Dear Friends,
Recently I was invited by Dr Norzizi Zulkifli, Head of Pengajian Seni Persembahan (Faculty of Performing Arts) UiTM, for a meet-and-share session with the students.
I must admit that I did not make any preparation and was taken by surprise when it dawned to me that this was the faculty that I had helped put in place, once upon a time several decades ago, working together with its first Head, my good friend the late Prof Najib Nor.
A brilliant and creative artist, Najib loved the theatre and was costume designer for many of our early productions.
Najib was requested by the Vice Chancellor then, the late Tan Sri Laidin to start a new department of Performing Arts at UiTM. This was during the challenging period of the banning of Makyong by the state government of Kelantan.
We had resolved then to make the faculty a haven for Malay traditional performing arts with Makyong as the artistic mainstay of the faculty.
Eventually politics took over when Tan Sri Laidin was no longer at its helm, and with the passing of Prof Najib, I left the faculty when I saw that my presence was no longer useful. I was never back to UiTM until now!
Simultaneously, hiding my ‘shock’, I was however happy to see that those who came to greet me were those I had known during their student days.
It was a pleasure to meet the moderator of the day, the talented Dr Hamzah Tahir, whom I had not met for decades and who I had known during his younger days.
I had also requested Sutra’s videographer Rabby to accompany me as I did not know what to expect – after all my last online discussion, invited by UTM (Johor) students, had to be cancelled at the last minute. (This storm in the teacup became a veritable cyclone in the media and I thought I should be ready with Rabby for any eventuality.)
It turned out the ‘sharing’ was quite pleasant and the students were rather ‘lovely’.
I was rather ‘frank’ with them. In fact at times, I thought I was quite ‘brutal’ in my answers to their questions as they seemed to be naive.
I was also concerned because there is such a disconnect between artists/practitioners, academia and arts bureaucrats. We seem to be producing mediocre arts academics and bureaucrats. Releasing them into the working force simply means increasing the number of deadwood in the corps of civil servants. We know what that means…
The talented ones who try to be professional artists in the ‘serious’ arena (rather than the more dispensable entertainment industry) do not have a chance to survive as professional dancers/actors. They are soon recruited back as part of the teaching staff and thus the cycle of in-breeding in the performing arts academia deteriorates to become the bane that they are for us at the moment.
I hope there are more interactions with other artists, poets and those who have carved their careers in the various fields of the arts.
It’s vital that dancers and actors look beyond and take inspiration from others, not be blinkered within their own narrow fields.
Ramli