A contradiction in terms?

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

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

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

Concubines hard at work.

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

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

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

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

The death of Buddha.

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

How clean is your toilet!

Toilet
Co-presented by Pentas Project and KLPac
20-24 May 2009
Pentas 2, KLPac

On the way to see director Loh Kok Man’s new version of his work now entitled Toilet, I was expecting, or perhaps hoping for, lots of grit and grime, blood and guts all over the walls, grotesquerie and grimness. What I found was altogether different: light polished vignettes, all scrubbed and disinfected. And while I enjoyed the production in the end, I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing.

Toilet began with an ensemble dance section, or at least, the dancers were dancing, and Gan Hui Yee, the only non-dancer in the cast, was providing a heavy posed counterpoint to the dancers’ romantic repeated phrase of little movements – feet padding rapidly on wooden benches, lips administering quick kisses to their own forearms, bodies hopping lightly on and off the benches.

Tin Tan Chai Chen and Gan Hui Yee.

Although a late addition to the cast to replace actor Berg Lee, Hui Yee quickly established herself as the grounded earthiness of the production, the only one to whom my original concept of the work could still apply. Soulful-eyed Louise Yow, veteran of Kwang Tung Dance Troupe who has worked with Charlie Tan Dance Theatre, Low Shee Hoe, and Musical on Stage, was by contrast the most ethereal of the group – her extremely slender form and easy extensions always controlled by her technique, but threatening at any moment to go drifting into the stratosphere.

But Louise and Hui Yee never got to face off in Toilet. Hui Yee was paired most often with Tin Tan Chai Chen, a doll-faced dancer with a committed and confident theatrical presence in scenes which require considerable physical stamina, such as the slow-motion sequence in which a banana-gobbling Hui Yee pops Tin Tan’s yellow balloon, or Tin Tan gets her own back by bullying Hui Yee with domineering singing.

Louise Yow.

Louise meanwhile shared several scenes with Leng Poh Gee, who started his dance career with Dua Space Dance Theatre and is currently a tutor and choreographer in the University of Malaya’s dance programme. In their first scene together, Louise and Poh Gee dance by themselves on their own wooden benches, a yearning phrase of balances and suspensions. I found it particularly difficult not to be mesmerised by Louise’s long lines and the elegant grace of her transitions. Poh Gee and Louise’s second scene together is a duet, full of clinging drags, close body work and lots of variations on the basic baby carry. Physically the sequence is interesting and it was well performed but it lacked convincing passion, as did the scene that preceded it, in which all the dancers kiss, then trade partners. Only Hui Yee’s character, rejected by the kissers, watching but uninvolved, strikes a chord.

Amy Len battling her solo.

And then there’s Amy Len. One of Kuala Lumpur’s most powerful dancers, Amy made her mark quietly in other scenes, but came to her own in an increasingly frantic solo against a backdrop of repetitive self-conscious narrative voiced by the other performers. The text, drawn from Peter Handke’s play Self-Accusation, documents the growing self-awareness of the narrator, and his subsequent descent into social anomie and existential crisis. Against this relentless wall of noise, Amy slices and twists, twitches, contracts, in battle with herself, dancing to and against a rising crescendo of music and sound and flashing lights, falling to the floor and dragging herself up again, to eventual collapse. It was a performance that had Best Featured Dancer stamped all over it.

But for me the best performer in this often baffling production was the Ng Chor Guan’s two-faced music. A melodious tinkle of pianos and birdsong dominated many of the scenes. [I was impressed that the birdsong was locally recorded rather than pulled from the usual catalog of sound fx – the call of the black-naped oriole was unmistakeabl.] The transitions between scenes interrupted the lightness with raucuous brass, the sound of the backwash of water, whistle-blowing, the crash of construction noises and the feeling of being under a train, all more commonplace and toilet-like.

The most memorable and magical moment of the production was entirely due to the combination of music with stage and lighting design, rather than with the intrusion of any human performers. Scores of different-sized disco balls descended from the ceiling, and to a brilliant tinkling score, they revolved at their own speed and heights, now all lit, now only some, showering the audience with shifting polka dots of light. The scene strained the barriers of belief, at certain moments it came dangerously close to the twee soulless spectacle of the sound, light and fountain show down the road at Taman Tasik Titiwangsa. But those gorgeous musical disco balls, they could not help but enchant.

The conclusion of 'Toilet'.

The risks of that scene were repeated across all of Toilet. At times the production bordered on kitsch and predictability, then it seemed to rescue itself. The performers were all individually skilled but they occasionally failed to convince. The production was enjoyable, and yet it somehow missed its mark. In its polished performances and sterile set I could not sense the ugliest gestures of the excretion of body waste. Perhaps the work should have been named something closer to ‘Hidden Desires’. Perhaps it was better left untitled.

But with such a strong cast and direction, I would go and see Toilet over and over again. And not just for the musical disco balls.

Times they are a changin’

Alarippu to Moksha 2009
13 May 2009, MTC Theatre, Jln Ampang
Sutra Dance Theatre

Big changes are going on at Sutra Dance Theatre. January Low is leaving to spread her wings elsewhere, starting with a 5-month residency in South Korea. With her exit comes a whole new era for Sutra, and Alarippu to Moksha, Sutra’s regular performance which serves as a launching pad for student dancers, was a good opportunity to check out the shape of things to come.

Certainly January is leaving some big shoes to fill. In a performance at the Singapore Dance Festival last year, January described how she feels that the Indian classical dance form is infused into her body. She is familiar with all its guises, its most subtle sensibilities as well as its most extravagant displays. This was evident in her performance on Wednesday night – she appeared to be enjoying herself immensely, freeing herself to happily inhabit the movement as I have not seen her do in a long while. In the sinuous phrases of ‘Saberi Pallavi’, it was delightful to watch her in one-legged poses, slowly deepening the bend in her supporting leg until it looked as if she could go no more, and then, with exquisite timing, launching into the next movement. And there was particular poignancy in her later portrayal of Krishna’s lover, when moments before she had been in tears as Ramli Ibrahim acknowledged her great contributions to Sutra and her art.

January’s absolute sense of comfort with the Odissi technique is one to which only very experienced dancers may subscribe, and the junior group who performed in the first few numbers on Wednesday night have yet to attain it. They also have a long way to go in developing focus and maturity on stage, but they are young, and their coltish awkwardness is both forgiveable and endearing.

Tan Mei Mei, with Divya in the background.

As for the senior dancers, their relative strengths were on parade in Ashta Nayika, in which they illustrated the various dramatic situations experienced in the eternal romance between mortal and god. Divya shows a pleasant abishegam, and a light graceful movement in her arms, but there is something a little unformed about her. She may yet grow into greater strength. Tan Mei Mei is very capable; her agony as the jilted lover was strongly performed, but perhaps too businesslike. Sivagamavalli and Geethika Sree were charmingly well matched in their flower-picking scene, and Sivagamavalli’s following solo was very expressive and watchable. Nishah Devi was perhaps a little too convincing as the pouting ‘little wifey’ to Harenthiran’s lover, but she is clearly a force behind the scenes in arranging works and rehearsing the younger dancers, and this is an important role that should not be overlooked. Revathi has the greatest capacity as a performer. She was quite fetching in her rejection of her lover, rejecting his token and slamming the door on him with spirited grace. In her opening duet with Harenthiran, the lines of her positions were lovely and she absolutely radiated serenity. But she is a small-bodied dancer, and her presence is naturally quieter – its delicacy can be eclipsed by the extrovertism of the other girls.

And then there’s Rathimalar Govindarajoo, who has returned to dance with Sutra in the last few years, after five years in London with Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company. Being Rathi’s close friend, I sometimes forget how virtuosic she can be. In the piece ‘Ashta Shambu’, depicting the attributes of Shiva and eulogising His triumphs, the audience was in no doubt that they were in the presence of a seasoned performer. Rathi is proficient in varied roles, but she particularly shines in the gruesome and bloodthirsty Shiva dances, when she accesses a great sense of darkness and power. When, as Shiva, she looses an arrow from her bow, it is a full-bodied gut-wrenching movement. She stomps upon her enemies, and claims her kills – you can almost see the corpses piled up around her. Then, as the worshiper, her pivoting turns with arms raised above her head, fists opening and closing, are distinct from the other dancers in her épaulement, spine and shoulders spiralling in ecstatic fervour.

L-R: Nisha, January, Mei Mei, Divya.

But Rathimalar has been branching into her own choreography, and performing outside of Sutra Dance Theatre, so it is unrealistic to expect her to direct Sutra’s future. I think the responsibility lies with the other senior dancers as a group, rather than as individuals. As individuals, none of them are as versatile as January Low, but the combination of their strengths is formidable. In the final Moksha there was a single magical moment, a sense of real excitement, when the senior dancers stormed the stage and joyfully launched into the rhythm, the junior dancers parting in their path like a school of startled fish. If, after January’s exit, the senior dancers can collectively harness this energy, then Sutra Dance Company can only go from strength to strength.

Up Next: Prince Siddhartha, The Musical

A more mainstream production from the Chinese community, also in Mandarin, from the prolific Buddhist production company Musical on Stage. Many talented dancers with classical training are involved, including my friends Chan Sheow Fern, Ng Sei Li, Hii Ing Fung, and Foo Siau Yin. Musical on Stage has a reputation for very high production values and polished performances.

22-31 May, Istana Budaya.
www.musicalonstage.com

Up Next: Toilet

What was once presented as a mainly theatre work is being revised in a more dancerly genre, featuring some of the more established contemporary dancers from the Chinese-speaking community: Amy Len from Kwang Tung Dance Troupe, Leng Poh Gee, lecturer at University Malaya, and Louise Yow. In Mandarin with English surtitles, this performance is likely to combine multimedia with grotesquery, illustrative of continuing trends within the urban Chinese-speaking avant-garde.

20-24 May, Pentas 2 KLPac
www.pentasproject.com

Speaking only to us

Gostan Forward
A Solo Performance Lecture by Marion D’Cruz
Five Arts Centre
8-10 May, Annexe Central Market

“Is it dance?” Marion D’Cruz is sick of the question. In her long and varied career  — the topic of discussion and demonstration at her masterful solo performance Gostan Forward at the Annexe last week — Marion was never afraid to take her art where she needed it to go, bending, breaking and redefining the boundaries of the discipline. Semantic quibbles over where to place her work on the continuum of theatre and dance mean little to her, for clearly they miss the point.

But there is another question, to some now equally trite and tired, which for Marion has been a lifelong source of inspiration, and we might phrase it thus: “Is it Malaysian?” Marion, like many members of her generation, has been consumed by the desire to participate in the process of a nation actively imagining itself. Her work has always been interlinked with the state of the nation, our politics, crises of identity, traumas and joys. Marion sought to create a vocabulary of dance and theatre that is uniquely Malaysian, and  she’s done better than most.

The degree to which she has succeeded can, I think, be measured by audience reaction. I went to Gostan Forward on Saturday night, accompanied by a non-Malaysian friend. At the performance I met another friend who, though Malaysian, was raised in the cultural bubble of international schools. He didn’t know what gostan meant. My friend from overseas was even more mystified – what sense could she make of this wild woman on stage, moving her audience first to laughter then to tears, speaking first in this language and then that, pulling disparate cultural and political references from here and there and weaving them into her narrative? Marion and Five Arts Centre, like Instant Café Theatre, have made a space for this irreverent style that only Malaysians (and, perhaps, older Singaporeans) can understand. For Malaysians, Marion’s performance was so clear and straightforward (despite its gostan topic), so accessible, that it requires little interpretation. During the performance, she wondered briefly, “What if I had not come back from New York?” Well, she might have been speaking to a more global audience, but she would not be speaking so directly to us.

Marion’s presentation was humorous, illuminating, frightening, always engaging, but never confessional. Some members of the audience thought that she could have spoken more about her relationship with her husband Krishen Jit, but I disagree. There is enough of the public Marion, the Marion that we already know in bits and pieces, to keep an audience sated when it is all brought together – why ask for more? Many of the people in the audience were younger than I am, and we didn’t really know much about Marion’s artistic activity in the past. But what we discovered, what Marion told us, about her life and its role in our history, came to us as easily as something from our collective subconscious – oh, of course!

Marion has reached a stage in her career when, although she is far from dead, it is useful for her and the audience to consider her legacy now and how it will be handed down to posterity. I grew up with another figure, seminal in the search for the Malaysian vocabulary, who was also energized by the optimistic nationalist visions of the 70s: my father. Which will prove more lasting, I wonder, his edifices of concrete, or Marion’s ephemeral presentations? These things are unpredictable. I am reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf at the moment, and it interests me how she compares her state of small but rising fame with that of contemporary bigwigs, Prime Ministers, lords and ladies. She would not have predicted that a hundred years later we would be reading her diaries, and all those lords and ladies dead and forgotten. But now, as the ongoing discussion on Arteri indicates, the idea of nationalism as a driving force seems to be spent in the younger generation of artists in Malaysia. So where now? And whither Marion?

Reading Woolf is instructive. “Now, with middle age drawing on, and age ahead, it is important to be severe on such faults. So easily might I become a harebrained egotistic woman, exacting compliments, arrogant, narrow, withered. To correct this, and to forget one’s own sharp absurd little personality, reputation and the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all be full of work.”

Marion is nothing if not full of work, as the program for Five Arts Centre’s 25^th anniversary this year shows. She is building a reputation as a teacher, too, although not as a guru – I think Marion has too much of a sense of humour, too much questioning self-awareness for that. What she gives us is not an authoritative sense of “This is how you do it,” but quite the opposite: an example of daring to which we can aspire, a pattern of action which may reverberate in our cultural consciousness for a long time to come. As she says herself, speaking through, from, with the orang tua mask which she assumes so comfortably, “Buat saja, lah, ’nak!”

[For a more straightforward, and less gostan, account of what happened during Marions’ performance, check out Choy Su-Ling’s article in AsiaDanceChannel. And for a more hard-hitting discussion, Simon Soon's piece on ARTERI. ]

The transformation of pole dancing — myth or reality?

I was at a production of ‘The Vagina Monologues’ when I saw my first belly-dancing. Eve Ensler’s mainstream feminist hit was being bolstered by a number of local acts with a connection to the cause. “Why bellydancing?” I asked my neighbour. “Don’t you know?” came the reply, “Belly-dancing is being reclaimed as a feminist art form. It was originally performed by women to entertain other women in segregated parties. It celebrates the power of womanhood!” Really? Interesting. But as I watched the soloist batting her come-hither eyes behind her diaphanous veil, then turning her back on the audience so we could better appreciate the jiggles of her wide birthing hips, I thought, “No. I don’t buy it.”

Some things are so entrenched in popular consciousness as practices that demean and objectify women that no degree of revisionist history can erase the taint. So it was with some trepidation that I went to see my friend Canela teach her pole-dancing class at the recent open day of Dancespace Ampang. Before we get into it, I’d like to say that Canela is about as strong and self-aware an example of womanhood as you are ever likely to find. She was top of the class when we were friends at school. She went on to trade ballet for ice hockey, and is now an analyst at a think tank, when she is not learning Spanish, practicing Arabic calligraphy, or attacking with a sword in wushu. So, what’s a girl like her doing in a place like this?

Pole dancing has become the latest craze for a certain segment of the professional female population. Its reputation for strengthening and toning the body are legendary. In an attempt at complete sanitization, gyms now bill it as ‘fit-pole’, the group workout that will have you hanging upside down using only the strength of your inner thighs in no time! The pole is being transformed into a workout accessory, as neutral as an exercise ball. Or is it? Although it is now the domain of privileged career women trying to combat the effects of overconsumption, can it ever be totally divorced from its origins as a means for underfed underprivileged sex workers to miserably make a little money?

In some ways pole has the leg up (excuse the pun) over bellydancing in this respect. There is nothing to necessarily tie pole dancing to a certain style of dance – no music, no costume, no prescribed movements, no sacred cultural traditions. There is only an accessory – the pole. Do with it what you will. And yet so much pole dancing, and Canela’s included, returns to the stereotypical movement vocabulary that my boyfriend describes uneuphemistically as ‘humping the pole’. But, Canela cautions, there are all types out there, from world champion and YouTube favourite KT Coates whose style is characterised as purely athletic, to others who go for a more ‘artistic’ approach. And, she says, there is also subtlety to consider – even if it is about sex, it can be done well or it can be done badly.

And there’s no doubt that Canela does it well. Watching her perform the routine she choreographed for her Advanced Beginners pole class at Dancespace [see YouTube video below] I was certainly impressed by her physical ability as she attacked all her tricks but also by her performance quality. She has nice lines and makes good clear shapes. She finishes all her movements and never appears to be straining. Despite the inherent suggestiveness of the piece (how could it not be, set to ‘Candy Shop’ by rapper 50 Cent?) Canela performed it with such calm confidence that I could not witness her enviable poise without thinking that here was a woman completely in control.

And after all what’s so wrong with it being about sex? Well, said my boyfriend, would you teach that to high-schoolers? No, of course not, but not, I hasten to add, because high-schoolers wouldn’t enjoy it. There is no creature in the world so excited about flaunting her own sexuality as a seventeen-year old girl. But I wouldn’t teach it to high-schoolers because that would of course invite backlash from parents and the community, and because I don’t want to be part of the cultural complex that pushes sexuality upon girls too early and too soon. But why isn’t it okay for consensual adults? In this dumbed-down world where grown-ups read Harry Potter and watch superhero comic movies without blinking, isn’t there space for more adult practices, in every sense of the word? Must everything be PG-13? Sure, pole dancing doesn’t require deep abstract thinking, but perhaps, like belly-dancing, it genuinely can become a method for grown women to come to grips with their own bodies and to explore their sexiness.

Sexiness, also, is always in the eye of the beholder, as well as the actor. For people who have spent a lot of time pole-dancing, like Canela, I think that initial impressions of sensuality wear off. They become immune to the suggestiveness of certain movements – to them they are just movements, to be learned and executed, well or badly. Canela demonstrated to me a move she included in her routine for the Clorets Amateur Pole Dancing Competition, posted to the Internet last year, in which she swings both legs together high up the pole, then bends her legs to wrap the backs of her knees around the pole as she slides down. My response: “To me, that looks sexy.” She’s surprised. She is so close to this practice that she can no longer see with the eyes of a non-initiate. So possibly the ubiquitous pole-humping move – whether facing the pole, knees spreadeagled around it, or with the back to the pole, writhing up and down – which speaks to me so clearly of strip clubs, is now in Canela’s mind and the minds of other dedicated pole dancers merely a point-scoring exercise, just like those ridiculous extraneous arm motions you see Olympic gymnasts pull out in their beam routines.

Then again, the pole dancers are not so distant from the general population as to imagine that their routines are always suitable for general consumption. There was some debate over my posting this recording to YouTube – how recognisable would the participants be? But we all have distinctions between private and public – this is why your Facebook page is for friends only. Some dancers will plaster themselves all over the Internet while performing at Sexpo. Others will be more circumspect. But given the inherent attractions of pole, I think it is here to stay. We must learn to make a wider space for it within our cultural consciousness.

In my five-minute lesson at DanceSpace, I experienced some of the things that make pole so seductive an activity, and I mean that in a non-sexual way. When you harness the centrifugal forces as you spin around the pole, and learn to climb it and control your descent, you experience a similar rush of blood to the head as you once did hanging upside down from the highest rung of the jungle gym as a child. This sensation is as far away, I think, as one is likely to get from the disempowered strip club dancers of yore. Perhaps, as Canela believes, pole really can be whatever you want it to be.

So, do you buy it?

Raising support for the universal language

International Dance Day was on Wednesday, and with is came the official launch of AsiaDanceChannel.com, a new enterprise by The Star dance critic and blogger Choy Su-Ling and her PR company Pixarus Communications. I was MC for the day, which meant I got to recite Akram Khan’s International Dance Day Message in my best poetry-reading voice. Apparently it moved some people to tears – I must still have the gift!

Spangly eyeshadow ahoy!

Held at the Media Department Auditorium in the convoluted warren of University of Malaya, the launch was the perfect occasion for a showcase of cultural dances. After all, International Dance Day is intended “to cross all political, cultural and ethnic barriers and bring people together” to celebrate the art form. Students from the UM Dance Department donned their best costumes and spangly eye-shadow to give us a zapin Johor, a Bharattanatyam alarippu, ngajat from Sarawak, and The Gathering, a short contemporary work.

Tendu a la seconde, zapin style.

Revues of Malaysian dance, so beloved by the Ministry of Tourism, always appear to me an ideal occasion to perform cultural critique. UM, like all public tertiary institutions in Malaysia, is dominated by Malays, so in addition to having Malays performing the zapin, we also had Malays performing the alarippu. Nothing wrong with that – we should all learn each other’s dances. But for some reason all the Chinese performers were lumped together into contemporary work. (Actually I know this was accidental – the work was originally performed with one Malay girl in the mix, but she has since graduated from UM and moved on to full-time employment.) Stranger still, all the major races were represented – Malay by the zapin, Indian by the Bharattanatyam, all the East Malaysian cultures glossed under Iban – but where was the Chinese dance? Unless – aha! — the contemporary dance was also meant to be the Chinese dance! It was after all choreographed by Leng Poh Gee, a lecturer in the Dance Department. What does this say about our equation of the Chinese community (and its oft-cited economic dominance and success) with our concept of modernity? The rest of us are stuck in the stone age, while the Chinese have advanced so far into the future that they can claim contemporariness as their own culture!

A more contemporary tendu.

Of course I am being facetious, but these things bear thinking about. Especially since The Gathering shows some surprising cross-culturalism. It’s an excerpt from the full-length work Contact which was performed earlier this year at Dewan Bandaraya. This section, with its ensemble of girls in faded crumpled dresses, is one of my favourites. The dancers start with a simple foot phrase, involving a heel strike, some steps, and a foot pointing to the side, and gradually the dance builds in momentum until by the end the dancers are competing to be in the front of the group to perform a grandiose temps levé à la second (hop on one foot with the other leg raised high to the side). Combined with the jaunty flute-dominated music by Matthew Lien, the emphasis on footwork with a very erect torso and stationary arms gives the work a somewhat Celtic air. In speaking to Poh Gee, however, I discovered that the work didn’t have Celtic roots at all, but Malay ones! The foot phrase is an abstraction of the zapin, which is used elsewhere in Contact. It neatly illustrates how a phrase of movement, when divorced from its usual trappings of music and costume, can attain a degree of universality. Perhaps dance really is a common language.

Choy Su-Ling, giving her speech to launch AsiaDanceChannel.com.

If so, then it’s a language that the majority of the business world has yet to learn. The aims of AsiaDanceChannel are twofold: to develop an online magazine that links and promotes dance in Asia, and to encourage businesses in Asia to develop corporate social responsibility plans that benefit the development of dance. In her speech, Su-Ling employed the jargon that, presumably, makes most sense to the business world: translating dance language into economic language. Dance is a ‘cultural resource’, we must learn to ‘tap the creative cluster’, because ‘creativity…will be the new currency of success’ when we learn to create economic value by exploiting intellectual property. This diminution of dance from art to economics is a far cry from the immediacy of the bodies only recently cavorting on stage, but perhaps it is necessary to get through to those with the money. I agree that it is very important to develop a sense of personal, and by extension corporate, philanthropy in Malaysia and other Asian countries which lack this civic principle. But I also think that this should be done by awakening the love of art within individuals, as in Su-Ling’s own case – this is first and foremost her passion rather than her profession. Art for art’s sake, rather than for profit. But in this time of uncertainty, a bit of money for dance from anywhere, and I wish AsiaDanceChannel.com the best of luck!

Images by James Quah.

Wait until it comes out on video

Seven Skins
The exhibition opening of ‘The Light Show 2009′
The Annexe Central Market
16 April 2009

Most dance productions have to be seen in person. No video, no matter how accurately captured and carefully edited, can compare with the ability of the human eye to encompass the width of the stage in one instant, then hone in to focus on the swivel of an eyeball in the next. That said, there are a few occasions when watching a dance production in person is so frustrating and uncomfortable that a video comes as a welcome blessing. ”Seven Skins’ at the launch of The Light Show at the Annexe Central Market was one such instance.

To be fair, the Annexe probably didn’t predict the crowd that showed up that night, but they should have. Not only were the art installations created by an accomplished and gregarious crowd with plenty of trendy friends, but ‘Seven Skins’ was directed by no lesser personage than Aida Redza, Malaysian dancer-choreographer extraordinaire who for the past several years has been performing extensively in Denmark. I went because I had never seen any of Aida’s work, and I was curious. Apparently, so was the rest of KL’s dance community. And it didn’t help that the inclusion of Suhaili Micheline and Shafirul Azmi Suhaimi brought out all the Aswara dance students, while Sukarji Sriman’s performance lured the dancers from University of Malaya. Add to that all the theatre buffs who came to check out Anne James in an uncharacteristically non-speaking role, and there you have it: two rooms of the Annexe packed to the brim.

Crushed into the centre of the room, trying hard to keep behind the black lines on the floor that separated audience from performers, and becoming more and more aware of the pins and needles in my legs, I found it very hard to concentrate on the performance, even when I was able to see it any of it. Most of the time it was hidden in atmospheric pitch darkness, or concealed by the crush of bodies. When the dance moved to the second room and the audience surged after it, blocking both the doors, I gave up entirely and headed for the food queue. So I was relieved to hear that a video would be made and displayed for the benefit of those who missed out.

Chris and Desmond from Lifetale, with editing and post-production by Nazim Esa, have produced a stylish little video that you can view at the Annexe until Sunday. They opted for an impressionistic approach, rather than strict documentation, which was probably a pragmatic choice rather than an artistic one given the challengingly low levels of light at some points, and the scattered nature of the performance at others. On video the camera swoops in close to the action, and the heaving swell of spectators fades to background. Reduced to two dimensions, my relationship with the work became much less fraught. I wasn’t worried that Suhaili’s flying elbows would land in somebody’s face. I wasn’t constantly craning my neck to catch this moment here, while suspecting that I was missing something rather more important over there. The great impersonality of video, the way it dials physicality down, benefits rather than hinders this dance work. It’s rather like admiring a picture of a bustling colourful market scene, and not having to worry about purse snatchers or avoiding that pile of fish guts.

On video, everything is reduced to light, which is particularly appropriate for this exhibition. Someone asked Suhaili why the piece is named ‘Seven Skins’. She replied because there are seven bodies, and Aida wanted the dancers to focus on their skins, the facade of their bodies rather than their content. [The person then said, no, there are only six dancers, but there are in fact seven, though it was not obvious to most of the audience during the performance – Aida's mother, wearing bright red baju kurung, was seated on one of the raised platforms, tranquilly twisting her hands to the music.]

The idea of describing dancers as skins reminded me, rather unfortunately, of the Jews in the Holocaust whose skins were transformed into lamp shades. After all, the entire exhibition was really about lamp shades. We didn’t come to see electricity flowing through a twisted filament and making it glow, we came to see the multiplicity of things that can be put around the glowing filament.

If the body is a lampshade, then what is the light that shines from within? In the video, freed from the physical reminders of my own body, I became aware of the different characters the dancers were allowing to emerge through their skins. First there was Aida, chatty one minute, fey the next. Sukarji exerted a moderating and calming influence, but he was not above taking on the belligerent Shafirul in a fight. Suhaili was a whip-end of wild abandon, who reared like a horse when Anne James blew at her. Foo meanwhile was a cool figure, smiling beningly, but also a crawling creature like a fractured Chinese New Year dragon.

If you have the opportunity, go and see the video, but don’t overexert yourself. Although it’s better on the small screen than in real life, I suspect this particular production was also better in rehearsal than it was in performance. With such an interesting cast of characters let loose in a playground of shining delights, you can imagine that rehearsals were interesting affairs. Suhaili described the process to me as two hours of talking, followed by one run-through. For her it was a particular pleasure to work with such an encouraging and caring choreographer, one who trusted you to produce something memorable without having to drive you towards it. In the end, Aida’s compassionate flexibility may have rather endangered this work, which seemed to diffuse light rather than focus it. But see for yourself; view the video.

A circle of stones

Nanci Traynor in 'Gather the Lost'. Photo by Daniel Liou.

Gather the Lost – A Ritual Theatre Performance
KLPac Foyer
12 April 2009, 2.30pm
Featuring Nanci Traynor, William Curtis, Chai Chik Ying and Vimala Devi Tanggavelu.

On rainy Sunday afternoons, KLPac seems like a warm glowing hub of humanity in a gray wet world. In the cafe, tables of friends laugh and clink their glasses of wine. Upstairs an orchestra is practicing – the sound of their brass and drums filters down to the foyer. A waiter with a trolley of beer clatters past. People filter in for the matinee in Pentas 2, chattering and twirling their wet umbrellas.

In the midst of this cosy camaraderie, a man is lying spreadeagled on the polished concrete floor in the centre of the foyer. More accurately, he is lying in shavasana, the corpse pose of yoga, his chest rising and falling in even breaths. He is surrounded by a circle of polished pebbles like those in KLPac’s landscape design, in a repeating pattern of white and black. Between his feet lie a coconut shell, lit candle and incense, and a brass bell.

The man lies oblivious to the hubub around him. High heels click past his head. A few people stop to stare, and then move on. A coterie of photographers, their black costumes making them more conspicuous rather than less, nose around the pebble circle, their cameras clacking.

A woman in white slowly emerges onto the scene. Then another, and another. Each carries a token – an corsage of flowers, a journeyman’s bag – like a burden. Like pilgrims they approach the pebble circle. You are aware of their bare feet on the cold concrete floor.

William Curtis in 'Gather the Lost'. Photo by Visithra Manikam.

All at once the shaman in the centre rises. He rings his bell. The women scream and collapse. The photographers descend upon them like carrion crows. The women pick themselves up, and begin to progress clockwise round the circle. Each happens upon the token that another has dropped, as if it is the thing long sought but almost forgotten. One by one, the shaman negotiates their entry into the circle. The music picks up – they’ve timed it well. The women break into a dance, the crouching shaman aware of them. Friends now, arm in arm and smiling, the women exit the circle and the space.

The beat of the music continues, in quick contrast to the measured clapping of the shaman’s hands as he douses the candle. He collects his implements, carefully places pebble after pebble into his cloth bag, then exits with a jingling limp. The ritual is over.

This brief performance in the KLPac foyer was a taste of ritual theatre, in anticipation of a full-length performance in the KLPac Indicine in June. It is directed by dancer, performer and yogi Nanci Traynor, who has been running a series of ritual theatre classes at KLPac. Nanci — with the help of her husband William Curtis, the shaman of this show – is trying to introduce ritual theatre to Kuala Lumpur as a novel form of interactive cathartic community performance.

Photo by Konghwee.

As Nanci says, ritual theatre is not for everyone. Its outré gothic quality drove at least one audience member to shouts of laughter. Nevertheless, in today’s world, where individuals are increasingly alienated from any sense of community, it makes sense to try to reestablish a sense of shared ritual: the careful delineation of a sacred space, the gathering of participants for a rite of passage overseen by a figure of power, entering into a liminal zone where anything can happen, and then reemerging again into the everyday world transformed. This is what theatre achieves in all its guises, but the deliberately ceremonial aspect of ritual theatre makes this structure particularly evident and accessible.

And even for those who are not interested, sometimes it is refreshing just to encounter a circle of stones like something transported from a windy mountaintop far away, or a moment of meditation, when you come in with your wet umbrella expecting food and wine and laughter.