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.

Good in theory, better in practice the second time around

contact Gonzo
Air Hole: Another Form of Conceptualism from Asia
30th April 2011
National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan.

This is a story about how I changed my mind. I was not wrong before I changed it, and I am not necessarily correct now. While this is a meditation about second chances, it is also a story about how every experience of art is personal, valid and couched in a very particular context of time and space. In particular, it is a reminder that the words of the critic can only ever be taken as partial, never as truth.

Last month in Osaka, I saw a performance by contact Gonzo, a group of performers who combine contact improvisation with the brutality of street fighting, all in a self-reflexive tongue-in-cheek milieu. In plain words, contact Gonzo is a bunch of young Japanese guys who get together and beat each other up, in more or less stylised and codified ways, sometimes incorporating lifts, leans and fairly architectural pile-ups of bodies. While they do this, they take pictures of themselves with disposable cameras, and these images are sometimes displayed around the performance site. contact Gonzo has become the darling of avant garde dance festivals around the world, not least because they embody a very trendy combination of masculinity, violence, and conceptualism. And when I first saw them perform, I hated it.

My first experience of contact Gonzo was in Jakarta at Indonesia Dance Festival 2010, packed into a ring of sweaty passers-by on the hot dusty sidewalk in front of Taman Ismail Marzuki. The oohs and aahs of the audience, when the boys landed each other a particularly reverberating thwack on the chest, or when one guy spat blood onto the asphalt, made it seem much more like a brawl, much less like art. Later that same week I saw them perform a slightly more structured version in the main theatre at Taman Ismail Marzuki, backed by the inflated silhouette of a tiny Japanese girl pounding on a drum set. Although I admired the dedication of the drummer, I liked the rest of the performance even less. I thought the performers look bored, the setup was too similar, and the wall of sound disguised the impact of the slaps and punches. The performers’ attempts to take photos of themselves from the bottom of the scrum I viewed as pretentious and gimmicky. By the end, I could not bring myself to care.

Less than a year later, watching contact Gonzo perform in Japan, my reaction could not have been more different. So I went back to my notes from Jakarta to tease out the details and to try to understand how one group performing the same kind of thing in the same style can elicit such a variety of responses from one person.

You cannot step in the same river twice, goes the adage, because both you and the river have changed. Did I have a different experience watching contact Gonzo in Japan because I was a different person than I had been in Jakarta? In the interim I had gone from being in a frustrating personal relationship, with little patience for what I saw as the juvenile posturings of neanderthal males, to being a single woman able to derive a lot more amusement from the performance of masculinity. I had also visited the Tanz im August festival in Berlin in September 2010, where I witnessed the cutting edge of global contemporary dance in action. I left Berlin with a fresh appreciation for the potential of masculinity as a rich topic of exploration (not least because there I watched a sweaty duet between two burly men who stripped each other naked, whipped each other with their belts and dragged each other around by their penises, to, surprisingly enough, hilarious effect).

So my perspective had shifted (I hesitate to say ‘matured’, perhaps it did quite the opposite), and both the river and its environment — the context and the work itself — had shifted too. In Jakarta, the sidewalk audience consumed contact Gonzo as they would WWF wrestling  — perhaps not a terrible analogy, given the self-conscious performative nature of WWF. But I found the crowd’s easy complicitness in the performers’ jokes irritating and their gasping response to blood predictable. Plus it was hot and crowded, and I was tired. At the second performance in Jakarta, the theatre audience was more sophisticated, perhaps too much so. I detected a lot of earnest art afficionados nodding sagely over contact Gonzo and assuring each other, “Aren’t they terribly interesting?” As the mob mentality inflamed my rebelliousness, I dug in my heels and thought to myself, “Whatever!”

In Japan, however, contact Gonzo performed before a home crowd of friends, peers and people who had seen them many times before. It was a mostly young audience, fashionable, highly educated, on the one hand familiar with the culture of exploitation of violence — from Japanese slasher movies like Battle Royale and hardcore hentai — and, on the other hand, citizens of a country recovering from fresh tragedy. It was certainly a more relaxed crowd, who seemed to know what to expect, allowing the performers to practice their craft without feeling the need to prove themselves. There was appreciative laughter, rather than gasps, at the pile-ups, and laughter too for a little boy who ran into the ring to retrieve a fallen hat for one of the performers.

The performance in Japan also occurred in a more thoughtful and, to me, appropriate context: in a carefully curated exhibition of Asian conceptual art at the National Museum of Art, Osaka. Conceptualism, at its worst, can be inaccessible and self-indulgent, reducible only to an interesting idea. A novelist once said that if it was possible to tell people what the book was about, it would not be necessary to write the book. Sometimes conceptual art is like the unnecessary novel — you can describe it to someone, they can imagine it and appreciate the idea’s significance, but that is all. It never becomes more than the sum of its parts. Like the white on white canvas at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they may serve some purpose in the evolution of art, but you never feel the need to fly across the world to see them.

The exhibition in Osaka, however, combined varied and extremely strong examples of conceptualism, all of which had a form-based aesthetic as well as an experiential quality, reaching out and enveloping the audience. All were good in theory and even better in practice. In practice, contact Gonzo seemed just as visceral as when I first saw them, with all the immediacy of sweat, panting, and muscle hitting bone. Their performance still had its lightning shifts of improvisation, but the effect of this was eclipsed, in my point of view, by my emerging perception of both the animal and the human elements in contact Gonzo’s work.

When people see contact Gonzo for the first time, they immediately suspect that there is some kind of code of conduct at work, although its details are unclear. Despite the apparent indulgence in violence for its own sake, there is more a sense of Queensberry rules than of no holds barred. Watching the performance in Japan, I was reminded of the show fights among male animals during mating season. Neither wants to hurt the other permanently — this would not be to the advantage of the species — only to demonstrate superior strength and dominance, and thereby ensure survival of the fittest.

Thus the show opened with two guys, in the group’s trademark slouchy sweatpants, t-shirts and baseball caps, slowly circling each other and sizing each other up. When they finally come to blows, it is like rutting stags or mountain goats: they lock shoulders, brace their sneakers on the cement floor and push with all their might, the fluctuations of their body weight sending the pair staggering and puffing across the space. Later, the rest of the group joins in the fray like a pack of wolves, liable to gang up upon the underdog: whoever falls, or is tripped, is jumped upon by the others. Being top of the heap is king of the castle, and there is a sense a stylised desexualised mounting to demonstrate dominance. But you always know that the alpha male in this pack is contact Gonzo founder Yuya Tsukahara — the rest of the group seems particularly aware of him, and they look to him for endorsement or censure.

Juxtaposed with this animal-like sense of release and restraint is a kind of trust, cooperation and unspoken communication through eye contact that point to the apex of human civilisation. These lend the performance greater finesse: the pile-ups have clearer structures, there are lifts that borrow heavily from the consensual weight sharing of contact improvisation, and there is a sense of a dramatic arc running through the performance.  Rather than what I remember as the free-for-all of Jakarta, the Osaka performance has a sense of people consciously working together to build something.

The stage set constructed in the white gallery space of the National Museum of Art also lends the performance clearer form. Within a ring of chain link fencing reminiscent of inner cities and prison exercise yards, a high platform with a long slide reaching up to it has been made out of thick planks. The group charge up and down the slope, sometimes using it as high ground from which to launch themselves on people below, sometimes combining weight to push some resisting individual to the top of the ramp.

Towards the end of the performance, Yuya sets up a wooden board about 10 feet from the bottom of the ramp. Two guys sit on a skateboard at the top of the ramp, one behind the other, and slide down. The first time — you can tell it’s about to happen — they careen off course near the bottom and land in a crash of jumbled limbs, without making contact with the board. This makes it all the more exciting when they repeat the trick, scoring a direct hit that sends the board flying and draws applause from the crowd. We feel like we, too, with our collective bated breath and our sympathetic surge of adrenaline, have worked together with the performers to achieve this small victory.

After the clapping, the audience breaks up, talking and laughing. The little boy and his smaller sister run up the ramp and try to slide down. Yuya holds their hands to prevent them from falling off. He tells me that the boy has wanted to be in contact Gonzo since before he could walk. Now, with my fresh perspective on contact Gonzo, I think this might not be such a bad idea after all.

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contact Gonzo’s appearance in Air Hole at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, continues until 5 June 2011.

Making Unfeminine Choices

She Moves at a Deliberate Pace
25-27 March 2011
Panggung Bandaraya
Produced by LAPAR Lab

The promotional material for LAPAR Lab’s contribution to the recent Women:100 festival featured some very stock standard stereotypes about women, promising to celebrate the fairer sex embodied by “a filial daughter, a loyal wife, a devoted mother, a dedicated housewife, a colleague”. Thankfully, there was not a stereotype in sight in the two new contemporary dance works in She Moves at a Deliberate Pace. Instead, they made space for women as rebels and iconoclasts, and, most significantly, as adults with complex sexual needs consciously in pursuit of their desires.

Divas, the first work of the double-bill, by guest choreographer Jonathan Poole from the UK, uses voice recordings to create narratives for his female rebels. Most scenes are bracketed by voice-over text from monologues for women written by British playwright and famous wit Alan Bennett (apparently it takes a gay man to write clever scenes for straight women). So when a woman describes herself as standing at the crossroads, dancer Hii Ing Fung indulges in a flirty trio with two male suitors. The choreography is quite technically challenging, with lots of high legs, neat barrel rolls, and risky lifts. While the male dancers are serviceable, Ing Fung, appropriately enough, is the real star, marrying her strong technique with a great feel for her character. She coquettishly ducks the boys’ embraces, flips her fringe out of her eyes, preens, and breathes in the scent of the flowers they offer before tossing them away. When in the end the boys get sick of her and walk off together, you can only feel sorry for her character.

Lau Beh Chin plays an alcoholic vicar’s wife who sleeps with an Indian grocer. Dancing solo as ‘the real drunken lady’, Beh Chin seems to be waiting for the music cues and her acting is somewhat overwrought, but when Tang Yong Kean enters to be her partner, she blooms with the connection. Guest performer Hoi Cheng Sim plays a single woman receiving a visit from her young local vicar. Accompanied by Bennett’s witty one-liners – “They don’t expect you to be an atheist if you’re a Miss” – Sim and Leo share a lovely duet, she sometimes appearing to lean upon him, then throwing him off. Leo is greatly exercised by the many risky lifts, but Sim makes it all look easy. When the vicar finally admits defeat, Sim drinks tea by herself, composed but thoughtful – an effective ending.

These narrative scenes are juxtaposed with slightly more abstract ones. In the first scene, lights come up to reveal a woman silhouetted on a screen, her hand raised, accompanied by the instantly recognisable garrulous tones of Margaret Thatcher. While Thatcher harangues her audience, a group of dancers in charcoal greys in the foreground works through a synchronised movement phrase. Promising young dancer Nancy Ng detaches herself from the group, and launches into a solo to a Sheryl Crow song, full of big kicks and jumps, releases through the torso, rolls on the floor and arches of the back. In the end, she rejoins the chorus, but, boy, did she seem to be enjoying herself during the solo! So Thatcher’s groundbreaking example, as a woman prime minister in solitary resistance to the introduction of the euro, is depicted as inspiring other women to break out of their mould.

The penultimate scene returns to Thatcher, and it is almost with relief to be on more abstract ground (although, as the European choreographer sitting next to me commented, he was hoping never to have to hear ‘that woman’s’ voice ever again!). On a dim stage lit by lovely angled smoky spotlights, like the interior of a cathedral, Lim Siew Ling moves in slow meditative low-level pathways, walking on her hands out to plank and back again, standing and dropping. The chorus, moving faster, coalesces around her. Occasionally Siew Ling and the chorus coincide, pausing in the same pose. Accompanied only by the sound of Thatcher’s rabble rousing, the timing of the group is forceful. On Thatcher’s “No, no, no!” they all turn to look at Siew Ling, then walk around her. Eventually only Siew Ling remains in the light, the others only black bodies seen in silhouette. This is a reverse of the opening scene, showing the iconic figure become flesh.

Divas is quite an accessible work, and, refreshingly for contemporary dance, it is not pretending to be more than it is. The movement vocabulary is functional and the character analysis fairly straightforward. There is an element of un-PC defiance in the choice of the Thatcher voice-over – she’s such a hated figure, especially in the arts community, which her policies sought to undermine at every turn. But that’s precisely why she may work so well in this context – this work is explicitly about women choosing to make unpopular, unfeminine choices. That they do so in Divas with strong clean contemporary technique to a gorgeous soundtrack just makes it all the more palatable.

Amy Len’s work Mysterious Rapture ticks the very opposite boxes to Divas. With an often bizarre movement quality, and a complete lack of narrative, Mysterious Rapture follows the pattern of Tanztheater, forcing the audience to make their own connections through the opaque presentation of contrasting scenes. This unwillingness to play to the peanut gallery made it much more interesting to me, but undoubtedly more challenging for the majority of the audience, and illustrates Amy Len’s own personal iconoclasm in making unfeminine unpopular choices.

The weirdest element in Rapture is the costumes, designed by Lee Choy Wan. Most of the dancers wear a cave-woman ensemble of huge fluffy white sheepskin briefs and capelets over nude leotards. They look rather like standard poodles groomed for show day. The lighting, by Tan Eng Heng, is also dim, cave-like, with strong angled pathways, spotlights and sidelights. In this ambience, Ing Fung moves slowly through several solos in the downstage left corner. Curling and uncurling, now she gazes over one shoulder, now she inverts into a carefully controlled shoulder stand. There is a repeated motif of lying on the back, flexed feet slowly pedaling the air, hands with fingers outstretched thrust between the thighs.

Similar sexual images are rife in Mysterious Rapture – the title itself indicates the main theme. But thanks to the restrained lighting, the slow butoh-esque pace, and the inward focus of the performers, Rapture never breaks the boundaries of good taste. In fact, there are some scenes where I would have preferred something more carnal and luscious. Rapture swings back and forth between atmospheric theatrical scenes, and faster dancey large-group set pieces. In the latter the movement is clean and angular, all swiping arms and sharp controlled counter-turns. At one moment, the mass of dancers repeats the same phrase over and over, featuring an out-thrust pelvis over a strongly arched foot with the arms hugging the chest, a foot circling on the floor, and a big kick to the side – impressive, watchable, but somehow too academic.

The slower scenes generate stronger images. In one, Lim Hooi Meng, swathed in red, moves gradually to centre stage. In the spotlight, she leans and gyrates from the waist, led by her twisting fanning fingers. With her height and her fingertips bent classically backwards, she seems a cool statuesque Asian Amazon. Then she starts to gather her red skirt towards her, exposing her legs as she audaciously tucks the skirt into her crotch, all the while staring fixedly at the audience. It recalls the mythic meme of all life deriving from the female vagina, together with the power of menstrual blood both to anoint and to soil. Here the myth is reversed, with life, passion, blood, deliberately gathered back by the woman into her own body – a denial of mere naturalism, a moment of seizing conscious control.

In the following scene, Lim Siew Ling takes the lead in the downstage corner. Upended, posterior to the audience, she circles a bent leg around and around. Gradually she pulls herself up onto tiptoe on taut legs, the narrowness of her feet in tight fifth and the width of her hips and butt in fluffy white making a long isosceles triangle standing on its point. Ever so slowly, she pulls up to standing and walks upstage, pigeon toed, knees wobbling. Meanwhile, a troupe of cavewomen on the floor behind her, kneeling with their rumps in the air, push slowly backwards. The sidelights are raised slightly off the ground, so you cannot see their bodies, only a primitive and surreal parade of their disembodied bottoms moving slowly past.

This potential objectification of women’s bodies as isolated parts leads to the most powerful moment of the work in the penultimate scene, in which Siew Ling is tossed back and forth by other dancers holding the edge of her long red skirt. Skewered by a red spotlight, Siew Ling reaches out as if for help and is repeatedly repulsed, until she starts to looks like a desperate victimized drug addict being bounced to and fro. The increasing violence of the repetitive movement calls to mind the work of Pina Bausch, proponent of Tanztheater, and the charges from her critics that she exploits a pornography of pain. In the end, when Siew Ling is dragged offstage with her skirt around her head, her legs and butt exposed, into the darkness and a crashing crescendo, there is no doubt about the connotation. The word ‘rapture’ derives from the Latin ‘rapere’ – to seize and carry off. Ditto, unsurprisingly, the word ‘rape’.

The final moment of the work, in which a line of cavewomen slowly cross the stage in a bent-kneed walk in order of height, serves to temper the shock, and the loss of control, of the preceding scene. Goh Lee Kwang’s complex and varied sound score, which complements and magnifies the tone of the work throughout, rises to an almost uncomfortable sirenlike wail. Darkness drops, the music is wild, and somewhere in the darkness the women are still moving deliberately forwards.

Before I end, I would just like to defend the title of She Moves at a Deliberate Pace against its detractors. So many dance shows (my own included) have forgettable, throwaway names. We seem to think that the work will stand on its own, neither helped nor hindered by banal titles. By contrast, She Moves at a Deliberate Pace constructs a definite mental image of a woman engaged in conscious action. The phrase is juxtaposed in our collective subconscious with “She moves in mysterious ways”, a phrase which encapsulates all the essentialist versions of the female as beautiful, natural and inscrutable (even to herself), in contrast with the logical cultured male. The choice of She Moves at a Deliberate Pace shows a greater sensitivity towards recent feminist theory than many other recent dance tributes to womanhood. Again, it might be an unpopular choice of title, but ultimately it is an empowering one.

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All photographs courtesy of Wyman Wong. Thanks to Leng Poh Gee and LAPAR Lab for permission to reproduce them here.

Bringing their A game to international high school dance meet

IASAS Cultural Convention: Dance
IASAS Dance Teams
3-5 March 2011
Robert B. Gaw Theatre, International School of Kuala Lumpur

Scuttling creatures facing in two directions. Beetles in evening wear doing a jig. Rainbows in grayscale, Spiderman and Green Goblin, clones, unhappy families and dance — oh my!

The IASAS Cultural Convention brings together dance teams from six big international high schools in the region — Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Bangkok, Taipei, Jakarta and Manila — for a 3-day meet at one school once a year. Each team of up to 10 dancers creates their own 20-minute work for performance. It’s a showcase, not a competition, although there’s always a certain amount of circling and sizing up going on. On the whole, however, the kids are a supportive and responsive audience for each others’ work, and what great work it can be. Whether their school has a fully-fledged dance program offering several dance classes for credit during school hours or only an extra-curricular after-school dance program, the dancers (and their coaches) bring their A game to Cultural Convention.

Full disclosure: I was a four-year IASAS dancer with the International School of Kuala Lumpur (ISKL) from 1994-1997. Duuring that time I was guilty of all the sins and very few of the virtues mentioned below, but IASAS remains in my memory as one of the best experiences a young dancer can have: the opportunity (and responsibility) of creating an entertaining and cohesive dance work in any genre, in collaboration with at least seven other moody, difficult and uncertain teenagers. Today I go to watch IASAS with a certain amount of nostalgia, but I’m also ready to be impressed, and the 29th Annual IASAS Cultural Convention held at ISKL this month did not disappoint.

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The host school usually opens the event, so the ISKL dance team landed the unfortunate performance slot of 7.30am on Thursday morning. Luckily I had watched ISKL’s dance work at their evening showcase the previous weekend, so I didn’t have to show up to the yawn-ably early morning performance.

ISKL’s dance depicted a 24-hour cycle in the life of the rainforest, and was entitled Awe, in reference to the feeling presumably evoked when contemplating nature’s realm. While ISKL’s performance did not quite generate its eponymous sentiment, it was certainly always entertaining. The host school gets to pull out the stops on technical exploits, hence the elaborate 3D forest backdrop, judicious use of a haze machine and other little tricks like a dancer flying down in a wired harness. Lots of beautiful costumes also kept the eyes happy, especially the girls’ butterfly-wing skirts in the first section, and the boys’ sheer black shirts in the darkness sequence.

The opening scene of insects (dressed in evening wear — ball gowns for the girls, coat-tails for the boys) who literally jitterbug the afternoon away, was charming, and made good use of the dramatic ability of some of the dancers. The after-dark scene with a lantern passing from hand to hand, signifying bioluminescence, and followed by a white moth character, was also effective.

The afternoon storm scene contained some conventional structures — dancers running around in circles waving coloured scarves to represent rain and flying debris — but also one surprising element: the boys went out to the edge of the apron, and motioned to the audience to follow along with their clapping and finger snapping. It’s an old theatre game I remember from eighth grade — with enough people participating, you can create the effect of an a capella rainstorm. In this dance, the sequence was too quick to create a substantial result, but the idea was clever and trendy, and probably anticipates more audience participation attempts in IASAS dances to come.

The ISKL dancers are often guilty of choosing movements far beyond their technical capacity, and this is frequently the low point of their shows. It’s unfortunate particularly because it isn’t necessary: the simplest things, from a technical standpoint, can have the greatest effect. For example, the dancers suddenly coming together in a forward-facing clump, and slowly sinking onto one hand on the floor behind them, made a striking dynamic interruption of constant on-the-beat moving.  Another moment when the boys on the floor rocked from side to side on their hands, elbows bent out to the sides, was easy yet evocative of a mysterious nocturnal predator. Yet another example, when the boys caught the girls in a simple turning baby carry, was made notable by the massing of bodies and the lovely lighting.

Another weakness of this work was going off-topic, including sections completely unconnected to the theme. The hip hop section (although it was interesting to watch the differences in quality between the male and female dancers) and the group huddle which violently pulled back any members trying to break out, came under this category. An exception was the final scene of groups depicting blooming flowers, especially memorable for its Rafflesia pose: all the dancers clumped together to form a faceless mass, with hands rising in the centre and lit by a strong red glow.

In sum, Awe was an uneven work, but with its constant changes of scene, costume, style and tone, there was never a dull moment.

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Taipei American School’s Boundless was quite a different case — a formal study of movement quality staying close to the structure of the music, but textured with surprising variations, canons and patterns. This work is something of a departure for TAS, more known for its theatrical character-based style, and as an experiment in a new direction it worked wonderfully well. The title is deceptive — in reality, this is a work tightly bound in its conception and execution, with four parts exploring variations on the themes of repetition, awkwardness, groundedness and elevation.  (I failed to read the program notes for Boundless before the show, but when I finally did, I was gratified to find that my notes contained three out of four of the names for the section headings!)

The beginning of the work — a strong shape with all the dancers lined up on the front of the stage, which cleverly decumulates into a diagonal — set the stage for the kind of formal playfulness that was to come. The repetitive section began with a travelling grand jete phrase like a class study, repeated over and over with different combinations of dancers, sudden stops and goes, in straight lines and circles. TAS is also known for its strong male dancers, and the bouncy elevation of the boys in this section did not disappoint.

The second section, illustrating awkwardness, was the most creative. (It’s interesting that most high school dancers, and not just TAS, come up with their most original ideas when they allow themselves to think, “Wierd!”) Couples sitting back to back scooted on stage,  to delightful and surprising effect — one person pushing off with the feet, the other with feet paddling wildly on the ground. Dancers were pulled around by a splayed hand thrust through the crook of an elbow. A line of dancers walked on in deep back arches, each holding the neck of the dancer in front. Towards the end, the entire group executed a neatly articulated phrase of rhythmic isolations, facing in different directions.

The slower grounded section came as a welcome lull, but the clever choreography did not let up, with cute transitions (two girls seated and spooning, one rolls over on her back to face the other way, then the other rolls — tah dah! same position, different direction) and occasional displays of virtuosity (a fantastic leap by two boys coming straight out of a weight-sharing pose leaning backwards on each others’ knees).

Nothing in Boundless was jarring; everything felt well judged. The transitions between the first three sections were subtle, so that the last transition, in silence with the dancers walking slowly off stage before erupting on again to the baroque tinkling of Bach, was also a welcome change.

Elevated, however, was the section I enjoyed least. An extended phrase with all the dancers in sync displayed weaknesses of technique which had not been previously evident. Towards the end of the work, the dancers looked strained and as if they weren’t enjoying the movement as much. The bravura ending, with girls being swung out by centrifugal force by a rotating group of boys, was impressive, but felt forced. I wondered how much of this was the result of having an external choreographer contributing to the final section, when the other sections were created by the dancers themselves.

All in all, however, Boundless was an enjoyable and surprisingly sophisticated work, showing what tasteful guidance coupled with talented young dancers can achieve.

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If Boundless was a triumph of formal movement engineering, Framed from Singapore American School was quite a different achievement, putting dance technique in the service of a strong emotional message. The premise — that posed family photos conceal the heartache beneath — was very clearly communicated, with the help of a great set — a large wooden picture frame on castors — and sensitive lighting which helped to focus the intimate scenes.

The work begins and ends with the dancers arranged within the frame like a happy family, all frozen smiles and hands on each others’ shoulders. As the characters step through the frame, they assume their individual attributes: the workaholic father clutching his briefcase, the attention-starved mother ringing her hands, and a bevy of squabbling children and future in-laws. The work consists of a series of encounters between the characters as well as occasional solos, but always backgrounded by a few characters within the wooden frame who maintain the chirpy falsehood, “In our family, everything is GREAT!”

The joy of watching the SAS dancers comes from knowing they can do everything they try to do. It is not that the dancers have omnipotent technique (although they certainly are strong) but they make smart choices. Everything they perform is firmly within their capacity; they are never reaching for something out of range. There is a lot to be said for IASAS as a platform for high school students trying things they have never tried before, which necessarily involves some failure as well as success, but it is also nice to watch tight polished performances in which no lift is wobbly and every grand battement is stretched and finished.

Framed made good use of the space, pulling the audience’s attention wide and deep towards figures huddled at the back of the stage, off stage and at the very limits of the proscenium. All the dancers were completely committed to the emotional expression of their characters, as well as their movements. Moments of contact — usually of the flinging, tugging, struggling kind — worked well within the theme.

There was never any lack of things to watch; indeed, often it was impossible to follow all the things happening at the same time. The angst also got a little repetitive and literal — there was plenty of pulling out of hair and stomping around which might have been rendered more subtly. There was also not much development of the characters — although each was rendered strongly, it was hard to see much change happening over the course of the work.

Nevertheless, Framed contained the only moment in the whole IASAS weekend that made me feel like bursting into spontaneous applause. The love duet between the character of the grown up son and his adoring fiancée, although fairly conventional in form and playing to the dancers’ strengths, was quite simply a joy to watch: a sensitive depiction, absolutely in control, showing natural attraction between the dancers. Beautiful but fragile, it was a nice way to remind us that although many family photographs may be gross misrepresentations, at least some of that love and happiness is real.

……….

Jakarta International School’s Musings with Morpheus was another example of a work driven by drama and characterisation. It presented six different dream types, ranging from romantic dream to nightmare, many of the scenes featuring only two or three dancers playing the main roles.

Every scene began and ended with the characters lying on large bed angled upwards on one side of the stage. After a brief, sometimes spoken, introduction, the characters would fall asleep, the music for their section would begin and they would slide off the bed and into their dream world. These transitions, however, felt rushed and unprepared, almost like afterthoughts, and the lack of any connection between one scene and the next emphasised the feeling of items ticked off a laundry list rather than a single cohesive theme.

Some of the scenes were rather lack lustre and unconvincing. The listless romantic sequence, for example, lacked any feeling of attraction between the two characters. The unsympathetic lighting throughout the work failed to create a dreamlike atmosphere, and, coupled with the coloured silk teddy costumes and largely formulaic choreography, left the dancers with weaker techniques nowhere to hide. Morpheus suffered from a number of other misjudgements, like the over-the-top fake-knife stabbing of one best friend by another after the nightmare scene, when a simple look of fear and distrust would have sufficed.

There were two scenes, however, that stood out in Morpheus for their creativity and comic charm. These — the superhero dream and the ‘quirky/strange’ dream — were both driven by their male dancers (why do boys seem to have the monopoly on senses of humour?). John played a very likeable overgrown toddler dressed up in a Spiderman outfit who chases his sassy female Green Goblin around in chassé circles to a retro Michael Bublé score, much to the delight of the audience. In ‘quirky/strange dream’ (yet another example of creative = weird, in teenager parlance), Fujio led his troupe of Wonderland-like characters in cute little bouncy hip-hoppy movements with lots of isolations and gesticulations, but his real genius was the ability to amplify the fairly minor movement material through his inventive and well-timed facial expressions.

In the ‘strange dream’ the dreaming ‘Alice’ character spends the entire scene bewildered by the shenanigans of Fujio and his crew, before finally waking up on the bed. Looking around wildly, she spots Fujio’s face, grinning like a demon, bobbing above the head board. Dazed, she reaches out to grab his dancing top-knot, but he ducks out of sight, and she turns an astonished face back to the audience, wondering if she had really seen what she thought she had seen. It was a dramatic, truly dream-like, moment that would have made a haunting ending for Morpheus.

……….

A work that had no problem with beginnings and endings was Surrogatus by the dance team from the International School of Bangkok. It starts with dancers walking onto the stage one by one, tossing floppy life-sized dolls into a pile in the centre. Two concealed dancers, dressed like the dolls, emerge from the pile strangely conjoined by a black straightjacket. One of the dancers controls the other, tossing her body to and fro like a puppet. As the duet progresses, however, the other dancer seizes control, manipulating her partner by the long sleeves of the straightjacket. It’s a succinct comment on the treachery of power, making you question who controls who in a surrogate relationship.

At the end of the work, one dancer lugs a doll on stage, almost hidden by her load. She makes the doll dance, then hugs it to herself with a fierce need, before flinging it from her, to leave it lying on the ground, all twisted and used.

These are powerful and evocative images in a work that aims to explore the “connections, relationships, rights and societal responses” surrounding the topic of surrogates. That is a lot to expect out of a 20-minute dance, and at least some of its intentions did not come through clearly. This year, every IASAS dance team was allowed a short video projection as an introduction to their dance work, and I think ISB’s video erred on the side of too much rather than too little information. After I heard the dancers on the video discuss everything they were trying to ‘say’ in the work, I became distracted by trying to match the work with the words, rather than allowing the immediate quality of the work to speak for itself.

One of the scenes that did clearly communicate was the repetitive production line sequence in which two dancers oversaw the creation of series of clones. At the completion of every unit in the production line, a dancer tapped one hand down the other arm from fingertip to inside elbow, then slid the hand out into a kind of heil Hitler salute. That one striking movement implied both a mechanized measuring of a human body part, and a relentless checking of items on a list. The salute also suggested the immorality of people who act like robots under orders, and the grim consequence of Nazi policies on eugenics.

The last two clones from the production, played by the two male dancers in the troupe, then went to war. They battled it out with acrobatic tumbles, throws and rolls up over their toes, until one clone ended up a twitching short-circuited pile on the ground. Some clones, apparently, are more equal than others.

The choreography of Surrogatus was dense and quick changing, juxtaposing large full-body movements with small details, and playing with different speeds. It was well constructed and well executed, but lacking in focus, often creating a blurry maze of movement without distinction. It was easy to become distracted, too, from the ensemble quality of the work by a few of the dancers with superior stage presence or abilities, especially Janet Neufeld, and Nate Vorapharuek, with her preternaturally supple torso. Overall, Surrogatus was enjoyable, but it would have benefited from stronger energy, to bring the whole work snapping into focus.

……….

Like TAS, International School of Manila took the opportunity this year to present a more abstract work than their usual offerings. Their all-female work Spectra begins with a single dancer, clad in a black unitard with attached cape, flinging her wings about the stage. She is joined by another dancer dressed identically in white. Having vanquished the dancer in black, the dancer in white shimmies out from the wings with her cape spread wide, then drops her wings to magically reveal another dancer in bright pink. It is not until the white dancer repeats this trick with another dancer wearing chartreuse yellow, who is followed by one in green, then red, blue and orange that the penny finally drops: in the beginning there was darkness, then there was white light, and subsequently light split into its component parts: all the colours of the rainbow.

The colours are all very pretty, and the dancers are certainly skilled, with their backward walkovers and high extensions, and yet individually they fail to make much of an impact. It is only when they come together to make group shapes that they really catch the eye and the mind. A Pilobolus-inspired balance, with two girls at the base bending towards each other from the waist and grasping each others arms, and two other girls standing on their lower backs, mirroring the position of the base, worked wonderfully well. Another moment, with the dancers in a diagonal line with one leg in attitude to the back, transmitting a breakdancing-like wave motion through their joined hands like a pulse of energy, also stood out. The essential rainbow shape, with the bottom dancer curled on the ground and the others layered on top of her, was terrifically effective. So was the final moment of the rainbow section, with changing coloured light projected over the swirling wings of the dancer in white — very Loie Fuller.

The rainbow section worked best with the physics theme. The second half of the work seemed like a combination of technical showboating and sound-bite dance history: one group wearing tap shoes, another in pointe shoes, then a barefoot group doing self-consciously ‘modern’ floor-based movement. The group in tap shoes were fairly skilled, and all in time with each other, but sadly not in time with the music. One of the dancers on pointe did not seem to have strong enough technique to safely support her movements. The modern group was clean and polished, and their gray halter-neck biketard made a very attractive costume, but again, much of the individual movement in the second section failed to make an impact. Strong group shapes — like the hand-holding line that consumed itself, another version of the rainbow pose in grayscale, and a line of dancers leaning back on each others’ knees and making shapes with their arms which echoed the projections of musical rhythm on the backdrop — reigned supreme.

It is hard, especially with an abstract theme, not to fall back on either virtuosity for its own sake or incongruous characterisation. Several times I felt put off by what seemed to be unnecessary facial expressions — rainbows do not smile, neither do they stare intensely into the audience. What works better for abstract themes and unitard costumes (or at least, it did for Cunningham) is a blank face, and focusing instead on the cool, precise use of the body to evoke a kind of cosmic truth. This can be a challenge for dancers who are used to being more dramatically present on stage, but it is a skill well worth developing.

Nonetheless, Spectra was a good work to save until last. ISM dance team’s combination of technical strength with variety, creativity and energy brought the IASAS dance program of Cultural Convention to a triumphant close.

Their all-girl team did not, however, exemplify what I felt was the most outstanding overall feature of this year’s IASAS Dance: the presence of so many male dancers. It’s always wonderful to see boys staking their claim to dance, which often get short shrift as a purely girl’s domain, and even more wonderful to see them doing so with such power, technical ability, humour and daring. The boys are taking IASAS Dance by storm, and I cannot wait to see the female dancers raise their game to keep up.

Surprise!

 

An Informal Showing of Dance
Saturday 9 January 2011
Experimental Theatre, ASWARA
Featuring Battery Dance Company

Sometimes the performances that spring up out of nowhere, cobbled together at the last minute and charging no entry fee, are the most satisfying. Perhaps it is because the audience arrives with full pockets and low expectations. Or perhaps it is merely felicitous chance that creates these unexpectedly enjoyable dance offerings.

Last Saturday’s informal showing at Experimental Theatre, ASWARA, was one such serendipitous event. It was originally intended to display the products of the five-day Dancing to Connect workshops organised by visiting artists from New York City’s Battery Dance Company. The end product, however, was much more lavish, with repertory works from host ASWARA, Sutra Dance Theatre (who are launching into a collaborative project with Battery), and the Battery artists themselves.

The evening opened with the delightful Joget Cak Kun Cak by ASWARA dancers. The ASWARA dancers’ familiar recipe of whoops and smiles never seem to get stale. With their natural musicality and unforced smiles — especially noticeable from Sufi and Mek — this was a fun little opening number, even when the dancers couldn’t remember what they were doing.

The joget was followed by the first Dancing to Connect workshop showcase, coached by Battery dancer Robin Cantrell. Dancing to Connect is a program that Battery has been introducing all around the world as a means of providing teenagers with the tools for getting in touch with the dancer within and choreographing their own performances. This particular group of teenagers was composed of refugees from Burma and Sri Lanka, brought together by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

[It would be easy, here, to regurgitate all the trite pleasantries about how inspiring and naturally talented these kids are, what a great opportunity it must have been for them, and how much they must be enjoying the therapeutic and uplifting qualities of Art. No doubt, but I think this goes for every group of kids learning to dance, and it doesn't necessarily illuminate the actions of this particular group, so I'll try to stick to what I saw.]

The UNHCR kids doing the wave.

There was a lot of pop culture influence in the movement material — plenty of hiphop bounciness and some popping and locking. I was struck by how much the refugee teens’ movement quality was similar to that of non-dancing teenagers I had coached at the International School of Kuala Lumpur — a combination of naive animal mimicry and the practice posturings of emerging sexuality — a curious similarity, given the very different backgrounds of the two groups. Apparently some things (like MTV) do cross cultural and financial boundaries.

Another notable element in the work were the graceful transitions. A small group of girls entered in a line, flapping like swans. After a few movements in place, they took off around the stage, gradually joined by dancers entering from the sides until all the dancers were on stage in a flock flying in a ring. Later, the circle of dancers repeatedly surged into the centre and then expanded again, leaving a single dancer behind in the centre to dance a brief solo. It was like watching waves at the seashore, coming in and going out, each time leaving a different piece of flotsam behind on the beach.

Third on the program was Alarippu, an old repertoire work by Umesh Shetty. In bharatanatyam, the alarippu is the introductory piece in an evening’s entertainment, in which the dancer systematically introduces all the elements of the body in movement (stamping, eye movement, hand gestures, etc) before launching into longer and longer combinations of increasing energy. This alarippu followed a similar structure but included movement vocabulary from Western contemporary dance and ballet, creating a more free-wheeling style.

Some very strong ASWARA dancers were performing — Faillul, Yunus, Norbaizurah, and Xin Ying among them — but the eye was automatically drawn to the newcomer: Kishore Kumar, a first-year student in the diploma program at ASWARA. Tall, powerful and statuesque, he’s definitely worth looking at, but it is the stylistic differences between him and the other ASWARA dancers that make him stand out. Previously from Temple of Fine Arts, Kishore is commanding in his bharatanatyam, and comfortable with the contemporary and ballet elements, but he simply cannot match the uniformity of the other dancers who have trained together for so long under the same unique syllabus. There is certainly a recognisable ‘ASWARA style’ emerging, and I look forward to seeing what ASWARA graduates will make of this in the long run.

Battery Dance Company contributed two short works from their repertoire to the program, both choreographed by the dancers themselves. The first was ‘She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not’, a duet created by Sean Scantlebury, and performed by Sean and Robin Cantrell. Robin starts squatting on Sean’s shoulders, before smoothly transiting into other lifts, including a lovely ‘Rolls-Royce’ arch standing on Sean’s thigh. Then follows a long sequence of movements in sync, in which Robin makes good use of her flexible torso. A repeated motif is Sean spooning Robin from behind, she sometimes accepting and sometimes rejecting his overtures. There is nicely controlled tenderness between the two, but the loveliest moment is the ending, in which the dancers perform the opening lift sequence in retrograde, cunningly running the movement backwards to return again to the initial squatting lift in a downward shaft of light. ‘She Loves Me’ isn’t rocket science, but it’s satisfying to watch these two strong experienced professionals going through their paces.

Then Sutra Dance Theatre had a chance to show their stuff in Ramli Ibrahim’s work ‘Kamala’. A homage to the female principle, the work references myths of Indian, Western and pop culture, including stories of Jesus, Shiva, Durga and, apparently, Lady Gaga. With Guna dancing as the token male, the female dancers produced a strong ensemble effect; Divya, especially, is growing into a stately presence. Rathimalar was unsurprisingly cast as the central female figure, which was a blessing. No one else could have carried off the blatant representation in the work — circling hands showing breasts, diving hands palm-to-palm indicating vagina — with such convincing dignity. It was interesting to watch the subtle play of her facial expressions; reigning herself back very firmly from melodrama, she allowed expressions to pass over her face like ripples on a pond.

I am not overly fond of homages to women or the female principle, and I feel I have seen a lot of them recently. For some, it may be quite acceptable that the pinnacle of womanhood is the ability to give birth to, suckle, nurture, dress, adore, mourn for and eventually consume society’s male god, but not for me. So I couldn’t enjoy ‘Kamala’ as much as I would have liked.

The following two works — the product of Dancing to Connect workshops with ASWARA students — went in quite the opposite direction to ‘Kamala’. Instead of being clearly representational and narrative, they were somewhat bewildering cauldrons of movement without discernible direction. Too many cooks spoiling the broth, perhaps — always a danger in large groups in which everyone is the choreographer. Nevertheless it was bracing to revel in the sheer energy and physical capacity of the ASWARA dancers, to be swamped by the power of the large group sections, and to pick out intriguing individual performances. In the diploma program group, Christine Chew had lovely lines and attention to detail, and made the most of every movement. Sufi showed a new capacity for subtle articulation and experimentation with movement vocabulary — he is definitely one to watch. In the degree program, Xin Ying displayed her usual confidence and finesse, while being tossed around between different partners, and the lifting combination of two women and three men created some interesting possibilities.

After the two ASWARA works, I was literally stuffed with movement. It was too much to stomach: huge chunks of dense movement material without lull or respite. But I did detect an inkling of newness in the ASWARA performances, a quality reminiscent of Ohad Naharin’s movement technique called Gaga. Gaga often uses visceral imagery to drive movement (imagine yourself squelching spaghetti in your fingers, for instance, or steering a heavy shopping trolley through a crowded supermarket). Naharin also frequently arranges his dancers in a mass on stage and has them go through the same movements, but without imposing uniformity. The result is that every person in the crush can be seen as an individual, sensitive to the ones around them, with blood cells, skin, muscles, guts and mind all completely in the movement. I hope the ASWARA dancers manage to maintain this new energy, as well as taking on board the creative tools that made it happen.

The last work in this gluttonous cornucopia of dance was ‘Black and White’, choreographed by Robin Cantrell for herself and Sean Scantlebury. Robin’s style is much more luscious and sinewy than Sean’s, full of rotating hips and high releases, suggestive of ‘Eurotrash’ choreographers like Jiří Kylián. The work starts with solos for Robin, in a black leotard, and Sean, in white bike shorts, to an atmospheric ambient musical score. Each solo is fairly loosely focused thematically but allows us to enjoy watching the dancer at play. Then the two dancers come together, highlighting the contrasts between their physique and personal styles. Again, there are some lovely lifts — in one Sean appears to be lifting Robin with two hands around her neck (really, she is holding onto his wrists). At the end of the work, the dancers take handfuls of coloured pigments from containers at the corners of the stage and daub themselves and each other in alternatives to black and white. In the final image, the kneeling dancers take it in turns to scatter pigment overhead, creating very photogenic puffs of colour hanging in the air, made even more memorable by the tiny interplay of the dancers’ fingers meeting over their heads.

Oh what a crazy unexpected afternoon of dance it all was! With the exception of the back-to-back ASWARA workshop showings, the arrangement of works served to highlight everyone’s strength and uniqueness. Last-minute lighting by Sutra’s Sivarajah Natarajan — particularly the combination of strong turquoise backlighting with amber sidelights — added theatrical magic. All the dancers, from the rank beginners to the hale professionals, brought their best game. It could not possibly have been any better, even with months of extra planning.

Disappointed that you missed this show? Keep up to date with last-minute happenings in dance in the Klang Valley with the fortnightly MyDance Alliance e-newsletter. Subscribe at http://www.mydancealliance.org or email contact@mydancealliance.org.

Thanks as always to James Quah, who did a superlative job with the photos. More here: http://jamesq.multiply.com/

More ballet highlights from Japan-Malaysia collaborative production

Rachel Rawlins and Robert Curran in the iconic pose from Kenneth MacMillan's 'Manon'.

International Ballet Gala
15 January 2011
Istana Budaya
Danceworks Production & Ena Ballet Studio Company

Dancework Production’s recent short season of ballet at Istana Budaya, co-produced by Ena Ballet Studio Company from Japan, was another welcome provision for KL’s starved ballet audiences, following their production of Carmen last year. I caught the gala night of classical and modern works on Saturday, which was sandwiched between two performances of Don Quixote.

The producers declined to include this season in judging for the revamped Kakiseni Arts Awards amid concerns that not enough of the performers and creative team were Malaysian. Certainly the international artists dominated the stage, but it was a learning experience for the few Malaysian dancers, and the audience was grateful for the chance to witness performances by some stellar dancers, including guesting principals of the Australian Ballet.

The program featured a number of short excerpts from meat-and-potatoes ballet classics: Le Corsaire, Flames of Paris and The Nutcracker. The dancers conducted themselves admirably in these items designed solely to test their technical strength. Yasuomi Akimoto hung breathlessly in the air during his jumps, but lacked the masculine swagger required for Le Corsaire and seemed scrawnier than when I saw him last at the TDS Festival in Putrajaya in December 2009. Perhaps his partner, Madoka Toguchi, was too tall for him, and altogether she was rather lackluster, although she demonstrated neat pliable bourrees and got through her fouettes with admirable determination.

By comparison, Rino Fujihashi in ‘Flames of Paris’ was a little turning dynamo, although I wondered whether it was altogether wise to include two variations in the program featuring extended fouette turns, in addition to some bravado fouettes whipped out for the grand finale. Rino also displayed her variation with many fondus and plies on pointe with assurety, but it was Kevin Jackson from the Australian Ballet who really caught the eye in that item — he seemed to be having so much more fun.

The Australians were really wonderful to watch; only their level of skill and ability enabled them to transcend the strictures of technique and to aspire to both artistry and enjoyment. Rachel Rawlins and Robert Curran were lovely in the pas de deux from Manon, although Curran seemed to find the floor slippery. The two displayed beautifully complementary lines and easy trust. The pas de deux from Swan Lake, with Rawlins and Jackson, was also a treat. Generally I don’t see the point of Graeme Murphy’s re-adaptations of the classics, but this duet made the most of the bouncing lilt of the music and the close contact of the choreography made the romance much more believable and human. Rawlin’s delicacy suited her well to the work, and the two dancers together created an atmosphere of charming vulnerability.

The remaining two works on the program were choreographed by Danceworks artistic director Jie Choong Wan-Chin. The weak points of Wan-Chin’s choreography seem to be beginnings and endings, while the main substance of the works are well-formed and satisfying.

Steve Goh and Suhaili Micheline in 'Luna'.

‘Luna’, a duet for Suhaili Micheline and Steve Goh, was a contemporary work set to a nuanced percussive arrangement of Ravel’s Bolero. It seemed a little too long, especially compared to the other works in the program, but the two dancers kept their energy levels high. In their soft landings and mirrored movement, Suhaili (as Luna) and Steve were so evenly matched they seemed like twins. There were some interesting arrangements in the duet — wide-legged stances, and an enchanting series of supported arabesques a la seconde — but the natural connectivity of the duet was marred by the work’s beginning and ending. The non-dancing appearance of a child meant to be a younger Luna, and creepy calls of “Lu-na!” from the audience in time with the music were unnecessary and distracting. Suhaili’s lengthy entrance from the audience was also unsuccessful, given the unforgiving sightlines of Istana Budaya.

Excerpts from ‘Cinderella’, also choreographed by Wan-Chin, suffered similarly. The first scene, a glimpse of the funeral of Cinderella’s mother, complete with blood-curdling scream, was jolting and ugly. The scene with royal cooks preparing the banquet was tedious and unnecessary. The inclusion of a video projection of what first appeared to be clouds moving over the moon but then turned out to be a sonogram of a fetus was completely baffling and somewhat grotesque.

These mis-steps were unfortunate, given the promise of the rest of the material. Wan-Chin’s simple modern ballet style showed the dancers to their advantage. Naim Syahrazad and Fairul Zahid, in drag as the ugly stepsisters, didn’t have to do much to elicit giggles from the audience. Ena Hirose as Cinderella was much more charming and convincing than as Carmen — until I saw her in costume backstage, I actually thought she had been replaced in the performance by one of her students, she seemed so shy and youthful on stage. Rosemarie Starke as the stepmother was warmly characterful (I didn’t quite buy her cruelty to Cinderella, she seemed such a nurturing motherly type) and Robert Curran as the prince was appropriately noble, although he did sometimes seem like a Gulliver among Lilliputians, surrounded by the little Malaysians and male dancers from Bangkok City Ballet.  Satoko Konishi stole the show as a court lady vying for Curran’s eye. Despite not having much to do, Satoko’s dramatic flair reached up to the cheap seats, and her movements were all emphatic and clear.

The transformation scene from 'Cinderella'.

The scene in which Cinderella and her prince have a flirtatious duet with an orange was nice, especially the atmospheric blue moon lighting. But the scene that really made my heart beat faster was the transformation at midnight, with the court escorts miming the tick-tock of the clock and Cinderella launching into desperate fouettes as the other vengeful ladies closed in around her — jolly good stuff!

All in all, I am grateful that Wan-Chin and Danceworks have put in the hard work to bring nights of ballet like this (and dancers like the Australians) to KL. With time and practice, the wrinkles can be ironed out, and judging by the crowd at Istana Budaya, there are a lot of people out there eager to see Danceworks’ next move.

Many thanks to James Quah for the use of his beautiful photos. http://www.jamesquah.com

Sympathetic exploration of madness from within

SMS from an Angel
9-12 Dec
Indicine at KLPac
Directed by Kimmy Kiew and presented by KLPac

Mental illness can be horrifying, terrifying and destructive. It can also be very inspiring, and not just in the Van Goghian ear-cutting manner of genius. Those who are witness to madness cannot help but wonder at the fragility of sanity, the socially-constructed nature of normality, and the challenge of epistemology – how we can ever know what we think we know.

Thus it was for Kimmy Kiew, who was inspired by the experience of a friend with paranoid schizophrenia to create the physical theatre work ‘SMS from an Angel’. With three bodies on a small triangular stage who alternate between playing the role of the crazed one and the other characters – hallucinations, medical staff and parents – ‘SMS from an Angel’ presents a series of vignettes exploring the experience of the mentally ill.

Mental illness, even just schizophrenia, is a huge topic. It might be best if the work did not try to delve into the causes of schizophrenia, which (as the mental illness awareness literature provided in the foyer explains) are many, varied and baffling even for medical experts. Certainly not every sensitive child who has imaginary friends and who comes from a broken family – the scenario portrayed in one scene of this work – ends up schizophrenic. The other scenes of the work focus, more successfully, on the actual experience of struggling with mental illness and with its treatment.

The treatment is the real struggle, because for most mentally ill the cure is worse than the disease. There is some comfort in being crazy, no matter how twisted that may seem to the ‘sane’. To admit that you are mentally ill is to renounce all sense of self, to confess that everything you think you know you do not, and to acknowledge that your own brain, your very centre of knowledge and existence, is monstrously flawed. Subsequently, to submit to treatment for mental illness goes against every instinct of self-preservation.

‘SMS from an Angel’ opens with a powerful scene in which Leng Poh Gee, as the crazed one, surrenders his body to the investigative onslaught of modern medicine. Sitting on a chair and clad in a slate-gray gown, he sticks out his tongue for inspection, taps his forearm to raise a vein for a needle, presents the pulse in his bicep for a blood pressure test, and breathes deeply as he allows a doctor to listen to his chest with a stethoscope. When he opens his eyes wide with his fingers you cannot help but remember that scene with ocular forceps from Clockwork Orange. Again and again he goes through the rigmarole, allowing medical science to exhaustively examine his body, because his mind, where the real problem lurks, is out of reach. Frighteningly, the doctors or nurses attending to him are invisible, non-existent – you see only his actions of submission enacted in a vacuum. The only thing real to him is his loneliness.

When he voices this loneliness, medication is mechanically shoveled into his mouth by a nurse clad in an identical costume, played by Angel Chang. Later she morphs into his psychosis, who rides him like a possessing demon, whom he embraces and devours, and who embraces and devours him. When they roll on the floor in the half-light, their limbs intertwined, it is impossible to tell which character is which, and whether the person or the psychosis is real.

In the next scene, Poh Gee embodies the psychosis, to Kimmy’s crazed one, and his performance is one of the highlights of the work. While the crazed one works at her day job as a masseuse, slavishly greeting customers, serving tea and explaining massage rates (this part of her character is enacted by the frighteningly cheerful and mechanical Angel), Poh Gee lounges around in the background, jutting his hips with snake-like sinuosity and blinking his heavy-lidded eyes with disdain. He leans against the massage bench and lazily admires the coiling of his hands. Given the choice between the two – meaningless toil versus graceful idleness – who wouldn’t want to be insane?

There are many other arresting images in ‘SMS from an Angel’, some of them unintentional. In one moment, Angel as the crazed one scribbles her frustrations with chalk onto a table and then collapses onto the table. When she rises, her scribbles are clearly imprinted in reverse on the fabric of her dress, her strident protest now rendered incomprehensible gibberish. In another moment, the blown-up projection of an SMS on the stage backdrop dissolves into a grid pattern which falls on Angel, dividing her skin into meticulous blocks, atomising a human being into pixels.

The lighting design by Lim Ang Swee creates an interesting sense of intimacy on the small stage. In one scene when many torn umbrellas litter the stage, the light falling through the tears creates a textured gobo-like pattern on the floor of the stage – the light itself seems torn. Goh Lee Kwang’s sound design provides dramative effect and narrative assistance. When the familiar beep-beep beep-beep sound of an SMS arriving on a mobile phone decomposes into barely recognizable screeching, you know madness is on its way.

The video art created by Alison Khor is well executed, but its content – Kimmy with her head wrapped in cellophane, and reproductions of actual SMSes from Kimmy’s friend – is not very helpful. The former is too predictable a metaphor for madness, and the latter is too disconnected to the action on stage. There was also an issue in this show for non-Mandarin speakers, as all the spoken text is in Mandarin. While there was a sheet of translated text provided, it missed a few things vital to understanding the work – the whispers of the psychosis, Angel’s repetitive speech as the massage receptionist, and what Angel writes on the table – and it was difficult to know what lines from the paper were happening at what moment on stage. Simultaneous super-titling on an electronic message board would have been preferable, although admittedly it disrupts the aesthetics of the work.

Nevertheless, ‘SMS from an Angel’ is well worth seeing. Anyone familiar with mental illness, and even those who are not, will find thought-provoking potential in this attempt to explore the struggles of the mind. It is a sympathetic treatment of a difficult theme which is often ignored but which is closer than we think; as close, in fact, as thought itself.