Communicate

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“It’s almost like Gulf News coming to life,” says one of the audience members at Freej Folklore, a dance/animation stage show based on the TV cartoon Freej, about four Emirati grannies. It does have that flag-waving appeal of the UAE’s patriotic press.

The whole stage at Dubai’s Madinat Jumeirah arena is effectively turned into a giant screen at times, and the show opens with a video from its sponsor Nakheel. It’s about how wonderful Dubai is, how wonderful the property developer is, and how wonderful it is to live in a world where we only need to have a vision for it to become reality. In Dubai. The film gives Folklore laugh-out-loud status, although that probably wasn’t the intention.

Freej Folklore is technically spectacular, there’s no denying that. It is, at times, a “theatrical tableau of fantasy and reality fused together,” and all the other stuff the show’s literature bills it as. The plot is weak though, and the propaganda is cringe worthy.
 
The show’s grannies are transported, through a somewhat unclear premise, to a cave where a giant genie tells them some stories about Aladdin, Sinbad, and others – whose roles are acted out by real-life dancers. This is when the show is at its most technically proficient. It’s hard to tell who’s real and who’s animated.
 
But then, like much of the region’s print media, the show moves past slick production and into cheap propaganda. What was a rollicking ride of animation fusion suddenly becomes didactic lecturing, as the show decides it’s time to teach the audience something more. Although it doesn’t really seem to know what it’s preaching.
The genie (or is it a magic tree by now?) tells the grannies that all over the world, Muslim scientists have invented lots of things we use in everyday life. But it never gets round to specifying what these are, as Ibn Battuta, the explorer named after a mall, gets in the way. He takes our heroines on a journey around the world, and we see dances from the places he explored, such as Spain, India and Turkey. But the Muslim slant seems to have largely disappeared by now.
 
By the time we’re back in the Gulf, we’re ready for the most horrific Emirates evangelism, when a nasty little rhyme makes Nakheel’s earlier offering look positively critical. We can’t remember the ditty verbatim, thankfully, but it involves vision, dreams, the patronage of our leaders, and a suggestion that this wonderful world could be The Future. No, it’s Dubai.
 
We are treated to a dirge-like song from veiled women sitting down and hitting the ground with palm fronds. (One Freej insider says this is his favorite bit, incidentally, suggesting that perhaps Communicate was just spoiled by an overdose of animated Aladdin earlier.)
 
There’s some pearling (remember that JWT ad for Aldar with the men singing, “Hoyamal?”), and men with sticks, who are sidelined – literally – while the central stage is taken up by much more active dancers.
 
By this stage the animation has petered out, and has been replaced with archive video and still photos played on the screen. We’re starting to nod off until…
 
… the showmanship kicks in again with dancing horses. Real, live, head-banging horses. Never mind the culture, it’s the show we’re there to see, and this does the job once again.
 
Lammtara, the company that produced Folklore along with production house JBM, has plans to take the show on the road; partly to recoup what must be a gigantic investment, and partly as a sales tool for Dubai (see Regional News, page 18, Communicate, Dec. 2008). The show was, after all, grown from the seed of a shorter show to flog the Freej theme park in Dubailand.
 
But do audiences within the Middle East, let alone outside the region, really want to be told that Dubai could be The Future, the most wonderful place on Earth? With less propaganda and more ace production, this show could be a great ad for Dubai. Just don’t tell the people what you’re selling. Let the dancing horses do that for you.

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