A Long Bet on a New Duet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uncompromising visions of modern nightmare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simply mindblowing

Nederlands Dans Theater in 'Silent Screen'. Image from SISTIC.

Double Bill: Silent Screen & Toss of a Dice
Nederlands Dans Theater I
19 Oct 2008, Esplanade Theatre
da:ns festival 2008, Singapore

Watching Nederlands Dance Theatre was like having a religious experience. Or like I had died and gone to heaven. I have nothing to say about it – I merely wish to communicate my speechlessness. After Lightfood León’s incredible Silent Screen, my brain was so full of all that fantastic movement that for the first half of Kylián’s Toss of a Dice I could only register the undulations of the backdrop and the sparkling of the twisting metal and glass mobile sculpture created by Susumu Shingu. When I finally returned to reality, it was only to confront the fact that Kylián had placed 12 dancers on stage in exactly the same way, a feat at which only he could hope to succeed. That blew my mind all over again.

They’re all geniuses. Nuff said.

A time to talk, no time to dance

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.

First a dubious concept, then an undoubtable dancer

Redoubled
Singapore Dance Theatre http://www.singaporedancetheatre.com/
16 Oct 2008, Esplanade Theatre Studio
da:ns festival, Singapore

Dramaturgs like to wax intellectual about their role, but perhaps their biggest contribution to dance is preventing choreographers making clunking great errors of judgment when venturing into territory unknown. Jeffrey Tan, choreographer of Sometimes I Think I Remember, could have done with a good dramaturg.

From Jeffrey Tan's 'Sometimes I Think I Remember'. Image from Singapore Dance Theatre.

Tan’s work was a series of solos by a male protagonist, interspersed by chorus sections by the other dancers. Its non-dance elements – original video projection and text given in voice-over – came across as over-determined and sophomoric. There were also lots of overused tropes – man in a stretchy outfit pressing his face through the fabric towards the audience, man killing himself against a backdrop of shadowy figures chanting “Don’t do that!”, man lying in a spotlight in twitching agonised dreaming — that were presented without any essential development or innovation. Despite the obvious technical ability of the dancers, the work came across as adolescent.

There was one redemptive moment, however. Towards the beginning of the piece, four female dancers perform a section in synchronization. All flying hair and gorgeous extensions, the whirl of movement is elegant and hypnotic. Clearly Jeffrey Tan has a mature ability to manipulate movement, but needs guidance when working with other elements.

Kuek Swee Boon’s work, Pellucid, was notable for the extraordinary performance by SDT company dancer Chihiro Uchida. It is terrible to resort to objectification of the inscrutable Oriental, but in Uchida’s case I have little choice. With her mop of trendily cut hair hanging over her pixie face, her expressions were completely invisible, but her movements were so wonderfully easy that it did not seem possible that they were initiated by conscious thought; rather, they were purely impulsive, instinctive. This animal-like quality was compounded by the perfectly calculated nature of her movements. Every slide or lift that might, in lesser hands, have a wobble or a correction, flowed seamlessly with impeccable distribution of weight and placement. Even when one of the other dancers pushed her off her stool, her response did not seem predictable, but her tumble to the floor had the same quality as a falling cat which wriggles, quick as a flash, to land on its feet.

Chihiro Uchida in 'Pellucid'. Image from Singapore Dance Theatre.

This feline grace made her appear less real; as if she were one of those impossible elegant anime figures sporting little kitten ears. Had she started to fly, I would not have been surprised. Perched on her stool, another dancer handed her a glass of water, and she gazed into it, with the same vacant yet fixated attention with which a cat contemplates a tank of goldfish. Towards the end of the work, in a sudden rush towards the audience, her hair lifted, revealing a small frown, a look of concentration, but by then the damage was done – the illusion of her surreality could not be shattered.

Uchida’s style might not work for all pieces, but it certainly worked for this. Kuek’s work was a fine vehicle for her talents. Had I been one of the other dancers in the work I might have been frustrated by the focus given to Uchida. Or perhaps the chance to watch her perform this work, night after night, was reward enough.