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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo of 'Yokohama Stay' from Actually Mag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Two

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.