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.

Repression v. Oppression: Finding the Balance

Tracing — Dance Dialogues in Singapore and South Africa
Joey Chua and Mcebisi Bhayi
1 & 2 August
Fonteyn Studio Theatre, Federal Academy of Ballet, Petaling Jaya

When Joey Chua and Mcebisi enter the performance space the first striking thing is their physical similarity. Both are small, finely moulded and tightly muscled. But as they perform their collaborative duet ‘Tracing’, what emerges most strongly are their differences: of gender, race, nationality, background, and ideology.

Joey Chua is a Singaporean dancer and choreographer who came to Rimbun Dahan as a resident choreographer in April this year. During her residency, she invited her collaborator Mcebisi Bhayi over to Malaysia from South Africa. Together they are working on a new piece which they will develop over the course of this year in various residencies, and will finally perform as a finished work in South Africa next year. The showing they gave of ‘Tracing’ in Petaling Jaya earlier this month was of a work-in-progress, followed by a feedback session with the audience.

'School of Fish' from 'Tracing'. Photo: Foo Chiwei.

‘Tracing’ develops as a dialogue between Joey and Mcebisi about their childhood memories and current selves. In ‘School of Fish’, the first section of the work, you get a feel for their stylistic differences — Joey is a precise and exacting mover, Mcebisi a more rough and rhythmic one. They attempt to copy each other’s movements, tacking from phrase to phrase with the suddenness of schooling fish, gradually and deliberately building their on-stage characters: of Mcebisi as vocal, confident and flirtatious, and Joey as hesitant and finicky, but at the same time passionately eager.

Recalling the restrictions of childhood. Photo: Foo Chiwei.

Joey starts to bark orders, summoning up her childhood under a disciplinarian — “Do not talk with food in your mouth! Do not sit with your legs wide open!” — while tying Mcebisi’s dreadlocks into knots. This elicits giggles from the audience, but these are quickly quelled when Mcebisi replies with the restrictions of his apartheid childhood: “Do not swim on this side of the beach! Do not vote! Do not strike! Do not marry a white woman!”

Mcebisi’s voice shifts into movement, and he embarks on an impressive solo, “Speaking with Amadlozi (Ancestors)” in which he roams about the stage, stamping and shouting to summon his ancestors from their sleep, entreating them to rid him of the bad luck which he scours from his arms and torso. His movements are meaty and extravagant, clearly marked by African dance traditions. Joey enters, and the two return to spoken narrative, with Joey recounting an episode from Mcebisi’s childhood in which he was disciplined by his uncle, eventually leading Mcebisi to retort, “I am not a child! Do not tell me what to do!”

'Precious'. Photo: Foo Chiwei.

Joey’s solo which follows, entitled “Precious”, offers intellectual interest as well as clarity of movement. In it, she shows us the emotional scars left by growing up in a narrow-minded regime. It begins with a moment of despair — miming her own suicide — but develops into a subtle play of sorties and retreats. In teetering balances, spreading her knees in a low crouch, and meandering in circles with tiny steps, she displays her longing to reach out to explore her character, potential, and sexuality.

Mcebisi re-enters as a source of hope. Their duet, which is rich in movement as well as ideas and which deserves greater development, portrays Mcebisi exhorting Joey to take comfort and direction from her tradition, in the same way that he is strengthened by his. Joey’s character seems excited by this possibility, but in the last section returns to frustration: Mcebisi easily plays jump-rope with a line of tied-up socks, but Joey keeps tripping over them, and eventually throws them to the floor and stomps off.

There are two main divisive themes at the heart of this work. The first is the distinction between repression and oppression: of Joey growing up in a society which enacts self-censorship to ensure the uniformity of the herd, and of Mcebisi growing up in a brutal regime which practiced systematic dehumanisation on the basis of race. The pain of the individual is similar in both instances, but the resulting character is not: the piece points to the rebellious spirit of blacks in South Africa and contrasts it with the retiring nature of Singaporeans trained into submission. It is a difficult and perhaps unfair contrast to evaluate. The moral power of Mcebisi’s righteousness seems to completely outweigh Joey’s personal suffering.

Photo: Foo Chiwei.

A similar scenario occurs with the other main theme: Mcebisi’s personal bastion of traditionalism contrasts with Joey’s modernity. Despite the fact that his ancestors seem slow to awake and assist him, Mcebisi is full of confidence in his beliefs and identity. Joey, cut adrift from her Hakka culture, is portrayed as anxious and lost. The piece pressures Joey to return to her traditions — as, incidentally, did many members of the audience during the feedback session — but the solution is clearly either too pat or too artificial, and Joey’s character does well to reject it at the end.

I am trying to draw a clear distinction between the dancers’ onstage characters and their offstage portrayal of themselves. As the producer of this work-in-progress showing, I have enjoyed a privileged perspective into Joey and Mcebisi’s lives and work. I think it is important to point out that both Joey and Mcebisi thrive in their post-modernist transnationalist milieu — how else would they be working together and jetting all over Asia to prepare for a performance in South Africa? Joey, especially, is an organisational machine — she sees possibilities, makes things happen, and seems unafraid to take risks or make leaps. It is her prerogative, of course, to explore in this very personal work another side of her nature, one which she keeps buried in the course of daily life. But I was concerned, while watching ‘Tracing’, that the her strengths — the skill with which she conducts her daily life and the delicacy with which she probes her past — should not be overwhelmed by the more forceful portrayal of Mcebisi’s life.