Malaysian Troupe Combines Tradition With Promotion

When a nation’s minister of culture is also minister of tourism, invaluable native traditions can get reprocessed into mere promotional display--exactly what happened Thursday when the Badan Kesenian Negeri Kedah Darul Aman troupe of Malaysia presented a sampler program at the Hollywood Palladium.

After a 20-minute speech by Minister of Culture, Arts and Tourism Dato’ Abdul Kadir bin Haji Sheikh Fadzir extolling his country as “a rich potpourri of cultures and traditions,” plus a related video spot, the company illustrated Malaysian diversity in 16 pieces performed over 70 minutes to heavily amplified accompaniment.

High accessibility proved the watchword, with nothing slow, quiet, small in scale or extended in development allowed to disturb the hard-sell entertainment values, and, of course, no sense of the complex belief systems that inform all traditional Asian dance.

Throughout, the company worked valiantly. Even to a synthesizer raga, the Kedah women established their stylistic authority in a piece based on classical Indian dance and their mastery of choreographic detail in everything from the sharp shoulder pulses in a dance from Sabah (a.k.a. Malaysian Borneo) to the delicate curving hands in their Malay pieces.

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The men, however, seemed unduly accident-prone in their Sabah pole-slamming showpiece and downright slovenly as Chinese-style acrobats but brought plenty of loose-limbed vigor to a galvanic Arab tambourine dance.

Many companies like this one used to tour the U.S. after carefully simplifying and brightening their repertories for what they considered to be our limited tastes and attention spans. But it’s a shrinking market, maybe because we’re not that easily dazzled (or conned) anymore, or maybe because the countries in question have grown beyond “welcome, stranger” programming to a deeper sense of cultural exchange.

Either way, Malaysia has some catching up to do.