My children enjoy watching dance performances – and I encourage this interest especially with traditional dances because they need to know their own culture.
For this reason, we attended the recent Sabah Travel Fair cultural performances a few times.
I wanted them to experience the melodious sounds of the kulintangan, the brilliant colours of the costumes from various ethnic groups and the graceful moves of these dancers who made cultural dancing their livelihood – and whom helped keep our culture alive and well-known.
Because of them, even the least culturally inclined Malaysians can make fairly accurate guesses on whether a certain dance is from Peninsular Malaysia or Sabah/Sarawak.
Which is more than could be said about us here – as having lived in Brunei for some years, I am ashamed to admit that I knew of no other native Brunei dance besides the Iban’s Ngajat – and that’s only because it is also a native dance of Sarawak and we see it often in the media.
Ask a Brunei resident on what the native dance of Brunei is, if there is an answer, most likely it will start with a hesitant “Errr…“.
At best they might name the Ngajat and at worst, you’ll get a “Do we have any?“
Perhaps cultural dances are not MIB-compliant – but when we see how comfortable our youth are with dances from foreign cultures such as the shuffle or ballet or hip-hop (not that there are anything wrong with these) this loss becomes doubly ironic.
