by Bilqis Hijjas

International Dance Day was on Wednesday, and with it came the official launch of AsiaDanceChannel.com, a new enterprise by The Star dance critic and blogger Choy Su-Ling and her PR company Pixarus Communications. I was MC for the day, which meant I got to recite Akram Khan’s International Dance Day Message in my best poetry-reading voice. Apparently it moved some people to tears – I must still have the gift!

Spangly eyeshadow ahoy!

Held at the Media Department Auditorium in the convoluted warren of University of Malaya, the launch was the perfect occasion for a showcase of cultural dances. After all, International Dance Day is intended “to cross all political, cultural and ethnic barriers and bring people together” to celebrate the art form. Students from the UM Dance Department donned their best costumes and spangly eye-shadow to give us a zapin Johor, a Bharattanatyam alarippu, ngajat from Sarawak, and The Gathering, a short contemporary work.

Tendu a la seconde, zapin style.

Revues of Malaysian dance, so beloved by the Ministry of Tourism, always appear to me an ideal occasion to perform cultural critique. UM, like all public tertiary institutions in Malaysia, is dominated by Malays, so in addition to having Malays performing the zapin, we also had Malays performing the alarippu. Nothing wrong with that – we should all learn each other’s dances. But for some reason all the Chinese performers were lumped together into contemporary work. (Actually I know this was accidental – the work was originally performed with one Malay girl in the mix, but she has since graduated from UM and moved on to full-time employment.) Stranger still, all the major races were represented – Malay by the zapin, Indian by the Bharattanatyam, all the East Malaysian cultures glossed under Iban – but where was the Chinese dance? Unless – aha! — the contemporary dance was also meant to be the Chinese dance! It was after all choreographed by Leng Poh Gee, a lecturer in the Dance Department. What does this say about our equation of the Chinese community (and its oft-cited economic dominance and success) with our concept of modernity? The rest of us are stuck in the stone age, while the Chinese have advanced so far into the future that they can claim contemporariness as their own culture!

A more contemporary tendu.

Of course I am being facetious, but these things bear thinking about. Especially since The Gathering shows some surprising cross-culturalism. It’s an excerpt from the full-length work Contact which was performed earlier this year at Dewan Bandaraya. This section, with its ensemble of girls in faded crumpled dresses, is one of my favourites. The dancers start with a simple foot phrase, involving a heel strike, some steps, and a foot pointing to the side, and gradually the dance builds in momentum until by the end the dancers are competing to be in the front of the group to perform a grandiose temps levé à la second (hop on one foot with the other leg raised high to the side). Combined with the jaunty flute-dominated music by Matthew Lien, the emphasis on footwork with a very erect torso and stationary arms gives the work a somewhat Celtic air. In speaking to Poh Gee, however, I discovered that the work didn’t have Celtic roots at all, but Malay ones! The foot phrase is an abstraction of the zapin, which is used elsewhere in Contact. It neatly illustrates how a phrase of movement, when divorced from its usual trappings of music and costume, can attain a degree of universality. Perhaps dance really is a common language.

Choy Su-Ling, launching AsiaDanceChannel.com.

If so, then it’s a language that the majority of the business world has yet to learn. The aims of AsiaDanceChannel are twofold: to develop an online magazine that links and promotes dance in Asia, and to encourage businesses in Asia to develop corporate social responsibility plans that benefit the development of dance. In her speech, Su-Ling employed the jargon that, presumably, makes most sense to the business world: translating dance language into economic language. Dance is a ‘cultural resource’, we must learn to ‘tap the creative cluster’, because ‘creativity…will be the new currency of success’ when we learn to create economic value by exploiting intellectual property. This diminution of dance from art to economics is a far cry from the immediacy of the bodies only recently cavorting on stage, but perhaps it is necessary to get through to those with the money. I agree that it is very important to develop a sense of personal, and by extension corporate, philanthropy in Malaysia and other Asian countries which lack this civic principle. But I also think that this should be done by awakening the love of art within individuals, as in Su-Ling’s own case – this is first and foremost her passion rather than her profession. Art for art’s sake, rather than for profit. But in this time of uncertainty, a bit of money for dance from anywhere, and I wish AsiaDanceChannel.com the best of luck!

Images by James Quah.