Poetic images miss the mainstream

Dreams in November
Hands Percussion
KLPac Pentas 1
19 November 2009

Hands Percussion has built a reputation for its high impact and high energy shows, with strong production values. In the uncertain environment of the arts in Malaysia, where expensive shows can be terrible and free shows excellent, Hands has consistently guaranteed a fun night out for all comers, whether connoisseurs or neophytes. This is what makes their most recent offering, Dreams in November, such a departure from the norm.

Last Thursday night, Pentas 1 at KLPac was packed with Hands fans. Groups of schoolchildren and gaggles of housewives waited eagerly for the lights to dim. But when the lights came up again during intermission and at the end of the night, the atmosphere was much more subdued. It wasn’t that Hands Percussion failed to deliver, but that it delivered a different show than expected, and its mainstream audience was not altogether convinced. Although Dreams included the usual high-energy large-group drum performances, these items were interspersed with quieter and, dare I say, more arty scenes.

There were extended periods of dancers moving in silence, during which the audience shifted impatiently, snored, and gossiped. A group of schoolgirls behind me burst into giggles over the appearance of dancers clad in briefs. Sometimes audience members provided their own sound effects where they felt they were lacking. Judging by the loss of focus in the audience around me, some musical scenes went on longer than the audience could tolerate, especially the solo drumming and the female percussionists on their platforms. Before intermission, when the audience generally needs to be pumped up and sent out into the foyer excited and chattering, an extended fan dance scene, lyrical and gentle, had the opposite effect. And at the end of the show, instead of going out with an enormous crash of drums, the lights faded slowly as a single dreamer sleepwalked slowly through the audience and out the back door of the stage, leaving the audience bemused and silent.

But for all its unorthodox dramatic choices, Dreams was full of well-crafted poetic images. In the opening scene, a silver Chinese lion lies snoozing in the middle of the stage, head tucked into its back feet like a cat, the scales on its side rippling like a fish. When it rouses to dance lightly on its feet, it seems to shrink and expand, now tall, now very small, on a stage covered with red cloth, bright as a Rothko colour field, which resonates green on your retina when you blink.

At the end of the first large drumming sequence, the drummers in white skirts whirl like dervishes, their drum sticks held out in both hands before them. They continue to turn long after we feel they should have collapsed to the ground with dizziness. The lights dim agonizingly slowly, and at the end, wondrously, they still and remain standing. Not reeling, not swaying – just standing.

A round platform slowly rotates onto the stage. On it sits a girl in a white spiky fur stole, surrounded by glass vessels which ring in different pitches when she taps them. Like a snow queen on a drifting iceberg, she plays her glass bowls like icicles, the shifting lights of the aurora moving around her. Later another platform enters, this one covered in brass gamelan units, with the player in their midst lit like a pinnacle in a lava flow.

A man lies on top of the big king drum, arms and legs outstretched. His shadow on the ground marks the limits of his pool of light like the Vitruvian Man. Two other men join him. Their slow movement gradually gains pace, until they are leaping on and off the drum, supported each other to reach greater height. Two men hang off the third in a weight-sharing hold. The lightness and control of their jumps is admirable – these men are gymnasts as well as drummers!

The drumming, unsurprisingly, is supreme. The variations in rhythm, the sense of humour and connection between the drummers, and the different methods of making sounds that are more than just gimmicks – sliding sticks flat across the skin of the drum in aggressive conversations, or whacking at the drums with long flexible rattans that give more power and leverage – all conspire to elicit a deep kinesthetic sympathy from the bodies of the audience. This is Hands’ real strength, and I cannot help wishing that there was more of this, and more attention paid to maintaining a conventional dramatic trajectory throughout the entire work.

Nevertheless, with Hands, I get the sense that they know what they are doing. They are so good at delivering crowd-pleasing commercial shows that their choices with this production suggest that this time they are deliberately trying to extend and educate, to stretch their mainstream audience’s viewing capacity. It’s an admirable intent, but it remains to be seen how much their audience will decide to accompany them on this journey.

A Long Bet on a New Duet

Dunas
María Pagés & Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui
da:ns Festival 2009
Esplanade Theatre, Singapore

When the da:ns Festival at the Esplanade in Singapore commissioned María Pagés and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui to create a new work to headline this year’s festival, they were betting big. Usually festival programmers go around the world watching seasons and other festivals, and then they cherry pick the best work for their own event the following year. Commissioned works are usually on a smaller scale, like Boi Sakti’s performance in the Esplanade Theatre Studio. To commission a new work as a main attraction, particularly a duet by a new collaborative team, is a risky move.

Some might have thought that the festival programmers’ odds were good. Both Pagés and Cherkaoui are accomplished artists. Pagés is a virtuoso solo flamenco performer who also choreographs in the genre for her company which performs internationally. Cherkaoui is one of Europe’s hippest choreographers and a darling of the festival circuit. He is well known to Singaporean audiences – four months ago he brought his work Sutra, performed by a group of Shaolin monks, to the Singapore Arts Festival, where it received popular acclaim.

So it was unsurprising that packed houses turned out once again to see Cherkaoui, accompanied by Pagés, premiere their new work for da:ns, inspired by the shifting sands of desert dunes. But the odds turned. Structurally, the performance had a lot riding against it. A duet is a difficult form to sustain for an evening-length performance, even more so on the enormous stage of the Esplanade Theatre. And the differences between the styles of Cherkaoui and Pagés are not naturally complementary.

Pagés, as might be expected from a flamenco prima donna, has a commanding theatrical presence. Her movement is extremely form-based, and finished with a classicist’s attention to detail and correctness. She launches into drama without ambivalence, proudly wearing the trademark flamenco scowl. Clad for Dunas in a succession of gorgeous two-toned gowns, she owned the stage, but rarely strayed from the comfort of her flamenco technique.

Cherkaoui, by contrast, is the everyman of dance. His presence is light and unassuming. With his unflattering hairstyle, t-shirts, baggy pants and terrible shoes, he looks like a fashion disaster who has walked in off the street. His physical style is rather post-modernist. It looks as if he has experimented with and discarded all kinds of dance techniques, to end up with his own rather formless, casual and pedestrian movement. He seems happier on the floor rather than standing, where his extreme flexibility makes him look as if he is melting through the stage.

The result of this unlikely duo is that Pagés and Cherkaoui shine when they are performing alone on the stage, but the work stumbles when they appear together. In the first scene where they are actually dancing together, Pagés performs flamenco steps which Cherkaoui matches. But he is standing diagonally upstage and sometimes a beat or so behind. Thanks to his experience, he never looks like he’s trying too hard, and it’s interesting for a while to see flamenco movement translated through his body, but in the end he still looks like a loony dance student out of his depth in a difficult class.

There are very few moments of contact between the dancers. A touch of the hand here, a kiss there, come off as contrived and unconvincing, largely, I suspect, due to Pagés’ uncompromising sternness. Their most enduring interaction is expressed in violence. In a long scene, Pagés’ trenchant stamping quite unnerves Cherkaoui and literally drives him into the ground. When he attempts to rise, he is at once beaten back by a flurry of footwork. As a scene intending to illustrate the Catholic Spaniards driving the Moors from Spain in the 15^th century (Cherkaoui, a Belgian national, has Moroccan parentage, so the analogy is particularly apt) it is successful, but literal and eventually uninteresting.

The most memorable parts of the evening stemmed from dramatic theatrical techniques. Enormous swathes of stretchy, translucent, sand-coloured fabric become the third character on stage. In the opening scene, the dancers approach each other from opposite sides of the stage, until they are checked by sand curtains rising like enormous desert dunes in front of them. They claw their way up the fabric, pulling it down from the ceiling until they can touch hands over it. Later the material moves across the stage to become a multi-layered scrim on which the shadows of the dancers fall in different sizes. The material shrinks to become a shawl which Pagés whirls around her. Then it explodes to hover like a cloud of sand over the stage, onto which Cherkaoui crawls, as if returning to the womb.

Using this versatile material, Cherkaoui presents fascinating illusory effects. By approaching the scrim from behind, he turns a simple solo for himself into a magical duet. He is lit by two diagonal lights and two shadows of himself fall on the scrim. With small clever choreography, moving his left and right sides independently, Cherkaoui has the two shadows express surprise at seeing each other. They touch fingertips. They threaten each other. They fight. Eventually they shake hands and then embrace. It may have been gimmicky, but it was extremely entertaining and the audience loved it.

The other memorable moment of theatrical magic involved both Cherkaoui and Pagés. Pagés approached the scrim which was suspended upstage. Suddenly lines of energy appeared on the scrim, snaking up from her head and her outstretched fingers. Sweeping motions of her arms made shadows appear and disappear across the sky. An enormous tree of life grew up from her body until it covered the whole backdrop.

The effect was achieved using a lightbox covered in sand, with a camera underneath it. The lightbox was on the side of the stage, and Cherkaoui was drawing in the sand with his fingers. The image collected from the camera was then projected onto the scrim. By watching Pagés’ movements closely, Cherkaoui could trace them in the sand, and it appeared that Pages was drawing hugely on the scrim. At one point he swiped the sand away and leaned over the lightbox into the camera’s view. To the audience, his face suddenly loomed large on the backdrop, like an evil genius gazing down at the tiny Pagés, a genie caught in his bottle. Although (or perhaps because) they were not dancing together, it was the most successful moment of the show.

For Cherkaoui and Pagés, Dunas was an interesting collaborative experiment. For the audience, it was an evening of great contrasts, alternating between scenes of compelling theatricality or virtuosity and moments that fell flat. For the festival programmers Dunas was a bold move, but ultimately a rash one, a bet that did not pay off.

Gorging on dance at the feast for the senses — Pt II

JAMU Program B
25 October 2009
ASWARA Experimental Theatre

The second program of the ASWARA Dance Department’s end-of-year show, featuring choreography by their faculty and performance by their students, opened to an excited audience at the Experimental Theatre. Our thirst whetted by Program A, we were eager to see more! Program B started with the work by artist-in-residence Wendy Rogers, which was also featured in Program A, and after that moved on to six other short works providing a veritable buffet of experiences.

Gan Chih Pei’s solo Before 40 is one of the most personal works on the program. For all dancers, and women especially, advancing age brings the loss of physical facility, which necessitates some soul searching, and perhaps a change in career. The age of 40 is a looming cut off point, before which so many things must be achieved. For women this is also the time when the demands of children are at their height and balancing careers and family becomes most difficult. Chih Pei’s solo touches on all of these issues; it is thoughtful but also heartening. As she strides across the stage, dragging on clothes, rushing bundles of laundry here and there, it is her forward momentum and energy that is most impressive, her continuing desire to get up and do things, to let no day pass her by.

Before 40 is made memorable by the magical confluence of Chih Pei’s movement and the live music of Sabahan flautist Razali bin Abdul Rahim. The work begins with Razali playing alone in a spotlight. Then he turns upstage and Chih Pei appears, as if he had conjured her into being with his music, as if he had said, “Come. Let me play for you the story of a busy woman sorting laundry in her house. Look. There she is!” As the work progresses, Chih Pei plays with repetitive movements, starting small and developing into larger and larger phrases, sometimes as if checking, “Yes, my body can still do that.” The musical score keeps track so sympathetically it is as if the flautist is channeling the humming that many choreographers make when they work alone in the studio. But Chih Pei is not in her studio, she is at home, with her couch covered in laundry, from which she wistfully lifts one tiny tutu. But for her, home must become the studio, and time and space for dance must be found in the midst of housework. This charming solo was the first work of Chih Pei’s I had ever seen, and I felt quite privileged to watch.

The third piece on the program was by Joseph Gonzales, head of the Dance Department at ASWARA, who is ever mindful of his responsibilities as a teacher, both to his audience as well as his students. So I was not surprised that his work Touched… adopted a theme with which many people in the audience could connect: a tribute to the many significant deaths which have occurred within the last year.

His choices are wide-ranging, from contemporary choreographers Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham, to pop favourites Michael Jackson and Patrick Swayze, local film-maker Yasmin Ahmad and political aide Teoh Beng Hock. The inclusion of Beng Hock, who fell or was pushed from the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, is notable – for a man employed by the government, Joseph never seems afraid to air his pleas for transparency and human rights, and I always appreciate the topical nature of his work.

The structure of the piece was simple. A small group of white-clad dancers was backed by a projection showing iconic images and videos of the dead, and accompanied by a beautiful instrumental version of Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah interspliced with voices speaking about remembrance. The dancers assembled themselves in friezes or small phrases reflecting the people on the screen – for example, slow-dancing in a circle to commemorate Patrick Swayze in Ghost. The coda, with dancers collapsing to the floor in positions of death I thought a bit unnecessary, but otherwise this was a graceful tribute to those who have gone too soon. I especially liked the moment when clips of Michael Jackson showed on the screen, and the dancers turned to watch it. They offered no movement to compete with the man who inspired movement in so many – they could only watch.

Then came the much anticipated Nerds Gone Nuts. I had missed this work by Suhaili Ahmad Kamil when it scooped the pool of awards at the first Short + Sweet Dance held at KLPac earlier this year, so I was eager to see it. You can tell why it’s such a crowd-pleaser – imaginative images, clever props, lots of jokes and a pace that never stops. From Naim tiptoeing past a floor light in pink pointe shoes (and those are his pointe shoes, in case you were wondering), to three girls sitting in a blow-up baby pool and spitting fountains, to the last image of a compulsive Rubik’s Cube player being strangled, there is so much to look at and take in you wish you had three sets of eyes and three heads (which I’m sure the nerds in the title would appreciate – if nerds take over the world, you’ll certainly get three-headed monsters, in addition to Transformer’s masks and the requisite inch-thick spectacles.)

With Nerds, Suhaili wanted to make something light-hearted, to counteract the usual somber stereotype of contemporary choreographers taking themselves too seriously. She certainly succeeds, but to me what makes Suhaili’s work so notable is the quality of movement. As with 2=1, this work is full of small jerky movements played at such high speed that the dancers are almost falling over themselves in their effort to complete them. The movements do not rebound from a natural limitation, as, for example, your arm will bounce back towards you when you fling it out to the side – her movements stop before their limit, so that it is muscle and not momentum that controls them. Kineasthetically, the result is a breathless claustrophobic kind of pandemonium that makes me feel like I’m hyperventilating. Nerds Gone Nuts is certainly a hit with the crowd, but it is not recommended for epileptics!

Steve Goh’s Compromise is quite the opposite – dimly lit, serious and graceful, with lots of moments of classical beauty. It opens with a group of girls in spotlights with their hair down flinging themselves about, but the core of the piece is an extensive male duet between Mohd Naim Syahrazad and Mohd Yunus Ismail. In it we see a lot of the attributes that make Steve’s own dancing so gorgeous to watch – the long lines, strong extensions, and supple movements of the torso. There is no overt emotion between the Naim and Yunus as they dance, and they are so well-matched physically it is as if they are dancing with an abstraction of themselves.

Compromise is a cool and dispassionate work. The dancers are completely absorbed in their duets and do not reach out to the audience. Later on, the piece recedes from view even more, as floor-level backlighting makes the movement almost impossible to see. We just get an impression of bodies, as if we are having a near-death experience and are bemusedly watching angels intervene between us and the light at the end of the tunnel. The work finally concludes where it began, with girls flinging their hair, and when it is over we feel ourselves breathing again, as if we have returned from some out-of-body place with the fading memories of a dream.

Suhaimi Magi’s work Nyaman intermingled traditional Sabahan dance styles with a contemporary outlook. The piece retained ethnic flavour, thanks to costume – the three female dancers wearing argus pheasant feathers in their hair and beaded jewelry – and music – with the live musicians and their traditional instruments mounted on a kind of float covered in palm fronds. The main dancer, Ng Xinying, and her two counterparts traversed the stage like the condong of Balinese dance attended by her two legong. There seemed to be no narrative or even any rising action in their dance. When the music rose to fever pitch, the dancers remained calm and composed, perpetuating the sustained reverie of the title. Even when choreographer Seth as impromptu comic relief circled the stage in singlet and sarong and a stunned look on his face, the dancers did not let a crack mar their tranquil facade.

I found Xinying very interesting to watch. The articulations of her slim but muscular arms, often with flexed wrist and straight elbow rotating from the shoulder, seemed odd in a way that I cannot quite define, as if she has hyperextended elbows or perhaps overly flexible shoulders. I was glad that the slow pace of the work gave me plenty of opportunity to study her and wonder at this small mystery.

Suhaimi’s son Shafirul produced the last work on the night’s program, Tapak 4, performed with a slightly different cast than when I first saw it in Lepas…tetap menari! in July. Its energetic fighting style was still a crowd-pleasing way to end the evening, and was more effective as a work of choreography using silat than Aziwahijah’s work in Program A. But I felt the group lacked the energy and infectious enthusiasm that I had seen in July, although it picked up towards the end, the dancers egging each other on with martial yells.

Overall, I felt JAMU Program B was generally stronger than Program A, with a greater range of styles and more successful choreographic choices. Program B left me at times curious, at times enchanted, and at some points frankly mystified, but it was always thought-provoking, and it is always uplifting to see the Dance Department at ASWARA moving from strength to strength.

Thanks once again to James Quah for permission to use his images. For more images by James Quah, see http://jamesq.multiply.com/

Gorging on dance at the feast for the senses — Pt I

JAMU 2009
Experimental Theatre, ASWARA
22 & 23 October 2009

Once again the end of the year swings around, and ASWARA brings us JAMU, a collection of short dance works choreographed by their faculty and performed by their students. For contemporary dance lovers in Malaysia this is one of the must-see shows of the year. For a mere RM 10 (RM 5 for students), this is a chance to see many of the major movers and shakers in the local dance scene in action. There is something for everyone – from cutting edge to conventional, bold and brash to quiet and contemplative. This year, for the first time, JAMU is presented in two programs over four nights, because the number of works would not fit in one program. So it was with great pleasure and anticipation that I went gorge myself on a feast of dance in Program A, shown on Thursday and Friday, 22 & 23 October.

Wendy Rogers, visiting artist from the University of California, Riverside, developed her work KL/CA Mix – 10/09 from exercises she gave ASWARA students in her contemporary classes, who, I suspect, were much challenged by her requests. To a soundtrack of birdsong and daily noises, a large group of dancers in brown and green begins to move in front of a green sky that changes colour as the day progresses. There is very little face-light, so the emphasis is on the movement rather than the facial expressions, which is how Wendy wanted it – she asked the dancers to allow the movements to speak for themselves rather than forcing meaning into them through theatricality.

At times there are strong formal structures – a line that “eats itself” — the person at the back of the line coming to the front in an endless cycle, or two parallel lines of dancers extending upstage which engage in a richly textured canon. But mostly the work is composed of solo moments or conversations between dancers, displaying the personal movement styles of each dancer. This is a work that rewards a quick eye and a quiet mind. There is no overriding rhetoric, but with its seamless coming together and falling apart, its understated final moment with all but two dancers seated on the ground, motionless but breathing, and its harmonious colour palette, it has a very calming effect and is distinctly enjoyable to watch.

Siapa!!! by Mohd Seth Hamzah developed themes he had explored with his solo at Panggung Bandaraya late last year, playing with the form of wayang orang, in which costumed actors perform shadow play instead of puppets. This work made good use of the space, pairing a large group of dancers with six hanging backlit screens. Accompanied by bold rhythms supplied by live drums, the dancers launched into stop-start movement reminiscent of wayang puppets, with clawed hands, outflung wrists and jerky poses designed to be seen in silhouette.

The dancers, often divided by gender, seemed to take over the stage, but in the background, the audience sensed Seth in a wayang orang costume flitting between the screens, and at the climax of the piece he emerged to stand in the spotlight, at which all the other dancers fell down dead. As a way to question the agency of man – is he free or puppet? — Siapa!!! was a good attempt; as a development of a distinctive contemporary stylistic form, it was better.

Aris Kadir’s Nasi Putih once again eclipsed all competition. This version seemed slightly different from the one I saw at the Datin Sri Endon Performing Arts Awards showcase, but it nevertheless retained its power. Ismadian Ismail and Mohd Azizi Mansor displayed superb control in their duet as man and wife, transferring their sexual tension to the rice-cooking pot balanced between them. The percussive shaking of the dry rice in the pot built the suspense simply but effectively. Compared with the previous performance I saw, the mistress’ solo, performed by Sufinah Abu Bakar, seemed less withholding and more extroverted (the sarong rising higher above the knees), and the encounter between wife and mistress was less of a conflict and more of a blatant expression of their collective sexual desire.

In the end the wife has the last word, enticing her husband back to her skirts with her nasi kangkang, and the final moment, in which the wife, supported on the husband’s thighs, pours rice from the pot over them both, was so evocative it was almost uncomfortable. Perhaps it is the space of the Experimental Theatre that makes the work closer and more immediate than it seemed in Pentas 1 at KLPac, but the work was so unabashedly sexual that I felt a little worried for Aris, and hoped for his sake that there were no censors in the audience!

Zamzuah Zahari’s work Selangkah, Dua Langkah was the puzzle of the evening. What was it? Bangsawan or vaudeville? High school play or kung fu movie? Surrounded by a set evoking an imagined rural Malay golden age, two men fight, chat, make friends and meet a bunch of girls (or monkeys in disguise?) who summarily reject them.

Despite good performances from the dancers, especially Shaikh Hasrul Shaikh Anuar who played an amiable village idiot in a Chinese vegetable-grower’s hat, in the end the work failed to be cohesive. It had the kitschy atmosphere of the animated Sang Kancil stories which used to be shown on daytime RTM, but without the moral punchline.

Oozing retro chinoiserie, the dancers in Wong Kit Yaw’s Revisited were crimped and curled within an inch of their lives – kudos to their stylists! Clad in tight cheongsam and high heels, and sporting intricate lacquered 60’s hairstyles, the dancers bobbed, pouted and fluttered their hand fans in a tightly-spaced group like a swarm of vain butterflies. Behind them, a projection showed snippets from Wong Kar Wai’s film In the Mood for Love, with Maggie Cheung swanning through various scenes of poverty in gorgeous soft focus, and wearing a succession of stylish cheongsam.

It was interesting to watch how the dancers handled themselves, and their coiffures, in very small spaces. But the scale of the piece suffered from the cavernous space, and the dancers were too simple and sanguine to match the slow soulful heartbreak occurring in the projected background. Nevertheless I would be interested to see Kit Yaw develop this work further – it’s a beguiling beginning, and, after all, they already have the costumes!

Nostalgia continued with Vincent Tan’s Autumn, featuring a bunch of boys in solid-coloured pants and mock turtle necks enacting a heavily romanticised vision of youthful friends playing in the autumn air. Towards the beginning of the work, each of the dancers illustrated the character they were playing with a little sequence of movement, and remained in character for the rest of the work. There was a certain homoerotic adolescent tension in the work, especially related to the central figure in red pants who characterised himself with an out-thrust bottom, and a scene in which the boys make each others’ body parts move around by blowing at them. Much was suggested in the language of sidelong glances, but otherwise the work was an easy if rather retro study of a gang of young boys, more Brady Bunch or Secret Seven than strictly believable, some with the enviable easy grace of youth, some nerdy, some Napoleonic. The score, a scrappy polyvalent sound like opera performed by monsters and muppets, suggested a sophistication which the piece did not supply.

The last work, Aziwahija Yeop’s Depak Gentik, was a fairly conventional presentation of the skills his students had mastered in their silat classes. A vast bunch of headband-wearing boys and girls feinted, advanced, attacked and sembahed their way around their guru, who eventually dispatched a black-shirted sword-wielding opponent with ease. A nice visual effect occurred when the students surrounded their teacher in a circle of fighting couples, each in their own downlight. As the guru pointed around the circle, they decked their opponents one after another. Aziwahija reversed his pointing around the circle, and, like a film run backwards, the victors helped their opponents back to their feet, just as fluidly as they had fallen. In another striking moment, the whole phalanx of students duckwalked their way upstage, a testament to the strength of many knees and thighs, and a fitting ending to a night of ASWARA students displaying their physical abilities in addition to their teachers’ choreographic skills.

Many thanks to James Quah for permission to use his images. For more images by James Quah, see http://jamesq.multiply.com/

Uncompromising visions of modern nightmare

VOID — Jendela Peradaban (Window of Civilisation)
24 Oct 2009
da:ns Festival 2009
Theatre Studio, the Esplanade, Singapore.

Boi Sakti’s new work in collaboration with Singapore’s T.H.E. Dance Company gives us a sequence of powerful vignettes condemning our modern lives under capitalism and globalism as slavery without self-awareness, primitivism without sensitivity, a dehumanised world in which lives are once again nasty, brutish and short. In its best scenes, VOID has the feeling of good science fiction, akin to the written works of the recently deceased J.G. Ballard, whose horror derives from our recognition of their familiarity, the knowledge that the author or choreographer has merely observed existing themes and followed them to their logical and appalling conclusions.*

Coming from Indonesia, and giving, as the Singaporean dancers mention in the program notes, “a Southeast Asian angle”, Boi’s work is also infused with the preoccupations of our collective recent independence – ideas of neo-imperialism and exploitation. These he weaves into strong visual effects that lodge in the memory and return with nightmarish flashes of clarity. As the lights rose, some of the audience gasped involuntarily and a group of schoolchildren rose into hubbub and had to be shushed. Where before there had been darkness, suddenly the dancers stood crowded in a lit window on a little raised stage, higher than we expected and far, far too close, looking at us and past us with sightless eyes.

After this jolting opening, the visual metaphors raced by thick and fast in scenes roughly corresponding to a sequence given in the program notes: a man wrapped in chains galloping around the circle on all fours with an impossibly animal gait (’sick civilisations’); dancers in muzzles with megaphones attached to their backs being walked by other dancers holding the microphones like leads and going into frenzy at the sound of their own feedback (‘democratisation’); dancers gradually donning individual costume decorations from traditional Indonesian dance – mirrored collars, bobbing tiaras, clinking arm bands – but with no recognition of their purpose or beauty (‘new internationalism’); a man hanging upside down behind steel bars having bar-coded tags attached to him haphazardly by a blindfolded woman, next to a hinged mirror daubed with graffiti (‘capitalism’).

The most disturbing theatrical motif illustrated urbanisation, and brought to mind ‘Billennium’, Ballard’s heart-squeezing story of systematic overcrowding. One by one the dancers laid their sweating exhausted bodies in a clear perspex box, piling onto one another like genocide murders tumbling into a mass grave. One dancer gently but irresistibly helped another onto the pile, but when she herself baulked she had to force her own body, her own hand pushing herself on her lower back, to complete the freezer full of bodies. As the perspex box was wheeled across the stage by stocking-masked undertakers, I heard the woman sitting next to me whisper, “That’s horrible.” The box circled. Suddenly the accumulated heat and sweat of the dancers fogged the plastic surface, and their little remaining movements made small clear patches through which we watched them, like the dying twitches of Auschwitz victims scratching on the ceiling of their gas chamber with their fingernails.

Sandwiched in between such powerful visual elements, I sometimes felt that the sections of ‘pure’ dance lost their impact. The movement itself was strong and well-directed – featuring recurring frustrated rocking movements on the hands and knees like an insect about to attack, an impossibly fast spin on the ground, and fast-twitch convulsive scratching of their bodies – but it was frequently performed by the whole group in synchrony, which gave it a repetitiveness that may have been robotic and symbolic of lack of individual agency, but was less compelling as a result. The dancers, however, were completely physically committed to the work, audibly breathing together in their group sections. Yarra Ileto’s muscular build was particularly well-suited to the power of the movement, where some of the smaller women seemed occasionally too delicate.

I was also a little put off when the dancers being walked like dogs began to bark – it seemed too predictable, too pat. Those who have dogs know that a bark is a very expressive sound, and when a person does it, unless they have voice coaching or lots of practice, it sounds childish and flat. The point may have been that humans have lost the ability to make sense with speech, that we make noise for the very sake of it, but I felt that the combination of croaks, gasps and gulps that the dancers used elsewhere were more effective.

There was also something about beating a dead horse in all this Luddite horror. Modernity is not without its detractors. Humanity is not unaware of its problems. But, like Ballard’s, this work of Boi’s came across as blindly accusative in its lack of compromise. At its base, it is negative and unredemptive. So at the end of the work we are left with nothing to say, when the hinged mirror swings (as we knew it would) towards the audience to reveal us to ourselves.

*This observation is by Anthony Burgess, in his 1978 introduction to The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard, Picador New York, 1995.

“We knew we wanted to dance together”

Duod
Evolving Motion, featuring Cathy Seago and Rosalind Noctor
Friday 4 September 2009
Indicine, KLPac

Malaysian artists complain that Malaysian audiences like to get things for free. Well, why not? Case in point – Shobana’s performance of Maya Ravan at KL Convention Centre, tickets starting from RM 153. Verdict from the cognoscenti? Rubbish! Contrast this with Cathy Seago and Rosalind Noctor presenting their work in progress Duod to an audience sitting on the floor of the Indicine at KLPac, most of whom got there shamefully late, but were still allowed in and even invited to participate in the show. Result? Ah, heaven…

Cathy Seago, lecturer in dance at the University of Winchester and director of the dance company Evolving Motion, and her dancer Ros have been holed up in a studio at KLPac for the last month. They chose to go abroad to develop their work, presumably to get away from distractions, but now they think they might return to Malaysia some day and I really hope they do! Watching such accomplished dancers enjoying each others’ movement is a treat that we enjoy too seldom.

On Friday night they performed four sections out of the seven that will exist in the finished work. As the audience shuffled shyly in to find a place on the floor, Ros and Cathy were sitting on a piano stool, necking. And by this I mean not kissing, but the movement that you sometimes observe in giraffes or cats, a rubbing of the head and neck against each other, leaning, entwining, unwinding. From here they progressed to a slow deliberate crawling on the floor, still firmly attached to each other, but with a sense of sleepwalking in the dangling, leaning, rocking and shifting of weight. For a moment they engaged like wrestlers, the tops of the heads pressed against each other, pushing, now one giving way, now another.

The second section began with the dancers donning tight caps with a long white fringe over the face that reached down to the floor. The impression was half burkha, half Chinese opera, a swaying white sculpture through which we could not see, but sensed we could be seen. Joined again, the dancers shifted from one slow one-legged position to another. At length they broke apart, whirling with arms and legs flung out, Ros like a dancer, but Cathy as if she were blind and clutching.

The third section lightened the mood. Like a game, hiding and seeking around the audience, the dancers scuttled to sit or stand next to each other, then rebounded away. The play moved faster and faster, the dancers stabbing limbs through each other’s negative spaces, bouncing off hips and backs, occasionally colliding, copying and following, swinging with immense momentum. The speed of their improvisation was impressive, born of long hours spent together in the studio and a deep inexpressible understanding of each other’s weight and physical habits.

In one particularly telling instance, Cathy made a slight miscalculation going into an inversion and hit Ros on the mouth with the end of her foot. The audience shared a in-breath of collective horror, but a few seconds later the dancers smiled at each other from the midst of their movement, and we knew that everything was going to be alright. The smile, of course, was for our benefit, not for theirs. Ros already knew that Cathy hadn’t hurt her, Cathy knew she hadn’t hurt Ros, and both of them knew that the other knew they knew!

In the fourth section, the dancers returned to a more businesslike mode with a choreographed phrase marked with moments of contact. It was intricate and visually interesting, but after the frenzy of the previous section it seemed like the exhale, the cool down. Afterwards, the dancers invited the audience to participate in a little experiment, holding the ends of long strands of raffia and passing them around the circle, while in the centre Ros became entangled.

I have described the movement of this work in some detail because — although Ros and Cathy have an established conceptual structure which they are exploring in their work, revolving around the seven stages of tension theorised by Jacques LeCoq – to me the highlight of the event was observing the sheer physical facility of the two artists and the kaleidoscopic delight of their bodies in combination. So it made more sense to me when Cathy and Ros remarked that their initial starting point in developing this work was that they really wanted to dance together, and they wanted to dance a lot.

It made me think that, within the right framework (one carefully censorious of self-indulgent wanking, for example), sometimes it is enough just to revel in the joyousness of two dexterous bodies at play. Nothing more is needed. There was an element of watching the cavorting of sea lions or dolphins, perhaps, if dolphins were familiar with fractal theory. Especially during the improvised section, you could see the dancers processing information and making split-second responses, weighing options and diving for new ideas, all the time moving faster than many of us will ever have the ability to move.

The finished work will be performed with elaborate costumes, designed by Ros, playing a major part, but it was nice to see the work in progress in a rawer state, unencumbered by additional layers of meaning. Nevertheless, I would be happy to see Duod in any state again, and I really hope that Evolving Motion will be able to bring their finished work back to KL for a proper performance. But I count myself very lucky to have been among the few to see them share their work-in-progress, and all of it, you see, for free!

All images for this article by Foo Chiwei — many thanks!

Treasures salvaged from the wreck

ASWARA dancers in James Kan's new work Dream.

Lepas…tetap menari!
17-19 July 2009
Experimental Theatre, ASWARA

The most dramatic event in the dance community this year didn’t happen on stage. The much-anticipated TARI ‘09, to which 10 international tertiary dance institutions had been invited, and which has become the bi-annual showcase of Malaysian dance at a time when no other similar opportunity exists, was postponed by the Ministry of Information, Communications and Culture due to the threat of AH1N1.

Needless to say all the participants were disappointed, but though the ship of TARI, in its July 2009 incarnation, is well and truly sunk, some things of value have still been salvaged from the wreck. From 17 to 19 July, ten short contemporary dance works (still a mere fraction of the number of items on the original program) were performed at ASWARA’s Experimental Theatre in the mixed bill show Lepas…tetap menari! Some of the works had been staged before, and looked a little worn and tired, and many more were laid low by heedless over-dramatisation, but from amongst the flotsam and jetsam a few true pearls emerged.

Angela Goh’s solo work filled and spilt was the first treasure on the night’s program. Like water rising in a bowl, projected light slowly worked its way up from illuminating just her feet — describing articulate configurations on the floor — to displaying her whole body. Simple text in the projection heralded a change of tone from one of quiet and restricted contemplation to larger and faster movement filling a greater space. A nicely balanced work, filled and spilt was especially charming for Angela’s unforced movement quality throughout, even in quick challenging moments. The softness with which she folded at the hip into forward bend, or caught herself on the floor in one of many liquid falls, displayed a great respect for the natural workings of the body and a degree of understated sincerity that many other items on the program would have done well to emulate.

The second highlight of the evening came during intermission, in a site-specific work outside the theatre. A representation of the story of Adam and Eve, Shakti featured choreographer Shafirul Azmi Suhaimi and Mahani Izzati Suleiman in a sand-filled courtyard at the base of one of the school’s stairwells, and was viewed by the audience standing in the stairs and corridors in the five storeys above it. Creating a work to be viewed exclusively from above brings with it certain challenges, which Shakti overcame with the simple expedient of transforming normally vertical movement into horizontal ones, with the two dancers twisting and writhing in full bodily contact with the sand, which was being constantly doused with water from a downpipe.

Dramatically side-lit in red and green, Shakti presented the familiar tale of Adam and Eve living harmoniously in Eden before the fall, then succumbing to the temptation of apples (dropped accurately into their waiting hands by accomplices from above), which incited a frenzy of self-knowledge which eventually forced Adam, at least, to quit paradise, leaving Eve to gnaw her apple with insatiable greed. The site itself, hemmed in by metal balustrades and thick foliage, created a claustrophobic air, as if paradise was a pit, a cage, begging for escape. In an appropriate homage to the recently departed Pina Bausch, Shakti was a work of self-punishing and painful-looking physical abandon. The dancers hurled themselves face-first, back-first, head-first onto the wet sand. Their inhibition was also notable in moments of thrilling danger, as when Shafirul walked on the surrounding metal balustrade in wet feet, or when he lifted Mahani onto a wooden bench balanced, apparently precariously to the watchers from above, on top of the balustrade. This work took the dramatic sensibility, which seems inbred in ASWARA dancers, as well as their predilection for iconic and mythical themes, and raised them a new and exciting level.

In the second half of the show, gears shifted again into a quieter and more cerebral mode with The Red Rose, a duet choreographed by South Korean dancer Kim Jungyeon and performed by Jungyeon and former ASWARA dancer Liu Yong Shean who has recently been studying in South Korea. Revisiting the classical ballet work Le Spectre de la Rose, this duet used impressionistic projected video – of hands sorting through rose petals, papers folded into turrets and towers, and finally petals made out of paper – as a backdrop for a work that contrasted the restrained and thoughtful movements of Jungyeon (depicting the woman who is imagining the spirit of the rose) with Yong Shean as the extroverted and extravagant rose himself.

The various scenes of The Red Rose were beautifully composed. In one scene Yong Shean’s hands played graceful shadow puppets in front of the projector, a reminder to ASWARA audiences of how his hands alone once dominated entire Mak Yong performances with their clarity and style. In another scene, Jungyeon moved with sliding feet and jerking hands in a rose-tinted solo, every step seeming exactly where she wanted it to be, not so much grounded as inevitable. And one multimedia effect worked particularly well, in which the dancers moved in front of the projector although the projection was not bright enough to illuminate the dancer’s body. Instead the shadow of the dancer on the screen behind became the focus of attention, a black void in a field of dancing lights. Although occasionally The Red Rose was a bit of an unjustified mish-mash of Southeast Asian dance styles, it was shot through with a thread of memorable images.

The evening’s program ended on an energetic note with Tapak 4, also choreographed by Shafirul. A group work for some of the most talented students of ASWARA’s recent diploma graduating class, the work displaying them all to their advantage. With the spirit and accent of silat but incorporating movement vocabulary from contemporary dance, Tapak 4 was a rollicking affair that rocked the audience to cheers. The dancers performed the work with combative seriousness, but occasionally they were so overtaken by the pure joy inherent in the movement that could not help bursting into grins as they went into the attack. Naim Syahrazad and Mahani Izzati Suleiman were particularly striking in their enjoyment coupled with their respect for the powerful and stylish movement.

With Tapak 4, Shafirul has created one of those happy works which pleases both dancers and audience. It was a fitting and uplifting finale for the program, illustrating the resilience of ASWARA and the dance community, and the unquenchable urge to dance even when times are tough. For these pearls, and the many more from Lepas…tetap menari! which are too numerous to be mentioned here, I am truly grateful.

The current state of ballet practice

Chang Huey Sze, 2nd place winner of Adult Open, in her Kitri variation from Don Quixote.

The 12th Annual Solo Classical Ballet Competition
The Dance Society of Malaysia
30 May – 1 June
Malaysian Tourism Centre

The Dance Society [TDS] solo ballet competition gives a good snapshot impression of the state of local ballet instruction, practice and performance, but it can be a bit of a gamble. Last year, coming after a long hiatus, I found the standards at the competition a little disappointing. Category 3, the youngest group of dancers, who are not required to dance en pointe, I found to be the most vivacious, and Category 2, the first group of dancers required to dance en pointe, seemed to have the strongest technique, while Category 1, the senior group, was fairly disastrous. The judges apparently thought so too. Last year they decided not to award the coveted 1st position for Category 1, giving the hopefuls only 2nd and 3rd.

However, TDS has not despaired. This year they introduced a new category, the Adult Open, to cope with those over the age limit for Category 1, which indicates quite a degree of confidence in the state of ballet instruction and practice in Malaysia. Never mind that they only got three entrants for the Adult Open! At least they decided that the 1st prize was deserved, and it was duly awarded, likewise across the age-limited categories.

Suhaili Ahmad Kamil, 3rd place winner in the Adult Open, dancing Gamzatti from La Bayadere.

This year I attended the TDS competition as part of Camp Aurora. Ballet can be competitive at the best of times, even without prizes on offer, and this event is no exception. TDS has made a diplomatic decision not to include the names of the studios from which the dancers hail on the program, but still there is quite a bit of sizing-up and posturing between ballet schools behind the scenes – where would the fun be otherwise? Being allied with Aurora School of Dance as a result of my friendship with Suhaili Ahmad Kamil, I was unabashedly routing for the four entrants from Aurora, who, I’m happy to announce, came up trumps. With all four entrants qualified for the finals, Mrs Suraya Ahmad Kamil, the principal of Aurora, was happy, and happier still after all the results were announced.

Teo May Jean, Category 2 first place winner.

Talent at ballet schools, as in nationwide competitions, comes in waves, and this year Aurora is lucky to have a particularly talented and hardworking trio in its Advanced 2 Ballet class – Teo May Jean (this year’s 1st place winner of Category 2), Siti Amellia Feroz (2nd place winner in Category 2) and Nelly Chew, who went home with the Category 2 consolation prize. But there is talent coming up in the ranks too – the spectacularly beautiful Amelia Thripura Henderson, who has only recently started studying ballet but is obviously naturally gifted, walked away with a surprise first place in Category 3. And Suhaili, who herself coached, joked with, criticised and comforted the other competitors from Aurora in preparation for this competition, worked hard for the Adult Open Category, but had to be content with third place.

The versatile Category 1 second place winner, Chew Zi Xin.

Winning a national ballet competition in Malaysia is not the equivalent of doing so in other places that take ballet more seriously. It’s unnecessary to point out that the local standard is lower. More importantly, an event that might rocket a dancer to fame and stardom overseas, or at the very least to a few decent job offers, here passes as an item to be checked by overachievers on the way to adulthood, like getting 13 A1s, or passing your Grade 8 piano exam. With no local ballet company to go to, there are no jobs on offer. A few dancers will move into teaching and perhaps set up their own studio. Some, perhaps, will go overseas in search of a career, but most will give up dancing altogether, perhaps when they start college, certainly when they leave college, and never look back. And after seeing the hard work and talent on offer at the TDS competition this year, that makes me immensely sad.

Showing absolute clarity of line, Category 1 first place winner Lee Jia Xi.

Take 18-year old Chew Zi Xin, winner of last year’s Category 2, who this year bagged 2nd place in the most coveted Category 1, despite her youth. She’s a great all-rounder, transitioning smoothly from very classical pieces to a contemporary style with lots of floor work. Both fast and strong, she appears on stage to have genuine enjoyment for what she does. The Category 1 first place winner, Lee Jia Xi, is a very different creature. She chose her routines – Odile’s triumphant solo from Swan Lake Act 3, and a slow exacting choice variation — to showcase her extremely strong sense of placement and line, and absolute control. I would like to see more of what she can do, but the TDS competition is one of the few occasions when Jia Xi, and many other dancers of her calibre, come out of the woodwork to perform for a broader audience. And at least we don’t have to worry about keeping an eye out for Raymond Liew, 3rd place winner in Category 1. He dominates this year’s dance diploma graduates from ASWARA, and is a convincing choreographer in addition to being able to bring the house down with his jumps. Or maybe it’s just nice to see a boy at the TDS competition, one with capable technique and a good dose of testosterone.

Raymond Liew, 3rd place winner of Category 1, in flight in his slave variation from Le Corsaire.

Boys are thin on the ground in ballet anywhere in the world, but more striking, I thought, was the racial breakdown of the competitors. It is apparently agreed, now, that only Chinese girls should fight for the top spots at a ballet competition, but has it always been so? Yes, there are a scattering of Malays and Indians in the younger ranks, but while there are a few Indians are still slogging through the upper categories, the supply of Malays seems to dry up when they reach Category 2, aged 15 to 17. I suspect that this has less to do with genetic natural talent than with nice Malay families not wanting to see their daughters flashing their legs in pink tights in public after they reach puberty. But black tights are always an option! Witness Siti Amellia Feroz, winner of second place in Category 2, whose panache and style were equal to any throughout the competition. In the required routine she demured with a little romantic country-style number, but in the choice routine she pulled out the stops, flashing eyes as well as legs to win the judges around. And black tights are not the only option — I believe that there are imaginative ways in which Muslim families can get around their trepidation about seeing their daughters on stage. They needn’t give up altogether. In all types of dance we need to resist the surge to ghettoisation by ethnicity, and ballet, by dint of being an ‘impartial’ import from the West, has the additional opportunity to be a middle ground where dancers from all races can come together, in competition or not.

The shining dawn of virtuosity and charm

Bharatanatyam Arengetram of Hariraam Tingyuan Lam
The Temple of Fine Arts
Panggung Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur
31 May 2009

Dance is a frustrating art. As the artist grows older and develops subtlety and maturity, the body, the instrument of the art, decays and betrays. Particular feats of gruelling physical demand may only be possible in the artist’s callow youth, and never again. For most of the life of the artist and his or her audience, those short golden moments will survive only as memories.

So it’s exciting to catch a young person in one of these sublimely physically challenging moments, while being certain that you are also witnessing a potentially great artist on the cusp of his career. The bharatanatyam arengetram, the solo debut, of Hariraam Tingyuan Lam was one of these occasions.

As the eldest child of Temple of Fine Arts bharatanatyam guru Geetha Shankaran-Lam and her musician husband Lam Ghooi-Ket, you might think that such a child is naturally destined for greatness. But think of the pressure! Not only was Hariraam required to satisfy his parents’ artistic sensibilities, but also to prove to the world the worth of his parents’ (to some, unorthodox) union. In the latter, at least, Hariraam is not alone – he joins the ranks of great Chindian classical Indian dancers which include January Low and Mavin Khoo.

Far from sinking under pressure, Hariraam rose to the occasion, and then sailed blithely over the top of all expectation. The seven compulsory works included in an arengetram are not to be attempted by the faint of heart, and Hariraam is clearly no slouch – his selections of work were both challenging and unusual. In the first half, his unusual musicality and technical ability came to the fore. His body, attenuated by the intense cardiovascular demands of the arengetram, was grounded and powerful. His lines and pathways were exact, almost mathematical – here describing a perfect circle with the rotation of his arm from the shoulder, there aligning his limbs in the most exacting angles. His leaps were bouyant, but his stamps trenchant. He could stop turning on a dime, freezing in the perfect position. His rock-like balances on one-leg had the audience applauding. And his timing with the complicated rhythms impressed even the connoisseurs.

If during the first half Hariraam seemed a little brittle in his technical bravado, one could attribute this to the indestructible hubris of a teenage boy. In the more expressive and narrative items of the second half of the evening, his charm trumped his virtuosity. While he appeared perfectly appropriate in the guise of the Gods, his dramatic ability really came to the fore with the less heroic characters. In his portrayal of Krishna’s somewhat snivelling friend, or the Lord Muruga disguising himself as a an old man begging for food, or Krishna’s harassed mother multitasking while doting on her baby boy, Hariraam showed a naturalistic style, a great sense of humour, and a keen eye for the subtle characterisations of human beings. His animal scenes were just as good – he put his somewhat wicked teeth to good use as Narasimha, Vishnu’s half-man half-lion avatar, and his puff-faced wide-eyed portrayal of Hanuman had me absolutely beguiled. His ability to cleanly transition from character to character in the space of a second maintained a clear narrative flow. And in spite of being a little off his legs, as dancers say, which could very well be due to enormous physical fatigue, his sense of timing was still exquisite.

Everyone who was there was certain they were witnessing the unleashing of a great artistic force upon the world. Strangely, there was no standing ovation, but perhaps it is because we were saving our applause and waiting to see what Hariraam does next. This, I think, is the most difficult part in an artist’s journey – how to follow a great success? The path to arengetram, with the assistance of dedicated gurus, is difficult, but at least it is clear. After that, things get more complicated. But if I were Hariraam, after such a performance I would think myself entitled to retire into a cave somewhere to play my violin … at least for a little while.

Many thanks to Rathimalar Govindarajoo for her thoughts on Hariraam’s performance.

A contradiction in terms?

Prince Siddhartha, The Musical
22 – 31 May 2009
Musical on Stage Productions
Istana Budaya

I have seen a number of productions from Musical On Stage. A couple of my friends, all very fine dancers, perform in the ensemble. It is appropriate that Musical On Stage should have the best dancers, as in other ways too they seem to lack for nothing. Their budget is impressive. Their productions are famous for their material extravagance – the no-expenses-spared sets, costumes, music and ensemble size.

The previous production of The Perfect Circle staged at KLPac Pentas 1 was somewhat restrained by the capacity of the space, but in the suitably lavish environs of Istana Budaya there are no such limitations. So, with their most recent production, Musical On Stage has indulged its every whim. For every scene change, massive sets descend from the flies and the stage itself moves up and down. The large ensemble – I counted more than 25 dancers – whirls through costume changes. The money spent on projected animation and synthesized backdrops alone must have been enormous.

Concubines hard at work.

But there is one unavoidable fly in this ointment. This particular musical is about Prince Siddhartha, who became the Enlightened Buddha, whose contribution to human kind, according to the musical, was to teach them to turn away from transient and material happiness to contemplate more universal and eternal themes. He eschewed his family’s royal bounty to don the simple robes of a monk. He encouraged a feeling of spiritual equality between all classes of people. So when his tale of modesty is told with all the pomp and circumstance that can possibly be mustered, doesn’t the term ‘Buddhist musical’ seem an oxymoron?

Perhaps a religious musical in any sense is never particularly successful, unless treated with a heavy dose of humour or absurdity. Jesus Christ Superstar had to be jazzed up with lots of sex and Seventies costumes to make it palatable. In addition to scale and extravagance,  many classic musicals appeal because they allow the audience to vicariously indulge in all sorts of delicious evil. Gary Kamiya of Salon once wrote that the glaring flaw in the classic Christmas tale It’s a Wonderful Life is its depiction of Pottersville. “We are intended to shudder in horror at the sinful city he [Potter] has spawned… There’s just one problem: Pottersville rocks!” And so it is with Sweet Charity, Chicago, and Grease — never were dissolute harlots’ legs so charmingly parted. Musicals cannot thrive on goodness alone. It is sex, drugs and rock’n'roll that get them going.

The same is the case in Prince Siddhartha. The scene in which a crowd of palace concubines try to seduce Siddhartha is the most colourful, musical and attractive. When Siddhartha encounters the dreadlocked ascetics living underground, whipping themselves and indulging in weird yoga, the scene is fantastically stalactite-ridden. Later when Siddhartha’s rival gets repeatedly struck by lightning and then dragged down to the firey depths of hell (the stalactites now doing double duty) – oh, what a celebration of sound and fury, colour and light! And as for the emergence of the Devil and his wicked daughters, well, that looked like a pretty good carnival too.

Musicals also need sympathetic characters, the shadier the better. The Enlightened Buddha, through no fault of the actor who portrays him, is entirely unsympathetic, and in fact that’s the way the Buddha would like it. Let’s have no worldly feelings of sympathy here! The only character who raises a heartbeat is Siddhartha’s father, the old king. In the beginning he appears ridiculously mustachioed, clad in anachronistic shiny synthetic material and giving vent to a terrible caricatured laugh — “Ho ho ho ho!” Yet in the end, when he is reunited with his son who has become the Buddha, and who cannot express any love for his father, uttering only platitudes, then we feel a pang of distress for the old man. In the next scene the Buddha meets his former wife, who after a bit of token soul-searching kneels down and energetically devotes her life to Dharma. Now the old king’s solitude is complete. Everyone who has meant anything to him is either dead, or has betrayed him to embrace a logic that he cannot accept. I am glad that, despite its other faults, Prince Siddhartha, The Musical never forced the old king into the same ecstatic heights which all the other characters so easily attain. It leaves the old king the one true tragic figure on the stage.

The death of Buddha.

Musicals, like all theatre, are characterised by impermanence and the fulfillment of desire. The Devil character says that Buddha wishes to destroy this evil world on which the devils prey, but an audience preys on such things too. In order to feel redemption, the audience must first witness and experience suffering. So a musical, as an art form, cannot do justice to the ideals of Buddhism. And Buddhism seems an inappropriate and paradoxical theme for a musical.