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