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Regatta Lepa |
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| Regatta Lepa 18 | Regatta Lepa 19 | ||
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Forum in Malay : http://forum.clickstartplay.com |
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Forum in Chinese : http://www.e-sabah.com |
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The
Bajau community on the East Coast of
Sabah have a very unique lifestyle –
They live on Lepa and only come
ashore for food, water supply and
during this LEPA festival. LEPA : In Sabah East Coast Bajau community dialect, lepa means "boat". The lepa boat is a cultural legacy inherited by Bajau people from many generations ago. The existence of lepa is believed to originate from the fishing community who live in Bum Bum
Island and used by the Pa'alau people along the coast of Semporna.
One can see the Sea Bajau (Bajau
Laut) fish on the clear and shallow
water of Semporna. The live in their
boats on the sea most of their life.
Present day, some groups have
settled on tiny islands.
From an event observed only by the sea gypsies of Sabah, theRegatta Lepa
Semporna is now an official state festival; an important agenda in the national
tourism calendar.
More about :
THE TRADITIONAL LEPA BOAT
OF THE BAJAU
Judging the most beautiful LEPA
Highlight of
LEPA : The high light of LEPA event is to choose the most
dazzling Lepa from the beautifully,
colorfully adorned boats which are
lined up at the waterfront. Other attractions in Regatta LEPA :
include sea sports such as rowboat, sailing and kelleh-kelleh (small dugout boat) competitions, lepa tug of war, and duck catching competition.
Colorful cultural night performance.
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Datuk Sri Nasir
Tun Sakaran. |
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Sambulayang
Sails - A brightly colored Bajau flag. The lepa boats are heavily decorated with colorful sambulayang in contrasting combinations of red and other bright colors. Traditionally in red, white and black. The colorful sails are made from medium weight cotton. Sambulayang is raised on special occasions like weddings, national day celebrations, welcome State leaders and Regatta LEPA. This decorative sails hang from a 5 to 7 meters tall T-framed mast topped with a ceremonial umbrella to symbolize sheltering of inhabitants from sun and rain. Flags, banners and buntings are strung from the bowsprit and cross members from front to stern fluttering gaily in the breeze.
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Boat Craftsmanship The skills to make a Lepa-Lepa are passed down from generation to generation with fathers teaching their sons and grandsons and so on. The Bajau feel that this is their identity and heritage that needs to be instilled in the hearts of their descendents. |
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This is a legacy that must never be left behind even in
the construction of a modern Malaysia.
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Needlework
Skills The Bajau are skillful in weaving and needlework. Young Bajau girls design and make their own traditional headgear which is worn during auspicious occasion such as Regatta Lepa-Lepa festival. |
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Igal (Bajau Dance) A "fingernail" dance showing dancer's flexibility and maneuvering ability in the elbow, wrist, and shoulder. Bajau dance usually presented during formal festivities such as weddings. A Bajau Dance with both male and female dancers is called Daling-Daling.
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Regatta Lepa-Lepa During each year's Regatta Lepa-Lepa the mose happening location are the two main attraction spots of the celebration – 1) The Seafest Hotel pier where the traditional boats were docked 2) The Semporna town padang, where a concert stage and some traditional houses were built.
The Regatta Lepa has been celebrated every year since 1994 to commemorate the Bajau tradition of building these splendid boats. First held in 1994 as a district-level event before being upgraded into Sabah state festival in 2003. Regatta Lepa is now an Malaysia national event in water festival. The Bajau seafarers' proud maritime heritage came alive in this annual festival of Regatta LEPA, featuring their LRPA boats, with participants dancing at the helm of their boats, decorated in full color. The event attracted thousands each year. This three-day cultural festival Regatta Lepa held annually in Semporna is a celebration of the lepa lifestyle, which nowadays has been replaced by village dwelling and engine-driven houseboats. Both village dwelling and engine-driven houseboats are social developments that began in the 1950s. However, the lepa has remained a cultural symbol, so much so that in the mid-1990s, local politicians came up with the idea of a cultural event revolving around the boat as the emblem of a way of life. Organized by the Semporna Pejabat Daerah (Semporna District Office) and well in tune with Sabah State’s official policy, the Regatta Lepa soon became an event with a political dimension to it.
On that day, these beautiful LEPA boats dot the dock of Semporna side by side shimmering in all their glory. The highlight of the Regatta Lepa includes a competition of the most beautiful Lepa-Lepa based on the boat's decoration, local ethnic music and traditional dances performed on board. The night embraces colorful cultural dances performed by the Bajau. |
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Lepa Boat
The whole afternoon is one big dramatic audio-visual arc: the colorfully decorated lepas, arriving one by one, are manned by families dressed in equally colorful traditional costumes, and on every boat, a complete kulintangan ensemble is playing at all times. Some of them will be moving at any given time, which yields an interesting aural effect. A dancer, usually one of the family’s teenage daughters, is dancing on each lepa prow.
Lepa and kumpit boats in Regatta Lepa
There are two types of boats made by the Bajau:
Lepa- Lepa is still widely used today among the Bajau. It is mainly used to transport, travel when fishing and to relay the religion of Islam to others. Islam was first introduced to the Bajau in the early 17th century. When the Bajau adopted this religion and its way of living, they translated its teachings onto their boats in the form of carvings. Few actually knew that the carvings on the Lepa-Lepa were of specific excerpts from the Quran. These carvings are similarly found on Muslim gravestones and at the pulpit in the mosques. The Bajau people used this concept to share Muslim teachings with those who lived around them. These carvings are unique to the Bajau and are deeply rooted in their religious history.
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| The traditional lepa way of life that the Regatta Lepa
celebrates each year might, for most Bajau Laut, be a thing of
the past, a nostalgic reminiscence of their recent forefathers’
world, characterized by single boats scattered over a vast water
surface. |
| Kulintang is a modern term for an ancient instrumental form
of music composed on a row of small, horizontally-laid gongs
that function melodically, accompanied by larger, suspended
gongs and drums.
As part of the larger gong-chime culture of Southeast Asia, kulintang music ensembles have been playing for many centuries in regions of the Eastern Malay Archipelago — the Southern Philippines, Eastern Indonesia, Eastern Malaysia, Brunei and Timor,[6] although this article has a focus on the Philippine Kulintang traditions of the Maranao and Maguindanao peoples in particular. Kulintang evolved from a simple native signaling tradition, and developed into its present form with the incorporation of knobbed gongs from Sunda.[5] Its importance stems from its association with the indigenous cultures that inhabited these islands prior to the influences of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity or the West, making Kulintang the most developed tradition of Southeast Asian archaic gong-chime ensembles.
It is played by striking the bosses of the gongs with two wooden beaters. Due to its use across a wide variety groups and languages, the kulintang is also called kolintang by the Maranao and those in Sulawesi, kulintangan, gulintangan by those in Sabah and the Sulu Archipelago and totobuang by those in central Maluku.[8]
Traditionally the Maguindanao term for the entire ensemble is basalen or palabunibunyan, the latter term meaning “an ensemble of loud instruments” or “music-making” or in this case “music-making using a kulintang.” |
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Considerably independent from political contexts, strategies, and implications, the Regatta Lepa attracts around 15,000 visitors, mostly Malaysian, every year. The program is similar every year and the official part spreads over two days.
Traditional lepa boats competed for the
much-coveted Regatta Lepa award. The Regatta Lepa's central
event is the selection of the “most beautiful” lepa. In the evening, the "Ratu Lepa," or "Lepa Queen," was crowned. The next morning, Saturday, marked the event's official start and began early, virtually after dawn. By 8am, the official program had commenced, which included a race of the lepa boats and, later in the day, the evening launching ceremony for the overall event featuring both national and local performers and notables. Sea sports activities abounded, such as traditional boat tug-of-wars and canoe racing competitions (keleh keleh). The event concluded with the central procession of lepa boats before the judges and the awarding of the prizes for the most beautiful boats. These activities were spread over two locations: the pier, where the lepa and kumpit boats docked, and the Semporna town padang, consisting of a few traditional-style huts built around a dance stage.
The judges, therefore, pay attention to the (dance) costumes' ‘authenticity," overall "grace," and dance.
The quality of the
latter is centrally important. Every potential ratu is required
to perform a dance of her choice that includes one of three
traditional dances combined with one of three contemporary
dances. |
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performing arts world wide |
 Three days in April every year, the sleepy fishing town of Semporna, East Coast Borneo (Malaysia) turns into a bustling little hive of activity, dance, and music: the Regatta Lepa takes over. The Southeast Asian island world is home to several maritime communities whose people often are referred to as "sea nomads" or "sea gypsies," names that appeal to the exoticist imagination especially of Ang Mos (“redheads"), as white travelers and residents are called winkingly in Malaysia and Singapore. The Sama Dilaut, one of these sea-going peoples, live all over the Philippine Sulu Archipelago, southwestern Mindanao, Sabah/Borneo, east Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and many of the eastern Indonesian islands. In East Coast Borneo, the Bajau Laut, as the Sama Dilaut around Semporna, Sabah/Borneo call themselves, have strong ties with their related communities in the Philippines. Locations in both countries as well as other, often sacred, sites in the archipelago play important roles for them. Some of these Bajau Laut have maintained their nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle, living in houseboats and only temporarily setting up makeshift huts on small islets in the Celebes and South China Seas, the eery borderlands between the Philippines and Malaysia. Not quite in keeping with romantic Ang Mo dreams about unlimited freedom and vagabond life, clear turquoise waters and simple living, however, others have become sedentary, living in the stilt houses of the so-called "floating villages" that started to grow considerably in Semporna during the 1960s. And yet, they remain “Bajau Laut”: “Sea Bajau.” .................
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