From KL to Cloud Land: An Exit

Tribstep
19 May 2012
Palate Palette 

Yoga instructor and bellydancer Nanci Traynor is chucking out all her stuff, taking her husband, her dog and two backpacks, and moving to Bulgaria.

As well as being a performer and a dedicated teacher, Nanci is a seeker. Her peregrinations have taken her to India and Western China, and now lead her onwards to Eastern Europe. It’s not strange that she’s decided to move on; it’s surprising that she stayed here as long as she did.

Nanci arrived in KL five years ago, to work for the short-lived and spectacularly mismanaged Yogazone. When Yogazone went belly up, she and her now husband Bill were, in her words, ‘stranded’. Without money or friends, they slowly began to eke out an existence for themselves, and eventually a niche in the cultural consciousness of Kuala Lumpur.

Nanci’s contribution to this country: American Tribal Style belly dance, or ATS. There may have been those in KL who did it before, but never anyone with such devil-may-care attitude. And now, after many workshops and theatrical performances, many more Wednesday-night Ink + Drink gigs, and umpteen yoga classes, on Saturday night Nanci gave her final Kuala Lumpur performance at Palate Palette, to a small but appreciative crowd.

The performance began and ended with an incense circle, blessing (or fumigating) the space and the assembled guests. In between, Nanci and her protege Nikki Law as well as visiting ATS dancer Beatrice Flowers, performed mostly solos, occasionally accompanied by the music and video projection by DJ French Chris.

Looking around the room at Nanci’s final performance, I see many of the audience are expatriates. Nanci says most in her yoga classes are too, and this may be part of the reason that she is leaving. Mainstream Malaysia has not taken her to their hearts, but being accepted has never been the point, either of Nanci’s performances or of her life. How, then, are we meant to enjoy this art?

With ATS, as with any style of bellydancing, and indeed any kind of dance, there are various inroads to appreciation. You can sit back and enjoy the vast tracts of female flesh on display, and the equally vast tattoos ornamenting that flesh. You can admire the skillful isolation of the hip juts, the physical control involved in the belly rolls and shimmies, and the supple flexibility of the arching backs. You can catch the subtle cues with which the improvising dancers communicate with each other, amidst the array of jingling coins, fringed shawls and outrageous feathered false eyelashes.

ATS, though, is more than a visual spectacle, it is the performance of a cultural meme. ATS speaks of a wistful nostalgia for an imagined ancient past — of moon goddesses and earth mothers, shaman queens flinging their hair in crazed rites around bonfires, fecund bodies shingled with coins stamping out a blood rhythmn in the shadows of mountains.

If you feel distrustful of this narrative’s authenticity, you are not alone. What can be verified about the history of bellydancing is that it is a substantially American invention, faintly inspired by Middle Eastern dancers who performed at the Chicago World Fair in the 1890s, and subsequently bolstered with whatever exoticisms came conveniently to hand. That this dance form was then re-exported to the Middle East, where it now comprises the staple fodder for tourists on cruise ships going up and down the Nile, is one of the richer ironies of dance history.

American Tribal Style, which arose in the alternative neighbourhoods of California in the 1970s, affects to return bellydancing to its roots, to hark back beyond fake tans and flourescent harem pants to dance as it was practiced by women in the nomadic tribal societies of Northern Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. ATS is not exempt from charges of Orientalist eclecticism, but it wears its heart on its sleeve, or at least, it’s all there in the name: Native Americans aside, the idea of an American Tribe is of course a desired, imagined and constructed one, but its construction makes it no less real or potent.

The existence of ATS, like the New Age culture in which it was nurtured, points to the social need, the feeling of spiritual vaccum, that engendered it. The increasing popularity of bellydancing indicates a similar physical vaccum. In Asia and America, women have flocked to bellydance to (re)connect with their sexuality, their inner beauty, and their mystical feminine strength.

Nanci Traynor, though, goes beyond being a symbol of spiritual guidance and reaffirming womanhood. She stands for the path we are not brave enough to take. She once lived like an ascetic in India, and now, again eschewing material possessions, she is heading to Bulgaria to take solace in the mountains like a hermit with her head in the clouds. And even while she is amongst us she is a figurehead for rebellion — not a politicised, revolutionary or anarchical kind of rebellion, but an aesthetic rebellion, visually signed by her tattoos, her bi-coloured hair, her feral in-your-face exhibitionism. As a colleague at the performance observes, Nanci made as many enemies during her time in Malaysia as she did friends. I’m not surprised. She does not mean for herself to be easy to take.

Nanci is here to perform the gypsy. Not the historically and culturally situated Roma people of Eastern Europe with their specific customs and genealogies, but the gypsy as stereotype, or, more specifically, as Western cultural archetype: nomadic, exotic, equipped with mystical fore-knowledge, and a special connection to fire, blood, earth and song. Her personal website is titled ‘Nanci Traynor Dances Rebellion’. She walks the talk; her bio at Lightworks, where she has been teaching yoga, comments, “She is one of the few teachers who lives by their ethics.”

And Nanci, like the gypsy, is feared. She represents an anti-civilisation to us cultural descendants of sedentary agriculturalists. Gypsies of lore were reputed to steal not just horses and gold, but hearts and lives. Babies were spirited out of windows. Young girls eloped with dark-eyed Lotharios. Not for nothing was there the childhood skipping tune:

My mother said I never should
Play with the Gypsies in the wood
If I did, she would say,
“Naughty girl to disobey;
Your hair shan’t curl, your shoes shan’t shine,
You Gypsy girl, you shan’t be mine.”

Nanci’s is a deliberately ostentatious alterity, but, oh, how she enjoys it! In her final KL performance, she spins around the room, hair flying in circles, a perfectly orchestrated image of wild abandon. She climbs up onto a sofa between bemused patrons, and hisses and spits at her dance partner from her perch. She writhes against a wall in the midst of DJ French Chris’ video projection of two white wings beating. She is meant to be a dove, but she performs like a demon, teeth bared, with flexed feet and claws.

For her final item, she chose the Johnny Cash song ‘Hurt’ (with its references to drug abuse and self-annihilation) as interpreted by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor (no stranger himself to drug abuse and self-annihilation). Nanci’s rage — bare palms slapping on the concrete floor, aggressive ‘fuck you!’ gestures — is epic. But truly she is raging against the machine: her performance cannot quite drown out the bourgeois chatter and laughter coming from the bar. It seems those people are not watching or listening. And that, I suppose, is why Nanci is leaving.

She leaves behind at least one protege, Nikki Law, who has been dancing with Nanci for several years. Nikki is a confident and very skilled performer, especially evident in her improvisation on Saturday evening to musician Azrin’s playing of the ukelele. Nikki has adopted some of Nanci’s physical mannerisms as well as her dancing style, but she is clearly not ready to completely kiss goodbye to the social construction of normality. Compared to Nanci, she is still rather tame and obedient, interested in validating her own performance through her mastery of technical skill.

It remains to be seen whether one day Nikki will chose to leave it all behind and run away with the gypsies. But when she does, it won’t be to follow in Nanci’s footsteps, if Nanci’s footsteps can even be found…

The Last Dance

Hunchback
2^nd Pentas Project Emerging Theatre Artist Program
Choreographed by Kathyn Tan Chai Chen
Pentas Studio, Cheras
16-18 March 2012

I spend a lot of time listening to old women. They tell me about their early romances, the hardships of the Second World War, the awesome industry of their middle years, and the encroaching silence and loneliness of growing old. No matter who I talk to – my entrepreneurial grandmother, the family friend who was a figurehead of nationalism, or the noodle seller on the corner lot – invariably they will sigh and tell me, “That was all so long ago. Life was different then.”

Kathyn Tan Chai Chen has been spending a lot of time listening to her grandmother, too. Following her grandfather’s recent death, Kathyn began to wonder what it was like to have been married to a man you didn’t know, to whom you bore ten children, and whom you served, in and out of the kitchen, for sixty years until his death.

With the help of Leng Poh Gee from University of Malaya, Kathyn went up to Penang to collect her grandmother’s oral history. Then, with the support of the Pentas Project Emerging Theatre Artist Program and continued goading from Pentas Project artistic director Loh Kok Man, Kathyn produced her new dance theatre work, Hunchback, an exploration of the lifetime of duty and devotion which rendered her grandmother’s body so crippled and stooped.

Hunchback has no story, as such, only impressions of life passing – youth, marriage and its consummation, labour (in the dual sense of work and birthing), witnessing death, growing old – occasionally disrupted by flights of abstraction. Although Kathyn is the main creative agent, Hunchback is a true example of dance theatre, in which all the elements of the stage merge into an interdisciplinary total art form.

In Pentas Project’s tiny Cheras theatre (a shop-house room seating fewer than 60 people) set designer Jackey Chan has painted the walls, ceiling and floor to suggest the frame of a house: each a large white square set in a broad black border. Combined with the sensitive restricted lighting palette by Yeo Lyle, the effect is simultaneously comforting and claustrophobic, a fitting analogy for the domestic sphere. The music by Jack Anderson and Terrance Chong is also sympathetic in tone and scale to the domestic setting. On this matchbox stage, the four dancers scurry around, illustrating the increasing burdens of a woman’s life.

With tiny steps and a red flower in her braided hair, dancer Hii Ing Fung shines as a bright-faced traditional Chinese maiden, all sidelong glances and coy smiles. Eden Lim, with her red top pulled over her face to serve as a wedding veil, stands beside a wall like a prisoner awaiting execution. She reaches out tentatively to touch the wall, gradually starts to dance with it, and ends with one long leg extended in the classic tango lunge, the sign of woman’s absolute abandon to man. In the kitchen scene, Ing Fung’s massive pregnancy cleverly turns out to be a hidden kuali, that ubiquitous instrument of the Chinese mother. And after the death of the husband, Tan Bee Hung gathers her grief within herself in a mounting frenzy of gestures, then is surprised to find that she is still standing.

These scenes are the meat and potatoes of Hunchback, but it is the other more abstract interludes which fully exploit the magical potential of dance theatre. In the scene titled Curve, Louise Yow cradles a lamp in her lap and embraces its buttery light like a huge invisible shining egg. Her slender arms and legs cast graceful shadows, slowly shifting, on the upstage wall. Sometimes you recognise fingers or toes, but most of the shadow shapes are obscure, unknowable, offsetting the etiolated curve of Louise’s torso seen in silhouette.

(One of my students told me that he enjoyed Hunchback because he could make sense of it. In the next breath, he said his favourite scene was Curve – the scene that is the least accessible, the most deliberately mysterious. For all its inner inconsistency, my student’s observation strikes at the root of the Hunchback’s appeal: you come for the familiarity of the story; you stay because it’s so magically told.)

The final scene is another flight of fancy, masquerading as a stroke of brutal realism. Three dancers drag back the upstage wall, to reveal a stage within a stage: a tiny raised room, with rough cement walls, a curtained window, a table and a chair. Clad in a translucent flesh-coloured samfu, Louise sits hunched in the chair, aged and broken. It seems the prison of a woman’s domestic life has dwindled to this solitary cell of old age.

But as Louise struggles to her feet and shuffles to the window, gentle piano chords sound. As if hands are playing upon her spine, she undulates up and down. A stringed instrument tinkles through an arpeggio, hopeful and happy, and she arches, head thrown back and around, her hands describing arabesques in the air. On and on she dances, her delicate wrists leading her through articulations of the spine. From the hunched position again, she reaches up a hand towards the light, a stretch towards something desired and never attained.

Then the magic of the moment is over; she is an old woman again. Turning away, she shuffles to the window, and raises the curtain to peek outside. The light fades with her standing there, hunched over, looking out.

In the discussion session afterwards, Lee Swee Keong asked why Kathyn chose for the old woman to dance ‘aesthetically’ at the end, rather than keeping with the realistic tone of the set and costume (which might, perhaps, have been a more dramatic ending). Kathyn responded that the work is an imagined version of her grandmother’s life, not a literal retelling. She debated several approaches to the last scene, but finally opted to allow the old woman the opportunity to have one last dance, her own dance.

Kathyn’s answer is a good one, I think. Instead of being composed and framed as a static object for our contemplation, the old woman in Hunchback is given the opportunity that Kathyn’s grandmother may never have had: a chance of personal agency and self-empowerment above and beyond conventional dramatic considerations. With her last dance, the woman elevates herself from subalterity to subjectivity.

Recently I had the good fortune to witness the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaking at University of Malaya. Spivak is most well known for her use of the term ‘subaltern’ to denote the oppressed, the objectified, the wretched of the earth. (In the military sense, the term means those who take orders rather than those who do the ordering.) In her most famous essay, ‘The Subaltern Speaks’, Spivak concludes that subalterns can never speak, because they have so deeply internalised their own oppression that they have no awareness of their subalterity, and therefore no desire to contest what they view as normal and inevitable. The realisation of alternatives elevates you above the subaltern position; in the act of speaking, subalterity falls away.

So, too, in the act of dancing. Watching Hunchback, we are appalled by the prospect of such a limited life. But Kathyn and her collaborators actually tell the tale with a remarkably light hand, with little of the tortured angst so common to contemporary dance. And, as Kathyn points out, her grandmother does not consider her own life difficult, bitter, or sad. She does not think herself unusual; in her experience, she did what women had to do. Yet we pity the woman, we view her life story as one of dark disappointment, and we expect the final frame to render her pinned and immobilised in a similar state, for our horrified delectation. We are expecting Whistler’s mother, but we are given something altogether different.

But this is all the more fitting because the elevation from subalterity to subjectivity does not occur because of our desires as spectators, but through the actions of individuals. First, Kathyn asks her grandmother about her life, and her grandmother chooses to reply. Then, in the creation of the art work, Kathyn chooses to give her grandmother’s alter ego one last chance to dance. And if this choice confounds our conventional dramatic aesthetic, then so much the better.

All photos by Loh Kok Man, courtesy of Pentas Project. 

Yokohama Dreaming

Yokohama Stay
Zan Yamashita
17-18 February 2012
Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse
TPAM Direction Program 

Zan Yamashita and Vincent Yong in 'Yokohama Stay'. Photo from Actually Mag.

At night in winter, the port area of Yokohama city is a strange and surreal place. My hotel room looks out on wide expanses of bare leafless trees, hemmed in by tall buildings. One of them, the Landmark Tower, is the tallest in Japan. On the edge of the water looms the massive World Porters shopping centre, its zigzag logo visible for miles. Next to it, the cycling neon lights of the ferris wheel. Further along the waterfront, the graceful dark lines of the old red-brick warehouses, now converted into arts and retail spaces, form the backdrop to a seasonal ice-skating rink. Here at least there are a few people, going around and around like tiny dolls on the coloured ice, but elsewhere everything is silent and cold. Very few pedestrians and even fewer cars are stopped by the traffic lights that change colour for their own amusement, on the too-wide streets. This seems like a ghost town, or, through a camera lens, like a scale model constructed by a great conscientious town planner, who forgot to populate it. The lights are on, but no one’s home.

A few years ago, Japanese choreographer Zan Yamashita came to Yokohama in September, and spent two months in a rented room trying to make a new work. The creation that emerged, Yokohama Stay, is a thoughtful and spare elegy to the city, and also a personal testament to the limits of creativity and of art. Zan took the work to the Esplanade in Singapore, where he transformed it into a duet with Singaporean dancer Vincent Yong. This month he brought it back to show at TPAM Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama 2012, where I experienced it as the most confounding and yet personally affecting of all the works at TPAM.

I had heard of Zan Yamashita before this performance. He worked with my friend Fahmi Fadzil, of Five Arts Centre, in Portugal and then again in Japan. On Fahmi’s invitation Zan came to Malaysia in 2009 to perform It is just me coughing and to conduct a workshop. Although I missed the show and the workshop, I heard they were thought-provoking, and that Zan is a deep thinker and talker, well versed in performance theory. So I was surprised by how immediate and uncerebral I found his work.

In format, Yokohama Stay is simple but unusual. Zan – tall, pale and wearing his trademark baseball cap – comes on stage with a microphone and a script, accompanied by Vincent wearing basic black. For about twenty minutes, Zan proceeds to read in rapid-fire English from his script, combining atmospheric anecdotes about his stay in Yokohama with descriptions of movement. Vincent demonstrates the movements as Zan says them. The imagery behinds the movements are rich and varied, from the physiological – “Feel the back of the neck, lift the right arm, roll on the ground” – to the mimetic – “Bowling, wipe tears, play the piano, feed the kitten!” Sometimes Zan’s words come first, and it appears as if Vincent is following instructions. Sometimes Vincent’s movement phrases surge ahead, and then it seems Zan is describing what he sees.

What was Yokohama Stay like as a solo, I wonder, without the inclusion of Vincent? A beautifully trained dancer with strong, expressive, generous movements who is not afraid to ham it up for the audience, Vincent is a perfect foil to Zan. Like an boisterous Labrador next to Zan’s dour brittle-boned Great Dane, Vincent bounces off the ground and dives effortlessly but enthusiastically into physical pyrotechnics. His movements are enjoyable to watch in themselves, but the fact is that in Yokohama Stay you cannot watch them by themselves. Everything Vincent does you see through the lens of Zan’s commentary.

Photo of 'Yokohama Stay' from Actually Mag.

As a dance critic, one of my methods while watching a performance is to be observant of the conversations that the work creates in my mind: to simultaneously record the work, and my reactions too it. (Like many theatre writers, I have become adept at writing in the dark.) But with Yokohama Stay, there is no space for my own reaction – instead of my own descriptions of movement, I can only transcribe Zan’s script. Forced into inaction, I sit back and follow the logical correspondence of the text with movement, the moments of match and mismatch. In retrospect, it troubles me – what is the point of movement if it is reducible to text? – but during the performance I experienced it as liberating, allowing my thoughts to range beyond the movement outwards to considerations of the Japanese arts scene as a whole, and inwards to my own experience of this town.

Interspersed in the movement description is Zan’s self-deprecatory commentary on his own creative process. “Lying on the floor thinking,” he says, “because I don’t know how to make dance…” During TPAM, I noticed that daily life presented as art is trendy right now among the Japanese avante garde. This endless mining of the self, even when the vein seems exhausted, seems both applauded and uncritically accepted by progressive arts funders and programmers. Yuya Tsukahara of contact Gonzo, for example, is recording the renovation of a derelict house into a liveable office for his arts collective, as its own process-based art work. Pijin Neji made a performance documenting his normal existence as a convenience store worker, and invited his fellow conbini worker to make fried foods on stage. Pijin had the decency to comment, “Some people thought this work not very worthy,” and indeed I struggle with this kind of narcissistic wanking masquerading as a crisis of form, and even more so if it is a crisis of form masquerading as narcissistic wanking.

Zan’s version of self as art at least seems concerned by the idea of the creation of value. “Stop it!” he reads from his script, “This is just stupid! This is not going to bring money. I’m too old for this kind of thing.” His monologue is self-reflective, even self-castigating, imbued throughout with considerations of validity, craft and skill, and a dark sense of humour. And what is humour but a sense of perspective?

Zan recounts witnessing a fatal car accident during his time in Yokohama: “I couldn’t think of dance after death.” He mentions 9/11, and looking at a doorway, “All I can think, if something happens, we will exit that way.” Yokohama Stay was first made in 2003, but it feels particularly topical now, less than a year after the earthquake and tsunami now known in Japan as 3/11. The Japanese art community has rallied and issued numerous statements to the effect that now, in the aftermath, art is needed more than ever, but there is a feeling, too, of the uselessness of human endeavour in the face of such destruction, that we are all building castles in the sand.

For visitors to Japan like me, the routine announcements before every performance are still sobering – “If strong seismic waves are detected, this performance may be stopped.” The assurances that “This building is seismically isolated, and safe” ring somewhat hollow. But in Zan’s script, the hint of cataclysm is expressed poetically, almost pleasantly – he speaks of the great bridge across the bay to Tokyo “flying up like birds” – and our little ant-like lives are put into perspective.

An empty intersection in Minato Mirai 21, seen from my hotel room.

Zan apparently had no particular reason to come to Yokohama from Kyoto to make this work. He might have chosen any other city, and arguably any city not his own might have had the same result, but I think there is something unique about Yokohama that binds it to the work that resulted. Someone in the TPAM conference mentioned that she wrote her undergraduate thesis on how different Yokohama is from the rest of Japan, how it seems like a place apart. Some of this uniqueness may come from Yokohama’s claim to fame as the first port opened up for outside trade, after Commodore Matthew Perry infamously strong-armed the Tokugawa shogunate into joining the global economy in the 1850s. Another surreal detail: the new urban renewal district of Minato Mirai 21 is built upon reclaimed land, which is expected to liquify in the event of a major earthquake. Some of the rubble that contributed to the reclaimed land may itself come from previous repeated destructions of Yokohama –  the 1923 earthquake which destroyed much of the city, before 42% of the city was again levelled by a single morning’s American air raid in 1945. These are empty playgrounds built upon the bones of the dead.

That the playgrounds are empty is due to the changing demographics of Japan. Falling birth rates and increased life expectancy has reduced once bustling areas to dead zones. 21% of all Japanese citizens are over 65 years of age, making it the oldest population in the world. Economic changes forcing young people to big cities have sucked the populations from regional areas. Everywhere, schools are being shut down for lack of students. For the arts community, this has proved to be an unexpected boon, providing them with large multi-roomed institutions that can easily and profitably be transformed into art spaces.

The Red-Brick Warehouses in the Minato Mirai 21 area of Yokohama.

In my part of Yokohama, although it is supposedly the new commercial hub, there never seem to be any traffic jams, even at peak hour. Perhaps that can be put down to superior urban planning, but it makes it hard to believe that this is the second largest city in Japan. Apparently the crush on the commuter trains going into Tokyo is frightening, but this only reinforces the feeling of Yokohama as somewhere existing outside itself, a dormitory town whose life blood rushes in and out each day, existing to serve another beating heart.

After a week in my hotel room in Minato Mirai 21, my experiences of Yokohama are narrow at best. I spend much of the time sheltering from the zero degrees in an influenza-induced haze, my sinuses so clogged that my balance is affected. There are tremors during the week, people tell me, but those aren’t the ones I feel; I feel earthquakes where there are no earthquakes. I spend long hours after discussion panels and before performances taking congested naps in my darkened hotel room. Then I wake in the middle of the night and uselessly troll through the tv channels, looking for something, anything, in English. Often I end up staring blankly at talking Japanese heads, before drifting back to sleep. Night and day, I feel adrift.

In Yokohama Stay, Zan describes Yokohama with the eye of a visitor, and I am struck the similarities of my experience with his. Perhaps this is where the mining of ordinary life for material generates a wider appeal. Zan mentions the bridge, World Porters, the Red-Brick Warehouses where we are actually located as we watch his performance. He speaks of wandering aimlessly through the city, looking for inspiration, cloudy-headed, distracted. He visited Yokohama in September, when it was warm enough to sit on the grass in the parks of Minato Mirai 21, but otherwise his descriptions compound my own impressions. It is as if in this town there are no residents, only travellers and dreamers.

My focus begins to fade towards the end of Yokohama Stay, as my thoughts unravel further and further out upon the ether. Just before the lights dim, I snatch what seems like a haiku from the stream of Zan’s monologue. Walking home that night, across the bridge in the clean cold darkness, I look up and think upon it.

“Past midnight. The lights are off on the Ferris wheel. Fish jump out of the water.”

Me and the Ferris wheel, in Yokohama on a cold rainy night.

Bad Boys of Korean Dance

The women in the theatre are screaming as if it’s a rock concert. There are eight half-naked young men, sweaty six packs on full display, down among the seats. Some of them are whirling their shirts around their heads. Some are repeatedly slapping their bare chests and flinging their arms out into space, their feet stomping to the blaring beat of an Arabic pop song. As the performers race each other back up to the stage, there’s a sense that at any moment the groupies in the audience will throw their knickers onto the stage, scream, “Marry me!” or faint.

This theatrical feat that has women in the audience fanning themselves is not a concert by the latest floppy-fringed boy band, nor a Chippendale performance for drunken hen’s nights. This is the surprising new face of Korean contemporary dance.

I went to Korea for a week earlier this month to attend the Performing Arts Market in Seoul (PAMS), a massive event frequented by festival programmers from around the world who come to shop for the most impressive, marketable and, yes, the sexiest Korean performing arts exports. The arts in Korea are big business. Unlike almost every other country in Asia, Korean artists are in the enviable position of being able to say that they have too much money and too much government support. Within the last few years, the government has declared its aim to position the country as the arts hub of Asia, and has embarked on an ambitious plan that involves building a new city for the arts in Gwangju as well as supporting expensive high-profile events like PAMS.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Korea Arts Management Service, I was able to witness this new Asian arts miracle, and duly report back to my homeland. Unable to afford any of the shows on display (despite the hefty subsidies being proffered by the Korean government to any international festival that picks up its choice offerings) I was just window shopping. But I have to say I like what I saw.

There are high quality productions available of every genre, from traditional Korean to modern ballet, hip hop and B-boy to Graham-style dance theatre. There are over 400 dance companies in Korea, who put on over 1200 shows a year in Seoul alone. Over a third of these performances are contemporary dance, so shoppers like me are spoilt for choice. But out of all these genres, it seems that a particular species of young male choreographer and young male dancer — clutching a dance degree from a prestigious Korean arts university, but schooled on the street in hip hop, break dancing and martial arts — is currently leading the pack.

The standout performances I saw in this new sub-genre were Park Soon-Ho Dance Project’s IN-Balance and Imbalance and Lee In-Soo’s Modern Feeling at Seoul International Dance Festival (SIDance), as well as No Comment by Laboratory Dance Project, part of the PAMS Choice program for 2011, which elicited the slobbering fans scenario described above.

Modern Feeling is a duet which explores the relationship between two men. There are beautiful lifts, tender weight sharings, intertwinings and pushings apart, fisticuffs and acrobatics. So far, so hum drum. What distinguishes Modern Feeling is its witty choreography — unexpected choices, humour, sometimes slapstick, and sequences of movement so intricate and unusual that they are literally undescribeable. It references popular culture (that one-handed come-and-fight-me gesture from The Matrix) but also culminates in such a feeling of subtle emotional connection that it’s hard to see how they managed to do all that, as well as work in a moment of gratuitous semi-nudity.

And semi-nudity is definitely a leitmotif of this genre. No problem here with reaching out to a new audience — this is as easy as selling soft porn! These performances are like an elegant artistic striptease. The dancers begin perfectly attired in true Korean metrosexual style, from their slacks, stylishly slim-cut button-down shirts, sometimes even waistcoats, and herringbone blazers, down to their shiny brogues, or even more trendy lace-up low-top sneakers. As the dance develops, the movement becomes wilder, the performers sweatier, and the clothes start coming off.

No Comment is the least choreographically complex work of the three, and the one that is most upfront about its popular (read, sex) appeal. It starts with a single male dancer, one hand thumping against his chest beneath his shirt in a stylised heartbeat. Seven other male dancers come on and join him. They gradually introduce other simple but virtuosic sequences of movements — running and flinging themselves across the floor in surprisingly long slides, and charging into rough and ready walking handstands before overbalancing. The only real dance phrase in the entire work involves barrel rolls and back flips — this work is not shy about capitalising upon its dancers’ physical prowess.

But the most effective, and indeed the sexiest, moment is the simplest one: the dancers, their immaculate shirts by now attactively untucked, stand with their hands nonchalantly in their pockets, stamping one foot to the beat, while they look about them with apparent disinterest, as if their moving foot has a life of its own. Gradually the stamp gets bigger, until the foot is lunging forward, side, then back, while the arms are flung out from the chest, the entire body ultimately compelled by the Bollywood beat. This movement goes on and on. Just when the audience thinks it’s over, as the music fades and the lights dim, the track loops, the lights come back on, and the dancers (minus another piece of clothing) start again.

There’s not a lot of subtlety to No Comment. After watching it you are hoarse from screaming, and feeling somewhat used and abandoned. If, as the program delicately notes, it is meant to “appeal to the essence of life within an audience member”, then it does so by ramping up the hormones and the urge to procreate. For this reason, I prefer IN-Balance and Imbalance(which also culminated in much audience cheering) if only because its morning-after effect is more languid glow, less wham-bam thank you ma’am.

Imbalance was performed as part of a triple bill called Korean Identity Through Dance, a program supported by UNESCO which is now in its 16th edition (which just goes to show how entrenched Korean contemporary dance really is). Unlike the other two works whose choreographers and dancers are from Korea National University of the Arts, Imbalance‘s choreographer Park Soon-Ho is a graduate of Hansung University (maybe they make better lovers there?).

But there are a lot of similarities. The work starts with two men walking in and grasping hands in a smoky downlight. Maintaining their grip they manipulate each other, twisting their arms behind their backs, and rolling each other down to the ground and up into lifts. It looks like a recipe for a dislocated shoulder. As this complex wrestle-play continues, two traditional Korean drummers enter with their instruments and start to speak in Korean. In heavily stylised dramatic tones, they recount a traditional animal fable. Meanwhile a third dancer joins, allowing the contact group to create more and more difficult lifts on each other, walking up each others’ bodies into sideways suspensions like pole dancing.

The dancers move very deliberately, working up into poses, and then relaxing gently down. The group of dancers grows. Some of them are even girls! The musicians start drumming, as in groups and pairs, with individuals joining in then backing out, the dancers transition gently into shapes, then slide down and walk away.

Suddenly there is only a shirtless man lying on the stage. One of the drummers approaches him, exhorting him in Korean. He drums on the bare skin of the prone body, and tosses the dancer like a puppet to and fro. The dancer, as if exhausted, launches into a solo which alternates between an incredibly rigid high-shouldered position and completely controlled floppiness. The drummers accompany him with heavy rhythms on their instruments and shouted traditional tunes, which build into a yelling climax.

The song ends and the soloist puts his shirt back on. But this is only a brief lull. The male dancers begin manipulating each other once again, which leads to sharp and clever rhythms of movement, then stylised fighting. Reeling like punch-drunk boxers, the dancers block each others’ attacks to the wailing shrieking song of the drummers. From here on, my notes and my memory desert me, as I sit mesmerised by the energy whirling on stage. I remember the male dancers driving themselves into huge squatting slides, from hand to hand on the ground like brachiating apes. I remember another moment perfect in its simplicity — the men standing upstage, each in his own tiny circle of light, rocking their heads from side to side, and in the silence only the sound of their breathing. And I remember the feeling of the drumming frenzy so tight in the diaphragm that I was not surprised to hear members of the audience crying out.

Another moment which I feel I saw repeated many times in works of this genre during my week in Seoul — the men standing in a line upstage, and then just striding in a line straight towards the audience, all the way to the footlights. It looks like something taken from a fashion show and in its audacious simplicity, it is perfectly sexy.

Certainly these young Korean men look set to take the dance world by storm. But cute as they are, they make me wonder what they are leaving in their wake. Where are the women? In this genre, women can’t compete. The comparative strengths of the average female body — flexibility, well-formed arches, a strong sense of line and capacity for finesse — are simply unnecessary in works like these, works which depend on wit and bravado, turning rough lines and raw energy into virtues. Women cannot hope to equal the sheer upper body strength and acrobatic capacity of men. In well-choreographed examples, like IN-Balance and Imbalance, the women look well integrated, but unexceptional. In poorly-choreographed examples, they simply look weak.

Contemporary dance in Korea, as in many other countries, has long been dominated by women. However, again similar to many other countries, the traditional view of dance and dancers has been a negative one. Dance was considered a low status activity, and therefore could be comfortably left within the female domain. It was only when Korean women dancers took the extra step towards institutionalism by establishing a dance department at Ewha Women’s University in 1963 that dance began its rise in reputation. Korean society deeply values learning, and the association of university credentials with dance has culminated in 49 departments of dance currently in existence across the country, which produce over 2000 graduates every year.

The amount of money being pumped into the dance industry can’t hurt either. Dance is now a secure career, and, with events like PAMS pushing Korean dance abroad, one with opportunities for international travel. The cynical feminist in me is saddened but unsurprised that men are getting into the act and elbowing women out of the spotlight, just as dance in Korea is becoming both profitable and respectable. But perhaps it is only natural that the tide should turn after the dance field has been dominated by women for so long, and that artistic preferences should embrace instead the new, the groundbreaking, the male.

I certainly would not wish away the new generation of male dancers and choreographers. It will be interesting to see where they go from here, how they transition from wunderkinder into established artists, and how they eventually integrate with the rest of the Korean dance community. And it will be interesting to see how the women fight back. But in the mean time it is interesting merely to watch these fashion-plate bad boys get their kit off, again.

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Reference:

An Overview of Korean Performing Arts: Dance in Korea, published by Korea Arts Management Service, December 2010.

Humorous, touching, surprising contact

An Informal Evening of Contact Improvisations
Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur
Saturday 30 July 2011
The Annexe Central Market

The best dance performances often have the smallest audience.

Granted, the idea of the informal showing last Saturday at the Annexe Central Market, by the participants of Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur, did not initially seem promising. How much can you expect from a bunch of people who had met only a few days previously, especially when they had spent their whole time together practising contact improvisation, a form of dance usually more social than performative?

And yet the informal showing was nuanced, varied, both humorous and touching by turns, and possessed of an effective dramatic arc, even more remarkable considering the sequence of its sections had only been worked out that afternoon, in the car between Rimbun Dahan and the Annexe!

Contact improvisation, to get the necessary explanation out of the way, is a movement technique developed in the 1970s in the USA. It usually involves a pair of people improvising with each other, exploring the sharing of weight through leaning, lifting, supporting and rolling. Its techniques – how to give your partner your weight using different parts of your body, for example, or how to be alert to your partner’s cues — are taught in classes, but its main activity is informal jams, in which anyone at any time can go into the centre and interact with anyone else.

In Malaysia, contact is mostly used by choreographers during rehearsal, to create movement material for group sections. Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur was an attempt, and a successful one at that, by David Lim of Contact Improv KL, to generate local interest in contact improvisation as its own practice and to energise a regional contact improv network. The six-day event, held at Rimbun Dahan, involved over 20 participants and 5 international teachers. The informal showing was only one of the festival’s many components, most involving classes and jams, and, for many of its participants, hardly the most memorable.

And yet for the lucky few in the audience, it was a memorable experience indeed. The overall structure of the informal showing, as well as the score for its opening and closing sections, can be attributed to Finnish dancer Ulla Makinen. Ulla provided the score (the rough framework for improvisation) for the first big group section, in which all the participants entered and walked around the space, warming it up as they warmed themselves up.

After a few surprisingly synchronised group hops, the group settled down into a shifting mass of pairs in contact, scattered throughout with people standing immobile, just watching, and others improvising by themselves. This range of positions, from people standing upright and still next to the walls, to the clumped masses of pairs in contact, created an interesting visual effect. The eye’s focus could widen and contract, narrowing in upon two people concentrating upon the meeting of their elbows, or opening out to encompass the mountain-and-valleys shape of the entire group. The combination of stillness and movement was also very effective. The eye tires of constant movement; it requires stillness to shape the space just as much as movement.

In the next section, a solemn-faced Christopher Liew carefully placed his iPad and speakers in the centre of the stage. A group of dancers then drew on the iPad with different body parts to change the sound of the accompanying music.

Humour always seems to emerge more easily from the split-second decision-making of improvisation, rather than from carefully premeditated choreography. If humour is the ability to differentiate what is expected and appropriate — in this case, the score, which was to use different body parts to touch the iPad and change the music — from what is surprising or inappropriate — for example, one dancer manipulating another dancer’s toes on the iPad to change the music — then our collective sensitivity to inappropriateness was turned up high.

Ulla and Australian instructor Joey Lehrer then presented an improvised duet, using as their set a large white plywood screen they found in the room at the Annexe. This improvised set was an inspiration — it lent a very touching human scenario to their performance. Two people are separated by a wall. They are unnable to communicate. They seem lonely and perplexed, vulnerable and blind. When they finally meet, their capacity to communicate is phenomenal, culminating in acrobatic lifting and rolling.

This duet was like a paean to contact improvisation itself, to the importance of being face to face, skin to skin. It is underlined by Joey and Ulla’s evident joy in the playful productivity of their contact. They showed a contact style I had not seen before, a bouncy repetitive sharing of weight when things did not go exactly as planned, as if boosting each other into place, a feeling of common goal and trying again.

Next, Japanese instructors Shoko Kashima and Chico Katsube showed a more structured and more musical duet. Shoko started with large rhythmic movements to the beat of the music, her long limbs tossed out into space, while Chico began with movements in slow-motion, all curled into herself. Gradually the two movement styles, one extroverted and one introverted, became more and more like each other, before drawing apart once more, only for the dancers to end precisely with the last beat of the music, back to back, one with arms raised, the other with arms dropped. Same same but different.

The next group section was inspired by Singaporean participant Chan Sze-Wei’s memories of her grandmother’s horror at the filthiness of other people’s bodies. Why would you want to get near these people, let alone touch them? The group began by scrubbing repetitively at their hands, Lady Macbeth-like, before moving on to other parts of their bodies. Pretty soon they started on each other’s bodies, and the unorthodox places they found to scratch each other became hilarious. At one point there was a conga-line of head-scratching. At another point one of the dancers started rubbing the wall as if it too was alive, and might respond like a dog having its belly rubbed, with eyes scrunched up and back leg convulsively kicking.

Taiwanese instructor Ming-Shen Ku, described by one of the participants as a ‘force of nature’, then performed a solo. It started with her standing mid-stage, clad in nothing but nude underwear. She puffed out her belly, and jiggled the fat under her arms and around her thighs. This shock tactic — this is my body, take it or leave it — was rather undermined by the fact that her body was the usual (or rather the unusual) dancer’s body, all long and lean and toned. There was not much fat to jiggle. She then suited up in protective gear — braces for her knees, shoulder and abdomen — before putting on more clothes, and starting to dance.

I found myself unable to concentrate on the rest of her solo, it seemed so detached from its beginning. Were we supposed to be imagining the movements of her unseen body, underneath her clothes and armour? The addition of clothing made it seem like something had been taken away rather than added — the voyeuristic desire, I suppose to see that extraordinary body, its skin and sinews, that had been briefly displayed and then concealed.

The entire group gathered again for the final section. Its beautiful score involved the group lined up on one side wall, then walking in a line together to the other side wall, turning, pausing, and repeating. In the beginning, when the entire group was walking, the sense of the group breathing together and stepping out together, linked by sixth sense and peripheral vision, was pungent. As the score developed, each pass of the line left people in its wake, who met each other in contact or moved alone in the space, before being sucked back into line by the next pass. The dominant form of the line slowly dissolved — at one point it was hard to see if the line still existed at all, so many people had left it to improvise in the centre — and then slowly reassembled.

Yet again, the touches of humour were most evident: festival participant Maru shuffles a seated girl towards the wall and into the line. Later Maru stands in the centre, ostentatiously fixing his hair; someone else pushes him back into line. Then, for a while, there was just the line again, moving back and forth like a wave on a beach, before the dancers stopped all together on a silent cue.

I wish I had known what a fascinating show it was going to be — I would have forced more people to come watch it with me. But that, I suppose, is the two-edged sword of improvisation: you never know what to expect. I think the performers themselves were as surprised and delighted as anyone in the audience by what they were showing us.

Images of Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur sessions at Rimbun Dahan by Yuen Kin-leung Maru. Images of the performance by Chen Jiexiao. Many thanks to the photographers.

A sensory epic from local modern dance duo

Two
Dua Space Dance Theatre
Pentas 2, KLPac
14-17 April 2011

Even before you arrive in the theatre for a performance of Dua Space Dance Theatre’s Two, you already know you are in for an immersive experience. The foyer of KLPac’s Pentas 2 is festooned with banners of newspaper and frayed coconut-fibre ropes. As the audience waits to enter the theatre, we are surprised by the stars of the show arriving in our midst. Covered in white paint, Aman Yap and Anthony Meh cavort amidst the delighted crowd like good-natured sprites. They investigate handbags, sneak up behind unsuspecting audience members, and dance with a woman in a wheelchair. Despite the homogenizing body paint, the two dancers already display distinct characters – Anthony plays the boyish rogue, while Aman is shy and grave – and later on in the work these differences will come to the fore. Then, dancing and mutely gesturing, the pair lead the audience into the theatre.

Two, Aman & Anthony’s epic duet, was first performed in 1998 and has not been seen on stage since 2001. In the last 13 years, the two founders of Dua Space Dance Theatre have matured into stalwarts of the Malaysian dance community, and this work clearly demonstrates the pair’s ability to combine artistic vision with high production values. Two is an unapologetically modernist work, dealing with strong mythic themes and symbols, rejecting the deconstruction, self-reflection and anarchic play of post-modernism. It traces the path of life from inception (symbolised by chicken eggs contributed by the audience) to birth (struggles with ropes like umbilical cords), through the complications of human and gender relationships, to a zen-like release from life.

Two is a largely impressionistic non-narrative work. There is a lot less emphasis laid on movement quality, for a dance work, and more upon the entire staging experience. The elaborate set features long ropes strung with clothes-shaped cut-outs from newspapers, which run from the stage into the audience, invading the fourth wall. The changeable soundscape, now a cacophony of Chinese opera singing and gamelan, now a baroque violin solo or a startling foghorn, is composed by John Liew. Tan Eng Heng’s lighting once more creates uncompromising in-your-face states, whether with patterned goboes, or stark white boxes which may be wombs or coffins or both. Even in the small space of Pentas 2, Two is a work of ambitious scale, demonstrating once again the daring production values for which Dua Space Dance Theatre is renowned.

Because of its multi-disciplinary interest and its elements of audience participation, Two operates on all the senses. The smooth weight of a brown egg held in the hand contrasts with the roughness of frayed rope touching the face. The theatre smells like smoke and newsprint. Earsplitting noises punctuate the soundscape. But the visual sense is perhaps the best served, with Two presenting extravagant visual confections that seem made for photography. In one such scene, Anthony stands in a grotto upstage, strongly sidelit in pink and green, against a backdrop of the newspaper negatives of the cut-out clothing. At these moments, movement becomes secondary to staging – what the body does is not as important as its careful placement within these constructed environments.

Two is an immersive work, not just because the audience is surrounded by the set, with all senses alert, but also because Anthony and Aman literally pull audience members off their seats and into the action. In one such scene in the middle of the work, Anthony in an effeminate white mask drags people down onto the stage. He is good at managing the audience, cleverly using audience members to get other audience members involved. He encourages the female audience member to trounce the male, and everyone in the audience laughs at this lighthearted battle-of-the-sexes.

But the atmosphere quickly changes when Aman enters. Stern and commanding, he points his finger at Anthony, who flees into the audience and hides behind someone’s umbrella. Anthony plays the coquette, but Aman is unmoved, directing Anthony firmly back down onto the stage, where they sit on a box in a sharply divided down-light, half pink and half blue. The soundscape plays a dialogue of a man and woman talking, the man dictatorial, the woman acquiescent, as Aman controls Anthony’s movements, half dancing and half acting in line with the dialogue. Pathetically, Anthony appeals to the audience for help, and we feel a surge of empathy for his lonely vulnerable figure, but no one goes to help him. We are complicit in the violence, at which we were laughing only moments ago.

Physical theatre moments like this are the dramatic climax of Two, although both Aman and Anthony are dancers by inclination and training. And when they dance, you can see that neither has lost their physical capacity. They seem not to spare themselves at all, wheeling from flexed-foot turns into huge windmill arms, big cartwheels into whacking side kicks and then suspension handstands. Most of their dancing together is done in synchronisation, like twins, or they perform disconnected solos at the same time. Physical contact between the two dancers is short-lived, and I would have liked to see more of how they negotiate each other in the midst of movement.

At the end of the work, Aman pulls back the upstage right curtain to reveal more white masks – the disguises of our daily lives – hanging on a textured grid. He washes his face in a basin beneath, watched by the empty-eyed faces. It is like the washing off of the birth caul, or perhaps even the shucking of the mortal coil. Anthony, too, has lost most of his white paint, from his furious dancing and the wearing of the female mask. The innocent flawless white surface has been symbolically scarred and destroyed through a lifetime of living. In death, the work suggests, we become ourselves, without the paint.

From this moment on, Two seems calmer, less changeful and distraught, less the ‘vague path of life in which things are really complicated,’ as the program notes suggest. Perhaps Aman and Anthony are angels now. They unhook the basket of eggs from where it has been hanging on a baby rocker. Taking the eggs gently out of the basket, they hand them to the audience one by one. Aman gently presses the hands of the audience closed over the eggs, to keep them safe, to emphasise the value of the treasure. People hold the eggs like blessings and like prayers. The dancers place the egg cradle in the centre of the audience, like the baby’s manger in our midst. With these symbols of rebirth, fertility and future potential safely transferred into our keeping, the two dancers are free to leave. They walk together upstage, away from the audience, leaving us mortals with our lives in our hands. Mid-way they turn back to smile at us, but it is not really necessary; angels do not smile.

With Two, Anthony and Aman prove that they are masters at manipulating their audience, providing a full-body theatrical experience which both entertains and illuminates, evoking laughter and thought.

Images courtesy of Dua Space Dance Theatre.

Fragments netted from the rushing river

As It Fades
T.H.E. Dance Company, choreography by Kuik Swee Boon
Singapore Arts Festival
Esplanade Theatre
21 May 2011

Kuik Swee Boon is a dancer’s choreographer. His recent work, As It Fades, is less about concept and plot, being clever or deep, as it is about movement — a gorgeous, layered, inventive river of movement which sweeps the viewer away.

The work begins with a single black-clad dancer moving on a white stage. The dancer’s changes of direction and play with dynamics — a sudden jump, a quick forced run in a circle — set the stage for what is to come. Suddenly, the entire company of dancers rushes on, then halts headlong, the bodies arrested in a strong sideways suspension. The mass of bodies breaks apart into small groups which coalesce again, here and there leaving an odd dancer out. The movement is mercurial in its pace and levels, impossible to pin down, with dancers spinning, dropping to the floor and rising again as if they are being sucked off the ground, legs flicking out at the edge of vision.

Upstage, behind an armada of steel and perspex constructions, Han Tok Ngan, a singer of Hainanese folk songs, stands in near darkness. The dancers move to the rhythm of her song. For a moment, the group launches into a movement phrase that looks vaguely like tai chi, but before this moment can cement itself the song fades and the dancers move on, leaving an aching sense of possibility sketched in the ether.

Kuik Swee Boon’s movement style might be described as Western contemporary dance, but it is a language that he speaks so natively that it’s a shame to to label it so narrowly. As It Fades is about reconnecting with memory, things that are “lost, forgotten and buried deep within our bodies”, and for Swee Boon the vocabulary of movement he honed when he worked with many of the leading lights of European contemporary dance at Compania Nacional de Danza in Spain is as much a part of his embodied heritage as the Hainanese folk songs that inspire this work.

Swee Boon’s movement style devotes enormous attention to detail, and the dancers need all their physical and technical strength to do it justice. Every position is clearly delineated. The interraction with the music is very exact, whether with atonal electronic drone or the expressive strain of a single cello. Even the movements that look throwaway — the unstretched legs, the floppy feet — are all deliberate and careful. Now and again, the dancers luxuriate into a fully pointed leg or slice up into a huge extension, but these are used sparingly. The unrelenting changes of level look exhausting and breathless (the word that dancers use is ‘puffy’ ) but in the silences you can hear how the dancers are using their breaths as the root of their movements. Again and again, they launch themselves on the strength of their exhalations, and the audience feels an answering tug at the base of the diaphragm.

Upon the work’s river of movement, a watcher can either float — viewing the dancers as an undifferentiated mass — or dive, zooming in upon a single body, sliding along the clear trajectory that every dancer constructs for his or her self through the movement. Perhaps because of the use of breath and the textured pace, there is a quality of silence and stillness in the midst of speed, like the empty eye of a whirlpool at the centre of a spinning mass.

Bodies are flung together in As It Fades, but these moments of contact are fleeting, breaking apart as quickly as they form. Men pull women towards them, or women fall backwards into the hands of men. The man is often braced in the centre, the girl spinning and leaning around him, or being dragging around in a circle, splayed outwards by centrifugal force. The transient duets display the women’s feet beautifully, either pointed at the end of elegant attitudes, or in forced arches on the ground as the woman leans in. A man lifts a woman by the waist in front of him, and in a moment of calculated abandon she relaxes back into him, legs and arms pulled up loosely in front of her. Later, in a variation on Pina Bausch’s signature duets between one woman and multiple men, a woman is tossed and spun from man to man so fluidly and fast that it’s over before you know it.

The staging of As It Fades, with its dependence on chic black costumes and a monochrome palette, also reminds me of the style of European companies like Nederlands Dans Theater (which, incidentally, will be coming to the Esplanade Theatre in July). The strong and changeable lighting states are an integral part of this formalist construction. Created by Finnish designer Anna Maria Rouhu, the lighting is dominated by long diagonals and clear squares of light in the glacial colours of the far north. The abstract set that dominates and defines the space is also very Kylian, but in this context it seems more like a tribute rather than merely derivative. The black steel-framed ships with their triangular clouded perspex sails are wheeled around by the dancers, creating changing environments in which to dance. At one point each ship floats in its own diagonal spotlight, and on every ship a woman lounges as if dreaming, or slowly balances along the the metal perimeter. As the music builds, the movement does too, until the women fling their ships away from themselves, letting them spin out randomly into the space.

Towards the end of the work, the ships are arranged in a circle. In its centre a man and woman carry out a duet, their slow intimate movements vaguely sensed. The circle slowly rotates, like a spinning gothic cathedral made of crystal. Later the ships make a line behind which the dancers move furiously but almost unseen to the sound of symphonic violins. On the audience side a few dancers in black silhouette walk and peer through the screen, waiting for the hidden dancers to emerge, to rush out into stillness.

There are some moments in As It Fades when the dominant aesthetic is unexpectedly lost. These scenes seem to be trying too hard to add meaning, and their literalness intrudes upon the cool clear flow of the movement. In one scene, the dancers assemble in a line in a warm block of light downstage. Standing in one place, they cycle through a range of gesticulations and sound effects: sneezing, coughing, shaking, scratching their bellies, running on the spot. The almost comic theatricality feels out of context. It is a relief when the block of light starts to dissolve and the dancers are sucked back into the movement.

There is another jarring section towards the end of the work, in which one of the dancers is speaking, barely heard over the music. According to the program notes, he is describing the cultural dislocation of not being able to speak Cantonese natively as a child. Meanwhile other dancers carry out disconnected solos in contrasting styles, which they may have choreographed themselves. As a nod to the dancers’ individual experiences of losing touch with the past and their embodied expression of this, this scene makes sense, but its qualities do not sit well with the cohesion and subtlety of the work as a whole.

This is not to say that the other parts of As It Fades do not say anything. Some scenes have an impact both visceral and cerebral. For most of the work, a group of the dancers’ parents sit in a line at the back of the stage. Slightly out of the light, the presence of these elders can be sensed, rather than seen, as a static solid weight counterracting the movement of the dancers. In one prominent scene, a pre-war Chinese aria plays, tinged with shades of nationalism and nursery rhyme. A group of female dancers runs into a white block of light in the downstage right corner. Slowly, swaying a little from side to side, they walk upstage towards the line of seated elders. As the song gentles, Alice Tan starts to dance as she walks, her arms moving through huge swooping curves. The other dancers pick up her movements, as the elders rise from their seats to walk down between them. Just as the elders pass through them, the dancers pause briefly in a pose, their chests lifted towards the sky, left arm extended diagonally upwards, the wrist pushing up and out and the hand splayed, and the right arm bent with the right hand pressed on the lifted sternum. It’s a moment of tribute, but also of self-assertion, of vindication and of gratitude. Other dancers enter the white square to face the elders, taking both their gently hands in theirs. The group of women dancers runs downstage to repeat their walk upstage and to repeat the iconic pose: an oath-taking, an assertion of faith, a swearing of allegiance, an act of remembrance, an avowal. As the elders walk off the stage, down the steps and into the audience, the dancers continue to move slowly upstage, the aria climaxing.

In the end, it’s about the dancing, and the inarticulable impact of this. Every movement phrase in As It Fades is weighed and balanced like a sentence, and can be savoured like poetry. Yet as the continually inventive recombination of lyrical phrases pushes on and on, the river of movement sweeps away any landmarks. The watching mind has to abandon itself to the torrent. Occasionally something lodges itself in the mind, like flotsam knocking repeatedly against a snag. But the elusive quality of much of the movement in As It Fades, the manner in which it washes over the mind and then disappears, is itself an expression of the theme of the work, and the way in which something in which we are deeply immersed, either a performance or a culture, can disappear, leaving us only with traces and fragments.

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Images by Matthew G Johnson, courtesy of T.H.E. Dance Company.