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.

2011 - My year in art

This year has been PACKED with good stuff.  I think I'll have much to digest for 2012. 

Here it is, in mostly chronological rather than any other order!

1. Model Citizens, a play by the Necessary Stage (Jan)
2. Getting burned by Louise Burns during my modern dance exam  - well I needed to start asking myself at some point what kind of artist I am... (Jan)
3. Learning to lenggang and ronggeng with Mdm Som Said (Jan-May)
4. Dancing Peter Chin's Syncretitude (May)
5. Dancing Albert Tiong's Checkmate (May)
6. A dinner at Nahm, Bangkok (May)
7. Lunch at Iggy's (May)
8. Dancing in The Hungry Stones by Raka Maitra (May)
9. SAF (May/June) Out of Context - for Pina, les ballets C de la B and Beautiful Thing 2, Padmini Chettur
10. The Screw of Thought workshop at Theatreworks (Jun)
11. A chance meeting with French choreographer Ole Khamchanla - little did I know what was to come, watch this space for 2012 updates... (Jun)
12. Teaching in the Singapore Schools Programme by TTRP/ITI - Grateful for some crazy adventures and experiments at RGPS and CHIJ-St Joseph's Convent (Jun-Jul)
13. Contact Improv Festival Kuala Lumpur (Jul)
14. My first Capoeira Batisado with Argola d'Ouro (Jul)
15. Cooling Off Day, a play by Wild Rice/Alfian Sa'at (Aug)
16. Pina, THE dance film of the year, by Wim Wenders (Sep during the Singapore International Film Festival)
    
17. Fear of Writing, a play at Theatreworks written by Tan Tarn How (Sep)
18. Creating PLAY! - a wacky-thoughtful dance/performance experiment with Joavien Ng, Yak Aik Wee, Patricia Toh and Bernice Lee at the ArtScience Museum (Oct)
19. My first solo dance work out of school - The Always Sea (Oct)
20. Being a part of the FangMaeKhong International Dance Festival in Laos (Oct)
21. Performing at and watching the 2High festival at the Brisbane Power House (Oct)
22. An exhibition of Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Gallery of Art, Brisbane (Oct)
23. Dust: A recollection by Vertical Submarine (Nov)
24. Some introspective conversations with Singapore choreographer Nirmala Seshadri - watch this space.  :) (Nov-Dec)
25. T.H.E Contact dance festival - as a volunteer and a participant, and a witness to many amazing performances (Dec)
26. Presenting my first live improv score at THE Contact's Open Stage platform with Chen Jiexiao and Sherry Tay! (Dec) 
27. Walk with Me - an Amanda Heng retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum (Dec)
28. Wicked at the Marina Bay Sands Theatre - I haven't enjoyed a well-crafted musical so much since West Side Story! (Dec)

And now, time for a real holiday.  :)

"Do not fear perfection. You will never achieve it"

- Salvador Dali

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.

Immigration

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

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

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

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

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

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

In some small way make our own

Photo by Oranje Lwin.

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of Zaidi

Anyway, Randai. I have swollen hands.

And a yearning to visit Bukit Tinggi.