Sze's dance updates Dec 2017 + Fundraising Appeal

Dear Friends,

Happy Holidays! It's been a challenging past year in my artistic life. I'm grateful to have learned a lot by doing much with little, about the importance of friends, networks and the beautiful spirit of mutual support across different fields of the arts community in Singapore.



Producing - and an appeal for support

My biggest leap this past year is as producer for my own work and an international tour. In 2015, I created an interactive performance work with Chilean dancer Gabriela Serani. "Talk to me and I slap you" was supported in residency and premiere by a small theatre festival in Zagreb. It is a high-stakes work where we challenged ourselves to reach into questions about the dynamics of violence, fear and loneliness in relationships. Whether it is the relationship of the performer to the audience, or relationships of love, family or power. We had one packed performance at midnight in a Zagreb bar. The connection with the audience was electric. A critic said we could be “a perfect mirror to the hopeless shortcomings of our present social condition.”

Since then, it has been one and a half years of networking and applications trying to get this work shown in the UK (where we were based together previously) and Asia. Finally, we have a chance to redevelop this work for audiences in Singapore and Bangkok in February 2018. I will be self-producing this work at the Substation on 24-25 February 2018. We have a little support from the Singapore National Arts Council, but this and ticket sales will only cover 25% of our production costs. We have also been invited by Democrazy Theatre Studio in Bangkok - but too late to apply for institutional funding for travel. We are currently $10,000 short of our total tour budget.
Details of our production and fundraising campaign are at the link below. We'd be very grateful for any support in cash or in kind (accommodation, air miles, printing, personnel support etc), or your recommendation of this production and fundraising campaign to your network. I'd like to acknowledge the amazing support and advice that I've received so far from venues, fellow artists and producers in Singapore, Bangkok and Manila.

(If you prefer an alternative channel to online credit card donations, please contact me.)

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sze-and-gabi-s-southeast-asia-tour-2018-dance/a1c0/3046203




Dance films

Following on from my Video Dance residency in the first half of 2017, I've had the immense privilege to be invited to work with the Cinemovement collective, a group of outstanding Singapore filmmakers and choreographers. Through residencies in Macau and Taiwan this year, I have two new short films in the oven. One of them features some gorgeous original music by Melbourne psych-folk band Cold Hands Warm Heart. The films will appear mid next year, resources willing... a fundraising story for another time. 

In the meantime my 2017 micro-short ode to the kopitiam "Tea Dances" was featured in the official selections of Danca em Foco (Brazil), the Outlet Dance Project Film Festival (New Jersey) and Greensboro Dance Film Festival (North Carolina). It still hasn't found interest in Singapore, but maybe next year!

(Photo: Epiphyte. Dancer: Jereh Leong. Photo/Cinematography: Looi Wan Ping)

MARK and SIFA
January through August 2017, I was involved as documentarian and online publicist in an ambitious site-specific dance project by Daniel Kok and a cast of nine talented dancers and actors for the Singapore International Festival of the Arts. It was an intellectually juicy and creatively satisfying chance to play as a dancer in a photographic and video documentary capacity. The production photos and video trailers for the production can be viewed on our Facebook page here.

Dance Advocacy
My work with the Working Group for Dancers Advocacy continues. As the year closes we're trying to get more responses for our surveys on the working conditions of dance educators and performers/choreographers to finally get some hard stats on the challenges facing dancers in Singapore. If you are a dancer or know any professional dancers here, we're very grateful if you can spread the word! In 2018 we will be running a series of practical workshops for dancers on essential skills for a sustainable career.

Some writing from this past 6 months
“from: The Platform” by Chowk Productions: A Running Imprint on the Mind
The Easy Trigger of “Guilty Landscapes III”
 
Here's to a good 2018 and new adventures.

Love,
Sze

The smallest movement becomes tectonic

"The smallest movement becomes tectonic."

I am excited for Kiran Kumar and Raw Moves for this weekend's Archipelago Archives installation-performance. Chatting with Kiran about his extended research project over several years into the junction of moving cultures between India and Indonesia has been fascinating. Wish I could be there to see this live.

Archipelago Archives Exhibit #3: If I could set with the sun
9 & 10 June 2017

artistic concerns

I was looking through some old archives tonight.  I found my resignation letter from the civil service, and I found this MA programme application that I wrote in 2013. Or rather, re-wrote as an exercise, after my application was rejected. I had some brutal but essential advice back then from Danny K, that I was giving a very poor account of my practice and needed to put more effort into it. 

So what did I think I was doing? What do I think I am doing? To go through this much struggle and sacrifice, I'd better know, hadn't I? I'm sorry Mum, I know you're still frustrated every time someone asks you what your artist daughter does.

These things are actually the hardest thing for me to come up with. Improvise from nothing in front of an audience? Eulogy for my grandmother's funeral? No problem. But synopsis of work, artistic statement.... the task makes me want to stab myself. Please try describing concisely why you exist. 

Of course, I had to try. I read this now and I see myself flailing and pretending. It's also still surprisingly accurate. In 2017 I'm still flailing, but maybe with sharper knives. 

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

2 - In light of your current situation, you could bring up issues related to your artistic concerns? Have you already identified one or more objects of research?
(2500 characters maximum)

What is the status of the individual in social organization, and how do we survive the systems and automatisms that we have created? We now have vast machineries, complicated institutions and modern rituals - urban living in particular has a quality of hyper-inflated reality where we try and insulate ourselves from discomfort and imperfection as much as possible.  In this frame the human life becomes so small.  I am frustrated and interested in both the system and the powerlessness that devolves to the individual.  The vain search for plastic perfection, how our systems re-create and process our lives, our modern incantations against pain and boredom, inequality and obliviousness, the need to remember and to be distracted and to forget.  What a safe space in which we enjoy TV, cinema, downloads, proscenium theatre, even the life in front of us in the myopia of handphone photographs. 

Seeking these themes, I feel a great impetus to make work from and in the cities of Asia.  I see the tensions of societies in development, the ever growing disparities of rich and poor, urban and rural, all painted in wildly auspicious colours. Singapore is one such place where comfort is cultivated amongst constant fear, a trope of madness and artificiality ripe for exploration. I continue to travel across Asia and Europe, exploring, creating and supporting production of dance and festivals.

In my current phase of creation I am exploring the emotional and intuitive resonances of these questions through improvisation, structured scores, spatial relationships, found text and my own writing. I know I am no longer thinking about creating something new as much as crafting filters with which to read the situations that I want to address – as well as the spaces and people that are already around me as collaborators and audience – a context that changes constantly. Working through the immediacy of physical and emotional responses, I’d like to confection performances to be so close that they are in your mouth, delightful yet disturbing.

I have done more than half of my work in the last two years with some degree of collaboration with partners or collectives including dancers, actors, composers and sound designers from different backgrounds and nationalities. The processes have been easy as well as difficult, but I continue to work this way for the impetus that I get from collisions and leakages from association with other artists, and realizing the differences between us.  This energy feeds back into my solo work and research.

At the same time I am following another track of body research.  Having studied a number of dance forms both “Western” and “Asian”, classical, traditional, contemporary, street, martial arts and improvisation, I try to approach movement languages and their interrelations with an appreciation of context.  First their meeting points in history, geography, and hierarchy, but also at an intuitive level their meeting points in the body - an instrument that has its own systems of integration and which when sensitized, learns to recognize the borrowings and transfers of physical knowledge that have seeped across cultures and through time - the body remembers things we don’t even know.

Of the two tracks of society and the body, it’s the anger in my understanding of the former that keeps me wanting to make work right now.   I accept that this is perhaps not the time at which the two tracks can be forced together, but I expect that they may grow to a fruitful intersection.
 

Sze's Dance Updates May 2017

Dear friends,

Hello, hope everyone is well! I've spent the past few months mainly in artistic research, teaching and advocacy with the Working Group for Dancers' Advocacy. I'm writing to share some recent writing on Artsequator.com, and upcoming performances and workshops.

Upcoming: I'm performing 
 
Signs of a Nest by Susan Sentler
Thursday 4 May, 12:00 noon – 7:00 pm
Friday 5 May, 12:00 noon – 9:00 pm
Brother Joseph McNally Gallery, LASALLE College of the Arts
Admission free

This work by Susan Sentler, lecturer in LASALLE’s School of Dance & Theatre, reflects on signs that are becoming lost in their material sense, only to be held in virtual images. These images resonate in the landscape of our bodily memory and recall material traces. 'Signs of a nest' explores ‘nesting’ as an abstracted, repeated ritual, triggered by such images.
(Valerie Lim, Yarra Ileto and I are rotating as performers in this installation. If you'd like to catch me, please contact me closer to the date and I'll let you know when I'll be there.)

Upcoming: My Work-in-progress and workshops

Seeing with the Body: Videolab 2
28 May 2017 (Sunday)
Dance Nucleus Studio, Goodman Arts Centre
1:00pm to 5:00pm
How does the body understand its meetings with the city? How do those meetings become visual and tactile? Experience a collection of in-progress dance films and video installations by Chan Sze-Wei, Susan Sentler, Faye Lim, Chen Jiexiao and others.
This showing is in the format of a drop-in open studio. Come by and the artists will introduce their works and be available for discussion.

Seeing with the Body: Collective Making
Facilitated by Chan Sze-Wei.
2 June 2017 (Friday)
Dance Nucleus Studio, Goodman Arts Centre
10:00 am to 5:00 pm
Fees: Give-what-you-can
Limited to 15 pax, register hereA full day workshop where dancers and film-makers will work alongside each other, starting from moving with the body, to shooting, editing and commenting on each others' work. Bring and share your knowledge and diverse experiences. Open to all levels of experience. Where possible,please bring a video recording device (e.g. video camera, compact camera, smartphone) and a laptop for video editing (anything form Final Cut Pro/Adobe Premiere to iMovie).

Some recent snapshots of my recent work made possible through the ELEMENT residency at the Dance Nucleus Singapore:
 
Curse of the Pontianak: Hags have more fun at Co:lab, commissioned by the Esplanade Library and the Asian Film Archive, 18 March 2017. Yes, that's clips from the 1958 classic Cathay-Keris film Sumpah Pontianak. And a lady flying on my feet.



Talk to me and I slap you (installation, work in progress). Featuring Gabi Serani.



Tea Dances, short film featuring Wee Li-N, hopefully accepted for festivals and showing soon!




I began writing for the new Southeast Asian arts blog ArtsEquator last year:
 
"Pallavi in Time" by CHOWK: Seductive Virtuosity - A review of Singapore-based CHOWK/Raka Maitra's latest production, Apr 2017

Mattie Do: Horror Film? It's all Ballet - Conversation with Lao horror filmmaker, Dec 2016

"Pallavi in Time" by CHOWK: Seductive Virtuosity

Photo by Bernie Ng. Courtesy of Esplanade - Theatres on the Bay

This was one of those rare occasions where I realise that I’m watching an important work of art. A discovery, a risk, a breakthrough, that will influence my aesthetic and many others’ for years to come.

Read at ArtsEquator.com - https://artsequator.com/chowk-dance-pallavi-in-time/

Safe studios and stages

This is so important. It makes me think of the times i excitedly plunged myself into choreographers' request that put me in the position of strong female who was then raped or violated. And then the work i directed myself, to have a male collaborator crush and subdue me, and participatory work where the audience could potentially do anything to the performers, or when a one to one performer triggered the audience - leaving a couple of my collaborators shaking and in tears while i was thrilled at the "audience engagement". I didn't think then of the potentially traumatic effects on myself, on my collaborators, or the audience. I wanted the job then, so badly. From my privileged position, I wanted to be the fearless one known to be able to provoke and stir. My techniques as a past support group facilitator could open up "vulnerability is strength" in myself and others. 

I now see that some of this was quite terrible. I started to look at the ethical complexity of audience manipulation. I still think subjects of violence, pain and discrimination are important to talk about. I'm trying to learn how to direct more compassionately. I'm looking for better ways to incorporate trigger warnings in workshops, rehearsals and performance work that reach for intimately personal spaces. I'm looking for ways to preserve my own emotional and psychological health too. I'm grateful to my collaborators whom i directed in participatory pieces over the years and my workshop participants. Thank you... And I'm sorry where it was too much...and Please, let's keep talking. About how we can go to meaningful and electrifying places with safety and with humanity.

Killing Desdemona: Creating Safe Spaces for Dangerous Work
by Alicia Rodis, on Intimacy Directors International

“I spent a great deal of my life being ignored. I was always very happy that way. Being ignored is a great privilege. That is how I think I learnt to see what others do not see and to react to situations differently. I simply looked at the world, not really prepared for anything.”

Saul Leiter

Mattie Do: Horror Film? It's all ballet.

Still from Dearest Sister. Photo by Mart Ratassepp

Many things have been written about Mattie Do, the pioneering female film director from Laos. She’s put her country’s horror films on the world festival map. She wears international laurels including the BFI London Film Festival and is an alumni of the Cannes Film Festival’s Les Cinemas du Monde with a sassy badass sense of humour and glamorous heels. But I’m curious about the intersection of Mattie the director and Mattie the ballerina, whom I met five years ago at a small dance festival in Vientiane, and in whose living room I practiced tendus and jetes with a home-made barre.

Read at ArtsEquator

Coming Home

Formal training in dance school is a mixed experience for many people. Stepping into the studio and theatre where you have spent every waking hour (or every waking hour commuting to) for three years brings a surge of memories. For me, camaraderie and excitement, but also tears, pain, disappointment, humiliation and a lot of anger.

There's a new dance alumni performance platform at NAFA opening this weekend. Talking about it with my former schoolmates Pam, Gretel and Viv brought a lot of those memories back.  

I recall that there was always so much to fight for. Fighting to be seen in auditions and exams, fighting injuries and exhaustion, self-doubt when toiling along at the back of the class, frustration as an understudy with no chance of being put on stage. Fighting for my choreographies when they weren't making the passing mark. What I was most grateful for was that instead of the cut-throat jealousy and pettiness that you see on "Centre Stage" or "Step Up", the dancers I went to school with were really a caring bunch. We knew that we were in it together. As our class size shrunk over three years, we cheered each other on and comforted each other when we were struggling with injury or getting a shelling from terrifying teachers (for our own good). We trusted each other to stay in time, to catch us when we jumped, and to know the combination so that if we blanked out we could copy it out of the corner of an eye.

In a competitive professional setting after graduation, I must say that sometimes it seemed like those deep bonds were one of the few comforting things to hang on to when I felt like an absolute nobody. Today, it is also nice to know that the positive vibes transcended different years. When I meet a more experienced dancer and discover we were both from the same school, it usually occasions a friendly chat, the sense that yes, you too had enough toughness and love for the form to survive! 

So when she was asked to support the new platform, Gretel took time out from other commitments and volunteered to be part of the organising committee alongside Max Chen, Peter Teo, Pamela Leong and Viv Phua. The title 归 ("Gui", loosely translating as "home coming" or "return") was chosen because it carried a strong sense of belonging and physical return. That sense of solidarity was very important for Gretel. "I feel like our local industry has much talent, but we're all seemingly on our own journey. So why not pool resources, ideas, friendships, to contribute to something bigger?" 

I am aware that the camaraderie can translate as clique-ish exclusivity for some of my professional dance colleagues who have not come from a conservatory-style background. It does trouble me sometimes, and I question what it means to declare that I am proud to be an arts school graduate. For sure, this isn't the only way to come to this vocation. It's a very specific mode of training, and a huge test of commitment. I'd hope that this new platform doesn't perpetuate the same kind of discrimination that some dancers feel they experience while in training.

Viv recalls that not everybody gets a chance to show their performing or choreographic potential while they're in their formative years. There are only so many solos and competitions to go around. A microcosm of the professional world, the selection for parts is unavoidably subject to highly subjective preferences of the choreographer or director. Sometimes X-factor isn't apparent until the dancer strikes out on their own after graduation. Viv was motivated by the knowledge that the pieces would be created by alumni passionate about their work, and that there was an inclusive spirit in the open call for alumni dancers. 

Rehearsal photo by Jeff Low. Dancers Mus Fitri Suhaimi and Natasha Neo.

The performance comprises five new pieces, choreographed by Elizabeth Lee, Seow Yi Qing, Goh Jiayin, Kenneth Tan and Wiing Liu. Gretel is excited about the ways in which the programme challenges and overturns our notions of dance in different ways. At a recent full rehearsal of the show programme, Pam was moved to tears. "Not because the pieces are sad but rather, I'm so proud of everyone." 

"Gui", 25-26 November 2017 at the NAFA Campus 3 Studio Theatre. Email nafadancealumni@gmail.com for tickets.

Substation Spaces: As if we've been living here forever

Signs of a Nest by Susan Sentler is meditative and sophisticated in its simplicity. When I arrive, the room seems empty with only one dancer and an iPad humming and whooshing with a minimalist pensive track. The other two spectators in the room have also chosen to sit along the walls, respectfully vacating themselves from the space as much as possible. There are little tiles of black and white photographs littering the floor. The photos are tender microscopes of HDB living. Fragments of gates, corridors, laundry, a shirtless tattooed man reclining in a void deck. I don't know why I'm surprised by Susan's sensitivity to the details of heartland life, as if she's been living here forever.

The dancer Valerie (last name?) has been carrying the iPad and gazing at it intently. She now places the iPad on the floor next to me. Her internal universe suddenly offered visibly amongst strewn photo fragments, another fallen piece of the world. She folds her body to the floor, wrapped around a door frame, and becomes part of the architecture.

In the colour images scrolling through the iPad, I recognise the Rochor flats slated for demolition. On the wall in negative, there are poster prints that I'm told are from Dakota crescent (pending demolition also) and Marine drive.



I'm suddenly aware of the empty shelves lining the wall. I know this space well but never have those shelves occurred to me to be HDB corridors like the one where I live. Not until the dancer props the iPad up on one of the shelves, injecting a contained life among the rubble of photo tiles next to it. The door opening the room to the alley is ajar, and the street and construction down the street aptly filter in.

This work gives us the space, almost without time. Its breath and its dimensions, in the patient time of the body. Earlier this week, I heard Susan talk animatedly about the Deleuzian fold. Look at the space. Look at it shatter, forms and architecture splintering. Look from the outside in, and be sensorially absorbed into this dear little space that I fear will also soon be remodeled.

Valerie is making attentive decisions and changes of pace and space. Her quiet presence leaves the room, and scatters photo fragments in the hallway outside before she returns to peer through the window. Is she really just a second year undergraduate at Lasalle? Susan is there, happily clicking her tongue and her camera, and for me it's an integral part of the piece. The urgency of the photographic moment leads me to relish my consumption of this space and time.

The dancer draws a pair of flip flops from a small shelf that I suddenly identify as a shoe rack. She slips out the open door into the street and the night.

Signs of a Nest with Susan Sentler at the Substation/A Home for the Arts, 17 November 2016.

Post-script: It's a perfect closing for my hour of visual meditation, but on the way out I discover the game room across the hallway. I spend the next ten minutes whooping and batting coloured ping pong balls with a badminton racket at Ang Song Ming's family of drum set and electric guitars. What a wondrous evening.

Piece for 350 Onomatopoeic Molecules

not dancing for nobody

written in response to Kiran Kumar's "There is no dance", on 6 July 2016

I'm pretty sure that one day soon, we'll be not dancing, for nobody. Dance will have arrived as a disembodied concept and will not even need to be seen, to be experienced. If nobody is watching, is there dance? If nobody or nothing is moving, is there dance? If there is nobody...is there dance?

I once cancelled a dance workshop because only three participants had signed up. It was our company's pre-arranged supermodel equivalent of "I don't get out of bed for less than $XX000 a day".  The cultural centre director in that small town in France called to beg me to change my mind.  The three girls who had signed up were a trio of friends, and they would be disappointed... No, I said. They could do their dancing somewhere else, with someone else. (We weren't actually paid for the class anyway beyond the residency stipend for the work we were making, but I did get a couple more hours in bed.)

A friend of mine, if I understood him then, used to insist that Contact Improvisation performance did not exist. That the improvisation should be as it was, between the improvisers, and if someone happened to be there, they would be witnessing but would not be a performance. I think that adamance was about a product. The expectation of entertainment, the spectacular. For CI, all the jumps and lifts and flying through the air. Performance would turn the participative/active/multidimensional  (and hopefully primarily somatic) experience into something else.

"You come, we'll show you what we do."

It might be about research first, and entertainment/curiosity of the onlooker, second. But still clearly, us and the. You don't want just anybody walking in to join the dancing, wouldn't that be dangerous? Or might it be about sharing, about community. It might just be about the joy of first flight.

It's a dance that changed my work profoundly, because it was a dance that was by nature relational. By nature unwritten and creative and challenging in its surrender to the unknown. In its possibility to be everything, really. That dancing is exploration.

"Compared to improvisation, choreography feels a bit like cheating."

Seke Chimutengwende

"perhaps there is something similar about making dances and writing descriptions."

"...perhaps there is something similar about making dances and writing descriptions. There are so many words in a writer's vocabulary and many combinations are possible. You weigh words and use one or another, depending on what you are trying to express. And that is the way it is with movement, too: you try to weigh things, to see the importance of this gesture and that one - placed and measured in time, of course. Time - music and silences - makes gesture mean something. It's dancing presented in a certain way. To make every step look different by the way it is presented. A writer chooses a word. I choose a gesture. Economy is the point, learning what we can do without, reducing to essentials."

"Ballets have short lives. Compared to books, paintings, to plays and pieces of music, they are ephemeral indeed. The ballet audience, like every audience in the theatre, always wants something new. When a ballet is a success, it sometimes remains for three or four years, perhaps ten, seldom more."

- George Balanchine, Introduction to Balanchine's New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets (Francis Mason ed.)

"There are some days when I think I'm going to die from an overdose of satisfaction."

 - Salvador Dali

Performance's potency comes from its temporariness, it's 'one time only' life.

"Performance's potency comes from its temporariness, it's 'one time only' life. The ontology of performance maps a gateway across a different order of production and reproduction. It suggests that matter (and the Real) is created out of nothing - 'the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is' (Wallace Stevens). This reproduction works according to the invisible calculus of the multiple offerings of what one does not have. This then as a coda, a prolegomenon for another book, other words, other eyes. This then in Hope, the hope we fake and perform and the hope we thereby make and have. Hope's power is measured in this faking. Each performance registers how much we want to believe what we know we see is not all we really have, all we really are. That negation reveals the generative possibility of the 'not all' that keeps us hoping. Maybe next time I'll love/be/loved; maybe next time I'll write a better book; maybe next time my I will see"
- Peggy Phelan, The ontology of performance: representation without reproduction

Please help me make my next production possible!

Dear friends,

We could really use your support for my next creation on 2 Dec with Katarzyna Witek and Chloë Abbott!

Even £10 (SGD 20) will make a difference. Please help us make this possible!


We have been doing some great work in the studio, and I'm confident that this is going to be an exciting, fresh and really quite funny experience. You'll see - click on the campaign link to view our video trailer. The website makes contributing easy via paypal and credit card. Do also pass this appeal on to friends!

Love,

Sze

Sze's dance updates Nov 2015-May 2016

Hello Friends!

I'm into my final term now at the London Contemporary Dance School. Having finished the coursework-based Postgraduate Diploma section, I'm now working on independent projects that will complete my work for the M.A. Time is suddenly passing quickly. I have become very comfortable and charmed by London and now I am submitting my final assignments in just a few months!

Some of my work since the last update: While here, I have gotten to make some projects that have been in the works at the back of my head for years.



​

Along with six wonderful collaborators, I presented The Sunshine Empire, an interactive ensemble of one-on-one personal consultations-performances for public spaces that included a theatre cafe, under a railway bridge, a public park and a charity fundraising open mic between June and August 2015. We asked what happiness meant to us and others... and whether it is something that we can buy. Check out our "corporate" website for videos and images -www.sunshinempire.com





I made my first dance film! 'Indivisible' has a group of dancers floating weightlessly down staircases, in iconic locations for dance in London, reflecting on the ecosystems of artists and art institutions. Film trailer at https://vimeo.com/143942731

Over the summer I had some wonderful exchanges at the European Contact Improv Teachers' Exchange in France, and the Radical Contact Summer Gathering 2015 in Sweden, as well as some research time with Kees Lemmens in the Netherlands that has led me in a new direction for my contact practice and teaching about how we share space.

With Cie Kham, we danced the final performance of Focus in April at Chateauvallon in France. It's been a wonderful 4 years and over 30 shows in France, Singapore and Laos, that have shaped me profoundly as an artist.

Back to the (near) future:

After a busy summer of contact improvisation, networking with other artists back home in Singapore and the excitement of the General Elections and arts festival, I am settling down to my independent study projects. I am writing a dissertation on "Audience Manipulation" and creating some new work! As usual, do contact me for updates if you're interested in the timing tbc projects.



​

WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get)
A contemporary dance performance with Katarzyna Witek and Chloe Abbott

The Place Theatre, London
Wednesday 2 December 2015, 4pm and 8pm

Do you remember the last time we were here, together? Sitting in the dark, breathing the same air.
Trying to understand.
If only we could present to you something that you could use, just like one of those software platforms that hide all the complex machinery and just give you the illusions of the simple result. The ability to directly manipulate what you see: the reality of what we see and expect to see in the theatre. Manipulating the space we share between our bodies, our breath, two women, two wigs, and a trumpet. 

Click here for our facebook event page.

Please support our WYSIWYG crowdfunding campaign! This is an unfunded project! Our indiegogo campaign is running for 50 more days. Do help us with a small contribution or a re-sharing of this link - where you can also view our video trailer! http://igg.me/at/WYSIWYG/x/3046203!


Migratory Objects
A durational performance installation with Sylvia Lim and Panos Chountoulidis
Ideas in Action, London Contemporary Dance School/The Place, London
Wednesday 18 November 2015, Drop in 1-4pm (timing tbc!)

I'm really excited to bring on board my music and sound collaborators of the past year to develop a series that I've been working on since 2010. Lost and found physical and sound objects make their way through time, space and boundaries - interacting with our movements, calling to us to transfer them and use them. They move us as we move them, we change their landscape as they change our present and our memory of distance and connection.


The Ice Nymph
A dance film in collaboration with Benjamin Boo
Live performance May 2016 (dates tbc), Royal College of Music

My next dance film was inspired when I was contacted by Benjamin, a Singaporean percussionist in the MA programme at the Royal College of Music. He has the ambition to revive Dr John Sharpley's 1989 composition, created for the Singapore Dance Theatre, in a collaboration choreographed by Mdm Lim Fei Shen, and designed by visual artist Tan Swie Hian. He'd heard that I'd danced this piece of repertory when I too trained at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts and studied with Mdm Lim and Dr Sharpley. I'm now thrilled at the chance to interpret this unique material originating from some great Singapore artists who have mentored and influenced me, to create a film that will accompany Benjamin's live performance in May 2016. I also hope to bring this film back to Singapore and elsewhere with Benjamin's recording.

And more projects to come!

Thanks for all the support so far. I hope to see or hear from all of you soon!

Love,

Sze

It's a free dance month in Singapore this October!

https://www.facebook.com/gottomovesg

Maybe I will see a kite looking for its string...

I hadn't realised till last Friday how absolutely beautiful the Bengali language is.

Musical phrases spilled from the lips of a lovestruck youth, wandering in a forest of airy bamboo frames. As the stanzas repeated, four female dancers who had sat listening rose to take the centre of the stage. Their steps wove a decisive counterpoint around his words. His companion, another poet, reclined in the background, making a bed next to a rustic bench and...a yellow hard hat. A reminder that this dreamy poet longs not only for love, but for his home and family in Bangladesh, while he spends lonely days hammering in the hot shipyard.

"From Another Land" is choreographer Raka Maitra's collaboration with dancers she has trained at the Chowk Academy of Dance, poets Rajib Shil Jibon and Zakir Hossain Khokon, musician Bani Haykal, and set design by Kiran Kumar.

I've studied and worked with Raka on and off since 2010. Of the many works that I've danced and seen so far, this is by far her finest.

Over the years Raka has developed her distinctive contemporary dance idiom - a blend of classical Odissi, martial Chhau, and evocative tableaux of restrained movement and fragments of storytelling set to abstract soundscapes.  What struck me right away with this new production was the sophisticated layering and interweaving of the various elements. I am quite amazed that the work was so integrated when two of the performers - the poets - had been able to join rehearsals only on their one precious day off every week.

In terms of visual composition, each tableau had an impressive depth of foreground, background and texture, with the casual lives of the poet-workers backgrounding the vivid dancers, then surfacing again as the poets stepped forward to share their words with animation and sincerity, anchored by subtle chords and drums.  A series of contrasting lighting scenes by Josiah Yoong transformed the simple decor from town square to metropolis, to a technicolour vision of Bangladesh.

Choreographically, I had the sense that Raka had chosen to pare her building blocks even more carefully than previous works - from the simplest of Odissi steps, the dancers patterned from unison into rhythmic canons and counterpoints. They danced solos and movement-chatter as they discovered a new universe (migrants arriving to Singapore? Singaporeans discovering Dhaka?). Raka herself danced a couple of the impeccable solos that she has always done so well - expressive, precise, coloured with modulations of dynamic and gaze. But she also took moments to retreat into the layered background, leaving the stage open to the other dancers' fluid grace and the poets' tender narratives.  Karishma Nair stood out from the ensemble with a magnetic focus and clarity of movement. Poet Zakir seized my heart when he rushed forward, laughing, with a child's excitement, recounting his son's letter, to end in a bittersweet embrace from his proxy family - another migrant worker.

During the performance, it mattered little to me that I don't speak Bengali.  It reminded me of how many people say they love to hear French spoken even when they don't understand it - the words take on a musicality and rhythm. Before the show I was already astonished by the translated poems in the programme notes (excellent translations by Subir Nag), and I was able to transfer their poignancy when I heard the words spoken by the poets themselves.

At no point did I imagine this as a token charitable project to glorify the "underprivileged" stereotype of the Bangladeshi migrant worker. It was apparent that each performer was fully an artistic contributor in their own right. Both Rajib and Zakir are published writers in Bangladesh. The biographies and post-show dialogues were a potent reminder of the richness of the lives and talents of individuals who are often invisible to the more privileged here in Singapore.  I appreciate that private donors had made it possible for a significant number of Rajib and Zakir's Bangladeshi colleagues to attend the performance when they might not otherwise have had the means. I sat among a group of them, refreshed by their bafflement and absorption at what seemed to be an unfamiliar form to many of them. I realised that I am from another land, too.

*The title of this post is an excerpt from "Shades of Light and Dark", Rajib Shil Jibon.

The worst performance EVER

With my chum Kasia we saw the WORST performance one evening two months ago in London. I don't think that there's a need to name the place or the group. We agreed wholeheartedly on its badness. In future it will be our reference: "That show was bad but it wasn't as bad as THAT show."

Then pressed by another friend to explain what we thought was so bad, we floundered for words. I suggested that this was a task we could persist in. What made something bad, SO bad? Took us a little while to get it together between two countries, continuing via comments on each other's text, but here it is now.

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K: To be in a really administrative language: lack of investigation, lack of depth in the movement itself.

S: My first words were useless, meaningless, obvious, amateurish, literal, cliched!  Unfortunately I know that these are really not very concrete.

K: It was cheesy. I said cliched!

S: I said it last night too! Double cliche. Double cheeseburger. Yuck. But these words don't actually tell us very much. I'm still very frustrated.

K: It was embarrassing. Didn't you feel embarassed? Don't you feel that when you watch bad work?

S: A news review once said that about one of my best friend's work in Singapore. Later she won an award in Prague for that same work.

K: Really? Well S.N. loved the show last night.

S: She loved some things about it.

K: She only disliked some things about it. As opposed to us hating the whole thing. I felt so uncomfortable that I had to go on twitter, online on my phone because I didn't want to watch what was happening.

S: It was cringeworthy. But the piece before it was cringeworthy in a very intelligent way. (Bravo!)
In contrast, horrible shows like that second piece are pretty much the only times that provoke me to resorting to the vocabulary of traditional dance composition studies.

K: I know what you mean. Maybe that’s because it seems like they might have made it with a choreographic handbook in hand? (Not Burrows though... ) And it read like a choreographic handbook too.

S: First, my pet peeve. It was so OBVIOUS. In case they didn't announce the theme into the mic, they danced it, they mimed it, they said it again and again. Without much development or elaboration. Well...what's the rest of the show for?

K: Has it also struck you that they were almost always facing us (the audience)? Yet they were looking completely past us... One of the things I dislike most in theatre.

S: The physical vocabulary was predictable. Really packed-with-cliches literal and predictable stuff. A text about the enforcement of prudish social mores: a naked dancer is looked at disapprovingly by clothed companions who grab her, paint her, and clothe her. There are several scenes where the dancers pretend to be embarrassed about being naked and try to cover themselves up. The naked girl returns and there is a fuss about trying to get her to keep her dress on. Next section, a text about futility in capitalist working culture. Dancers make repetitive working gestures and conform, thanks to surveillance by boss.

It was 30 minutes of a sort of lousy pantomime without going deeper to examine the illustrative cliches, comment on them or contrast them.

K: Question is: how do you dig? What is your way for digging deeper Sze? Do you let things take their own course as you improvise around the subject and see what unfolds? Do you transfer questions onto different aspects of life? I just don’t know...

S: Digging! I mean reflection, development, tension.... The music use too, was really cliched, it was a bit of a silent film where the orchestration mickey moused the action or vice versa.

K: Well put...

S: And it was incoherent. The scenettes were just two of something like seven or eight "stories". Generally on the theme of anti-neoliberal frustration. They were rarely linked, but they weren't very juxtaposed either.  Or do I mean too coherent.

Gratituous spectacle. I am generally all for running around naked. I am all for body paint and powder and wrecking the stage. But wield these sacred tools judiciously and wisely! They easily lose their impact. Or maybe they are the medium and the language of the universe that you are creating, they might mean something. They might influence the texture of the movement...
["Nudity is no more neutral than a large hat" - Jonathan Burrows. ]

I wanted to leave so many times but I kept trying to find something redeeming. Something surprising or at least mildly interesting.

K: I do admire you for that. I must admit I stopped trying pretty early on...

S: It didn't have any of the following - of which I'd like to think that I am a proponent of not thinking that any of these are necessary to a performance when there is a strong idea or aesthetic.

1. Pretty dancing - I am really not a pretty dancing person. I am the first one to jump at working with pedestrian movement and performers who haven't been poisoned in a conservatoire (unlike me). But I can watch that in the absence of anything else. In this case... absent! It was ugly...and it wasn't even authentic! It was so overdone!

K: Do you think that what this performance was, was due to the fact that they were in fact non dancers (which could have been honest and beautiful) desperately trying to create a piece which could be read as dance. That it was desperate in their attempt to fall into a category of “physical theatre” - gosh i really don’t know. It’s mind boggling...

S: 2. Pattern. Even the most unspectacular elements would make for me a genius composition if thoughtfully patterned. Repeated, alternated, varied, progressed... which brings me to

3. Arc or trajectory. Whether in narrative, energetic quality, or visual richness, Rhythm of the show?

4. Tension/Irony (as I said earlier about not digging or reflecting deeper).

S: If you can't do any of these... at least 4. some surprise? Please? Even if it's the surprise that you stick to your guns and never change a pattern that nobody dreamed that they'd be able to watch for 60 mins? (Maguy Marin. Xavier le Roy. Yes.)

K: At least the performers were completely committed and spent the whole time really trying to make it work. Bless them.

S: Bless these guys at the Edinburgh Fringe. Really.

K: A last word: to be brave and perform a piece of work of your own, to take it on stage where work is mostly harshly criticised and have guts to be feisty and proud about it - I RESPECT THAT! More than I ever do.