At the Musee de la danse project at Theatreworks, a choreographer (Boris Charmatz) invited me to hop on to one of four box thrusts that had been lowered to waist-level in the studio theatre, above the clutch of eminent artists lying on the floor and tackling the question of "what is dance in Singapore".
"Just sleep there" he said, and I lay down on the dusty shafts, and attempted to create a position. Boris was sceptical. "How can you sleep like that?"
He was right. I opted for something less contrived and more comfortable. Then I entered a zero-gravity world, dazzeld by the fluorescence of the worklights so far above. Floating as child on the sea. Helpless, and free.
We are so used to creating movement every day as dancers, striving for finer or stronger control. But movement does not belong to human beings alone. It is also the property of beings non-sentient, infitesimal. Planetary and microscopic. We are of the same family in our origin.
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Saturday, 10 October 2009
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!
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!
Performance Updates
What a hiatus! I confess! I have been very busy dancing, and thinking and making dances at quite a frantic pace. It has been wonderful so far, discovering a lot of possibilities that I never realised, learning about my body and my thoughts, seeing a lot of very innovative work (see the wildly wonderful calendar on the edge of my seat at right), and finding that my limits may be much further than I would have dreamed of two years ago before I started this programme! Wonderful, and absolutely exhausting at the same time.
Two of the exciting projects that I'm involved in right now:
The Third Space at the Esplanade dan:s festival
30-31 October (Fri-Sat), 7.30pm Esplanade Recital Studio
I will be performing a contemporary Bharatanatyam dance theatre piece by Nirmala Seshadri. Incorporating classical Indian dance and music with contemporary movement, theatre, video and chinese poetry by Singapore-based poet Dan Ying, "This and That" is an intense piece is about age, memories and unfulfilled dreams. It is one of four dances in this year's NAFA Third Space showcase, an annual exploration of Asian traditions and history through contemporary dance.
More details here. Tickets are available from SISTIC.
NAFA Music Department new compositions showcase
3 November, 4pm, NAFA Lee Foundation Theatre
A new collaborative work with Indonesian contemporary music composer Jenny Rompas, which I am choreographing and dancing with Tong Wen Yee. The showcase also includes new music/multimedia collaborations by other composition students.
Two of the exciting projects that I'm involved in right now:
The Third Space at the Esplanade dan:s festival
30-31 October (Fri-Sat), 7.30pm Esplanade Recital Studio
I will be performing a contemporary Bharatanatyam dance theatre piece by Nirmala Seshadri. Incorporating classical Indian dance and music with contemporary movement, theatre, video and chinese poetry by Singapore-based poet Dan Ying, "This and That" is an intense piece is about age, memories and unfulfilled dreams. It is one of four dances in this year's NAFA Third Space showcase, an annual exploration of Asian traditions and history through contemporary dance.
More details here. Tickets are available from SISTIC.
NAFA Music Department new compositions showcase
3 November, 4pm, NAFA Lee Foundation Theatre
A new collaborative work with Indonesian contemporary music composer Jenny Rompas, which I am choreographing and dancing with Tong Wen Yee. The showcase also includes new music/multimedia collaborations by other composition students.
Saturday, 8 August 2009
moving like air
I had the privilege of taking an open workshop with Kuik Swee Boon and some of his dancers last night. It was an introduction to the style of T.H.E. and their current repertory Silence , a brooding piece that's going to be revisited at the Esplanade the week after next (see listings on the edge of my seat, on the right).
The workshop was slightly painful and mostly ecstatic - I thank all my lucky stars and wonderful teachers for the training that allowed me to follow it. Swee Boon's style is built on a ballet base of clear body positions and verticality, but has the beautiful, organic elements of interaction with the air and the earth. The phrases that we looked at pulsed with an urgent tension and fluid grace.
The best part was just watching him as he generously demonstrated the details, and explained their qualities in his gentle, eager voice. There is an amazing kineticism about him, a lithe electricity in his elastic relationship between verticality and the gravity of the floor, the flow of breath to muscle.
This weekend I shall dream of moving like air.
The workshop was slightly painful and mostly ecstatic - I thank all my lucky stars and wonderful teachers for the training that allowed me to follow it. Swee Boon's style is built on a ballet base of clear body positions and verticality, but has the beautiful, organic elements of interaction with the air and the earth. The phrases that we looked at pulsed with an urgent tension and fluid grace.
The best part was just watching him as he generously demonstrated the details, and explained their qualities in his gentle, eager voice. There is an amazing kineticism about him, a lithe electricity in his elastic relationship between verticality and the gravity of the floor, the flow of breath to muscle.
This weekend I shall dream of moving like air.
Friday, 7 August 2009
my favourite time of year
Time to get inspired!
The dan:s/dance festival is back from 23 Oct - 1 Nov at the Esplanade. The headline programme list has been unveiled with Paloma Herrera of American Ballet Theatre, Shen Wei Dance Arts (New York), a collaboration between Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (who recently showed Sutra at the arts festival here) and flamenco legend Maria Pages, and Australian group RAWdance (who also visited Singapore at the last M1 fringe fest).
I'm hoping that there will also be a good selection of local and experimental work at the theatre studio and other smaller venues.
Of course NAFA is performing too! I am scheduled to be working on a contemporary Bharatanatyam collaboration with Singapore-Chennai-based choreographer Nirmala Seshadri, which I'm very excited about.
Dan:s Festival Blog 2009
The dan:s/dance festival is back from 23 Oct - 1 Nov at the Esplanade. The headline programme list has been unveiled with Paloma Herrera of American Ballet Theatre, Shen Wei Dance Arts (New York), a collaboration between Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (who recently showed Sutra at the arts festival here) and flamenco legend Maria Pages, and Australian group RAWdance (who also visited Singapore at the last M1 fringe fest).
I'm hoping that there will also be a good selection of local and experimental work at the theatre studio and other smaller venues.
Of course NAFA is performing too! I am scheduled to be working on a contemporary Bharatanatyam collaboration with Singapore-Chennai-based choreographer Nirmala Seshadri, which I'm very excited about.
Dan:s Festival Blog 2009
Thursday, 18 June 2009
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.
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!
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!
Sunday, 14 June 2009
Sweat
"Sweat, you know, is for most sensible human beings not quite nice. Not quite delicate, nor mannerly, and to be avoided wherever possible. But a dancer lives-I use this verb in all its implications and with all emphasis-lives in it, with it, around it, soaked with it, permeated by it, marinated in it." - Jose Limon
It has been a sweltering three weeks since the end of my first year as a dance student. Nice of the weather to make sure I still feel like a dancer even when I'm not in the studio! With a break from evening rehearsals, I've gotten the chance to catch a bunch of shows, including one while I was away in China. Here's one little write up to start!
Forward Moves: Body Swap/Joavien Ng and Dani Brown; Q&A/Danny K
Thank you, NAC, for once again commissioning local work with a mandate to prove that dance, too, can be intellectual. It can be conceptual. That it need not be just movement. Okay, there were a couple of walkouts, perhaps some of these people just not evolved enough to figure out what was going on. Where the dancing was. (The editors of the festival programme have my empathy. Wouldn't it be odd to have a section for "not just dance".) But the majority, like me, did stay to be constantly puzzled and thoroughly entertained.
In the first piece, the festival commissioners put ultimate faith in German dramaturg Jochen Roller to navigate the triple minefield of (a) the old trick of two people swapping into each other's lives, (b) intercultural collaboration, (c) collaborators who had never met and seemed to have little in common. I feared the worst when the show opened with two women lolling side by side on a rug conducting an aimless conversation about a flight to Dubai. The Chinese dancer clad in yellow, the American/German dancer clad all in white. Most of the piece was talking. Joavien and Dani excavated parts each others' histories, and took commercial break type segments to ask the audience if they thought that Americans bathed enough, or if Asians weren't expressive. Interspersed with some matter-of-fact video clips of their week of living uncomfortably in each others' families and sleeping in each others' beds (partners included). For the remainder, they wrestled each other energetically and finally swapped clothes that turned out to be too small on Dani and too big on Joavien.
What made it work in the end for me was that the collaborators gamely sized up the invisible beast in the room, and grabbed it by the horns. We might like to pretend that we live in a perfectly globalised world, where one artist can speak the same language as another halfway around the world, and we suppose, simply step into another's shoes with brilliant effect. But for these two choreographers, the body swap experiment made it very clear that at a fundamental level, another culture is simply incomprehensible. As a result, we inevitably fall back on stereotypes of race and culture, including third cultures (at one point the two blended bodies to make a series of Hindu-ish live sculptures, in response to Joavien's having learned a "Hindi Dance" as a child). Joavien and Dani executed their analysis with personable charm and focus, and none of the pseudo-lofty conclusions that a lot of other inter-cultural explorations try to foist on audiences. But I found that I wasn't quite satisfied. A conclusion seemed to be missing to follow from the observation that cultural divides continue to exist. I also would have hoped that in a dialogue on culture, both dancers could have gone deeper than the stereotypes and looked into the complications of their own multi-cultural identities.
The second piece by diskodanny was a delicious satire on the number-crunching approach to cultural planning, or the art also occassionally known as pandering to the masses. At intermission, ushers distributed a study that Danny had commissioned, whose thesis was that it is possible to aggregate and pinpoint the formula for the contemporary dance piece that audiences want to see so that "audience's satisfaction will be maximized when their expectations of the performance are met". He then showed a seven-minute solo of lyrically modern mush set to Madama Butterfly, which he had choreographed based on the numbers, namely that audience preferences were for:
i. movement travelling across space
ii. earthly lighting
iii. recorded classical music
iv. costumes revealing body form
v. simple or no set design at all
vi. multimedia unncessary
After taking the audience through the statistics while flouncing around in a series of fantastic costumes, Danny offered amiably to adapt the movement, costume and music to better suit the audience's tastes. The result of a show of hands vote on that evening was a techno-mechanical recasting of the piece, with the artist wrapped in yellow and black hazard tape, "if you like, like a censored Singaporean".
Why annihilate an artist's individuality like this? "Because," he declared flamboyantly, "the artist desires to be desirable". Bravo.
Forward Moves on 6 June 2009 at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. Survey results quoted from Q&A: A Performance by daniel k.
It has been a sweltering three weeks since the end of my first year as a dance student. Nice of the weather to make sure I still feel like a dancer even when I'm not in the studio! With a break from evening rehearsals, I've gotten the chance to catch a bunch of shows, including one while I was away in China. Here's one little write up to start!
Forward Moves: Body Swap/Joavien Ng and Dani Brown; Q&A/Danny K
Thank you, NAC, for once again commissioning local work with a mandate to prove that dance, too, can be intellectual. It can be conceptual. That it need not be just movement. Okay, there were a couple of walkouts, perhaps some of these people just not evolved enough to figure out what was going on. Where the dancing was. (The editors of the festival programme have my empathy. Wouldn't it be odd to have a section for "not just dance".) But the majority, like me, did stay to be constantly puzzled and thoroughly entertained.
In the first piece, the festival commissioners put ultimate faith in German dramaturg Jochen Roller to navigate the triple minefield of (a) the old trick of two people swapping into each other's lives, (b) intercultural collaboration, (c) collaborators who had never met and seemed to have little in common. I feared the worst when the show opened with two women lolling side by side on a rug conducting an aimless conversation about a flight to Dubai. The Chinese dancer clad in yellow, the American/German dancer clad all in white. Most of the piece was talking. Joavien and Dani excavated parts each others' histories, and took commercial break type segments to ask the audience if they thought that Americans bathed enough, or if Asians weren't expressive. Interspersed with some matter-of-fact video clips of their week of living uncomfortably in each others' families and sleeping in each others' beds (partners included). For the remainder, they wrestled each other energetically and finally swapped clothes that turned out to be too small on Dani and too big on Joavien.
What made it work in the end for me was that the collaborators gamely sized up the invisible beast in the room, and grabbed it by the horns. We might like to pretend that we live in a perfectly globalised world, where one artist can speak the same language as another halfway around the world, and we suppose, simply step into another's shoes with brilliant effect. But for these two choreographers, the body swap experiment made it very clear that at a fundamental level, another culture is simply incomprehensible. As a result, we inevitably fall back on stereotypes of race and culture, including third cultures (at one point the two blended bodies to make a series of Hindu-ish live sculptures, in response to Joavien's having learned a "Hindi Dance" as a child). Joavien and Dani executed their analysis with personable charm and focus, and none of the pseudo-lofty conclusions that a lot of other inter-cultural explorations try to foist on audiences. But I found that I wasn't quite satisfied. A conclusion seemed to be missing to follow from the observation that cultural divides continue to exist. I also would have hoped that in a dialogue on culture, both dancers could have gone deeper than the stereotypes and looked into the complications of their own multi-cultural identities.
The second piece by diskodanny was a delicious satire on the number-crunching approach to cultural planning, or the art also occassionally known as pandering to the masses. At intermission, ushers distributed a study that Danny had commissioned, whose thesis was that it is possible to aggregate and pinpoint the formula for the contemporary dance piece that audiences want to see so that "audience's satisfaction will be maximized when their expectations of the performance are met". He then showed a seven-minute solo of lyrically modern mush set to Madama Butterfly, which he had choreographed based on the numbers, namely that audience preferences were for:
i. movement travelling across space
ii. earthly lighting
iii. recorded classical music
iv. costumes revealing body form
v. simple or no set design at all
vi. multimedia unncessary
After taking the audience through the statistics while flouncing around in a series of fantastic costumes, Danny offered amiably to adapt the movement, costume and music to better suit the audience's tastes. The result of a show of hands vote on that evening was a techno-mechanical recasting of the piece, with the artist wrapped in yellow and black hazard tape, "if you like, like a censored Singaporean".
Why annihilate an artist's individuality like this? "Because," he declared flamboyantly, "the artist desires to be desirable". Bravo.
Forward Moves on 6 June 2009 at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. Survey results quoted from Q&A: A Performance by daniel k.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)