Dance of a thousand years
STEEPED in mystery and folklore, makyong is a mystical performance with stylised dance and music rituals.
It dramatises mythological tales that were created and evolved from the ancient Malay people who dwell on the peninsula.
Observed for purposes of both entertainment as well as shamanistic healing, it has been played in villages of Kelantan, Terengganu and the Patani region of southern Thailand for more than a thousand years.
According to academician Dr Ghulam-Sarwar Yussof, who has researched makyong for the past 30 years, it is quite likely the oldest and most authentic form of Malay performing art to exist today.
Makyong stories and performance styles cannot be found anywhere else in the world. This is unlike other Malay traditions like wayang kulit, bangsawan and menora whose influences are widely seen in India, Indonesia and the Indo-Chinese region.
Once patronised by Kelantan royalty, makyong is believed by experts to have emerged long before Islamisation, and even before the earlier Hindu-Buddhist influence that dominated the region a thousand years ago.
It is therefore unique as its stories invoke characters and mythological beings that are indigenous to the Malay land. Its physical movement styles, its tunes and its lyrics are purely derived from ancient Malay psyche.
Today, makyong is on the brink of extinction. There are presently only about eight people remaining in Malaysia who can perform the art as practised in ancient times.
In fact, in its genuine form, makyong is today performed by these remaining practitioners only on an ad-hoc basis in villages on the east coast of peninsular Malaysia. It is very rarely performed at weddings and harvest festival celebrations like it used to.
Most of the 35 distinct tunes and 12 stories that are part of the makyong pantheon have not been performed for years and may well be lost in the near future.
Its invaluable anthropological heritage and current precarious condition caught the attention of Unesco, which declared makyong a world heritage treasure. Makyong was proclaimed a "Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" — the first of its kind for Malaysia — during a ceremony at the Unesco headquarters in Paris on Nov 25, 2005.
Makyong is now mentioned in the same breath as the kabuki theatre of Japan, the wajapi expressions of Brazil, the kunqu opera of China and the mystery play of elche in Spain.
According to legend, makyong was created from a mythical being called semar, whose name has been found in places like Java.
Another belief has it that the dance theatre began from a maternal spirit of rice called mak hiang.
Source: www.nst.com (20 Aprol 2007)