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