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

JAMU Program B
25 October 2009
ASWARA Experimental Theatre

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JAMU 2009
Experimental Theatre, ASWARA
22 & 23 October 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Treasures salvaged from the wreck

ASWARA dancers in James Kan's new work Dream.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An evening of enjoyment

Jamu 2008
Akademi Seni Budaya dan Warisan Kebangsaan
9 November 2008
Experimental Theatre

Jamu is always a treat, as well as a safe bet. If, out of eight dance works between eight and twelve minutes long, you can’t find something that you enjoy, you may as well give up entirely! And this season’s Jamu did not disappoint. Showcasing the large amount of talent among the faculty at ASWARA, the multiple bill’s diversity of styles and its high quality of performance demonstrate how ASWARA has emerged as the beating heart of the Kuala Lumpur contemporary dance scene.

ASWARA dancers in Joseph Gonzales's 'Random'.

The first work of the evening was ‘Tujuh Puteri’, a solo choreographed by Aris Kadir for Norbaizura Abdul Ghani. The dancer starts seated downstage, in a flurry of rose petals, twisting and pivoting through an elegant sequence of feminine gestures from Malay dance. As she advances upstage, her stance becomes more and more martial, until she is whirling and tumbling through a prolonged silat-like attack in a circle of light.

With this work, Aris Kadir proves once again why he is the darling of ASWARA, and the great hope for Malay culture in contemporary dance. His choice of movement is bold – the Malay style is so ingrained in him that he is not afraid to strike out with it. In Norbaizura he has found a sympathetic collaborator who can bring out the intricacies of his work. She is a talented dancer who seems to understand the intention of the movement exactly, knowing when a piercing look should replace a soft glance, and how to gradually transform the grace of her dancing hands into something more energetic and full-bodied. Aris and Norbaizura succeed here where others have failed, convincingly evoking the long tradition of strong and decisive Malay women.

The second work, ‘Time’, choreographed by Zhou Gui Xin, I had seen a few times before, and frankly I can never get past the first time I saw it performed with Jessica Ho in the lead – this classically lyrical piece seemed made especially for her. In this version the chorus was confident and well-rehearsed, and the leads equally assured and emotive. The decision not to include the projection of the poem at the beginning makes the work a lot tighter.

Suhaili Micheline Ahmad Kamil’s work ‘2=1′ was next, performed by herself and four dancers from Aurora Ballet School. Better known as a dancer than a choreographer, Suhaili was the only female choreographer in the night’s line-up (this is a topic on which I will continue to harp) and, perhaps because of this, her theme was a little more down to earth, and her style a little more self-reflexive and self-deprecatory than those of the other works.

The work started with a solo by Suhaili, demosntrating the impossibility of doing everything she is required to do in one day. She flings herself around within the circle of her dancers, who gently but unsympathetically repulse her. Then she retires and her dancers take over, portraying with quick, clean and quirky little movements and a preoccupied air how she eats, drives, teaches, performs, rehearses, prays, sleeps, and thinks. At one point Teo May Jean puts on thick-rimmed spectacles, and a person emerges from the audience to tell her, “Wow. So nice!”, a reference to how people always comment when they find out Suhaili wears glasses.

Suhaili was worried that people would dismiss her work as the ‘cute piece’ of the evening, but I think it came across as honest and personal. It also had a nice little ironic sense of humour that is frequently missing from Malaysian works, and which I found refreshing.

Humour there was aplenty in the next work — ‘Random’, by Joseph Gonzalez — but certainly not of the little or ironic kind! Joseph is a teacher to the core, and his work had pedagogical intent: audience members would pick three numbers from a box, corresponding with three movement phrases which the dancers would then perform. This was meant to introduce the enthusiastic but somewhat green ASWARA audience to elements of chance and audience participation which were prominent in contemporary dance in the last century.

'Random's stylish presenters -- Shariful Akma and ladies.

It sounds a little dry, and perhaps for this reason Joseph introduced the item that will surely win the audience popularity vote for the evening: transvestites! There is something about ASWARA that always leads to cross-dressing. Rarely does an ASWARA show not feature it. I used to think it was due to hidden penchants among the students, but now I think that the faculty has been leading the way!

Nonetheless, if they do cross-dressing, at least they do it well, and with style. Shariful Akma as the Madam gave a creditable version of Amy Winehouse, and had a personality to match. The helpers in their slinky dresses, who proffered the box of numbers to the audience, were utterly convincing. My non-Malaysian guest, being unfamiliar with local traditions, had absolutely no idea what all the cat-calling was about – she didn’t have the slightest suspicion that they were all men!

The movement phrases that followed seemed rather an after-thought, although the portrayal of garlic and onions frying in a pan in the cooking section had me giggling. The ASWARA dancers performed with aplomb. Raymond Liew’s technical ability was noteworthy, particularly in the last phrase, and Chai Vivan’s lovely side attitude turn caught my eye. The group of boys clad in bright yellow baju, hanging around like backup dancers, had me completely nonplussed, until, after everyone left, they had a quick group hug and then turned upstage, as if in preparation to perform another work for an invisible audience. It was a magical little touch transforming everything that preceded it, which now remains in my mind as a colourful light-hearted romp. Random, indeed.

'Sum', by Umesh Shetty.

The next work I must admit was my absolute favourite – Umesh Shetty’s ‘Sum’. The three Kathak dancers from the Temple of Fine Arts shared the spotlight equably with musicians from the Temple of Fine Arts and from Hands Percussion Team. Neither one was relegated to the role of accompanist to the other, which is fine in theory but very difficult to achieve in practice. In effect, all were dancers, and all musicians. The dancers started their phrase in silence, their feet making their own rhythm, and voicing hissed cues to stay in synchronisation. The Hands drummers entered with full pomp and ceremony, and the sight of their performance, as usual, was as captivating as their sound.

The dancers were very strong, in control of the joyous movement, and expressive where it was required. The structure of their work seemed dictated most by the big Hands drum, to whose rhythm they struck strong poses and changed direction sharply. The calling of the vocalist from Temple of Fine Arts married with their quick darting hands and changes of focus. For a moment, they would stand still and mark the rhythm of the music with claps, like flamenco dancers, transferring the focus to the musicians. Then they would dive once again into the movement.

Members of Hands Percussion entering with their instruments.

At one point, the dancers were visibly marking time with impatience, looking for the right beginning of a musical phrase so that they could start their movement phrase. They missed the cue, and had to skip the section, and start with the next. I gather they were quite upset about it afterwards, but for me it was a wonderful moment, seeing all the performers really watching, listening to and responding to each other, in a way that rarely occurs.

'Xin Dong' by Wong Kit Yaw.

Wong Kit Yaw’s piece ‘Xin Dong’ was the first I had seen of his work, and I was not disappointed. It began with the dancers in the depths of meditation, clad in white and connected by red thread. Their movements revolved around an enormous prayer bell which rose to reveal two dancers beneath. The hypnotic swaying of the bell, manipulated by Aris Kadir, was reflected by the slow ceremonial movements of the dancers. Norbaizura shone once again in this piece, although no dancer was featured. Her quiet focus and the evident thoughtfulness invested in her hand gestures were exactly what the work required. When I spoke to Kit Yaw previously he said he wanted to show how the theory of his teaching at ASWARA could be illustrated in practice, and I think the work succeeded. The iconography of Chinese dance combined well with the element of improvisation, and created a work that seemed both timeless and extremely apt.

Male dancers in Vincent Tan's 'After Duet'.

Vincent Tan’s ‘After Duet’ was a shift in mood, returning to larger movements and greater technical skill. I found the music choice initially difficult, but as the work progressed the movement proved itself a match for the music. The dancers were strong, especially the boys, whose daring physicality was well used without betraying any weaknesses in their technique. There were a few overwrought moments, but there were also some very satisfying ones, especially when couples locked in embrace were juxtaposed against the other dancers rushing past them.

Steve Goh’s ‘Unforgettable’ was the final work of the evening for obvious reasons: it featured a make-shift paddling pool half-filled with water, with rain falling into it from the ceiling. The work fulfilled the promise of its title with this visual stunt alone. It begins with a solo in which a shirtless (of course) Steve gets increasingly drenched in the midst of risky balances and romantic arcs of spray he kicks up from the pond. A multiple recipient of the BOH Cameronian Arts Award for best dancer, Steve is so talented that any self indulgence in this solo was forgiveable – we would probably watch him watch TV with equal delight. His obvious enjoyment of the set is interrupted by Nuur Faliza Saad, who bursts onto the stage and slides to a stop at his feet. He reaches for her and embraces her, but their connection ends there. She flings herself about like a thing unleashed, while he stands and watches, eventually quietly stepping back into the shadows. For the remainder of the piece, Nuur Faliza continues to hurl herself into the water, transforming the set into a violent Slip’n Slide, giving the work, as a few audience members commented, a very Pina Bauschian air. Nuur Faliza’s commitment to the movement was admirable – she was clearly holding nothing back – but in the end the work failed to make much of an impact apart from its first impression.

I really enjoyed Jamu, and I can’t wait for the next one. It’s a great introduction to some of the movers and shakers of the KL dance scene, and an easy way to keep an eye on their development. I even brought my arts-phobic boyfriend to watch, and I can honestly say that he enjoyed it too, which is higher praise than any I could give!