Box of delightful dance
A mini-dance festival featuring 27 local dance groups takes centrestage come April 11. Subhadra Devan talks to producer Bilqis Hijjas
EVERY few months, MyDance Alliance holds a night’s worth of short excerpts of dances — some new, others classics — and after 18 years of doing the Dancebox performance series with The Actors Studio, the time has come to offer the best of the best in a festival.
Also held in conjunction with The Actors Studio’s 30th anniversary, MyDance Alliance president Bilqis Hijjas has gathered 27 local dance groups for four days of dance.
“This is a wonderful opportunity to showcase both the diversity and the longevity of our dance traditions,” says Bilqis.
“It was natural to look back on the many Dancebox programmes — over 18 shows across 18 years — and pick the favourite works we would like to see again, for the Dancebox Restages programme.
“Why not do the same with broader Malaysian dance history, beyond Dancebox? So the idea for Classic Restages was born.
“Another aspect of Dancebox has always
been its diversity and unpredictability — you never know what you’ll get in the box! So we wanted to make sure to include the wider dance community in Programme C, with those who don’t consider themselves to be professional dancers but who really show us that everybody can dance, in our own different ways.
“Finally, Programme D is the tried and true format of Dancebox, welcoming new works and emerging choreographers onto the stage, looking from our past into our future.”
The Dancebox Festival will include two programmes of restagings of Malaysian dance works. In Programme A falls Nasi Putih ,a sensuous and chilling work by award-winning choreographer A. Aris A. Kadir, which was presented in 2007 at KLPaC.
To be performed by Aswara’s dance faculty members, Nasi Putih garnered Aris Kadir Best Choreographer in a Mixed Bill Award, at the Boh Cameronian Arts Awards in 2009.
Other iconic works in Malaysian contemporary dance history include reconstructions of repertoire from the National Cultural Group in the 1970s, by Kesuma of Universiti Malaya, and the Four Seasons ballet from the Kuala Lumpur Dance Theatre which premiered in the 1980s, presented by Federal Academy of Ballet.
Back by popular demand, in Programme B, is Alla Azura’s mysterious and powerful
Munajat Batari from Dancebox March 2011. The dance features the original cast members of Nurolakmal A Wahid, with newcomers Munirih Jebeni and Muslima Saptuang (a.k.a. Lily Terindah).
Alla, an independent artiste and a dance researcher, creates site-specific dance connecting with the natural environment, and women and human rights.
Also in Programme B is Hwa Wei-An’s acrobatic solo The Art Of Falling, Initiate by Suhaili Micheline, and Murni Omar’s contortionist duet M2M. In Dance in the Community, Beautiful Gate’s Low Mee Li is offering a solo piece called
Ascend To The Stars, choreographed by Ng Xinying.
Low is part of Beautiful Gate Art Troupe, which was awarded the Malaysia Book of Record for the largest participants in a wheelchair performance in 2000. The troupe offers an opportunity to the disabled community to feel the joy of the performing arts and allow it to be the media of communication with the society.
Says Low of her dance: “It is a classical-contemporary dance about someone reaching for the sky. The dance showcases how a disabled person starts from the bottom slowly dancing her way up onto her wheelchair.”
Low is a polio patient. “I have been very fond of arts such as music and dancing since young. I want to tell people that although I sit on the wheelchair, I am able to express myself through my dance. What people see is not my disability, but the beauty of the dance itself.
“This is my first time performing on a big stage, so I feel very stressed. I am pressured to the extent that I have been worried about everthing. I am scared that I might not perform well.”
Well-known dancer and choreographer J.S. Wong will offer his new piece, Fit Us Out, in New Dances/New Faces.
“When I created this choreography, the first image I had was a mountain of unwanted clothes. This image led me to research the issue of human waste especially on the environmental costs of fast fashion.
“In response to the notion of consumerism, I wondered about the relationship between money and consumerism. With this awareness, my choreography focused on the infinite desire of people who could not stop positioning, making and eliminating,”
says the Seremban native.
Fit Us Out, which premiered in Solo, Indonesia, will feature Tan Bee Hung and Lee Ren Xin.
For Bilqis, restaging works is a very important practice in dance, an art form which is so brief and ephemeral, and vanishes in the blink of an eye.
“It’s important to look back on works that resonated with us in years past, and to make sure that dance students and artists of the present appreciate the depth of creation that they are building on.
“The other challenge, almost unbelievable in this day and age, is the lack of documentation. Before everyone had video capabilities on their phones, we used analogue tapes to record rehearsals and performances, and many of those are lost, destroyed by fungus, or inaccessible because we no longer have the right technology. I found myself hunting through my boxes of old tapes the other day, and trying to find a working Hi8 video camera! Without video, we rely upon the hazy memories of dancers themselves, and, as every dance historian knows, this is a poor basis for reconstruction.
“If the public enjoys the restaged programmes in this Dancebox Festival, I would love to continue doing this as a series in the future.
“No single work can represent the whole of Malaysian dance — our dance scene is simply too rich, diverse and divergent for that.
“The only way to even start to appreciate the state of dance in Malaysia is to see lots of short works — and that’s what we try to do with Dancebox.”
She feels that non-dancers will be enchanted with what’s on the bill for the festival. “I hope there will be something to delight everyone, no matter what you like.”