, or even leave the house for fear of random police detention for lack of documentation. Although it is one family’s story set in a single country, the piece highlights the challenges faced by stateless people worldwide.
Much of the narrative dialogue unfolds through interactions among family members, rendered as life-size shadow puppets projected against the rear wall of the theatre, presumably a nod to a variety of Asian theatrical traditions. Verse elements are delivered in a range of languages, with occasional, not always easy-to-read, English subtitling.
Tristen ZiJuin dominates the dance segments, most powerfully in a pas de trois with Indian actor Ru Chavan and Native American performer Rosemarie Kingfisher, which explores the boy’s torturous involvement with authority figures. The trio weaves a complicated pattern of frantic moves that involve ever-greater enmeshment with a large piece of fabric, presumably a nod to the red tape the boy faces in every interaction with the government and the police. Polish-born Kaja Posnik shines in a duet with ZiJuin that involves juggling what appear to be bridal bouquets and explores the challenges of falling in love without any way to arrange a subsequent marriage.
Reviewed on 23 March 2026
