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.
 

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.

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.

Sylvie

Tonight I saw Sylvie Guillem's "Life in Progress" at the London Coliseum - added dates as part of her "farewell" tour. The programme included pieces made for her by her longtime collaborators Akram Khan, Russell Maliphant and Mats Ek, with a guest appearance of a duo from Bill Forsythe.

This isn't a review. It just triggered a memory 13 years ago when I first set eyes on Sylvie on the stage of the Opera Garnier in Paris. I had picked up a student ticket in the gods, not really even knowing what I was going to see. She was dancing in Manon, returning as a guest to the Paris Opera. She set the stage on fire. That performance changed my life. It was one of the defining moments in my understanding of performance, and bringing something personal and challenging to every performance.

Over the years I watched her at every opportunity I could get, on stage, on DVD and on youtube.  One of her statements from her DVD Evidentia has stayed with me: (this is a very rough paraphrase as I understood it then) that if you take a risk on stage as a performer, push yourself to the point where you almost fear what you do, then you will take the audience with you entirely. They will feel that risk and go with you.

But as I watched her over time I often felt quite sad that I found that few of her performances gave me the thrill I first felt when I saw her. Her collaboration pieces of the past few years quite underwhelmed me. As did some of the programme tonight. Yes, 6 o'clock legs, fine and fierce control. But I didn't see her quite as much. Except for Bye by Mats Ek.

More than about Sylvie, tonight told me a lot about me, and how I've changed as a dancer in 15 years. How my tastes and my aspirations, my idea of my "work" has gone from technical performance, pushing myself all out in performing presence, to creating and bumbling and fearing, to playing and now driving myself on to investigate questions of society, questions of the body's capacities, and questions of abstract composition and the relevance of art and performance.

Lately

Lately I marked the end of my postgrad diploma in London - for those of us who don't speak that strange vocabulary, that means 2/3 of the way towards the MA at LCDS.



Most recently, last week I began studio research for my next project.  I also heard the good news that an artist I respect very much, Sara Wookey, has agreed to be my MA supervisor.

It's been a really full year. Since my last update at the end of 2014, I have written papers on Contact Improvisation - a cooperative form of dancing contrasted with its roots in the martial art of Aikido, and separately speculating on Contact settings as a laboratory for new forms of social organisation. I participated in the creation of a new work by Paolo Mangiola, who questioned contemporary dance as a form for the future. I reflected on my choreographic process through a jelly-making lecture demonstration. I turned my last few years' hobby of sliding down staircases into a dance film, with the support of a wonderful group of collaborators mostly from the London Contact Improv community.

And throughout the month of June I worked with a wonderful group of dancers to produce "The Sunshine Empire", an interactive performance selling the secrets of happiness.

Now it's my summer of Contact Improv in Europe, and reflection and rest in between.

In a way it seems that this time in London is allowing me to finally come into my own - spending time with other choreographers and like-minded collaborators has helped me find confidence in my practice: my exploration and research, my aesthetic, and my working style. (For now!)

I'll be home in Singapore soon, looking forward to attending a workshop with Danny K at the Esplanade. And!  Fingers crossed, I hope I will get to vote.

The Sunshine Empire

On probably really the last, last of 15 performances of Sunshine Empire today:

I'm so grateful for you wonderful collaborators. I have watched the delight, puzzlement, surprise and challenge that you brought to our audiences these last two months. While we made part fiction, it was also really personal and genuine and powerful in that way. Often I find myself standing back while I ring the timings, and just truly enjoying all of you perform. The more I see, the better it gets. I'm really glad and proud of what we've made together.

Also, thank you for all the venues, and the old and new friends who have supported us, making time to come to our shows, and supporting us with feedback along the way. You know who you are!

sunshinempire.com

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.

When I grow up I'm going to be an improviser

I know, famous last words, I was saying in Retrospective last year "I'm not sure if I'm a dancer anymore, but I do call myself an improviser."  This after about six years of struggling with my love for improvisation (and contact improvisation) but an education in which "you're improvising!" was a reprimand and a performance culture where improvisation is often taken as a shorthand for laziness.

When we were working on Retrospective, my dear friend K pointed out that I might be claiming improvisation as an identity because while there are many criterion for technical dancing which I prefer not to be judged by, I could noodle around but not be judged for not improvising!

But the more I see and experience, I am humbled and delighted.   I don't know if I merit the label "improviser" - but when I grow up I want to be one! I feel reassured that I won't run out of things to work on for another 20-30 years at least.

Here is my knockout list so far:

1. Yvonne Ng - I saw her perform at the Grey Festival in Singapore 2010, during my final year at NAFA.  I knew from that moment that I wanted to make improvised solos.
2. Rick Nodine and Simonetta Alessandri at the LCI celebrates Chisenhale fundraiser - 3 DAYS after arriving in London, Sep 2014. Knocked my socks off.
3. Table of Contents (Siobhan Davies Company) at ICA Selfridges, 2014.
4. and tonight... Sten Rudstrom at Trip the Light Fantastic Toe!

Thoughts on first contact

We had a beautiful jam in the Hanoi botanical garden last Sunday. After the jam I received these thoughts from Hanh, who experienced CI for the first time that day:


"As promised, I write down some thoughts and feeling of the dance session last Sunday.

For me, it is a kind of performance art. It is not just a dance performance.

This was first time I've danced in public space and I think I discovered a boundary in myself.

I strongly believe in the existence of body talk because I made friends through dances with Jill, Sze and a guy whose name I can not spell. It took less time than usual with verbal languages."

Monkey biz

I can hardly believe that we've finally wrapped up three shows of Do Gorillas Peel Bananas? at the Substation! What the heck just happened!

Photography by EnricKoan 

It seems like a really long time since we first tossed around the title in 2012, and then the selection of the Open Call in May 2013. Searching for what my "process" might be...painful-confusing-hilarious-terrifying-absorbing-exhausting-exciting-miserable... I couldn't have gotten through it without some amazing and patient collaborators David Lim, Andy Lim, Brian Gothong Tan, Norisham Osman, a whole new bunch of perspectives from my mentors Natalie Hennedige and Fendy, and the listening ears of friends and relatives. I'm kind of stunned that my silly little experiment with a lot of duct tape has resonated with so many people. A huge thank you to everyone who worked on and supported the show in so many ways. Thank you for the space to grow.

(Thank you the Substation, Lee Foundation, Arts Fund, Rimbun Dahan (KL), Mum, Dad, Yi Gu Ma, Air and Odor Management Pte Ltd, Laura Kho, Tong Wen Yee, Laura Tham, Yen Feng, Joey Feng, Nick Yip, Dylan Tan, Din and Israf, Annabelle and the Substation staff, Pat Toh, Ian Tan, Bilqis Hijjas.)

Why I dance III

This morning I finished my yoga practice and realised that I have come to these interrelated body practices - dancing, yoga, improv - probably because I have needed them so much.  They have been literally exercises for the physical but more importantly for the mental aspect.  My practice has gotten me through a lot of challenging and stressful times in my life.

I had to learn patience with my body... and having an older and inflexible body in professional training needed a lot of patience, and perseverance! It was patience with my body that got me to learn patience with myself, and finally patience with other people.  Not just the kind of patience that prevents me from losing it and being nasty to people, but a patience to try and hear others out even when I really don't agree, and understand why.  I still have my temper and my moods of course; they will always be a part of me.  But I do find that I want to bite people's heads off less often.  And I can recover my emotional balance more quickly.

Both in my improv practice and yoga, I am dedicating time to observing and listening.  Not just with eyes and ears, but with touch, smell, awareness of space, time, energy.  Maybe that's why I never watch TV anymore - I prefer to spend time listening to my breath, my time, or other bodies'!

In a way this lesson worked in the reverse to the patience lesson.  It was through other bodies in contact improv that i discovered what it was to listen and to be present.  Not in the combination, not in the corrections, not in my expectations or anticipations, but just here and now.   Realising that this made a huge difference for how I worked as a performer and particularly as an improviser, and that it is also perceptible to other dancers and my audience.

An amazing question that I received recently was "how do I know I exist?" In fact it came incidentally twice, in the two unrelated great workshops that I took in April with Karen Nelson and Joerg Hassmann. (How's that for a sign!) Both Karen and Joerg talked about how other bodies and encounters allow us to discover ourself.  So observing and listening came to me from the outside... and I am now learning to apply it to myself and my body.

In another context completely (group therapy facilitation practice!) I also recently received the idea that we go through cycles of experience but we benefit most when we take the time to integrate them.  I guess this is a moment of integration.  I don't know how long I'll be here, when I might move on or need to retrace my steps.  But for now I have a sense of gratitude for what I am receiving.

It's making me enjoy my practices more and more. Hopefully they also make me a better dancer and artist, if incidentally.  I suspect that in these very small ways, they're also making me a better person.

#whyidance - I had a vague memory that I'd been writing on this title some years back.  Looking through my old entries, I have been doing this even more than I thought!  So I've created a new tag if you want to look back in time with me.

EnricKoan photography 2011.

What is a triangle II

My last five days now have been spent in Coventry, immersed in Tuning Scores improvisation work with Karen Nelson.  (a workshop organised by decoda in Coventry)

One of the first few exercises had the initial 12 of us working around a large studio space with our eyes closed - a cornerstone of the sensory heightening in this work - when Karen said "now make a triangle".  What was that?  How would we find that without sight, with so many people, and the confusing immediacy of touch, sound and intuition?  After the exercise ended, Karen said, "Give me a title for what you just did." One dancer volunteered, "what is a triangle?".

The questions continued.  How do you know you are dancing? Can you walk forward, with backwards eyes? How do we know we exist?  We learned to make suggestions to the group as we danced, and worked on listening to the calls and to our senses and our desires and expectations.  Pause. Reverse. Replace. End. Begin.  A multitude of instantaneous decisions and interactions.  So much information around us, in every instant. How do we survive this world?

These five days in, I know my improvising will never be the same again.

There is such a richness in this practice of sensitization and questioning. As individuals we take in snapshots of inspiration from time to time, and live in a world constantly filled with many other people. But in how many of those moments are we actually existing together, in connection? I realized today that this work is one of those pathways that allows us to cultivate the present.  When reaching with intuition and an activation of as many of the senses as we can muster.  Calling out our desires and curiosities to ground our attention and to allow us to enter into each others' perception and experience.  Allowing us to be present in a common reality with ourselves and connected with others - moments otherwise so fleeting and often unacknowledged.

Right now there is nothing better than having no idea what is going to happen next.  "A funeral," said Karen, "for our desires."  It is a work that takes practice - for people like Lisa and Karen, a lifetime.  It is fun and at times playful but it is also exhausting work and a commitment to be alive, to be awake and to be together with other people.  At the workshop, Charlie Morrissey recommended this article by Lisa Nelson on how we look at dance - and how we dance as a consequence.  Before your eyes: Seeds of a dance practice.

What is an end?  I am growing to love how the idea of an "end" is a marker that holds time.  It draws our attention to see a possibility of finite-ness, or the space for new beginnings.  In our lives, we identify things as "end" because that's a test of how much we want to be able to stop time.  Or how much we wish we could force it to continue as it was before. Continue it does, but only in a way that we have no control over.  We can only respond.

For the first time, on the last night that I am here, I am noticing the sound of the train going by. Tomorrow I will be in a new place.

(some little edits from what I posted a day ago.  blogger's license!)

what is a triangle I

This is one of those moments!

I am never going to be the same again.  My dancing and my living has taken me into another place, another phase. I am older, I am changed, I am new.

I could feel the change coming in the last month  in France.  Focus was back on tour. 9 shows from the South-west, to the Ardeche, Lyon and Paris.  Format-wise, little has changed.  On the road rehearsing, eating, sleeping as a trio.  In its shape the show isn't so different from what you might have seen in Avignon or Singapore last year.  But in its execution we are all profoundly different.  A year later, each of the silences has found its sense, the lines their parallel and our words their rhythm. 

The biggest difference for me was that Ole did work some changes into my opening solo, which is now a duet between me dancing and him whipping the wind out of the Kaossilator gadget.  It's been a year that I have been searching for that improv solo, tormenting even at times when we were not performing. I was sure that despite all the work I devoted to it, it was my most forgettable moment on stage and I dreaded it. Then finally, Ole gave me some new ideas the day before we opened in Paris. I wasn't sure when we went out and sat on stage in the fog, but once I started moving that night, I knew that it had been found.  The sense of finally having found what I want to say and digging into the space between me and the audience to hold it.  Each night, it grew.

That chinese girl who does indian dance

This and That (2009) by Nirmala Seshadri

I'm currently working on a new piece I watched the flowers with Nirmala Seshadri at the Substation, an experimental bharatanatyam work.  The first question I always get, is "why?!"

The short story is that I started dancing bharatanatyam, odissi and chhau during asian dance modules at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.  I had a great connection with my teachers, Nirmala and Raka Maitra, and still perform and work with them today. This led me to other indian-classical based work with Dr Siri Rama, Jayathi Siva and other choreographers who have been interested in my base in asian dance alongside my western contemporary and classical training.

Looking back, though, I know I was interested in asian art and philosophy much earlier. I devoured asian folktales as a little bookworm, and went on to history and literature when I was in school. My yoga practice has been part of my life for over ten years. Dance and performance is an integral component of the oral history and culture of Asia, and the forms as they exist today are fascinating junctions of history, migration and human interaction over centuries - so the social scientist part of me just gets hooked.   The emphasis on asian dance, theatre, music and their contemporization was one of the things that drew me to NAFA in the first place. 

I wonder now if it was an accident that among the many other asian forms I have touched on,  it is these indian forms that have become as much a part of my vocabulary as ballet (which I have done the most) or Limon (my first modern dance technique).  They weren't easier for me than ballet or modern, they were certainly difficult to begin with and difficult even now, as I guess all rich classical forms are!  I don't consider myself to have a complete grounding and practice like January Low (who is also half-indian, for what that's worth) and I don't see myself devoting hours to accomplishing an arangetram graduation. But the more time I take to practice these forms, the more they reward me with their intricacies and my fascination, and provide me with a counterpoint to the aesthetics of Western dance that are easy to take for granted. 

Could this only have happened in Singapore? Growing up in Singapore in a kantang (westernised) family, I guess it's normal that I feel estranged from the monolith that is Chinese history, culture and language, even though I do have great respect and interest in it today.  It's probably also normal that I grew up feeling comfortable with access to the other cultures around me, particularly Indian and Malay (and need I say American and European). I guess there's also the novelty of being an outsider that works to my advantage, like the way I am considered to speak excellent french only because I'm not french!

The most important factor is definitely the affinity that I have with my teachers and mentors, who I'm lucky have chosen to work in Singapore and where I had access to them. They have very different personalities and approaches.  But both celebrate their deep heritage and extensive practice while approach these forms in a contemporary context and constantly question their functions.  They are great improvisers, which gels well with my own approach to making dance.  I loved channeling non-mythological characters and re-creating abhinaya gossip in Raka's Hungry Stones.

Now with I watched the flowers, Nirmala and I are building a duet from our collaborations in 2009-2010 when I was part of the ensemble that performed her work This and That in Singapore and New York. Both of us are dancers as well as writers, and connect strongly with stories and emotional content.  This material has led us to some startlingly profound conversations about feminity, sexuality, philosophy and life journeys.  It will be the most intensely autobiographical work I have done so far.  Bharatanatyam is the main idiom and reference, but there is also improvisation, floorwork, text and theatre - in a strange way, the question of why a chinese girl is doing indian dance seems less and less relevant as we go along.  What I hope we'll share with you is two women at different life stages, in a sincere conversation about womanhood.

I watched the flowers - a meditation on womanhood, maturity and love at the Substation, 28-29 June. Ticket details to come.

One tour ends, another begins

Got back from France two days ago.  I think I haven't really realised that the first leg of the creation of Focus is over.  I am still waking up at 4 am with my body trying to remain on french time, still thinking about the choreography. About jumping into Ole's car and heading for the studios at the Pole Culturel Camille Claudel.  Thinking what I'd like to fix for dinner for Ole and Jereh, our SM Lise and our landlady Mireille.

It all happened so fast.
 
2 March, Sorgues/Avignon, les Hivernales. Premiere in a thick cloud of pea fog, in the familiar black box of our residency with the audience on a steep rake and scalding showers backstage. A final curtain call with Cie Stylistik (the other half of the double bill) among their field of Laotian straw hats.

3 March. Pile into car at 730am to hit the road for Toulouse.  Focus was an entirely different show in the huge square of the Place du Capitole. We danced in the chilly wind, practically in the laps of the bemused crowd, the marketplace, and the cars horning a wedding on its way to the town hall. We can hear every mutter of the audience, their amusement and perplexion.  I love performing in the open.  Hit the road again.

4 March. We only see a corner of Lourdes, the town of the Virgin Mary.  It's the corner between the snow-capped mountains, our motel and the Salle des Fetes. The theatre is a mini House of World Cultures, all concrete-oyster and dark glass.  There is a small constellation of citrus-tinted globes suspended above the stage, and four hundred people sitting on chairs in the dark.  We are the last item in the festival, just before the hip hop battle. Then again the road, the clouds for hours.  We return to Avignon past midnight. Jianhao and Lise gulp down a coffee and take the road for Lyon.

Five weeks will pass very quickly, said Ole.

Coming in out of the cold

Travelling to another country, rehearsing in unfamiliar spaces, participating in a new creation, ploughing through the cold cold wind.  In my innocence I never realised that performing life and cultural outreach is a much huger world outside the work I've known in Singapore.

This is pretty much my first full time production - daily rehearsals in an isolated space, living day in day out with the same collaborators, touring in our choreographer's beat-up little car.  Minus so many of the daily distractions - other technique classes, part time jobs to pay the bills, additional projects, social life - that fill the air when I am working at home. Instead I am really dancing day to night - with preparations focused on a single project instead of the scattered repertoire as I knew it in school.

This degree of concentration is a luxury as well as a challenge.  We have three weeks to go to the premiere of Focus by Kham Company at les Hivernales dance festival in Avignon.  Some days I can hardly believe my luck to be here - and on other days I wonder if he chose the right dancer and if I'm actually up to this. If I can grow enough in these six weeks so that I'm not wasting all these fantastic facilities and arrangements where everything is taken care of.

The best premiere

First tech run, Thakhek. Photo by Caroline Cochet.

I declare now that I fell in love with Laos last month. There will be some sentimental raving.

I am indebted to four squirming tots in a disused motel restaurant in Thakek. Who watched my first dress run of the Always Sea in Fang Mae Khong (FMK). They sat transfixed through all 20 minutes of languid soundscape and strange sitting and falling and object collection. Also the horde of tweens at the actual first show who were so weirded out that they actually ran away from me as I exited through the audience.

What a pleasure to have fresh eyes. An audience that you can amaze and touch.

These were people who have never seen any dance in their lives save for a bit of breakdancing. Part of me wishes I could see as they do, and see for the first time the ambitious mixed bag put together by Ole Khamchanla and his FMK team. The Vientiane-based Laobangfai b-boy crew (virtual teen celebs here) were the draw and local street dance crews opened the show. I wouldn't have bet that this audience would sit through it all - Lao dancers reinventing tradition and hip hop through contemporary dance, meditative contemporary Indian dance, Cambodian classical-meets club groove, clowning on Jacques Brel, Myanmar classicial dance battles b-boy, contemp hip-hop, stripped down experimental contemp, and my own weird installation performance thing. (See here for more info about the festival). And watch they did, in three towns. 

I can still feel the press of the last audience we played to, in the cool night below the bemused gaze of President Souphanouvong and the hills of Luang Prabang.  Maybe three hundred people, squeezed into standing room and peeking from benches or the tops of cars just to be able to see... They were completely along with us for the ride.  We were all amazed together.

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.