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.

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. 

Dancing can change your life

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

This is gonna be the sappy posting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Never be afraid of failure."

"Never be afraid of failure."

The right advice at the right time. I didn't know until now how much I needed to hear this as a young choreographer.

Thank you, Larry Clark.

dancing for love

It has been a long hiatus since the arts festival, and a lot has been happening for me in my final year at NAFA Dance. Oddly enough, the theme of my last post in June resonates a lot right now. We've just struggled through another production week of NAFA's annual Third Space show at the dan:s festival at the Esplanade Recital Studio. I say struggled because for us student performers and crew, it is a mad battle against the fatigue of the theatre schedule on top of our usual coursework and the accumulation of injuries and stress as we wind up our academic semester.

Dancing is indeed painful. Injuries are something that I am becoming used to as part of dancing life, with ice packs and anti-inflammatories as my best friends. What is more difficult is facing fellow cast members who may not care or work as much as you do, critics (professional and non-professional) who are unenthused about your work, audiences who sit stonily and reject every ounce of heart that you open to them. And toughest of all, your own expectations of yourself that can be the hardest to meet. Especially when working in the "contemporary asian" genre these last few years, I have encountered all of these a lot. Very often I have wondered what I am dancing for. It's horribly depressing. We had one of those stony audiences tonight, on the closing night of our show.

The only answer I have found is that I must be dancing for me. First and foremost I have to find something that I really connect with and believe in with the work, despite all doubts that others may have about it. It is my own story to discover and share. Then I have to go out on the shaky limb where I simply trust that in this conviction, I will be able to touch somebody, somewhere, out there.

I am coming to treasure a piece of advice I got from Ms Robin Payne, a director and former theatre lecturer at NAFA: that as a responsible performer, I need to believe that every work that I am currently involved in is perfect. I was confused to hear this at first. But this has become more and more useful to me in the last few months. As a performer I am responsible for making the work real. It is in my belief to bring it to fruition. I may have my own doubts or hear more from others, but when I come to the rehearsal studio and the stage I need to put those aside and surrender to the world in the work. Any doubts and fears I carry, anything less than full conviction will only sabotage the performance.

So pushing aside the boundaries in Raka Maitra's Boundaries...Dreams...Beyond this weekend, I did feel rewarded. It started to make sense in my own life and my own story what it means to face the many rules and OB markers that rule our lives, and to find courage to make a lonely journey and cross them into uncharted territory where our lives are truly our own.

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.

Pinch yourself

It's true? Three weeks: I have given away my alberto rinaldi suit, moved to the far industrial reaches of this island, corrected my vision of the last 20 years, and disguised myself as a student-card carrying 18 year-old. (Disillusioning my classmates about my age is the best fun. The China posse even screamed in disbelief and seized my IC.) And best of all, DANCING every day. And talking and writing and thinking about dance not on the bus or the loo, but in my focused time.

After my first week at NAFA, my groaning ankles and back are glad to remind me that it's real. Change is good. Change is possible! I'll save my miserable moments for later. Nothing else feels like this.

my new address on Bencoolen Street.
irrelevantly, also one of the worst designed school buildings and logos ever