"How can you be right here, if you're trying to be over there?"

- in Contact Improv class with Robert Anderson

Affective marketing

So I'm having these ambivalent feelings about how some of the loveliest shorts, photography or a stop motion like this get made on advertising budgets. Not that we needed confirmation of the affective power of artistic/aesthetic creation. And I guess it's not so much a matter of integrity, but just a matter of reality that some great stuff gets funded because it's used as a prop for money-making or for state propaganda. (Then I also get confused because on the other hand I believe in art for activism, for causes related to human rights, ecology, freedom and so on. Not that most of that really gets funded.)

That said I did enjoy this stop motion very much. And the marketing side doesn't make a difference to me personally because I'll never have the dough to be a credit suisse customer - and I doubt they'll take a chance on investing in art for art's sake since it has 0 potential for returns.

Eleven Questions

My classmate Joanna Kalm​ asked me for a list of questions that I'm considering in my creative practice at this moment. I gave her a blank look. But we talked about it again today and it turned out to be a great exercise. I came up with this!

1. How can I allow What is going to happen next, to happen next?
2. What the heck is wrong with these people/institutions/politics etc?
3. How can people survive society? Capitalism?
4. Why do I do all this to myself?
5. How does art exist?
6. How does peace exist?
7. Do we know what "dancing" is?
8. How can I make this about you instead of about me?
9. Will my mother hate this?
10. How can I make everything my choreography teachers would have failed?
11. Can I have a cookie yet?

10 things I should have been told in my early years of Ashtanga

Reposting something another practitioner shared with my teacher Denise!

10 things I should have been told in my early years of Ashtanga.

1. Ashtanga Yoga is a lifetime commitment.

2. Pain (paining) is your spouse for better or for worse.
3. If you practice warming-up (stretching) you'll get better in warming-up not the practice itself. So just practice straight then the practice itself in the long run would be like a warm-up.
4. But some would say, "Warm-up/stretching is to avoid injury." Injuries OCCUR whether you do warm-up or not. That leads me to the next one.
5. If there's one thing that needs warm-up/stretching. It's the mind.
6. Ego + Yoga Asana = Injury
7. Humility (mandatory). Don't step on your mat without it.
8. Acceptance is the only new asana you need.
9. Being judgmental is a reflection of your frustration towards your practice and/or life itself.
10. Mindbending is more important than backbending.

My year in art 2014 - I

It’s usually one of my favourite postings at the end of every year to look back over my “best of”.  I sit and dig through my growing stash of programmes and festival brochures to remember what I loved best.  

The 2014 event list has been sitting in my journal since January, but it’s taken me some time to understand why this posting was so hard for me to get going – and also why it became so important for me to still write it even though 2014 is so far gone. My year in art in 2014 was essentially a “worst of”. I had a horrible year.  I did a lot of cool things (list below), but overall it was a painful time that made me doubt myself, my work and my life choices.

I began the year in severe burnout from 2013. I had somehow survived several crisis-fraught creations and volunteer projects in between heavy duty creation and touring with other productions and festival administration. When 2014 arrived, my sensible annual resolution was to permit myself not to make any new work for at least six months.  I thought about the future, my family and my artistic work. 

I decided it was time to take the leap and go and do a Masters in choreography, or I'd never take the time to jumpstart the concentration and reflection that I felt I needed.

However this ambition did not generate the head space and confidence that I’d hoped it would. The seemingly mundane act of writing and rewriting applications should not have been so difficult or different from the grant-extraction machine that I had become over the past three years.  Instead it plunged me into a puddle of anxiety over researching the most suitable choices among unfamiliar.  Struggling over the question of the wisdom of separating myself from my partner for over a year (in some cases, two years or more), and how I should organise the finances to achieve this. I reviewed a previously rejected programme application that I had submitted on a whim.  I wrestled with iMovie late into the night. I plugged some savings and hours into Goethe Institut courses. I sat in the uncomfortable expectation of sceptical eyes looking over my work and my aspirations.

I did make it to the first round of several applications and auditions. I went scrounging around affluent relatives for frequent flyer miles, and made an unthinkable series of trips (dates were non-negotiably spread out). I declined another audition when they wrote with a weeks’ notice to get to Seoul. I angsted myself into exhaustion and slipped up on several deadlines for applications and scholarship.

Then the rejections started coming in. 

Finally I was left with just one acceptance letter.  A wonderful school in London, but with an impossible school fee and living costs, and no hope of a scholarship. I did not know what to do.

My self confidence was plunging and leaking negativity into my creative work. I was convinced that I didn't want to dance anymore.  My creative well was dry and hollow. I worked alongside brilliant people and felt nothing but my own insufficiency. By my own judgement, I delivered the worst performances of my life that summer. I was an improviser who couldn’t improvise. I radioed my therapist and my shrink.

Then my loving family stepped in to the rescue! My relatives offered me funds where I hadn’t been able to get a scholarship. It was unqualified support and love. I accepted the place in London but I felt like a fraud.  I compared myself unfavourably against other Singapore alumni of the same programme. I struggled with guilt that I was abandoning and hurting my partner. I woke up in the middle of the night terrified of what a mess I was heading into.  I calculated the height from my window to the ground – something I hadn’t done in years. I wondered if I was ploughing ahead with plans to leave only because I had now accepted the money.

I scrounged for ways to be gentler to myself, to remember that it would pass. Took fragile steps towards packing my bag and queuing through airports.

Finally I arrived in the blinding sunshine in a new place. Breathing was surprisingly easy. I gave myself permission to start again.

My year in art 2014 - II

The actual list...

• Catch the Wave contact improv festival in Koh Chang, Thailand, April.

• Exploring CI with some wonderfully curious diploma students at LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore in April.

• Hosting Angelika Doniy in Singapore, April

• SEA Choreolab at Rimbun Dahan, Malaysia, May

• Dancing on the MRT with Kai Eng

• Finally getting the groove of festival organisation at Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur 2014, June

• Participating in Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy at Theatreworks Singapore, 25 Sep-2 Aug 2014

• The worst Focus tour I have ever done. August.

• Assisting the rehearsal process for Gitanjali by The Necessary Stage, Aug-Sep

• Seeing Disabled Theatre by Jerome Bel and Theater HORA at the Singapore Arts Festival, September

• Starting off with the facebook networks for Independent Dance Southeast Asia, Contact Improv Southeast Asia, and Singapore Interdependent Dance 

• Getting introduced to London through beautiful weather and the CI Celebrates Chisenhale Dance Space, 13 September

• The Place and the 2014 LCDS Postgrad cohort.

• Seeing To Singapore with Love, Tan Pin Pin at the Southeast Asia Arts Fest London, September

• Seeing the Elixir festival "KnowBody" programme at Sadlers Wells (also my first of many evenings at this theatre): Potato and Memory - Mats Ek and Ana Laguna, The Elders Project - Jonathan Burrows and Mateo Fargion (and a cast of stellar retired dancers), Dominique Mercy in a solo by Pascal Merighi, September

• London Contact Improvisation Jams at Moving East

• Building towards daily ashtanga practice with Hamish Hendry at Ashtanga Yoga London.

• Seeing Idiot-syncrasy, Igor and Moreno, 30 September at The Place

• An intensive workshop on Improvisation into Performance with Jovair Longo and fellow dancers of the LCDS PG programme

• Seeing Pact with Pointlessness, Wendy Houstoun, 8 October at The Place

• Seeing Phyllida Barlow at the Tate Britain

• Seeing Anselm Kiefer the Royal Academy of Arts

• Seeing Plateau Effect, Cullberg Ballet, 13-14 November at Sadler's Wells

• Creating music collaboration projects at LCDS 5-6 December 2014: Loop with James Albany Hoyle, Feet of Bread with Sylvia Lim (Review)

• Choreographic course with Sue MacLennan: A 2 hour silent walk through Tavistock and Kings Cross 

• CI classes with Robert Anderson, October-December

• Beginning Aikido at the Tetsushinkan Dojo at Moving East

• Attending the Crossing Borders lecture series curated by Frank Bock at Independent Dance, notably Meg Stuart, Steve Valk, Andrea Phillips, Sara Wookey, Helen Poynor, Cally Spooner.

• Seeing Paradise Lost (preview), Lost Dog at The Place, October

• CI workshops with Charlie Morrissey, November

• Singing Christmas carols with 200 people in Broughton Castle, December 2014

• Hearing Benjamin Britten's War Requiem on the WWI Centenary at the Royal Albert Hall, performed by the Royal Choral Society, London Philharmonic and Trinity Boys Choir, Evelina Dobracheva, Stephan Rugamer, Bryn Terfel, Richard Cooke, November

• Seeing John, DV8 at the National Theatre

• The London New Year Contact Improv Gathering

What took me so long:

• Are we here yet? Meg Stuart and Jeroen Peters (now reprinted!)

• Getting my own copy and frequently delving into Jonathan Burrows' The Choreographers' Handbook

• Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters (just as I was moving to London and landing in Bethnal Green)

• Properly sitting down and watching the whole of Blush by Wim Vandeykebus and Strange Fish by DV8

What my body has understood - at the Dharma Shala London

Not to judge people by their yoga mats.
Not to judge people by their poses.
Not to judge myself.

(I'm still working at this last one!)