Peaceful Parents Joyful Juniors

Seeking peaceful resolution to problems

2 November 2011

For the workshop, communication is the first to be emphasised.

By GRACE CHEN

At the recent preview of a workshop with the enticing title, Peaceful Parents, Joyful Juniors, my boys, aged eight and four, got into a fight. It did not take long before the younger fella’s bawls turned the cosy room into a giant pressure cooker. At that moment I had the urge to give both a tight slap.

But wait, wasn’t I in a room with two experts? Now’s the time to find out if this programme is effective or quixotic, I thought.

“Take a deep breath,” advises Jin Yap and Carly Nair, the workshop facilitators.

I do. As I exhale the four-year-old extends his hand and asks Mummy to kiss the pain away. His brother unmasks the real perpetrator by showing me the fresh scratch marks on his arm. By the time both have had their say, the anger has evaporated. No slap equals no tears, and no more outbursts equals a happier mum.

Call it a little sample of what to expect at Nair and Yap’s workshop.

Nair, 29, who hails from Scotland, is a hypnotherapist. A mother to three-year-old twins, Nair was inspired by her school guidance counsellor back in Aberdeenshire to pursue a career in wellness.

Twenty-six-year-old Yap has eight years’ experience as a counsellor. At 18, he went to Dehyana Lee, a life coach specialising in addiction and breath work, to undergo a 12-step recovery programme. In addition to breath work, Yap also practises art therapy.

Both Yap and Nair advocate NLP (neurolinguistic programming) and EFT (emotional freedom techniques). In a nutshell, NLP teaches people how to build rapport and trust by active listening; EFT is a way of soothing energy disruption by tapping on the energy meridians to remove negative thinking and beliefs.

These, in addition to art and colour therapy, are the tools used in Nair and Yap’s workshop.

Yap and Nair use EFT and NLP to help children and parents understand the emotional aspects of a relationship better.

But back to my boxing champs, do I let it go? What if I do, will it mean that I am condoning physical violence?

“We don’t have all the answers. No doubt parenting is a challenging and exhausting task and that’s why we think that parents are heroes,” laughs Yap.

Truthfully, they state that their workshop on peaceful parenting does not come with guarantees. Instead, the aim of the day-long session, which involves parent-and-child (between ages seven and 12) participation, is focused on communication methods and exploring parent and child emotions.

There will be activities designed to understand the power of verbal and non-verbal communication, and parent and child will be taught how to use visualisation, a technique to create images in the mind for better confidence and performance. At the end of it, it is up to the parents to practise these methods with their children.

“The catchword here is active listening. The same way you listen to a business prospect is the way you should listen to a child. Don’t just focus on the words but read the body language too. It’s also about putting emotions into your daily communication with the children,” explains Nair.

But having started the programme two-and-a-half years ago under the banner of Rainbow Children, surely they would have something to share, I push on. What can a parent do on days when tantrums and patience are in opposition?

Nair suggests self-reflection.

“Ask why this is grating on you. Is it the noise that bothers you? Why? Are you irritated because you are tired? Or are you unhappy with your husband for not taking out the trash? Many times, parents take out their frustrations on their children,” says Nair.

Going deeper, she adds that parents are the ones with issues, not the child. Say, when a child makes noise, why is there a need to shush him up? Is he doing anything wrong? Or when you are in a family restaurant and your child does that, and a diner gives the kid the evil eye. In telling the child to keep quiet, you are actually trying to please the other person who has made you uncomfortable, she points out.

If it’s a lesson in consideration that you’re trying to drive home, explain why. Make it clear that the digestion process works best in a calm and soothing atmosphere. Explain that whooping noises do not contribute to sereneness.

Still, keeping junior happy does not mean an end to rules and conduct but instead of resorting to authoritarian methods, one can impart lessons in a fun way.

“Say, if you are in a library, you can engage a child in a little contest of who can talk more softly, for example, instead of going ‘sshhhsshhhsshhh’ all the time,” says Nair.

And Yap is all for sparing the rod. “Resorting to caning or adopting the ‘My Way Or The Highway’ stand is very damaging. A lot of social ills and problems come from there,” he notes.

He also reminds parents to lead by example.

“If parents want to have children who are sharp in following their own dreams, but they are not doing the same with theirs, then how can they expect their child to do so?” he asks, adding that his experience as a counsellor shows that children mirror their parents’ actions.

In an earlier workshop, Yap separated the children and parents in two different groups where they were asked to act out a tantrum.

It turned out that the children’s actions were identical to their parents’!

This means that it will be pointless to tell a child not to fight when the parents are constantly arguing or to expect them not to swear when every single sentence a parent utters is filled with expletives.

Yap also points out that when parents complain that their children have to be told a hundred times to brush their teeth, maybe it’s because the very basic practice of listening to each other is not carried out among the adults in the family.

For Yap and Nair, having happy children is largely dependent on the atmosphere at the home front. As such, the first step towards peaceful parenting is to take on a positive stand. This means ensuring that only practices which are in line with what is good and right are observed among the adults. That will pave the way for junior to have a joyful and meaningful childhood.

The Peaceful Parents, Joyful Juniors Workshop takes place next month at B2-05-03 Bukit Utama Condo 1, Bandar Utama, Petaling Jaya, Selangor. For details and to register call (010) 277-2950 / (03) 7713-2091 or e-mail info@ultimateperformancesolutions.com.

Emotion-filled performances at fest

THE Collision Arts Asia Festival which took place at Publika in Solaris Dutamas recently also featured a 72-hour creation challenge for the artistic community to see if they can muster up a show within three days.

In an effort to raise money for underprivileged children in Cambo-dia, artistes from all walks of genres banded together to perform for free in a two-hour show which ended with a spectacular aerial and fire show from Viva Circus and Psycusix.

Spins: Hula hoop fire trick from Psycusix.

Opening the act was Hilton Lee, a male belly dancer who admitted that he had spent more time on his costume than worrying about rehearsals.

With six years of experience in his hips, Lee gave the ancient art of seduction a tribal fusion feel with his wicked gyrations.

Making a special appearance was Michelle Chang of Sutra Dance Theatre who showed her support for the arts by joining forces with four new dancers to present a whimsical piece on a love triangle.

From Olah Karma of KupuKupu Arts and Events, comes a haunting tale of infanticide told through dance. Titled Komulo Nimbus, it is a story of an insane young mother who murders her babies. But instead of being vengeful, the souls of her twin sons take pity in their mother’s suffering and refuse to go to heaven until she is healed.

Why so serious?: A dancer in Komulo Nimbus immerses himself among the audience and earns a candid camera moment with this playful fan.

This sad piece saw an unexpected lift when a member of the audience took the chance to snap a picture of himself with one of the twins midway through the show. Much to the dancer’s credit, he maintained a straight face.

Olah, who is the head of the AH! Project, which aims to raise awareness on social problems through the arts, is famed for his thought-provoking pieces.

His last performance, Medula Oblongata, at the Short and Sweet event at KLPac was about the story of how six glue sniffers came clean.

Rising from the dead to breathe life into the show was Reizo Zen, who has been impersonating Michael Jackson for the last 20 years.

Zen had started life as a clown before developing an interest in mime and later, impersonation.

A cry: An Iranian student dances the part of the insane mother in Olah Karma’s Komulo Nimbus.

Fans of MJ can reconnect with the Gloved One through Zen in Facebook.

As this was a charity show, Mr Banana, a clown from Canada, also did his bit to drum up donations by passing his hat around.

Unperturbed by the lukewarm response, he pleaded with one generous member of the audience who was watching the show at the upper floor to take out his wallet and throw him RM10. To watch more of Mr Banana’s antics, catch him on myspace.com/mrbananashow.

Closing the Collision Arts Festival was Viva Circus who performed a series of pole dances and aerial stunts.

At one point, hearts almost came to a stop when an aerialist went into a free fall only to be stopped at the last minute by a series of clever knots she had made in the folds of hanging silk.

Credit also goes to Psycusix, who had the crowd moving back to ensure that they would not be razed by the flames of their fire show extravaganza.

To warm up, they showed off their arsenal of tricks which included contact juggling, poi and wand levitation.

Viva Circus began humbly as a pole dancing outfit four years ago. Over time, Vivian Lea, the founder, expanded the group’s show repertoire to include aerial artistes and give budding local acrobats a platform to show off their talents.

Fantastic Faun

A lithesome dancer commands the stage as a frolicsome forest creature.

WHEN L’apres Midi D’un Faune (The Afternoon Of A Faun) was staged in 1912, famed premièr danseur Vaslav Nijinsky nearly caused a riot. The editor of France’s venerable Le Figaro newspaper started a campaign against the ballet, calling it shameless and deeming Nijinsky’s choreography “too expressive”. Thanks to the furore, the dance was only performed another few years before it was shelved.

It was revived in the 1980s by two dance notation specialists who reconstructed it from Nijinsky’s notebooks and photographs taken shortly after that first performance. Since then, the piece has been performed by the great Rudolf Nureyev and later elements of it were used by Queen’s Freddie Mercury for the band’s I Want To Break Free music video in 1984. Coincidentally, it was in that same year that Ramli Ibrahim would perform his own version of the frisky, uninhibited faun in Malaysia when he returned from studying dance abroad and established the Sutra Dance Theatre.

And recently, Ramli reprised the choreography for Sean Scantlebury of New York’s Battery Dance Company.

Animal behaviour: Sean Scantlebury as the faun in Ramli’s choreography of L’apres Midi D’un Faune. — Photos by GRACE CHEN

This intriguing performance had its start in January, when the American troupe – working with the UNCHR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), Aswara (National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage) and Sutra – held dance workshops for refugee children. The workshops were part of the Battery Dance Company’s Dancing to Connect programme, which exposes children from low income families to the arts.

The lithesome Scantlebury, 31, had been a visual treat on stage, and a bulb must have come on in Ramli’s head after the lights had dimmed at the Aswara auditorium in Kuala Lumpur back then....

So, did Ramli’s contemporary version of L’apres Midi D’un Faune cause a scandalous sensation at the DBKL Auditorium on Sept 22? Well, suffice to say that, though one could have heard a pin drop, there were no gasps of outrage. Today’s dance audiences are obviously well acquainted with the animal kingdom and animalistic movements, thanks no doubt to National Geographic and the Discovery Channel....

As the titular faun, Scantlebury was simply amazing, and not just because he managed to effect a sort of crazy calm while kicking his heels in the air, an action that may have made a less competent dancer look silly. It was his ability to appear masculine as he placed his palms together to endearingly rest his cheek on them. It was his underlying energy that commanded every eye. It was how he made Sutra dancer Divya Nair float like a feather when they danced together.

Of course, the stage was not Scantlebury’s alone to conquer, and there were three other performances in the Into The Center production that night.

In Karma, which featured actor Sandra Sodhy as Mistress Maya with Ramli and Sutra dancer Guna as her servants in the illusory web of Time and Death, it was the constant rasp of Valerie Ross’s musical score that set a rather unfortunate mood. A member of the audience remarked that the performance felt more like a tribute to a mosquito god. And thanks to her menacing presence, Sodhy too came across as a human-sized insect. Others thought the piece too much of a mish mash of classical Indian dance, ballet and contemporary dance.

The ‘faun’ with Divya Nair who becomes the object of his affection.

But the piece did tug at the heart strings when we saw how seamlessly Ramli and Guna came together despite their age differences.

Those who have followed the growth of Sutra from the days when it was an open-air ashram in Brickfields, KL, would know that Guna joined Sutra in 1989 at the age of 26 and is now Ramli’s right-hand man. What both have gone through to withstand the test of time revealed itself in this piece – and the moment when Guna lifted Ramli in his arms and spun the senior dancer took on a metaphoric significance.

Finally, we came to Layapriya, choreographed by Jonathan Hollander, the head of the Battery Dance Company, using a musical score from Finish composer Eero Hameenniemi.

The conventional practice has always been, fast tempo equals swift movement but Hollander seems to have broken this traditional rule. The 60-year-old choreographer would not only apply this to Layapriya but to another vignette for Into The Center, when Ramli moved like a snail despite the ascending tempo of tabla beats in the background.

When the same treatment was seen in Layapriya, there was a brief moment when this writer wondered if they were playing the wrong music. When the tempo rocked, the dancers glided. When there was the anticipation that the pace would finally pick up and move on, things still remained in slow motion.

What gives, we wondered at first. Then we recalled what the MC had said at the beginning of the show: Take a deep breath and relax. And that, in turn, reminded us of the snail.

A few days earlier, we had observed a snail in Ramli’s garden. Content in a pot and oblivious to the snarling 6pm traffic just outside his gate, the snail was rippling leisurely across a leaf no bigger than a palm, leaving a shiny coat of slime in its wake.

There were two ways of regarding the snail: As a pesky critter out to destroy or as a potential idea for a National Geographic documentary entitled Lessons On Taking Your Own Time, Starring The Snail. If one was of the second school of thought, one would have appreciated Layapriya and learned a lesson from it: Command your surroundings, don’t let them overwhelm you.

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Malaysian Masala

Although locally-made Indian movies are not a dime a dozen, there have been inroads made into the scene.

TO trace the colourful trail of Malaysian made Indian movies, we must go back to the 1960s. One could consider Rathapei (Bloody Lust) as the first Indian film made by a local production as it had been done by a dance troupe who recorded their performance on stage while touring India.

Two more projects would follow suit in the 1970s. One was by Felix Anthony, a producer from Ipoh with Thun Bangal Urangu Vathillai (Worries Don’t Stop) and Anbe En Anbe (My Love).

One was a disaster. The other two never saw light of day due to lack of funding.

He’s the man: M. Suurya, a newcomer to the silver screen, plays the quintessential Indian hero. The actor, who is director M. Subash’s cousin, helped to produce Pensil in 2005.

So, credit for the first locally-made Indian movie to become a success has to go to Panchacharam Nalliah, better known as Pansha, who directed Naan Oru Malaysian (I Am Malaysian) in 1991.

Pansha, an established film distributor who then shot to fame in Adutha Veedu, a TV3 Tamil drama about hostile neighbours in 1984, recalls what spurred him on.

“During the 80s, many production houses from India did their filming in Malaysia. Every time they came, there was a lot of talk about collaborations with Malaysian artistes to encourage the film industry. But as soon as they finished production, these people went back and nothing more was heard. So, I decided to do something about it by making my own film,” says Pansha who wrote, directed and played the hero in the movie.

Naan Oru Malaysian made its run in three locations and raked in RM150,000. Pansha recollects that it played to full house in Kuala Lumpur’s Federal Cinema during its week-long run and even reckoned that it would have done better if not for the turmoil between two bickering political parties who had forced the authorities to cordon off the town area which affected attendance at the Coliseum Theatre in Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman, KL. But in all, the man has no regrets.

Haani Shivraj and Gana Pragasam in Appalam, directed by Afdlin Shauki.

In 2005, Deepak Menon made Chemman Chaalai (The Gravel Road), a Tamil film with English subtitles. The film was shown at a number of film festivals across the world including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, San Francisco International Film Festival, Pusan International Film Festival, Korea, Nantes Festival 3 Continents, France and the Fukuoka International Film Festival in Japan. A few years later, he released another film, Chalanggai (Dancing Bells). These were not your average Tamil movies, but rather stories portraying the daily life of people as humanly and realistically as possible, and met with a promising reception. However because they were made in digital format (which is not yet a recognised medium), the movies were not classified as locally made films.

What made Naan Oru Malaysian different for Deepak’s films was that it was shot on 35mm film. According to Pansha, the director and producer of Naan Oru Malaysian from Berjaya Film Production, shooting on film is a giant step for the industry in terms of cost as it requires a huge budget. A can of film which has a screening time of five minutes can cost RM500. So, a full length movie spanning two and half hours can take up to 100 cans. In truth, this means that last year’s production of Appalam was indeed only the second Malaysian-made Indian movie after Naan Oru Malaysian to be shot on 35mm film.

Malay director Afdlin Shauki’s Appalam was produced by Tayangan Unggul, a sister company of Astro, and released with much hype from the media.

Pansha (middle) with well-known local actor Ramesh (right) in a scene from Naan Oru Malaysian.

Interestingly, Gana Pragasam, the actor who played the hero in this movie was also the first producer to come up with the Tamil VCD.

Hello, Yaare Peserathe (Who Is There?), a comedy about prank calls, was first released as an audio cassette in 1999, before it was adapted into a two-hour VCD movie.

“There was no Indian movie VCDs back then except for the Kollywood imports. I wanted to create a new market,” recalls Gana.

The start was not encouraging. When he bandied the idea to local producers, one told him point blank that no one would want to see his face.

Unperturbed, Gana went ahead. A stall at Batu Caves, Selangor, set up during the Thaipusam festival, became his first sales outlet. Eleven VCDs and RM2.5mil later, this prolific producer, director, script writer and actor is best known among Tamil movie fans as the local comedy king. His latest project, Budak Estet, an animation is due for release in 2012 as a 26-episode TV serial.

M. Subash in Pensil, about a disabled boy’s unconditional love for his drunkard father. The success of the film shows that an Indian movie can do without the song-and-dance formula.

Having forged his own path into showbiz, the former Toshiba copier technician is also the industry’s most fiery advocate.

In a letter to Astro in August this year, Gana who is also president of Malaysian Indian Art Activist Association, voiced that the current practice of the broadcasting station in producing local Indian content on an in-house basis was no help in encouraging the industry to progress.

“Allocations to produce documentaries and 26-episode dramas should be given to private production companies to help the industry expand. Local stations should have at least one Tamil channel airing 100% locally produced content,” he says.

The National Film Development Corporation Malaysia (Finas), he added, should also play its part by allocating grants to deserving companies.

So is the Indian movie scene in danger of extinction? A personal observation at a DVD store in Brickfields, KL, shows that it is still progressing at a healthy rate. This year alone sees two film releases.

One is Garuuda, directed by M. Subash. Released in August. It features actor M. Suurya in his first starring role. In this action-packed movie, the fight choreographer is none other than national taekwando champ, Selvamuthu Ramasamy, who made headlines in the 1989 and 1991 SEA Games with his gold medals.

Another is Anusthanaa a thriller starring Anaantha the THR Raaga DJ, and Haani Shivraj. Shot in Kampar (Perak), Fraser’s Hill (Pahang) and Kuala Lumpur, it promises plenty of suspense and drama and should be released at the end of the year.

Another new movie, anticipated for the Deepavali season according to Pancha, is Vilaiyaatu Pasanga (The Tuff Nuts) directed by Vimala Perumal

Being Malaysian-made, the local Indian movie naturally has a muhibbah feel.

For example, in Singakottai, a GV Media VCD production of a comedy about a royal court that has isolated itself from the modern world, the king receives a letter from the Kuala Lumpur City Hall! Audiences are quick to recognise the palace as the Sultan Abdul Samad building in front of Dataran Merdeka.

In Undercover Rascals, starring C. Kumaresan of Gerak Khas fame and Jasmine Micheal, the hero’s best friend falls for a Chinese girl, lending a unique touch to the song-and-dance routine.

So, since we are brewing our own productions would it be possible for an Indian movie to go without the song and dance for once?

Subash, who directed Pensil, a story of a disabled boy’s unconditional love for his drunkard father which was shown over Vaanavil in 2005, gives a ready nod.

However, he points out that one of the trials of making Pensil was a rejection slip by a station because there was no song and dance. But after sinking more than RM25,000 of his and his partner’s hard earned savings into the making of the film, they were not going to let go.

The perseverance paid off because when it finally made it on Vaanavil, the response from the media was huge.

“I got people calling to ask how they could help the boy in the movie and I had to tell them that it was a fictional character,” says Subash, who played the lead role. (In 2008, Pensil was made into a Malay film and screened at cinemas, with Subash reprising his role as the lead character.)

But one thing that no Indian movie can miss is the love story and one of my favourite love scenes is in Undercover Rascals.

This is where the hero enters into the line of fire with his Mitsubishi Evolution IV to rescue the damsel in distress. Seeing the baddie go for his gun, hero swings heroine to safety and in that split second, their eyes meet and they fall in love. How dramatic!

Meanwhile, plots continue to simmer and boil, enveloping everything in an aroma of drama and suspense.

Only this time, the cooking is happening right in our own backyard.

As for what’s in store for the future, trends show that the dream of “making it big in India” remains popular. But there are those who prefer to break away from the pack.

Currently, Gana is collaborating with partners from Bangladesh for Foreigner, a movie chronicling the life of a migrant worker abroad.

“Compare the Malaysian population of 28 million, Bangladesh has 180 million. You can do the math from here, I guess,” concludes Gana.

Published in The Star Monday 24 October 2011