Of Closure of MAG

To clear the doubts that the Alumni are having, I will explain about the current status of TP MAG. What I'm posting is what I got from the people who handled the situation and spoke to Mr Sonny Lim.

For those Facebook users, Anwar (Titisan's Alumni) has created a group "Save Temasek Polytechnic's Malay Arts Group and Titisan Temasek"

You can view the group here: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=726742017&v=photos&sb=16#/group.php?gid=65469026503

Quoted from what is stated in the group, the rationale of closing down MAG is:

The Malay Arts Group and Titisan Temasek will be closed down in the coming academic year stating administrative issues such as, it doesn't contribute to the number of admissions into the tertiary.

On top of this rationale, an additional reason was

According to the director, SAA so called wanna "renovate" the cca groups and concentrate more on ARTS rather than a culture group. They wanted to closed down all the other drama group like Indian culture group and MAG and focus on individual arts group. And they expect Titisan temasek members to join Dramatec (an english drama group) and Nadi kesenian (Production crew in MAG) to join TP's official prouction team. With this, they so called "hope" that they could concentrate on each arts group and bring them up to be the best in TP.

An explanation was given by Mr Sonny Lim, the director of SAA, in the Facebook Group that states:

The Malay Arts Group is actually an umbrella group that covers a collection of individual arts groups – the Malay Dancers, the Dikir Barat and the Malay Drama Group. All these three are actually separate performing categories; they are not one and the same. They have just been gathered together under one umbrella. There is a historical reason for this, because many years ago, we had a separate section of umbrella groups. For example, we also had the Martial Arts Group. This Martial Arts Group covered Chinese martial arts, judo, taekwondo etc. Over time, this Martial Arts Group has re-organized so that now we have martial arts listed on their own merits – we now have Aikido, Taekwondo and Silat which all exist independently.

Similarly, I felt that it is now time for the Malay Dancers and the Dikir Barat to come out from under the umbrella and exist independently and be showcased on their own merits. My plan is for them to be listed separately and exist proudly on their own, just like Aikido, Taekwondo and Silat now exist proudly on their own. It just makes more sense, since our Arts Division proudly presents a list of individual performing arts groups. I would like every group therefore to be listed separately. This also always leads to the members of the group working very proudly to raise their standards even higher, and this is a good aim to have.

We have to give praise to Mr Sonny Lim for clearing the stigma with regards to this. I have never seen any other upper management who is willing to give explainations on why such decisions are made.

However, latest news was Titisan Temasek will NOT be closed down. Instead, they will exist as a Sub-Group of Dramatec. Therefore, they can still practice drama in their existing language and culture, which of course, is Malay. The closure of MAG and Nadi Kesenian is inevitable. I am not sure if there would be reconsiderations in preventing this closure but as of now, Nira Nyertika, Panjy Sry Temasek, Kesenian Si Anak Tari and Titisan Temasek are now stand-alone CCAs. We are not sure if Nira Nyertika and Panjy Sry Temasek will be combined into one CCA which is "Dikir Barat". Most likely, that would be the case since their move is to combine the similar art forms into one.

Before we get emotional about the closure of MAG, we should balanced out the pros and cons of this action that has been carried out by the management of SAA. Looking on the bright side, Nira Nyertika is still around. I won't list down the benefits here because these are administrative issues. However, if need be that the alumni needs to know what these benefits are, you can just contact the SGH (Amira) or ASGH (Faat) of Nira Nyertika.

I hope this clears the air on why MAG is being closed down. I am not sure if any other actions would be carried out to prevent this from happening. All of us are dissapointed with this closure because no MAG simply means no Pentas, no AGM and no other events related to MAG. Existence of MAG hasn't been made official but as of now, we will take it as though MAG is no more.

If there are any mistakes made to this post, please get back to me because I wouldn't want any serious matters to happen.