Immigration

I have had the fortune to travel and perform a fair bit in the past year. The immigration forms gave me the realisation that I had a great luxury of self-definition.

Seems hard to believe that just five months ago I was still immersed in three years of formal dance training. That orgy of intensely self-directed sweat, angst, humblement, reshaping oneself through guidance. At the end of which I stopped writing “Student” and put down “Dancer” every time I crossed a border.

Then the last five months – The Hungry Stones. The Screw of Thought at Theatreworks. The Singapore School Project with ITI. Contact Improvisation festival KL. My capoeira batisado.The Always Sea. Randai. Play! at the ArtScience Museum. Fang Mae Khong in Laos. 2High in Brisbane.

It is odd to say this. These days, I don't think I am dancing. I am moving, a great deal, but not in the same sense that I understood this in my past few years at NAFA. I have my own work, and it is often movement but it is not necessarily dance as in the technical sense. In the rehearsed and prepared sense. In the rules of choreography sense.

I am seeking. I am drowning. I am reading and mis-reading other human beings and human bodies. Sniffing around for ambient energy and human history. I am asking questions and writing emo drivel like this and proposing that something could happen. And also I am spending a lot of time writing proposals and grant applications.

In the last month I started to write “artist” instead of “dancer”. Then I end up explaining that I don't actually paint or sculpt. It could just as well be “researcher” or “interpreter”. I still hesitate over the boxes Holiday and Business for “purpose of trip”. I am tempted to draw in another box for Art, or Life.

In some small way make our own

Photo by Oranje Lwin.

Tonight I performed in a Randai workshop showing organised by the Intercultural Theatre Institute - the presentation of a four-day intensive together with a group of theatre students as part of the NAFA Symposium.

It was an incredibly special experience.  For the first time I felt that contact with an unfamiliar culture and art form was so open and welcoming, and something that I could actually connect to and in some small way make my own.  Our three master teachers from Institut Seni Indonesia Padang-Panjang.  Pak Edmiral, Pak Halim and Pak Arif were warm and sincere as they arrived to share with us something that they confessed was deep inside them, and an integral part of the Minang culture that they treasure.

I have an increasing soft spot for folk art.  At any rate, the folk art that is practised as art and not as commerce.  The good stuff and other work that grows from it has a wonderful organic quality that I can't get enough of.  (My own theory: The folk art of Singapore is in our food.)

Photo courtesy of Zaidi

Anyway, Randai. I have swollen hands.

And a yearning to visit Bukit Tinggi.

One journey ends, and another begins.

Dear NAFA classmates, thank you for the inspiration to sum up our last three years, and look ahead to the future. Yesterday's convocation was an emotional moment for me.  It was hard to look back on the way we've come - a mix of relief, achievement, joys and frustrations remembered, sadness that it's over, and most of all, gratitude.


This is what I shared with our class and guests yesterday.


_______________________________________

Good afternoon Mr. Frank Benjamin, Executive Chairman of FJ Benjamin Holdings Limited, Professor Cham Tao Soon, NAFA Board Chairman, Mr Choo Thiam Siew, NAFA President, NAFA Board members, Lecturers, Ladies & Gentlemen.

I am Chan Sze-Wei, a graduate of the Diploma in Dance. I am deeply honoured to have been invited to stand before you today, representing the Class of 2011.

Dear classmates, I am honoured to stand here among you and remember my first day at NAFA, three years and two months ago. On that day, one of my newfound classmates put it perfectly.  She was happy to be here, she said, “because I am finally with my people”.  Entering art school, we were finally in a space where our passion for art or dance or music or design didn’t make you an oddball or a weirdo. We were finally here, in a space together with other young people who knew that the choice to dedicate yourself to the arts was a legitimate one.  And for some of us it wasn’t even a choice, but the recognition of a necessity.  We knew exactly why we wanted to be here, the distances we had travelled, and the sacrifices we had made.  While others among us started out simply because we didn’t know what else to do with our lives. We signed up for the first of many firsts, with little idea how this journey would change our lives.

For the purposes of this speech, I am really glad to have had the opportunity to get in touch with many friends across all the different faculties represented here today.  There were stories that were celebratory and some that were bitter.  Each was unique.

We are the ones who are left.  We saw many others abandon this path along the way.  Some couldn’t handle the mental or physical stress, some needed to support their families, or because they didn’t have the support of their families, or couldn’t muster the financial possibilities to find even $5,000 of school fees a year.

I believe that it’s normal that a number of those who come NAFA take a time-out, take longer to graduate or eventually decide that this isn’t the path for them.  Why do I say this?  Because I know that a life in the arts and creation is one of the loneliest and most challenging paths that we could possibly choose.  Every day that we train, we practice, we create and perform is a day that we have to face ourselves and our weaknesses, and not run away.  Allow me to clarify that this NAFA education is not about fun.  We come here to NAFA and literally volunteer ourselves for a position where we receive criticism every day, all day, from teachers and peers and the most merciless of all, the voices in our own heads. I am not exaggerating when I say that we have known three years, some of us four, of blood, sweat, tears, and pain. Days of frustration, humiliation and craziness when we wondered if any of what we were doing or learning made sense, when we doubted we would see this course through. We learned that pride and failure were bitter pills to be swallowed day after day, followed by swallowing the advice that this was all for our own good.

But it’s not as if there is no fun at all in this arts education.  It is something of a door to a funny landscape where you have to re-wire your sense of fun and find it re-connected to stress, craziness and physical and mental exhaustion.  Does that sound like opening week or production week, anyone? We all know that there’s no other kind of fun we’d rather have and no other place that we would rather be.

Also on the other side of this surreal and confusing door are instructions to be different and unique, yet to conform.  To learn discipline, technique and professionalism – and yet still try to hang on to a sense of who you are and what’s important to you. All these contradictions have a wonderful old-fashioned charm.  It may not be the only way to become an artist.  But it is a process that has allowed us to start to discover who we are, and realise potential we never imagined we had.  We were given first chances to show our work to Singapore and to the world. We acquired friends and mentors for life, and lessons for life.

My message to my class today is: let’s believe in ourselves and what we have to say.  The best gift that we have received in our time here was not the inspiration and praise from our mentors and colleagues.  Just as valuable were the criticisms and rejections.  This was probably the best preparation that our teachers could give us. Let’s face it. We live in a society that generally doesn’t understand or appreciate what we do.  If we’re really lucky, art is viewed as a profitable commodity or convenient propaganda vehicle.  When we’re not, we are too often brushed off with the assumption that what we do is self-indulgent, wasteful, incendiary, needlessly provocative or simply meaningless.  In a culture where individuals are too often treated as political and intellectual children, a young artist has a particularly heavy burden of proof to carry.

And I am sad to say that while NAFA is a sanctuary for the arts, there were moments where I felt that we couldn’t fully escape those same elements of the real world that want art and artists to be predictable, viable and pleasing.

So it is up to us, and only us, to first believe that what we say is worth saying. And then to go ahead and say it!

Let us not be afraid. There will be little recognition and probably even less remuneration. Don’t let that stop you. Let us not be afraid to make mistakes.  Not be afraid to continue to make meaning of our world.  To see and remember for society what is beautiful, what is forgotten, what has no voice, what has been censored by fear and by choice. Let us speak and sing, draw and dance, play and produce what is really important to us. Let us not fear to be loved and to be hated. To provoke questions and provoke reactions. To communicate.  To touch people’s hearts. To be understood and misunderstood. To surprise and to delight. To put ourselves and our work out there in its truest and most powerful form.  Let us not be afraid to let our art guide us.

My dear fellow schoolmates of the Class of 2011, and now my fellow colleagues in the arts, I am proud of you and I am excited for what our future holds. Now it is time for thanks. To our families, our lecturers, and friends.  The people who have loved us and supported us all this while. We really could not have done this without you. Let’s now rise and give these very special people a round of thanks and applause. 

Cheeky memories - Flip Book

For the first half hour, I swore that Cunningham and Cage were turning in their graves.

Charmatz and co. looked like a gang of merry bandits stuffed into the most merciless unitards to do a massive spoof a la the Reduced Shakespeare Company. The arena-like stage was filled with incomplete contractions, sloppy balances, and careless lines paired with cheesy grimaces. A pathetic mime imitation of Cage doing old fashioned analog editing while the music alternated between Cage-y noises, static, and period pop of the 50s and 60s. I found myself laughing, but in horror. Among the sound crew seated just in front of the stage, the namesake picture book was being flipped as they danced, but even in the small Drama Centre theatre I couldn't see a thing of it. The house was half full, and one chap walked out. I wasn't sure whether to be relieved or even more pissed off when the dance seemed to end in a premature curtain call at what felt like thirty minutes. Billed as a memorial to Cunningham, Flip Book seemed to be no more a tribute than Joavien Ng's bitter take on Martha Graham in Body Inquire (2008).

Then they started again! For two more rounds, each faster and sillier than the last. Then I had some time to relax a bit and start to enjoy the nonsense, and get prodded to think about my discomfort. What is this awe which my Western contemporary dance training has given me for the work of Cunningham? What has he really left to us? The strict precision of form and direction that I studied with Larry Clark (two generations from Cunningham via Viola Farber) is one way to remember Merce, but these philosophies about movement and space also influenced a great part of the dance world even if you didn't actually study with him. In the 50s and 60s his company struggled with great resistance from audiences, but his work has now become canon. What would it take today to innovate like him? To surprise, shock, disgust and delight in the way that he used to do?

It made more sense as I heard more about Charmatz' underlying concept for the piece. This wasn't one of those pleasing shows where the audience can get its satisfaction in one go and understand everything just from seeing the work. It is very specific in this case, as Mayo Martin has pointed out it is a work that references something that references something. And Cunningham may be a giant in the contemporary dance world but you just can't compare it to the anglophone world's access to Shakespeare. This is one of those shows that requires a fair bit of audience work to grasp. I don't think that's bad, but it's also not easy.

I was interested in how Charmatz insists on working out each edition of Flip Book in only five days, and that he recreates it simply from the visual impression of the pictures, with groups of very different experience - high school kids, Cunningham veterans (incidentally very Pina/Kontakthof). Here was a strong reflection on history and how we receive and replicate it, and a deliberate contrast to the usual methods by which we study dancing - directly from the master's body, precisely, painstakingly and unfortunately too often without questioning.
Flip Book by Boris Charmatz/Musee de la danse, Drama Centre Theatre on 16-17 May 2011

The Hungry Stones

My first production out of NAFA is with Raka Maitra's Hungry Stones, this Saturday 28 May 8pm at the Esplanade Theatre Studio.

When I studied calligraphy and seal carving at NAFA, Wee Beng Chong was adamant that stones have life. He showed me several examples of the marble blocks that we use to create seals, regenerating themselves in crazy crystalline forms! It gave me a whole new way of looking at why we engrave them, and seeing Huang Laoshi's style of recapturing the look and feel of ancient time in the present. Then a couple of years later, I have gotten cast as a living stone, full of stories!

Tickets available through SISTIC. Details here.

As it Fades

Pick of the week!

This is the most powerful piece to date from T.H.E, and Swee Boon's most focused statement on the emotional content of lost Chinese dialects and personal histories that the present has received from past generations, set among a mobile city of frosted glass towers.

The climax of the piece was a quiet one, with the dancers' parents emerging from the darkness and taking the hands of the company dancers, sharing a very private moment of connection and gratitude, the vision then filtered through playful silhouettes of a chain of girls. The dancing by members of the first and second companies was of all the virtuosic physicality that we have come to expect of T.H.E dancers, with a fresh element of a more gestural and even comic vocabulary.

It was clear that Swee Boon's muse in this piece was the newest, tiniest and youngest member of the main company - Indonesian-born and Singapore-trained Jessica Christina. Of the many commendable performances of the evening, Jessica simply shone. She carried the piece from opening to closing with a frenetic precision and fragility, and a maturity in performance quite beyond her years and experience.

It was however a pity that Swee Boon has not managed to find a composer to work with on this piece - though each of the contemporary music selections were appropriate to the choreography, I wasn't able to hear them as a coherent soundtrack or connect them to the haunting Hainanese song that opened the piece.

As it Fades, T.H.E Dance Company, 21 May 2011 at the Esplanade Theatre

I want more people to remember - Singapore Arts Festival 2011

The Arts Fest has just begun, but already I feel like I've been running a marathon. Back to back with the Singapore Biennale, overlapping with the World Dance Alliance's free dance events of Singapore Dance Week, and the Esplanade programming of the Hungry Stones smack in the middle of the Arts Fest programme. It's a crazy amount of art to take in (and give out)!

Sadly, I've had to give away half my tickets because of my production schedule, so I'm counting on friends and blogs to tell me about the rest of the shows. I also don't have the time to churn out full length reflections on everything, so am giving the arts fest blog a miss. I will however be posting snippets here on what I've seen.

Apart from my rant about the festival website, my overall feeling is that the arts fest programming is quite interesting this year. The theme is simple but has the personal, sociological and conceptual dimensions. I have been surprised at the number of non-artist friends who have actually noticed the festival theme this year, and told me that they like it very much. There's a good mix of accessible and experimental work this year, which I am enjoying, and if I had more time I would definitely have caught the selection of free programming and public-friendly work. Choir Karaoke and Filem Filem look brilliant! The outdoor festival village has a nice energy to it after the post-show crowds start coming in at 103opm, although I am disturbed that the main feature of the village seems to be the Shiraz bar and kebab stand, and that from the exterior, the outdoor theatre has the feeling of a fortress against the un-ticketed.

So what happened to the ticket sales? It is painful to go to the dance performances and see the Esplanade Theatre and even the smaller Drama Centre at 50% house, when the performances have been excellent. I can imagine how tough it must be for the performers to look out into rows of empty seats, even if the other half of the house is moved to a standing ovation. On the other hand, what I hear from the music and theatre programming (that I had to give away my tickets to, bleah) though, is that the houses are doing just fine.

I actually like the concept of this year's dance programming - tributes to three dance greats Pina Bausch, Merce Cunningham and Kazuo Ohno - and thought it would work well with audiences by banking on the names of the inspirations while bringing audiences to new work. This as opposed to the blockbuster-type programming we had last year with Sylvie Guillem and Cloud Gate. But it wasn't to be. It can't help that right now there is an esplanade publicity bombardment for the Nederlands Dans Theatre and the Mariinsky Ballet in the next few months, which aren't part of the arts festival (or dans festival, for that matter). I suppose that a large part of the Singapore audience, both local and expat, have yet to mature from the celebrity recognition phase. It's like visiting Paris so that you can show off your photos of the Eiffel Tower - and whether you liked Paris doesn't have to matter very much - but the Belgian or Cambodian experimental interpretation of the tower isn't going to interest you very much. And god forbid that you have a Korean superstar concert to compete with at the same time... my mum would have taken over my ticket for the Living Dance Studio from Beijing, but she was watching Rain. Of course.

A part of me hearkens a little to the sleepy arts scene of the 1990s, when it was possible to see pretty much everything in town, of all artistic disciplines. I love that we have such vibrancy today and a much larger audience base overall, but it really feels like all the events are cannibalising each another.

I sincerely hope the dance film component is doing better. I shall see next week!

On a tangent about Pina Bausch memorials. I enjoyed Ballets C de la B's Out of Context very much (snippet on the way), but I did wonder why we couldn't have gotten Pina's own Tanzteater Wuppertal, which is currently on its memorial tour around the world. I saw them in Hong Kong in March, and realised what a waste it is that the dance audiences of Singapore have never seen them here. Not when she was alive and the company visited Hong Kong and Taiwan in 2008, either.