LAST May I found myself in a theatre in Dublin, Ireland, watching the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan premiere their work 13 Tongues as part of the Dublin Dance Festival. The theatre was full of Dubliners who had come to see a performance from across the world, from a country that was ethnically and culturally different from them. My daughter and I were probably the only Malaysians there.
When you see a performance or attend any arts festivals, you’re looking to see something new, something that will touch you, something that will enhance your soul. You want to come away feeling like you’ve been through a new experience. You don’t want to see the same old, same old: for that, you can go to a political party convention.
Which is why I don’t understand the fuss about the George Town Festival (GTF). The GTF has been going on for years and I have attended several of them. I love the fact that I can see performances, local and international, that I would never have had the opportunity to see all in one place. It takes some planning and energy to get to as many of the shows as you want but since most are based in the centre of George Town, it’s really one of the easier festivals to navigate. You can even walk from one venue to another, and there are plenty of cafes to stop at if you get tired.
I remember very well the giant bamboo sculptures in front of the Penang City Hall, a modern dance performance by a UK-based Indian choreographer, an exhibition of photographers by a young Chinese photographer held in one of the old shophouses and many others. Some shows were enthralling, some were not, but you can’t have everything at one festival.
One thing I did not go around thinking was, why weren’t there more performances from my community? There certainly were some, though I’m not sure I got to them. But I figured I can see my own community’s cultural performances any time, whether live or on TV. I remember a glorious night of traditional Malay music at the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas once that was very enjoyable. And I often attend shows by a young singer who specialises in singing old P. Ramlee songs in a new jazzed-up way.
But I’m not tallying up who’s being represented and who’s not. Of course, when one particular nationality or gender is over-represented, I will frown and sometimes say something. I have been to writers’ festivals where the speakers tend to be overwhelmingly White and male. Women writers of colour often have far more interesting books to talk about so I pointed out to the organisers that that was a serious omission.
I also once complained that a conference about global moderate people was only half-global because none of the speakers on any of the panels were female. Apparently, the organisers thought women had nothing to say about the economy, education, politics, the climate, etc. I wonder what happens when those people meet with women heads of governments, of which there are an increasing number. Do they talk about what kuih to have for tea?
I do believe that there is nothing wrong if anyone wants to have a festival that only showcases the Malay community. After all, not only are there a pitiful number of showcases for the Malay arts and culture, many of these arts as well as their exponents are dying. Take the Mak Yong in Kelantan for instance. It is perhaps ironic that the only people I know who are documenting these dying arts are not Malays.
Last week I had the privilege of being in a roundtable discussion with several other people from the music industry and one thing we agreed on is that music is music. Even if you don’t understand the language (eg Korean) or have never heard certain instruments before, the music can still reach something in your soul. Tinariwen, a group of musicians from Mali, performed in KL last year to a mesmerised local and expat audience. Who knew?
What is clear, the arts in many ways have no ethnicity, even if they originate from particular cultures. I’ve seen videos of White Americans singing Javanese traditional songs, for example.
There is little point in making a lot of noise about what is in a festival programme or not. If you feel there is a gap, then organise a performance or an exhibition yourself. That is the only way to keep an art alive, by making sure that as many people as possible get to see it.
In 1982, Ezane Azanin Ahmad, the renowned Malay traditional dance choreographer and dancer, took her production of Jentayu to the London International Festival of Theatre where it was very well-received. Like the Taiwanese production, ours can cross boundaries, if there is support for it. The only proviso is that we bring our authentic culture abroad, not the watered-down speeded-up versions that we produce for tourists on the assumption that they have short attention spans and can’t understand our so-very-sophisticated folk dances and songs.
Our problem is that, even here at home, there are very few platforms and very little support for such performances. People would rather pay thousands to see Taylor Swift than a few hundred to see a Mak Yong exponent like Zamzuriah Zahari perform locally.
It’s tragic, made even more so by the fact that the folks who least care about this are the very same ones who make a lot of noise just to show someone else up. You have to wonder if they truly feel passionately about the arts or found this a convenient way to get some attention.
Marina Mahathir would like to ask every nationalist loudmouth what was the last book they read. The views expressed here are solely the writer’s own.
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