I appreciated that I can be one of the coaches to in charge Chinese Traditional Dance. Before I choose to involve in multicultural dance, I had considered and worried that dancing might consume my time and energy in preparation and practice compared to other activities. However, I was inspired with a short sentence with: “The whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” In other words, the whole body can work well only if every part of the body together works out its own unique function. It reminds me that every one of us needs to function according to the potential we have and utilize it to contribute the success of the program, rather than to be a free-rider. Therefore, I decided to become one of the dancers because I realized that I can contribute more ideas based on my past experience in Chinese Traditional Dance as well as know where to borrow the fans, transitional umbrellas and costumes.
Due to these advantages, I became one of the coaches in choreographic Chinese Traditional Dance. I learned that critical and creative thinking is very important for helping us to come out with a strategy. Also, work smart is more important than work hard in planning and doing things. In this event, we were required to perform 10 minutes multicultural dance with one and a half months of preparation. We do not only need to conduct this event, but we have other assignments and Final Year Project Research to do as well. So, we came out with a strategy as the solution in meeting in order to have an awesome performance, at the same time, we can also save our time and energy to do other things. We had divided into 3 dancing groups and each group in charge different type of dance, which are Malay Dance, Chinese Dance, and India Dance. Each group only needs to perform a particular traditional dance for 2 to 3 minutes rather than perform all cultural dance for 10 minutes. This strategy had success to help us efficient in preparation and well done in performance.
The main challenge I faced is some of them are the first time in learning Chinese Traditional Dance. It indicated that they are very new in dancing Chinese Traditional Dance as well as they need more time to learn certain movement and techniques such as the way holding Chinese fans. As a coach, I need to put other dancers in consideration while I am choreographing the dancing steps. Because of these considerations, I had to make sure the dancing steps are simple so that other dancers can easily learn it and enjoy in dancing, rather than adding on their burden by spending more time to catch it up since they have other things to do. Meanwhile, I have to make sure the attraction of overall the Chinese Traditional Dance from the audience, so I had played strategy on the formation that can beautify the overall dance, even though the dancing steps are simple. Also, I had watched some Chinese traditional dance videos to get more inspiration and ideas for dancing steps before the dance practice. Sometimes I might lack idea in thinking the dancing steps, but my teammates are willing to contribute their ideas. In other words, the dancing steps not only come from me, but other dancers also contributed their ideas in this choreographic. Because of everyone’s contribution, the dance only can be performed perfectly.
Furthermore, the creative and critical think I have applied in this process is open-minded to others’ idea and try to integrate all the good practical ideas, rather than persisting with my own idea and perceiving it is the best. Moreover, I had utilized my critical thinking to define out the hidden problem in the 10 minutes of cultural dance. The problem I found is our origin plan of this 10 minutes dance did not integrate all the cultures in one to represent Malaysia culture, rather every cultural dance is separately represented its own race and identity. So, before I shared the problem in group, I briefly came out with a plan of choreographic to integrate all culture in the last song of dance, which is “Joget Malaysia”. This is because I would like to not only reveal the problem, but also I want to give a clear picture of how the problem can be solved in order to easier persuade all dancers to agree with me.
Last but not least, a big lesson I learned from this event is a little contribution can make a big difference. Everyone should not underestimate the impact of changes that she can make to the group. Meanwhile, everyone should not over-confident with own idea that leads someone to be close-minded to reject other opinions. A week before the event, I came out with an idea that can integrate all cultural elements together to make the “Joget Dance Malaysia” be more creative. In the beginning, I was struggling whether want to share out this idea with other dancers since it seems like we have no enough time to learn the new steps. Once I shared my idea and explain the reason to them, surprisingly they agreed with me. Then, we contribute ideas together in thinking of the dancing steps for “Joget Malaysia”, rather than me alone think about it. It was inspiring me that a successful and perfect work or performance has not come from a person, but is come from a group of people.