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.
