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.