Despite a thin turnout of less than ten people for the dance/film masterclass, we had a great, thougthful discussion with British filmmaker Alex Reuben today at Objectifs.
What constitutes a dance film as opposes to a document of a live performance? What are the possibilities of the camera, editing, technology, and sound in film? We had a good discussion in between four of his shorts and a feature documentary. The films spanned a broad scope of his work which includes dance as sociology-political comment, movement transformed by computer and technology into abstraction and pure line, dance with literary text. I liked his work best where he allowed the simplicity of images, movement and sound to do the speaking – in the catchy Line Dance where he creates astounding depth with only stick figures, and the impressive documentary ‘Routes’ that speaks volumes about race and politics in America without a single word or narrative text.
A DJ and visual artist by training, and a film maker with a pedagogical flair, Alex was really approachable and frank in his sharing. I didnt stay for the subsequent class by James Allen because (duh) I went to watch Shelly Love’s films at Cathay. Sadly I hear this class was even smaller than the first. The good news is that when I swapped over to Cathay in the afternoon, the Shelly Love films that had been advertised as ‘experimental’ managed to draw about 50 people.
Kudos to Danny K and Objectifs for pulling the masterclasses together against the odds. I hope we will have more dance film events in future.
Routes, Line Dance and a couple more of Alex Reuben’s shorts are showing tomorrow 6 June at the Cathay at 12.40pm (tickets from Sistic). The tough part is that you have to trade off the dance/film forum if you want to see them.
Sze
Jeffrey Tan (talkback moderator, speaking to audience): What were your experiences like?
Leong Liew Geok: I felt very spooky. I felt I was surrounded by ghostly experiences.
Jeffrey: But I started to enjoy that after a while.
Me? I wasn’t so nuts about this show – yeah, great interaction of contemporary music and art and design and maybe a bit of theatre. But the music itself seemed to elude transcendence – and all this after an assiduous study of sorta-cutting-edge scientific principles, which don’t *really* make for good art, with the possible exception of Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements Song”.
Nonetheless, the ticket’s worth it, just to hear composer Joyce Koh at the talkback.
Joyce: I’m not sure if you realised there were sounds coming out of your butt.
(She’s actually talking about the sound system, which included speakers above and below the seats, mutlifaceted sonic environment, octophony with subwoofers, yadda yadda.)
Joyce: We wanted this to be visual. We wanted it to be doyng doyng doyng, but as you see, it will not doyng doyng doyng. So it’s just visual.
Joyce: If I were to do the ngiy ngiu ngiu sound, it would be wtb wtb wtb wtb! I had to do the bowing, wooo wooo wooo, and I think it worked quite well today. Don’t you?
**
There are few pleasures as enjoyable as hearing highly intelligent, artistic people making silly noises with their mouths. Gives you hope for yourself someday.
Ng Yi-Sheng (more…)
Adelynn Tan: I’ve never seen lighting interact with actors like that before. Incredible.
Anand Bala: Your myopia goes up 100 degrees just trying to read the subtitles.
Jonathan Lim: You know all the magic tricks? I’ve seen them all on Japanese Youtube videos. Families do them. This show is for people who don’t watch Japanese Youtubes.*
**
All three of these guys really liked the show. Me? I wasn’t that thrilled. And the friend who got me the tickets felt it was conceptually out of date – kept referring to a negative Guardian review (although oddly enough, the only one I can find is pretty positive).
I didn’t feel it was saying enough – that we should be tolerant of human androgyny? Okay, okay, what else? And you’re seriously going to trot out Aristophanes’ creation myth again? Also, the Japanese elements barely came through save for a few live props at the beginning – mad props to Ridzal Hamid for accusing Robert LePage of exploiting exotica!
Still, towards the middle they did a deliberately proscenium theatre drama scene, and as soon as I accepted the show as drama, I began to have a good time. Can lah, can lah.
Ng Yi-Sheng
*Jonathan says via SMS: Hey just wanted to say with regard to the youtube video thing, I am not implying that their magic moments were not original, but that in their playing they discovered visual surprises similar to the ingenious stuff you see in some of these clips. Which is in keeping with some of the almost vaudeville-esque nature of some of the sequences in Eonnagata.
By Compagnie Une de Plus Growing pains
On the way home, I asked my three-year-old daughter what she thought the show was trying to tell her.
“It’s telling me to walk on stilts,” she replied.
Bryan Tan
