one and two and three and turn!

Dancing, i will never understand that kind of art. I can never get the concept of shaking/wiggling/dramatizing(?) your body in front of people - i would never do that, but i did(!) it anyway!

Of the three years i lived in Johor Bahru i have danced Zapin three times, and indian dance twice, and sarawakian ethnic once - all are different. Where zapin is aggresive but graceful, indian dance is just aggresive (not in a bad way), and sarawakian ethnic dance was downright interesting. Sadly to admit, i enjoyed dancing.

Zapin had a disciplined about it, you have to tilt your head a certain way, not too much becase it would destroy the whole concept - just tilt your head a certain way - it can't get more ambigous than that! Everyone in the number have to move in the same place and at the same time, which was really hard to do because coorperation is something rare to find nowadays (as rare as the sumatran rhinocerous - interesting analogy).

Of course after doing the Zapin i got laughed at by my friends because in a way dancing may have unmanned me, but i have to say, to see your hard work practising to be greeted with applause was a great feeling. Being the only indian in a traditional malay number was so malaysian - as my lecturer put it. I may have developed a certain liking with malay culture since i cant stop imagining that two thousand years ago (or maybe a bit more recent than that) - zapin is their television!

Indian dance is where i let go, seriously - there was a lot of jumping and twisting and stuff. It was like as though you moved your body vigorously and suddenly you felt - light, as though you are a feather, indian dance help me let my insecurities go!

Now with the sarawakian ethnic - this was really interesting because i did this dance as an act for a thetre. I wrote a theatre and it was staged in IPP Penang, i got this idea that when the characters in the play was about to engage in a catfight, dancers (myself included)come out and did the dance - it had colourful musics and weird steps which i found suitable to portray the anger of the characters. Even when at the time of staging we had some technical problems, but if there were none, it would had the effect i wanted.

From what i have learnt from dancing - moving/shaking/wiggling/twisting your body with music help discipline/calm and portray your emotion - but i doubt that the whole point of traditional dancing!

Wither Shall I wonder?

By: Muhammad Azhar Khan b. Ashfar Ahmad

I love histories, all those things about greek tragedies, roman bloodbath, terrible Tudors, madness of Qin - Everything - I was elated to learn the histories of drama (because I have never read about it) but my excitement were gone because - I did not know that Antigone was pronounced Anti - Go - Nee!The first class of Drama and there is already a thing that i don't know. (not to mention other scores of things that i don't know - who knows that Gladiator originated from a form of theater?)

To live another whole sem with 5 hours of bafflement every week... there got to be more energy that i could muster to go through this. When i was listening the lecture about how theater originated, I didn't know that there were more to theater than Tiara Jacquelina over-publicizing herself in Istana Budaya.The whole time that Dr Edwin was lecturing my head was spinning with the nursery rhyme -'goosie goosie gender, wither shall i wonder'... not because of that 'not saying the prayers' part, it was about the wondering part, and the going upstairs and downstairs part because I felt like my mind was scampering through my brain in hopeless attempt to find the intellect to grasp all these new facts, and some familiar facts too - the fact that I have to learn more Shakespearean English was and always will be a challenge to my little tiny brain.

Hopefully i will make it through this course, or every time Dr Edwin lectures, there will only be the sound of goose squawking in my little tiny head.