Seen:Silent
Hun Pen & January Low
17 Oct 2008, Esplanade Recital Studio
da:ns festival, Singapore
Two talented female dancers not content to be objectified at this year’s da:ns festival were Hun Pen, star Cambodian classical dancer, and January Low, her counterpart in Indian classical dance. Their show, Seen:Silent, was quite engaging: the two accomplished performers, born on the same day, met to talk about their lives and demonstrate some of their experience. This was followed by a brief question and answer session with the audience.
The performance could not escape comparisons with Jérôme Bel and Pichet Klunchun’s work About Khon, which was presented in the same space at da:ns 2007. Both performances were discursive rather than performative, and both discussed Asian classical dance forms. Some members of the audience were virulently opposed to the similarity, but I think their indignance was misplaced. Bel and Klunchun do not, and should not, hold a monopoly on this very useful form which they helped to pioneer. And Seen:Silent was essentially different, because it was about the lived experience of women, and because it was more democratic: rather than having a representative of Western culture interrogate a guardian of Asian culture, two Asian women were interrogating each other.
Seen:Silent shed light on the interesting ways in which two classical dance forms discipline and create female artists. Hun Pen and January talked about the experiences of their bodies maturing and now aging, their relationships with their draconian taskmasters, the challenges of embodying sometimes essentialist female roles on stage, what happens when (male) audience members confuse art with reality, and how Pen and January see themselves developing in the future.
Both artists acquitted themselves well; January, perhaps, was more articulate, but Hun Pen made up for it in spirit. At times, as some audience members later noted, the performance seemed scripted, but, to be fair, this is a trait that trained dancers have great difficulty overcoming.
A number of audience members also said that they wanted to see more dance, but I felt quite the opposite. We already know these women can dance, we don’t need them to do it just for our satisfaction. In fact, I felt that the demonstrative sessions – all Cambodian classical dance movements compressed into 3 minutes, for example, or the structure of Odissi training shown in 5 minutes – detracted a little from the focus of the talking. The fact that Seen:Silent sometimes seemed like a girly gossip session was not only part of its charm, but also part of its intent; we, the audience, were subjected to the anecdotes and fancies of these two people, as they, so often, have been subjected to our gaze. These two artists are now taking bold steps in control of their own image, and I could not help but feel privileged by this chance to get to know more about the people behind the performance.
