Preparation for Nauryz Celebration
Nauryz (науриз) is a celebration for Kazakhstan's people mainly around 21 of March. It signifies the spring equinox, when the hour of the day and night is the same and some people calls it "The renewal of nature". The name "Nauryz" is translated from Farsi meaning "New Day". On this day, people dress up, visit close people and keep wishing well (It;s like Hari Raya Aidilfitri in Malaysia).
The administration of IITU decided to postpone the celebration until we have arrived. Meaning, for this year, they celebrate Nauryz a bit later than the previous year. They decided to make an outdoor carnival so that students can enjoy various activities outside of the campus.
This celebration is supposed to be in the next week (22 April 2017). They had asked us to prepare a performance for the celebration. We decided to make a 'Joget Toleh-Menoleh' performance but with a little tweaks from the original. We want to combine multiple traditional 'joget' and some 'Silat' performance.
We started our training for the performance on 10 April 2017 night. Firstly, we focused on the 'Silat' performance as it is the first performance. Only the 5 of us (Shazwa, Iskandar, Anwar, Arash and Nadzmi) will be responsible for the 'Silat' performance. We only perform a simple move of 'Tarian Silat Gayong Pusaka' and we make it as simple as possible because none of us has the ability and stamina to memorize and perform the steps (seriously, there is quite a lot of them and it is exhausting).
Meanwhile, for the 'Joget', we first learn how to 'Joget' and differentiate between their types. During this session, we learned to do the moves in a calculative way. There are 8 steps for one 'Joget', each with the same tempo and each time we move, we calculate together to synchronize the steps with others. There are approximately around 20 moves for the whole performance. That is quite a lot to catch up.
This is the picture of our training last night. We usually practice indoor, at the cabin outside of our hostel as we cannot make noise inside of our hostel (we do not want to upset our hostel-mates), but starting last night, we decided to take our practice outside of the hostel because we need a little bit of space because there is 12 of us who will be performing (including Kak Diana who handles the sound system).
