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.

"the only thing that's a mess is your self-confidence."

an amazing bit of advice that I had at the beginning of the year.  I hope to be able to act - or rather dance on it.  Thanks Uncle Y!

m1 Fringe Festival - Deproduction and Xtra Large

It's been quite a while since I published a review - by my own choice because I sometimes find it difficult to reconcile the positions of artist and reviewer.  I happened to get a request to review a couple of shows for last month's Fringe Festival for theMuse.com.sg.  In the end it was actually quite nice to discipline myself to sit down and put in words what I had read from a performance.

Deproduction by Assoc Sam-Hester

Xtra Large by Cie Irene K

2012 My Year in Art

2012. It went so fast that I feel like I hardly know what happened! But wait, I refuse to let it just slip by and disappear like so many things seem to do in Singapore life.  I am lucky, I am grateful. But there's a lot more to it than that. I guess that's why I keep making these shorthands for time, and attempting to decipher them afterwards.

Making Things.
The rhythms of my year were structured around creation - works for others as well as works for myself. More than once, I realised that the experiences that were changing me the most weren't the actual performances.  I've been conditioned for years to yearn only for the magical moment when the curtains go up, etc. For which everything else was merely a preparation.  Nah.  I am getting quite hooked on the rehearsal process - getting convinced that sometimes the best things are discovered in the studio, with other like-minded artists.  Now I suspect that "performance" is the excellent convenient enabler for those rehearsals to happen and for me to continue to grow.  Sh.  don't tell the funders.


Focus with KHAM Cie (Jan-Mar/Apr/Oct/Nov in a lot of places) was the first time I've experienced the intensity and luxury of a creation residency, and the bizarre intimacy of a company living and learning and working together on tour in different venues and different audiences, watching a work change and grow over several performances.  I also learned not to panic when faced with grant applications, tour budgets, and festival applications. 


I watched the flowers (Jun at the Substation) was my first full-fledged production as an equal artistic collaborator, decision-maker and producer. A leap of faith that Nirmala decided to take with me.  We had so many wonderful collaborators and friends who made that work possible. It was a trial by fire but also a rebirth...  

All is Divine (May at SOTA Theatre) with Charlotte Engelkes was the shortest of all the production processes that I did this year.  I didn't think I liked opera but here I guess I got what I was asking for! I was amazed by what Charlotte's intuition and decisiveness led our team of collaborators to explore and stage in just one week, and I'm really excited about continuing this work this year.

My best birthday present was Pretty Things (Sep at the Substation) by Pat Toh and an amazing team.  I haven't attempted any theatre work since I was 18 years old (or okay, since I auditioned for the Vagina Monologues in college and didn't get a part). Pat is a crazy girl who assembled a fabulous team for her crazy experiments.  Milk, sheep, cakes, poetry, gonzo and so many questions.  I wish we could do it again!

Developing my new solo S@ (Dec, Srawung Seni Candi) was a test of my own discipline and also a test of my own methods and intuitions that continue to develop - versus my own inertia!  Then the unnerving serendipity of getting to perform the piece for the first time in such a spiritual and imposing place itself dedicated to reincarnation.  In the meantime I've also began conceptualising two new pieces - seeds for a duet and two ensemble experiments that i hope will grow in 2013!

Making things happen.

I fully acknowledge my festival junkie-dom. I jumped on board the organising teams of two festivals this year - Contact Festival Kuala Lumpur and the Fang Mae Khong Festival in Laos. Obviously festivals look very different from a co-organiser/administration perspective than as a volunteer or a performer. It is a sort of satisfying constant state of panic.  I was seeing how things happen - or rather very often almost not happen.  Who needs bungee jumping. We have the adrenaline rush of pulling together gigs that may or may not have all the artists, the funding, the equipment, gambling with last minute changes and the weather.  Devising makeshift solutions and turning decisions on a dime.  And the great satisfaction of working with some capable collaborators and teams that support and forgive.


Learning
I'm also a class junkie.  As in taking class.  I hope my addiction is more than the old fashioned technique zombie insecurity that the dancing body cannot survive without being fed with a million plies - or the comfort of switching off my head and letting the teacher tell me what to do.  I do like seeing other people's methods of working, of moving, and trying them on.  It's a bit like shopping in a vintage vault.  You don't always recognise yourself but it can be very entertaining.  Sometimes just silly, sometimes it helps you to see something new.  I have been a shopaholic in 2012. Odissi, capoeira, acroyoga, contact improv, popping, contemporary randai, the Jan Fabre method and even a moment of pole, on top of my rat race to keep up ballet and contemp classes wherever I could find them.  When I find a method that works for me I love to get to know the garment in as many qualities as I can - even if maybe I'll never learn how it was made.  And not by any planning of mine, I also ended up teaching.  Baby ballet (terrifying), improvisation for french high schoolers (chaos) as well as rolls on the grass for adult dancers (by far the kindest of them all). I still don't love teaching and I enter most classes wanting to bolt for the door.  But I see each time that the process is teaching me - and I am increasingly fascinated by how classes are constructed and how instructions and constraints affect our experience.

Seeing 
Some folks can't live without TV.  I can't live without theatres and performance - and after that without books and visual art.  Last year these guys knocked my socks off and i never want to forget them - they grabbed my heart and didn't let go, set my brain on fire, made my jaw drop, or got tears streaming down my face.

Waiting by Carlotta Ikeda (les Hivernales, Avignon)
Pavlova's Dogs by Rachel de la Nieta and performed by Scottish Dance Theatre (The Place, London)
(un)it: HD85828 by Ming Poon (The Substation, Singapore)
Lear Dreaming by Ong Keng Sen (Singapore Arts Festival)
Gostan Forward by Marion de Cruz (Singapore Arts Festival)
The Lan Fang Chronicles by Choy Kar Fai (Singapore Arts Festival)
A Very Wagnerian Night by Charlotte Engelkes (Singapore Arts Festival)
Double Take by The Plant Collective (Reconnaissance competition, Echirolles)
Cheerleader by Danny K (SidebySide at the Esplanade, Singapore)
Phase47  by Shoko Kashima and Chico Katsube (Telok Ayer Performing Arts Centre, Singapore)
Preparatio Mortis by Jan Fabre/Annabelle Chambon (Theatre de Gennevilliers, Paris)
Bouziane Bouteldja in Alterite by DAN6T (Fang Mae Khong Festival, Laos)
And some new discoveries of older things:
A retrospective on the work of Lee Wen at the Singapore Art Museum
Selected short stories by Rabindranath Tagore
Paroles by Jacques Prevert

Suprapto Suryodamo, Martinus Miroto, Eko Supriyanto, Fitri Setyaningsih and Danang Pamungkas (Srawung Seni Candi, outside Solo)

Penangsang Gugur by the faculty and students of ISI Solo


Remembering
That now familiar ache of a disappearing landscape (captured in 2011 so poignantly with Dust: A Recollection) I found again, visiting the displaced hallways of the Tanjong Pagar Railway Station and the rail corridor, the deserted blocks of Covent Garden estate and the sad boarded face of the Shui Xian Gong when invited to Old House @ Zion.  I didn't make it to the Bukit Brown Cemetery except in essays and I discovered wonderful photographs of HDB playgrounds only after they were demolished.

Happy updates 2013!

Happy holidays everyone!

Here's wrapping up one year, crazy in a good way - and looking forward to more of the same!

la Rampe, Echirolles - stealing a moment from the tech run of Focus at the Reconnaissances competition.

To bridge the old and the new year, I'll be performing my new solo, in Solo! s@ expands on an exploration that I begun with that big old chain of bells in I watched the flowers - the same one featured in Zaobao. It will be shown at the Srawung Seni Candi festival on 31 December and 1 January.

Focus in Vientiane, FMK 2012.  Photo by Morning Song Production.

Focus with KHAM Cie continues to tour in France - we will be near Toulouse, and in Lyon and Paris in March-April, and on summer tour (venues tbc) in July.

All is Divine at the Singapore Arts Festival 2012.  Photo by Anna Ardelius.  I'm the strange spiky thing on the left.

All is Divine by Charlotte Engelkes began with a workshop at the Singapore Arts Festival this year and is going to be expanded as part of her Very Ring trilogy! Rehearsals begin in April and we will premiere at the Dansens Hus in Stockholm in September.

I'm also looking forward to my new collaboration Do gorillas peel bananas? with David Lim (Singapore and KL production dates and venues tbc). and the next editions of the Kuala Lumpur Contact Improvisation Festival and the Fang Mae Khong Festival.

I hope that you're all well. Best wishes!

Sze

The Politics of Imagination: Post-Painterly Art of Interactivity

This awesome title for a future show was contributed by The Random Exhibition Title Generator, also known as the lazy curator app.

I won't claim to know a lot about how art works at this point in my life.  But what I have been finding out in the past year is the critical importance of randomness (and silliness!) in my creative process. It seems that going through art school teaches the cruel discipline of *making* things happen.  That's the part about coming back to the studio even if you feel like crap and still doing those plies, repeating those combinations and monologues, setting brush to canvas. Now to be paired with *letting* things happen.

This has quite more of an impact on my life than I've imagined!  I'm getting much better at dealing with uncertainties.  Choreographers and directors change their minds.  Technical hiccups. Shows lose money. Festivals struggle for sponsorships.  Three year olds never do the steps that you plan for them. Collaborators vanish off the face of the earth. Yet life and art still goes on and has its amazing moments!  Somehow its also making it easier to deal with being confused in real life.  Smashing my favourite coffee mug. Taking a wrong turn. Losing money on the stock market. Scratching the car. Not being able to have everything I want.

Life is so beautiful when it takes you by surprise.