bottled sunshine: another piece from my childhood

Another piece from my childhood...
I'm a little bit bored reading an article on Dissociative Identity Disorder (or Multiple Personality Disorder or Split Personalities), so I've decided to write another post (esp. after I noticed that I only wrote 4 blog posts in January).

Let's talk about dance..
This semester bruises are my friends. The ones on my knees and ankle areas are from contemporary dance and the ones on my thigh are from Saman Dance, a traditional dance from Aceh. I remembered there was one time my manager in Yahoo! msg me then I told him to come to Eusoff Dance Production. Then, he replied, "Stop dancing and find real job." Hehehe. I guess dancing is not a real job for him :P

Ironically, if I were not in Spore, I would not continue dancing traditional dance (I think). The university that I was admitted into in Indonesia didn't have traditional dance CCA. Sometimes I wonder when I will stop dancing, whether one day I will give up dancing (or sacrifice? whatever it is), just like now when I give up my piano lesson. Playing piano was something important for me, then I stopped learning. I even stopped playing for fun (or maybe I only played piano for my lesson?not for fun)

Well, let's go back to dance. My first time dancing Hip Hop and Contemporary was here, in Eusoff Hall, in NUS. Back in high school, I never ever thought of doing modern dance. It was just "not Ferninda" hahaha.. But yeah..I always love traditional dance, but it's very hard to learn classical dance in Tangerang, my hometown. You have 'Sanggar' (the 'club' to take arts lesson), but either no teacher or no students. My only proper dance lesson was when I was in kindergarten, when 30-40 girls were trained in a big hall and we took exam every year (and I got D for 2 consecutive years! HAHAHAHAHA)

Tari Yapong from Jakarta, I was 5 years old, in my kindergarten :)

So I stopped dancing.. Then in Primary 4, I moved to Tangerang where I met new friends who also liked dancing. Vivi (the name of the friend) encouraged me to join traditional dance as CCA. So I started dancing again :) In primary 5 and 6, even though it was ONLY a CCA, the teachers were very strict. They always made sure that our postures were right and one of them liked to yell at us, "Mendak!! Mendak!!" (means: the lower position with the bended knees which makes ur legs ache after dancing). The nicest thing was we always performed twice a year.

Tari Merak (Peacock Dance), Yogyakarta version, primary school :)

Junior High School..
I continued taking traditional dance as CCA in my 3 years in Junior High School (except in the second year, coz there was no teacher that time). However, there were not any performances. Here I met another senior, she's very small (smaller than me, hahahaha), but well, that's not the point, she danced VERY WELL! and I learnt a lot from her. When I entered senior high school, she encouraged me to join again and of course I did :) In my first high school year, there was a school open house where they exhibited the CCAs (sth like Matriculation Fair in NUS). Apparently the traditional dance CCA didn't have enough people (as usual =.= ) so they wanted to choose some first year students. Guess what the dance was? SAMAN!!! yeah! (actually now I just realized that it means I've been dancing Saman Dance for 6 years with different versions hahaha)

Saman Dance (not the proper costume), with my seniors in high school

However, I didn't really like my dance teacher in high school. He always said, "Some of you do sth wrong. The position should be like A, but you do B. But I don't want to tell you who it is." I was like, "WHAT??" The problem with his style was most of the times, we are not conscious of our movements, so we need feedback. Hhh.. and somehow he taught the same dance for different years.
Well, but I still feel grateful coz he was the one who taught my batch "Tari Ngarojeng"(a dance from Betawi) and "Tari Piring" (Plate dance, from West Sumatra), the dance that I performed in NUANSA'09: Sitti Nurbaya.

OHhh..let me tell u sth..my junior high school dance teacher (a lady, different with high school teacher) was involved in her parish and she often asked me and my friends to dance for church events. The last dance that I did with here was for Christmas CHILDREN Liturgy. Why did I use capital letter? coz that time we tied our hair to two and wear ribbons etc with "Sleighride" song. Anyway, I was 'already' high school by that time and up to now, my senior in that parish often asked me, "Are you going back for Chirstmas and dance again?" and I said, "No....I am too 'old' to wear ribbons again.." hahaha..

Dunno..really dunno..will I stop dancing? Let's see... :)
Nitez and Happy Valentine's Day :):)
ps.my Valentine's Day event = presentation meeting in a psychology lab for Thursday presentation!! JIAYOU!!


Tari Ngarojeng, from Jakarta. We were in a dance competition organized by the Diocese. Guess what? The competition was in GUYS SCHOOL. (Edbert's school!)