That chinese girl who does indian dance

This and That (2009) by Nirmala Seshadri

I'm currently working on a new piece I watched the flowers with Nirmala Seshadri at the Substation, an experimental bharatanatyam work.  The first question I always get, is "why?!"

The short story is that I started dancing bharatanatyam, odissi and chhau during asian dance modules at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.  I had a great connection with my teachers, Nirmala and Raka Maitra, and still perform and work with them today. This led me to other indian-classical based work with Dr Siri Rama, Jayathi Siva and other choreographers who have been interested in my base in asian dance alongside my western contemporary and classical training.

Looking back, though, I know I was interested in asian art and philosophy much earlier. I devoured asian folktales as a little bookworm, and went on to history and literature when I was in school. My yoga practice has been part of my life for over ten years. Dance and performance is an integral component of the oral history and culture of Asia, and the forms as they exist today are fascinating junctions of history, migration and human interaction over centuries - so the social scientist part of me just gets hooked.   The emphasis on asian dance, theatre, music and their contemporization was one of the things that drew me to NAFA in the first place. 

I wonder now if it was an accident that among the many other asian forms I have touched on,  it is these indian forms that have become as much a part of my vocabulary as ballet (which I have done the most) or Limon (my first modern dance technique).  They weren't easier for me than ballet or modern, they were certainly difficult to begin with and difficult even now, as I guess all rich classical forms are!  I don't consider myself to have a complete grounding and practice like January Low (who is also half-indian, for what that's worth) and I don't see myself devoting hours to accomplishing an arangetram graduation. But the more time I take to practice these forms, the more they reward me with their intricacies and my fascination, and provide me with a counterpoint to the aesthetics of Western dance that are easy to take for granted. 

Could this only have happened in Singapore? Growing up in Singapore in a kantang (westernised) family, I guess it's normal that I feel estranged from the monolith that is Chinese history, culture and language, even though I do have great respect and interest in it today.  It's probably also normal that I grew up feeling comfortable with access to the other cultures around me, particularly Indian and Malay (and need I say American and European). I guess there's also the novelty of being an outsider that works to my advantage, like the way I am considered to speak excellent french only because I'm not french!

The most important factor is definitely the affinity that I have with my teachers and mentors, who I'm lucky have chosen to work in Singapore and where I had access to them. They have very different personalities and approaches.  But both celebrate their deep heritage and extensive practice while approach these forms in a contemporary context and constantly question their functions.  They are great improvisers, which gels well with my own approach to making dance.  I loved channeling non-mythological characters and re-creating abhinaya gossip in Raka's Hungry Stones.

Now with I watched the flowers, Nirmala and I are building a duet from our collaborations in 2009-2010 when I was part of the ensemble that performed her work This and That in Singapore and New York. Both of us are dancers as well as writers, and connect strongly with stories and emotional content.  This material has led us to some startlingly profound conversations about feminity, sexuality, philosophy and life journeys.  It will be the most intensely autobiographical work I have done so far.  Bharatanatyam is the main idiom and reference, but there is also improvisation, floorwork, text and theatre - in a strange way, the question of why a chinese girl is doing indian dance seems less and less relevant as we go along.  What I hope we'll share with you is two women at different life stages, in a sincere conversation about womanhood.

I watched the flowers - a meditation on womanhood, maturity and love at the Substation, 28-29 June. Ticket details to come.

Dancing can change your life

It certainly has for me. I can hardly believe that my three years at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (NAFA) are over. In the past month I sped through a daze of impossibly long days. Rehearsals, technique examinations, final year choreography project, bump in for our final performance in the department showcase. Thank you cards. Editing weepy videos all night. Final year end party. It was so hard to imagine it all coming to an end, that we sat in the park with each other and a lot of vodka until the wee hours of the morning.

This is gonna be the sappy posting.

I think I knew what a huge gamble I was taking three years ago when I handed in my resignation letter in the civil service and headed to full time dance school. What I had no idea of was how my life was going to change. I find it really difficult to imagine myself in my old life now. Hard to imagine ironing my shirts, jet setting in suits and heels, scribbling in long meetings and drawing a comfy paycheck. I am surprised how uninteresting it sounds to me now. The thought of long meetings and laptop-lugging is enough to make my back twinge.

I am really grateful that a lot of good people gave a chance to an unlikely dancer - starting with friends and teachers who encouraged me to perform and choreograph when I was still working full time, and the faculty at NAFA who auditioned me and accepted me, even though I was over the age limit. A dance diploma programme is no joke. I wondered many times if I would survive the sheer misery of the technical training, the pain every day, the injuries that took me off my feet. I don't think I would have even passed the attendance requirement if I hadn't had a faithful partner to wheedle me out of bed every morning at 6am to make the long commute to school.

I encountered a lot of scepticism when I chose a local school for my dance training. Were the students of good caliber? The faculty of international standard?

In the first few weeks of school I realised that of my cohort of 22, none of us were "perfect". Most of us didn't have perfect bodies for dance, many were late starters with little dance background, some didn't have the finances (to complete the NAFA education), and many in my batch were to me really young and lacking in focus. I believe now that it was exactly the right place for me. In a programme full of imperfect dancers, we were there to encourage each other. I want to give credit to the faculty at NAFA for their dedication to nurture anybody with the commitment to try. However unlikely all of us seemed, our teachers believed that we could be transformed. Believed that from the passion that each of us showed at audition time, each of us could beat the odds and make it to a professional level.

I was able to work with some wonderfully diverse faculty, both local and international. Graham and Limon classes actually felt like coming home to my earlier training in New York. It was meaningful to work with Asian artists on their own journey to reconcile the contemporary and the traditional. The NAFA signature curriculum that I went through exposed me to both Western and Asian art traditions, and different disciplines such as music, calligraphy and fashion. It gave me many avenues for reflection on history, identity and society. I am especially grateful to those teachers who urged me to see myself as an artist, not a student, and to demand quality work from and for myself.

We ended our programme with a graduating batch of just 9 of us. I think each of us fought tooth and nail to make it through - through to yet another beginning.

Screen Dance

One of the special things that I have seen recently is a British Council-sponsored series on "Screen Dance" in the UK. Contemporary choreographers are these days so enamoured of putting "multimedia" video projections into their works, but in Singapore there are far fewer of us looking into video itself as a performance medium.

Who needs lunch when you can go for a talk by the electrifying Liz Aggiss. She began dancing when she was 30, becoming a fearless artist and choreographer, and also a dance film maker and academic. In person and in some quirky on-screen introductions in the film, she pointed out the vast possibilities of film for directing and framing the audience's point of view, and also creating special effects to transcend gravity, venue, and sound. How nice to be able to keep a record of the work for posterity, that is made to be viewed on screen instead of inch-high blots for dancers on the wide-angle stage shot. It surely helps when generous institutions realise the potential and reach of dance film. The UK has the BBC, Channel 4 and the Arts Council England.

Singapore is just now falling in love with animation, computer graphics and film shorts. The most beautiful movement in Singapore is waiting to be shot and edited!

Three cheers for adults dancing in Singapore!

One of the main reasons that I began this blog was because so many people tell me that they love dance and ask me whether I think they could dance too, even though they've grown up and got careers and families. Yes, absolutely!

I am especially grateful to the bunch of radiant mums and professionals who I get to dance with at Attitude, who rush down to class after work or when they've fixed the kids dinner. We even have a grandmother in our class.

Mr B:
"I don't want people who want to dance. I want people who have to dance."

I find that this describes my friends as much as the NYCB ballerinas that Balanchine was thinking of! They teach me a lot about perseverance and passion, and help me to believe that dance is something that can stay with you forever, if only you can find your strength to stick with it.

The best part about dancing in Singapore is that there is so much interest and so many places where dance is happening. Every month I scratch my head over the arts calendar while I make difficult choices over the many local and international dance performances (not to mention attempting to squeeze in my other three loves, theatre, music and visual arts). Because of my indecision, I miss quite a few shows because they get sold out. But I really have to be happy about that too. At this point in time, we are blessed with audiences that are both faithful and adventurous. And I am constantly hearing about new schools and wonderful teachers. One board that I like to drop in on from time to time is at Dance Net.

I've had the chance to add some links at the sidebar for schools and classes that I hope you'll find useful. Please feel free to send suggestions! The list is focused mainly on schools for technique in ballet, modern/contemporary and jazz, and I hope to add a section on ethnic dance too, as I learn more about it. As I'm not as familiar with them, I haven't included the waves of social dance, latin, and line dancing that also have huge followings here.

Happy dancing!

Boxing Rings for Butterflies

Did you hear wailing about this year's festival programme being crammed with avant-garde work from unheard-of post-soviet states? Well, wail on.

Maybe it was with a knowing wink that this year's festival began with a Requiem. If you could imagine artistic insanity, it might well comprise an orchestra, a full choir, five vocal soloists, and two major ballet companies in swimwear. Also liberal silence, two divergent requiems and four black couches.

Yet all of it came together in impossible, dark genius. Choreographer Edward Clug harnesses the force of Mozart's requiem and migrates the conventions of beauty into a totalitarian state. Gradually, he strips all human comfort away: off with the skirts, the jackets, the couches. The fifty odd corps de ballet disrobing at dim centre stage formed a lump in my throat. They were just that reminiscent of preparation in a concentration camp. The dancers were transformed into a proletarian swimsuit parade, sweeping in mechanical ranks across the stage.

Out of such brutal uniformity, the ballet strives to remind you that in this cruel arena, we are still beautifully human. Such a soaring, exuberant Dies Irae. Lyric duets conceived in boxing rings for butterflies. Finally, the corps(es) struggle towards you to collapse in a plastic massacre. In the aftermath, a girl in white floats solemnly through, dispensing shining arcs of baptism water. Another dancer discovers her existence half-submerged in a fishtank.

Clug is well aware that his work is steeped in religious and political imagery, and insists that you must take away your own interpretation. But to explain its genesis, he admitted in the post-show dialogue that he wanted to turn the music around, create a requiem for the living, a purgatory, a rebirth. That this was his response to a childhood in Ceausescu's Romania, and his own realisation of a desperate need for freedom.

He found much resonance in Singapore. At curtain call, the audience were springing to their feet in applause. I guarantee you three theatres-full of Singaporeans can now identify Slovenia on the map.

-The Architecture of Silence by the Slovene National Theatres Opera & Ballet Maribor and Ljubljana/ Singapore Festival Orchestra (Slovenia/ Singapore) blew me away on 30 May 2008, The Esplanade Theatre

counting to eight

Many "grown-up" friends don't know how happy they make me - when they ask me suddenly how they can start dancing. They're not planning on taking it seriously, they say, but they'd like it to be part of their lives. They wonder shyly if it's too late if they're 25, 30, 50? Can they do more than wait for their daughters outside the studio?

I'm so glad to have another opportunity to say: You're not alone! There is no better time to express yourself than Now!

It has been a joy to discover the dance community in Singapore since i returned from New York five years ago. It's a community of people who watch dance, practice dance, teach dance, and above all, love dance. They are present at the performances of classical as well as experimental work, and populating the pockets of adult dance classes across the island. Proof that movement is a language that transcends age, traditions, and languages. I've met dancing doctors, teachers, lawyers, bankers, homemakers.... and I'll admit that till recently, I was a dancing diplomat.

Dear friends, the link page of this site is dedicated to you!