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University Malaya marked 11 to 17 August 2008 as one of its historical week. This was because, for the first time ever, University Malaya became the convener and organizer of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) conference, which was held outside of Europe for the first time. The mastermind behind this successful conference is an eminent performing arts scholar, Professor Dr. Mohammad Anis Md. Nor. It was an honor to interview this animated person who is very dedicated to conserving dance heritage in Malaysia.
1. What was the Symposium all about?
It’s the 25th Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Ethnochoreology. ICTM stands for International Council for Traditional Music which is an organization under UNESCO. There are many study groups in the organization and one of it is on ethnochoreology, or dance ethnology. This symposium is the first symposium held outside of Europe since its inception 20 years ago. I bid three times to hold the symposium in Malaysia but they were afraid to organize it outside of Europe. However, two years ago in Romania, we managed to convince them to come to Malaysia.
We had two themes for the study group. The ICTM came up with the theme “Transmitting Dance as Cultural Heritage” and the local organizer, which is University Malaya, proposed “Dance and Religion”. There were about 160 participants - 70 international participations, 70 local undergraduate students from University Malaya, and the rest are made up of other local participants.
2. Was this a brain-storming symposium?
No, it was a professional and scholarly conference where all the abstract papers were submitted to the program committees by distinguished international scholars and after the peer review process, papers which were more meaningful towards the symposium were selected. All these papers were presented scientifically rather than poetically. It involved serious case study and empirical methods of analysis then after which the dialogue took place. There were a lot of sharp critical dialogues in the conference to the amusement of the students. For the first time, students got to see the authors of the books they were reading because most of the key speakers were authors of their academic reference books. Then, at every conference the proceeding of the dialogues would go into a publication and I am in charge of compiling it because I’m the local host of this symposium. For this compilation work, I am assisted by the program committees as well as the co-editor of this publication. We hope to publish it in about a year from now. This symposium is very serious and is very highly regarded by dance scholars in the world.
3. From your observation, what can you say about the dance industry in Malaysia?
There is such an industry. I mean, you can survive by dancing if you want to work as a dancer, and you can make money. It is a question of how much you make. If you are smart enough to secure contracts for many festivals, you can make more money. If you are attached with State groups you can get to travel a lot and you can get money from allowances. Commissioned works are paid very well. Like in Citrawarna and all that, they pay the artists very well. So, in terms of dance industry as a commodity for both states and tourism, it is doing very well. That I can say.
4. What about the awareness of dance amongst youths in Malaysia?
They are aware of hip hop. The youths in Malaysia are not naïve. The series of “So You Think You Can Dance” and whatever not is very hot. But like any youths in every country in the world they’re into the trendiest gig. So, they would like to emulate, imitate and do it because it is a trend. Hence, awareness is very high.
5. Has the dance industry changed over time? If yes, how was the transition and can you explain how this happened?
Every dance performance structure changes, nothing remains intact and however you want to preserve it, tradition will also change over time. There are those that survived the test of time and there are those that didn’t. It is the same in any part of the world. Dances are not static and they are not just memories. They are performative. So, you have to be very careful about it. There is no right or wrong. The rights and wrongs can be adjudicative by masters. Once the dance masters are gone then everything goes. You can have a group of Malay people dancing with stilettos and glittering costumes because nobody says it is wrong and because they have no idea how to do it right. But you may also see traditional dancers who keep away their shoes because being flat footed and dancing on the ball of their feet produces a technique that gives them a sort of performative display. So, it all depends on where you are treating it.
6. How does a dance reflect a culture heritage?
Dance is a non-verbal communication. This means the movements of the body and other gestures are very culturally defined. It’s like a language. If you do not practice it, it will become extinct. Latin is extinct because it was never pursued when the church changed Latin masses to vernacular languages. So simply, should one day Malaysia decide that we cannot practice dancing because dancing is wrong, then it is as good as robbing the people’s right to speak.
7. Is there a Malaysian traditional dance listed as a World Heritage?
Yes, there is one. “Mak Yong” received the United Nation Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) intangible heritage award last year. However, we have many more masterpieces other than Mak Yong.
8. How does a dance qualify as a masterpiece? What are the criteria?
The qualification is that it is a tradition which has a history and it is living and being practiced. Then it connects itself as both being a representation of the people who owns it and how it is being utilized and used. It is more of a living tradition than a clinically dead kind of tradition.
9. How does Malaysia promote this heritage to the eyes of the world?
They had one in London recently. The promotion of our tradition overseas is done by the Ministry of Culture and the other one is the Ministry of Tourism. So, they did it well enough otherwise we won’t have the tourists clogging all our roads now.
10. How does our dance heritage relate to the economics of our country?
The problem with cultural dance is that there’s always this association with heritage and exoticism. You can attempt to modify heritage fundamentally as a commodity. But once you do that, you turn heritage into commodity for tourism to make it economical. Once you do that too, you lose your heritage because you are satisfying not the beholders of the tradition, but you are satisfying those who pay for it. I do not think you should say heritage equals to economy. The word economy does not mean money. But if you relate that to social economy or culture economy, then it makes sense. But if your “economy” by definition equates to the Ringgit, then it does not make sense.
Let me give you an example. If you go to Hawaii to watch the hula, you see such performances every night in hotels. These hulas are exotic, erotic and are performed by sensual dancers. But if you want to see a real hula, you have to go to the hula halau (temple). Between the hula in the hotel and the hula in the temple, which do you think is more meaningful? Of course it is the latter. The latter performers are not concerned whether they can sell their performance or not because their patrons are people who really value their heritage. Now, this is intrinsic economic value.
11. What are some of the key points that was discussed and raised at the symposium?
Initially, the question of heritage in the symposium was looking at what heritage means in the context of ”living tradition”. We are not talking about a museum piece. We are looking at how revival works are done. We had a panel from Cambodia who spoke about the post-genocidal project they do. The concept of reviving tradition is so strongly estrange in their conservative world view. They made ‘revival’ more accessible by learning new ways of educating the few living master teachers of the need to come out from their conservatism.
The word that they used, and that came out very powerfully was “heritadization,” which means, the process of ‘making’ a heritage rather than holding a heritage and trying to tie it down.
We also touched on tourism while we looked at how heritage works. It should be reflective of our cultural embodiment rather than the reflection on what the tourists need.
Other issues raised included nomenclatures of dance in the context of religion and ritual, genderless performances, negotiating situations where dance is state, people or community-owned, and so forth.
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From this symposium, we came out with new terminologies and possible theories. Essentially, what we did was present case studies for critical review and then we have dialogues about it.
12. How does the owner of heritage negotiate with authenticity and modern day life?
We also raised the issue about authenticity. Well, authenticity is no longer a favorite word for many people. Authenticity is relative. “Authentic” is a heavy word and it is very difficult to deal with. We always question the knowledge of the beholder in our dialogues of scholarship. That mystery of intrinsic knowledge is very powerful because it gives us the narrative of what authenticity means.
13. Were there any similarities in issues in other countries?
Yes. We have several overlapping issues. They are issues of gender, ownership, hierarchy, materiality, feminism, patriarchy, politics, and governance.
14. After all the talk and discussion, what is next?
These groups meet every two years. Next year, there will be a big ICTM conference in South Africa where all the study groups will participate.. Then on the following year, these groups will meet again but we have not decided where it should be held. Meanwhile, as an upshot of this conference, we formed a new study group on South East Asian performing arts where we have several sub-study groups. The ethnomusicology and dance ethnochoreology groups will be working together. The first meeting will be held in 2010 in Singapore. And, the next thing I will be doing as a host committee member, is to publish the proceedings for the use of students and scholars. The idea is to provide as many leading theories as possible to dance.
15. From this year’s symposium, what can you conclude and how does the outcome impact our Asian dance industry?
The symposium went very well and it pleases me to see that we managed to hold such important scholarly conference in Malaysia. Malaysia is casted to be the most important country in dance scholarship. This makes me very happy. We also feel that the level of attendance and the quality of the papers submitted were extremely good. In fact, many of the presenters went around asking for the papers. Of course we did not give them because it is at draft stage. In this scholarly meeting, what was presented is still work-in-progress. We hear criticism, we bring it back and rework on the draft and submit it for another level of reading before it gets published. For Asia, this is the first time ever. We had so many Asian participants for this symposium because this is the first time it is held outside Europe. We also had a very impressive number of papers from Asia and the Pacific. The attendance from the Asia pacific is the largest in the history of this conference.
I guess the outcome is that scholars who have never been to this conference now realize that dance scholarship is not just narrative. People think that if one can write a narrative cultural dance performance, that is already a dance scholarship. If you give a journalist RM20,000 to write about the particular dance style, he or she can come out with a very good paper. But it does not necessarily mean that is a paper of critical analysis because it describes a narrative.” So, what we want is how we evaluate. For example, the question of what it means to the culture because we are talking about dance and music as culture rather than just a performance. We are more anthropologic and we are more concerned with what dance means to a person and why its significant to him because it is all about that individual. Dancing is about ‘you’. So, if you do not dance and you do not know how to dance, then what do you think the problem is? Your problem is you have never been exposed to dancing, thus you may consider dancing as dirty. This is an important question. So, this is the kind of thing that now many Asian participants are privileged to learn in the symposium.
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