Hehe, from the baby shark song. Well I know I was away for some time since my thesis issues but now since my exam's are over, I thought I should post some events. On the 8th of November, I went for my first ever Mak Yong live performance. Yes, its in Kelantanese dialect, and it took some time to actually understand the jokes and everything. The performance was held at USM's Dewan Budaya and to my surprise the performance had a mix variety of audience. I guess since its been given UNESCO heritage title, a lot of people interested to watch the show and I must admit it was a great performance.
If you remembered a few post before this, I wrote that the story was about the queen giving birth to a snail. The king actually got mad and threw her out of the court. She then lived with an old man in the Forest where here the prince in the snail came out and played with the naughty children nearby. After an incident where one of the kings wise men was brutally bullied by the children. The wise man went to the king and ordered the boy (which was the prince, being the head of the naughty children) to be killed. When the prince was captured, the king's heart could not kill the boy so he felling lonely took the boy which was actually his son to be his adopted son. So, the actual story of "Anak Raja Gondang" starts after this.
Something to think about, Mak Yong is a symbolist performance so that some items like the two male jesters or "pengasuh" had daggers that could be used as other things like ruler, ore, a fan something like No theater in Japan. In the No theater a fan is used as a knife, and many other stuff, when the actors act, you should know what the fan is really is. This performance used other paraphernalia such as a toy chicken, shoes, a cloth and some other stuff that i cant remember of. Perhaps nowadays its ok to incorporate these Mak Yong which in the old days shouldn't have been. Like in theater class we were told that a troupe used an umbrella and got some feedback from saying that they shouldn't have done that.
Another thing is most of the actors are not even from Kelantan itself. Nothing wrong, its just they were very good that I thought they were actually Kelantanese. (which because i had a hard time listening). Perhaps if since if the performance would like to cater for non-Kelantanese speakers like me and my friends hopefully they put subtitles like when I watch P.Ramlee the Musical in Istana Budaya. At least others have some clue what they are talking about. Some more they should also write the program in English so that the "ang moh" or non-Malay speakers could at least understand the story before hand.
Overall I think its a good performance. I don't really mind the changing of the usual conventions because I'm not a Mak Yong expert. I support all kinds of performing arts and I hope in the future, USM students get more exposure to these arts which some are soon to be gone. The next day, there was a talk which I didn't attend but you could browse Dr. Kipli's blog to know all about it. I'm glad that all my exams are over and I hope I can pass my Macroeconomics paper...till more events come again...adios!
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