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.

Ad astra per aspera — the journey to the stage

Photo by Hafzan Zannie.

Contact
UMa Dance Company
22 March 2009
Panggung Bandaraya

The concept of beauty is much-maligned in current art criticism, especially in the Western world. Beauty as a goal of art has been relegated to the Victorian era – now we cherish grotesqueries, novelty, sometimes even outright obtuseness. I must have an old-fashioned aesthetic, because I cannot help but be deeply moved by forms arranged for their beauty alone.

The performance of Contact I saw on Sunday afternoon falls into this vein. Quite a lot of its beauty, I think, can be attributed to the light-handed direction of choreographer Leng Poh Gee, interesting costumes by Tin Tan Tai Chen and sympathetic lighting by Low Shee Hoe.

UMa Dance Company in 'Contact'. Photo by Hafzan Zannie.

The structure of Contact itself was fairly straightforward: a bildungsroman of eight dancers who are about to graduate from the dance program at University of Malay, tracing their development from before they were admitted to the program to their triumphant presentation of their senior theses. When they start out they are wearing neutral tops and black bottoms. They shake envelopes containing their application letters, and introduce themselves. Despite differences in language and accent, their stories are fairly similar; most have an STPM qualification, and few have much previous dance training. They begin to move slowly as a group, alternating between a handful of poses, before exiting with a run.

Solo by Muhaini Ahmad. Photo by Hafzan Zannie.

This introduction is followed by a series of scenes in which, alone or in small groups, the dancers illustrate their own stories and the story of their undergraduate journey. The tone varies from Lim Chee Wei and Lim Cheng Choo’s cutesy romp of a duet, to Muhaini Ahmad’s thoughtful, almost fierce, solo. On the whole, though, the entire work is somewhat elegiac, solemn and monumental. Though their undergraduate careers may have in reality been messy, rushed, exciting but confusing struggles, hindsight here lends them a quiet focus.

In the penultimate scene, the dancers reassemble, wearing an assortment of green and white items. The envelopes they carried in the first scene have transformed into their theses, and the poses they first performed so painstakingly have now been woven into a dance. The implication, underlined by their different outfits, is that through their studies the dancers have created their own individuality, but what is also evident is how their training has disciplined their bodies into the strong uniform performing unit seen on stage. Ah, they’re a credit to their teachers…

Lim Chee Wei giving verbal movement directions, resulting in the zapin. Photo by Hafzan Zannie.

The learning process is reiterated in miniature (a play within a play) in one scene in which Chee Wei directs the girls from a text of movement instructions, “Left foot step diagonal front mid-level, right foot step diagonal front mid-level,” etc. The girls perform the phrase correctly but mechanically, and the movements are unrecognizable as anything else but the fulfillment of the directions. Then Muhaini enters and distributes a pile of sarongs. As the girls don their sarongs, their bodies settle into a different stance, and when the music strikes up they launch into a spirited Malay dance (zapin?). It’s a nice illustration of the necessarily hands-on body-on nature of learning to dance – those dry words on the page, how little they can communicate this physical understanding!

Pan May Tzy and Lim Siew Ling in 'Contact'. Photo by Hafzan Zannie.

There was a lot of cheering from the audience when the zapin began, perhaps because of the moment of comprehension, perhaps because zapin always seems to require cheering, or even more probably because here, finally, was something that the majority of the audience understood. If this is so, it’s a shame, because there were so many other equally enjoyable moments in Contact. In one, Pan May Tzy and Lim Siew Ling stand facing each other on the tiny seat of a bar chair. They hold hands and lean back. The precariousness of their position and the visible workings of their trust elicit a gentle thrill, matched when Chee Wei enters to feed Siew Ling off the chair in an elegant walkover. When a clutch of girls wearing tiered printed dresses – making them look strangely as if they’re wearing crumpled dollar bills – start a line dance, it morphs into something much more interesting, with Pan May Tzy practically shining in the front row. In Tan Shioa Por’s solo, her pushes, suspensions and falls show a real mastery of phrasing – and this from a girl who wanted to be an interior designer!

And Shee Hoe pulled out all the stops for lighting this performance – he’s like a kid in a candy store. During the zapin, a row of lights descends on a bar upstage, their faces covered in gobos (the pierced plates usually used to project patterns of light onto the stage).
Here, instead of the audience seeing only their projected shadows, the delicate filigree of Malay patterns on the gobos is seen directly. Later, during the graduation scene, three or four empty lighting bars descend above the performers’ heads and then begin to cycle up and down, their movement reflecting the structured but chaotic movement of the dancers beneath.

Lighting by Low Shee Hoe. Photo by Hafzan Zannie.

Apparently there were a few stagehands backstage putting pedal to the metal to achieve this effect, and their effort was both evident and worth it, as it was throughout the entire performance, and through the undergraduate training process itself – a lot of hard work backstage and beforehand to achieve the appearance of perfect beauty.

Many thanks to Hafzan Zannie @ Antradika, for the use of his photographs.

Condors sound nonsequital notes

Condors in rock star mode. Photo by Haru, taken from the KLPac website.

Conquest of the Galaxy: Mars
KLPac Pentas 1
20 March 2009

A friend of mine, Doug Bishop, who teaches drama at Taipei American School, recently directed his students in an adaptation of the great absurdist theatre work, Ubu Roi. After watching the play, I complimented him on how much I had enjoyed it, adding that when I first read the play I had hated it (perhaps it had something to do with reading it in French). Doug surprised me by saying that he hated the play too, and that it had taken much time and force to whittle it into the relatively comprehensible and linear 45-minutes which I had witnessed. The author Alfred Jarry would probably turn in his grave, he added, because Ubu Roi was meant to be fragmentary, nonsequital, offputting – in a word, absurd.

Absurdist theatre is, I feel, akin to postmodern dance, and to that all-black oil painting of the early 20th century. It had to happen. It is a natural development of the postmodern condition. It has its place, I agree, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Last night I watched The Condors perform their world touring work Conquest of the Galaxy: Mars, at Pentas 1, KLPac. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy it. I laughed at all the right moments, but I also spent a lot of time in puzzlement. Judging by the oddly subdued silence as the full house audience filed out of the theatre after the show, I was not alone. After uncountable humorous skits, projected animations, high-energy dance interludes and puppetry vignettes, what, we were all thinking, was the point?

The point, of course, was that there was no point. We were there to be titillated, to have our 2-second attention spans stroked, to laugh at the fat guy, clap for the break-dancing trick, and nod our heads knowingly at the political references. The performers were crazy and madcap in the particularly peculiar way that we have come to expect from Japanese contemporary dancers. They even had suitably funky hairstyles. But in the end, despite the pumping rock music, the screams of the crowd sounded somewhat desperate. It felt like two hours of MTV advertisements, a little funnier, but without the high production values and without the sex.

Last year I met a Japanese dance curator who told me something I still feel hard to believe: in Japan, contemporary dance and modern dance are two entirely separate communities. They study in different departments at different universities, and never go to each other’s shows. The Other is the enemy. They have grown against each other so unremittingly that what once were strengths have become weaknesses. In the contemporary dance movement, the alternative trend and penchant for rebellion have resulted in a generation of dancers who are able to create works of theatre but, because they refuse to submit to so disenfranchising and old-fashioned an idea as learning a technique from a dance teacher, they cannot dance. And because they reject convention and linear narrative, like the absurdists of old, they are trapped in a logical repeating loop of their own making.

There certainly were moments when the Condors raised the bar, but I think those came only when they dedicated themselves to developing a single idea for more than thirty seconds. The scene in which the group balanced apples on their heads, directed by a guy in a pink mop wig who suggested increasingly impossible physical tasks, was both sweet and just physically impressive enough to be memorable. When they created snapshots from the seaside – a surfer catching a wave, slow-motion beach volleyball, or a tourist tracking egg-laying turtles – the continuing sense of location cemented our attention.The ingenuity of their groups shapes recalled the works of Momix. And when Ryohei Kondo, the founder and choreographer, played out his now-sustained-now-staccato solo, there was a real level of interest in his movement.

At those times, the Condors became more than just 11 crazy Japanese guys jumping about on stage. At other times their non-sequiters just got in their way. Perhaps it’s time to leave absurdism in the 20^th century, where it belongs.