The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion
The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion |
| Posted: 26 Dec 2011 04:11 PM PST DEC 27 — My nine-year-old daughter has a lovely head of glossy brown hair; why would she need to wear a wig? But Amy and her team-mates were the only ones showing off their natural locks. Every other girl performed underneath a crown of perfectly coiled synthetic ringlets that jigged up-and-down almost in rhythm to the fiddler's tune. This was the annual Mid-Atlantic Oireachtas (Irish for gathering) championships held in Pennsylvania, and that last weekend in November was our first foray into the closed world of competitive Irish dancing. At 8am on Saturday, the ballrooms of Philadelphia's Marriott Hotel filled with hundreds of young dancers and their "Feis" mums (pronounced "fesh", meaning festival in Irish) armed with hefty vanity cases. The tap-tapping of hard shoes on wooden floors soon resonated through the vast dressing-room area, and those not feverishly practising were being groomed. Careful applications of stage make-up onto poised faces; stray ringlets teased into shape; "sock glue" rolled onto fake-tanned legs to prevent sock slippage; tweaking of sparkly tiaras and zipping up of neon costumes encrusted with Swarovski crystals. Gulp.  "In the real world 'conforming to expectations' means you wouldn't wear a wig, but in the competitive world of Irish dancing it means you would," said Niall O'Leary, former World Irish Dance Champion. "Absolutely everyone here [Oireachtas] is chomping, I mean, you know... trying really hard to place high enough to qualify for the World Irish Dancing Championships," Texan mum Linda Cooper explained while stitching the cuffs of one of our team's modest burgundy and gold appliquéd dresses. Although, the chances of her daughter Rosemary, 18, doing so "are nearly impossible because at her level, it's just so technical." She is quietly optimistic that her son William, 16, already a "national qualifier", might. To win at the annual World's championships (heading for Belfast, April 2012) is a serious achievement. And it's the prestige that accompanies the title; the prize money barely covers the cost of a solo dress ranging from US$1,500 (RM4,732) to US$5,000. Amy's Irish dance teacher Niall O'Leary, who started dancing long before he could tie his own laces, won the World Championships in 1989. His mother, a dancer herself, blessed his career by hooking him up with Kevin Massey, former coach to Michael Flatley, famous for catapulting Irish dancing onto the worldwide stage through Riverdance. O'Leary headed to NYC 15 years ago to pursue his "two passions in life — Irish dancing and architecture." The exuberant and often outspoken character (when his thick Southside Dublin accent can be understood) has made a quite name for himself in Manhattan through the Niall O'Leary School of Irish Dance formed in 1996, his own architecture company and as president of the Irish Business Organisation of New York. As his four-hand céilì team dancers stopped practice for lunch, I asked O'Leary, why he was bucking the wig wearing trend that has prevailed over the past two decades? "You don't need to wear wigs, everyone on the team has lovely hair. Other people of other teams probably have lovely hair too, but they feel they have to wear wigs or go for a certain look, or because it is more convenient." No curlers, no hassle. The love affair with ringlets is historical: Only a few decades ago children in Ireland went to dance classes directly after church still wearing their Sunday best, and for girls, curls formed from a night spent with damp hair in rag curlers.  Niall O'Leary's under 12s four hand reel (Amy first on left), the only Oireachtas team to go wig-less! Although they could have picked one up from several wig stands at the event carrying signs like: "all wigs come in 28 colours" and names such as 'Colleen' ($80), a Sinead or a Grainne ($126) Winners are those "with the best technique and style, who get all their moves right on the day", O'Leary remarked. "It is sad some girls only wear wigs because they feel they have to look normal, and what looks normal at an Irish dancing competition is not necessarily what the general public see as normal." Indeed, the beauty pageant-styled presentation of dancers and costs associated with the ornate costumes often leads to negative publicity; something the Oireachtas committee were keen to avoid by banning press attendance this year. O'Leary has just heard of "a big name school in Ireland that recently decided to drop the wigs." He firmly believes more will follow, "but it will happen gradually, and in a good way." And for Amy, the "dancer from Malaysia", as O'Leary takes great pride in mentioning at every gig she attends, she'll find a set of foam curlers and hairspray in her Christmas stocking, but most definitely not a wig. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
| From the comfort of our armchairs Posted: 26 Dec 2011 04:04 PM PST DEC 27 — Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you, the armchair. All hail the ingenious inventor who came up with the idea of affixing comfortable armrests to sitting furniture. It is generous and cosy. It usually fits one. It is what most people look forward to after a day of stressful deadlines and difficult bosses in the office. It goes very well with a television set and a can of beer (or Coca-Cola, for the non-drinkers). It's very comfortable. We lean back. We dig our elbows into the squishy armrests. We feel at ease. We feel at home. From our armchairs we face animated screens and we watch (or read) the local news. From our armchairs, we face people and we talk, comment and criticise. It is so easy. It is so comfortable. We never want to leave our seats. It is easy to talk, because talk is cheap. We flip through the papers and skim the headlines. The government announces a new project — an MRT line connecting numerous areas which will increase general accessibility in the Klang Valley. We sneer and make derisive comments on how it is once again "feeding time" for the cronies. Then we throw in that little "racial politics" card just for an added kick, and say that the project was intended to punish the pro-opposition Chinese just because it happens to involve the acquisition of Petaling Street. Somehow, the fact that we would all probably benefit greatly from the MRT line, just as we currently do from the LRT and Monorail services, goes unnoticed. Who wants to talk about that? It's boring, and it's stating the obvious. No, it has to be about the cronyism and the money-swindling, we say firmly. Besides, the country would be in absolute ruins if it weren't for we who sit in our armchairs and point our fingers at all the shenanigans the government gets up to. And then we reach for another can of beer. Bored with the standard fodder that all mainstream papers feed us, we log onto the Internet and access alternative media. The Internet, being a fertile breeding ground for emerging talent and intellect, is a fresh marketplace of alternative ideas. We read articles, written by none other than our fellow rakyat, proposing new ideas and policies for more efficient crime control, or to curb loan sharks, or to reduce the bullying of consumers by big establishments. We dismiss them one by one and say it would never work. Why? Corruption will nip the new policy in the bud. That, or the lack of enforcement. Actually, why stop there? We go the whole nine yards and launch the one-size-fits-all argument, that any sort of solution (short of kicking out the entire government altogether) to any sort of problem will never work, because nobody will carry out that solution. We shoot every last idea down, not because of its merits or lack thereof, but because we think that the government won't put it to work, or that any implementation will be poorly done. Any idea is crap, we argue, because Barisan Nasional will screw it up. So, undilah Pakatan Rakyat! Like a broken record, we rinse and repeat this argument for every new article that appears in cyberspace. It's a convenient argument, because we don't really need to think, judge and evaluate the particular merits of each individual idea. Why would anyone want to do that? It's exhausting. So what's the point of suggesting anything new at all, if it is true that all possible solutions, short of having a brand new government, are useless? We shrug and pop open our third can of beer. We don't have any better ideas to contribute, but that's not our job anyway. It is not for us to add anything of value to the discussion, oh no, we decide what is of value and what isn't. For we are the great armchair critics, perched on our padded thrones, delivering our sardonic judgments from behind online screens of convenient anonymity. Unsatisfied, we go a step further and we get personal. It is insufficient for us to parade around shooting ideas down and rewriting articles for the writers themselves, oh no, our armchairs grant us greater powers than that. To the fresh-faced university student who tries to see both sides of the argument, we accuse him of being exceedingly naive and wet behind the ears. We accuse him of being paid by the government to write what he writes. We note that he is currently studying in one of the best universities in the world, and promptly take it to a personal level: "Why do you write such stupid stuff which I disagree with? Hasn't your Ivy League education taught you anything?" To the writer who spent a considerable amount of effort trying to provide an academic analysis on a particular government policy, say, on the feasibility of the JPA scholarship programme, we lambast him for "wasting his time", and ridicule him for not writing an article that focuses, instead, on corruption. To the writer who chronicled several observations of her own, we jeer and sneer, accusing her of being ignorant and having "not done any research", just because we know a friend of a friend of a friend who experienced something to the contrary. We don't write anything ourselves because we don't have anything better to say. But we condemn writers for having the audacity to write about Topic A, when we want to read about unrelated topic B. We fling unwarranted personal attacks just because we can. We brutally kill off ideas. And we do all this from the comfort of our armchairs, in our safe, air-conditioned rooms. * Yizhen Fung has recently completed her undergraduate studies in the University of Oxford. This will be her last article for this column. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. Full content generated by Get Full RSS. |
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