By Afifah Zamri
GOMBAK, 11 November 2017: Despite heavy rain, the commitment and spirit showed by participants of IIUM uniform bodies and martial arts had brought satisfactory performance to Dauntless ROTU Army Exhibition (DaRE ’17), Programme Coordinator ( DaRE ’17), Muhammad Nur Hafizuddeen told IIUMToday.
He said VAF ’16 as previously known had only one night’s performance. This year it has been changed to DaRE ’17 to reform the concept and to come out with a three-day exhibition on 13, 14 and 15 November.
The exhibition highlighted the uniform bodies among students and the IIUM community.
“Our initiative to combine the event with the opening Ceremony of Convest Festival 2017 is for IIUM community to socialise with the uniform bodies to create a new perception that uniformed bodies are not something unfamiliar in IIUM,” Muhammad Nur Hafizuddeen added.
The event ‘s opening ceremony held at Sayyidina Hamzah Stadium on 9 November night was officiated by IIUM Rector, Prof. Dato’ Sri Dr. Zaleha Kamarudin.
Muhammad said the audiences were impressed with silent drill performance by the Police undergraduate Voluntary Corps (Kor SUKSIS), acrobatic show by ROTU Airforce, war dance, martial arts and dikir barat, and a Drumline Army band performance by Satu Melayu Rejimen Askar Melayu Di Raja.
The most eye-catching performance was a short play by ROTU Army which created a pantomime ops city Gubir that passed through captain Zainal and his friends on the night. It could be seen from the reaction of the audiences that they were deep into the play.
“As we know, Convest Festival 2017 is to celebrate IIUM students graduating. For this year, we make some changes from before where we collaborate with DaRE ’17 to change people’s perception that the army is not different from us and we are not different from army too,” Assistant Executive Manager, Mohammad Aiman Azuan told IIUMToday.
“I am proud of my fellow friends who managed to put up such a bombastic performance last night. All of them did a good job and the audiences were enjoying the performance,” said one of the audience, Nur Aishah Fadzil, a third year student. ***
