Prying Into The Heart Of Drama

I usually take one week to finish reading a play text. However, I spend almost three weeks to read King Lear. This is dued to the difficult language style and a lot of contracted forms employed by the playwright Shakespeare.

I am deeply moved by the tragedy happened on King Lear. I can feel the suffering, love and hatred between King Lear and his three daughters. King Lear divides his kingdom among the three daughters by testing the degree of their love to him in their words. Goneril and Regan are content to flatter and promise obedience in lying about their love for their father. They use elaborate and exaggerate language to conceal their true feelings for their father. On the other hand, the youngest daughter,Cordelia, whom King Lear has loved the most, refuses to lie in this fashion. She uses simple, straightward prose and refuses to tell her love to her father publicly. As a result, she loses her share of the kingdom to the two wicked sisters. King Lear misjudges her and disinherits his loving daughter in favour of her wicked sisters.

At the end of the play, King Lear in his madness realises his fault against Cordelia but his reconciliation with her is too late. After the death of her two villain sisters, Cordelia is found dead after strangling and King Lear too dies brokenhearted. What a sad consequence because of the misjudgement of a father! Here is a tragedy in King Lear, one death after death. A king has fallen from the height of his powers to become a bothersome old man. Only after going madness he understands the vanity of his former existence. What a sad tragedy!

King Lear’s tragic experience has helped me to discover the relationship among humans. We should cherish the relationship we have in our family. We should not compare one’s love with another. People express love in many different way.

We started to read the play “Oedipus The King” this week. With the play text opened right in front of us, Dr. Edwin read out the stage direction before the prologue. The last sentence was ‘ Oedipus enters’. He asked us to imagine how the king walked into the palace and even asked four persons to demonstrate it. Our four friends tried their best to walk as a king with dignity and arrogant. However, Dr. Edwin said that he was in ‘the jungle of hopelessness’!

Well, we have neglected the fact that the name Oedipus means “swollen feet”. It refers to the mutilation of Oedipus’ feet done by his father, Laius, before he was sent to Mount Cithaeron to be put to death by exposure. So when Oedipus enters the palace, he should have walked limply or hobbled with the aid of a stick. That means all of us have wrong interpretations for the stage direction.

I think when we read a play, we should read with insight. Essentially, insight is the ability to see into the true nature of human character with deep understanding. Though I have read “Oedipus The King” for two times. I still can’t understand and make sense of what I am reading. As Dr. Fouziah in her lecture has said that comprehension is the basis of reading. When we read, we must read for meaning. Not only that, we must be an active reader.

I have read an illustration given by Christine Nuttall in her book “Teaching Reading Skills In A Foreign Language”. She says that ‘the text is full of meaning like a jug full of water, the reader’s mind soaks it up like a sponge. In this view, the reader’s role is passive, all the work has been done by the writer and the reader has only to open his mind and let the meaning pour in.’

I think I am a passive reader. Though I wake up at 4.30am every morning so as to read some materials before I go to campus. However, whatever text I read is just like a jug of water that pours into my mind. I absorb it totally without giving insight into it. Well, I think I should change my reading strategies, I should read into the deep meaning of the text in the play if I want to understand it clearly.

Dancing is an activity or exercise that relaxes our body. We learn the dance steps and forms especially for performance on stage. Today, many Chinese elderly men and women take up dancing class to fill up their leisure time. When I was a Chinese schoolteacher, I had to teach a few dances to the students for performance on certain festive nights every year. I find that it is interesting to learn and teach the dance.

There are two types of dances, the traditional and modern dance. Personally, I enjoy the traditional dance. The traditional dance needs the dancers to dress up their colourful traditional costumes and carry some hand props like fans, umbrellas, handkerchiefs and others. We explore Chinese culture and heritage through traditional dance. The Chinese traditional dances are Lion Dance, Dragon Dance, Feather Fan Dance, Traditional Chinese Ribbon Dance, Ribbon Dance, Silk Fan Dance, Sword Dance and so on.

Most people use sound to communicate in their everyday life, but a dancer on stage uses his limbs and body to do the same thing. Just like the Chinese language, Chinese dance has its own unique vocabulary, semantics, and syntactic structure that enable a dancer on stage to fully express his thoughts and feelings with ease and grace.

Chinese used choreographic movements of the hands and feet to express their veneration of the spirits of heaven and earth, to act out aspects of their everyday life, and to give expression to shared feelings of joy and delight. Dance was also a performing art that brought pleasure to both the performers and the audience.

Nowadays, we seldom see people performing traditional Chines dance. It can be found only in festive seasons like the Chinese New Year and Mooncake Festival. The young people today prefer modern dance like cha-cha, street dance and so on.

When reading the play “In The Name of Love” by Ramli Ibrahim, we can see that a traditional Malay dance, makyung, is losing its popularity and fame. As the protagonist, Mak Su in her monologue reveals, “The old makyung is not what the makyung is now. In the old days, it was alive. Segar. Now, you yourself can see what it has become – not dead or alive!” I totally agree with her views on traditional dance. Nowadays, many people prefer modern dance, traditional dance has received few attention from the public. So who is going to learn and inherit the skills of traditional dance from the older generations? If we don’t inculcate the love for traditional dance among the young ones, I am sure one day the traditional dance will face the same fate like makyung. If not, it will become not dead or alive!

In another play, “Dance lIke A Man” by Mahesh Dattani, the conversation between Amritlal and Jairaj has shown too the decrease of the traditional Indian dance has caused the professional female dancers who work in the temple turn to be immoral prostitutes. What a pity the society has forced these professions into such degrading and obscene conduct!

Dance, whether social, theatrical, or ritually based, is a form of cultural expression. Dances can teach us practical knowledge about a culture, such as its agricultural traditions or the historical migrations of the people. With every dance that dies, another source of data about the nature of human communities dies with it.

Therefore, regardless of our races, whether we are Chinese, Malays or Indians, we want to preserve our cultural and traditional dance. We want to promote awareness of cultural identities among our younger generation. It is time for all of us to cultivate our interests in the traditional dance and pass it on to our next generations. A dance dies along with its last practitioner. Yes, why not we start to learn our traditional dance today?

We did a mini performance on a play of Edward Bond’s 'Bingo' last Monday. The selected extract contained only two characters who spoke ten lines that were made up of five questions and five brief responses. It was interesting to see how our friends’ creative minds had turned the story into different settings with characters of different relationships. Some pretended to be lovers who were sitting under the tree, some were teacher and student in the classroom, the most interesting were two chickens using their claws to write on the ground.

This mini performance has helped us to understand the nature of text. It makes the play more interesting than reading it. Without performance, we have to visualise the stage and try to figure out what is going on there in the play. We are also given an opportunity to explore and interpret the play by our own creativity and imaginations. Now I know that a small extract from a play can be done in different settings, characters and mood. We can play it positively or negatively that depends on our creativity.

I think this is how we are going to teach our students when we teach in school. We may choose a small extract from the short stories, novels or dramas and ask the students to act out. I am sure they will be enjoying the activity just as we do.

Reading plays is for most people a difficult and unfamiliar task especially among Malaysian students. The Literature Component has just been implemented since the year 2000. It is still a new programme that our students need more time in their exposure. Teachers should be aware of the fact that not everyone responds positively to drama, therefore we need to make the classroom activity interesting so as to capture our students’ interests.

Why ‘prying’? Some people may want to ask me. From what I know in the Oxford Dictionary, the word ‘pry’ means “inquire too curiously or rudely about other people’s private affairs”. Yes, those people who look into my journals in this blog are considered as prying into my private affairs! However, I can’t deny the fact that there are no secrets in this blog. As Dr. M.Edwin says, this is e-journal, a public journal that everybody can access to it easily and read whatever they like. Therefore, I can’t stop others from reading my journals. However, since this is my first time in doing e-journal, I will love to hear some comments if the readers feel they want to leave a few lines in my blog.

The heart is an important organ of our body. From it, we manifest various activities in our desires, affections, emotions, passions, purposes, thoughts, perceptions, imaginations, wisdom, knowledge, skill, beliefs, reasonings, memory and consciousness. Wow! So many things! Therefore, the heart represents the total inner personality. By reading literature especially drama, we are able to immense in the author’s or characters’ inner feelings. Drama, which speaks to the heart as much as to the mind, provides materials with some emotional colours that can make fuller contact with our own life. When we are able to pry into the heart of certain characters, we feel close to them and share their emotional responses. Of course we can’t speak to them personally, yet by asking questions ourselves while reading, we come to our own conclusions. It is interesting to read drama. I hope by the end of this semester, I will be able to build up my inner person and carefully mold my desires, affections, emotions and goals in life.