Singapore Arts Festival Blog

Platform Campus by Ng Yi-Sheng

I was going to assume my usual screwball authorial voice in this entry, but given that I actually received a comp for this show, and that we’re probably the only non-campus-based news source covering it, I figured I’d try and restrain myself.

(Which means my joke about a college where everyone wears platform shoes is kind of wasted. Sigh. Another time, perhaps.)

However! “Platform Campus” is a really great initiative. Putting up pairs of tertiary-level student dance groups with professional choreographers, homegrown and international, is probably one of the best ways to introduce mass numbers of people to modern/contemporary arts. It’s not just an inspiration to the dancers (who are at what’s probably the point in their lives where their strength and flexibility and ability to commit is at a maximum, after all); it’s about the audiences of BFFs and frenz 4ever who’re in attendance, and this gigantic affirmation to younger Singaporeans that yes, you matter to the arts, thus hopefully the reverse is true.

That said, not all the shows in this quintuplebill have the unadulterated flavour of excellence. Here, I’ll give you a tour:

scene 1: “Night Stalkers… Resist of Succumb”
Fresh Elements – ITE College East Street Jazz Club
Choreography: Celeste Theunissen

Oh dear. I mean, oh gosh, because the dancers really are quite boomz: a crowd of teenyboppers in multicoloured clubwear (think early Britney Spears videos) running up and doing all these slick, sexy dance moves, good synchronization and ensemble work, headed by a grinning young boy in a blue jacket and a grinning young girl in a green dress, hip yet wholesome as hell…

BUT OH NOES HALP because the stage is suddenly invaded by EMO GOTH KIDS IN BLACK, about six of them, mostly male and kohl-eyed, undulating slowly to punk rock and solo ballads about loneliness. (Technically, these guys were fine. Stylistically, their style was so exaggerated and misplaced that it looked campy.)

Then of course the two sides clash. At first I thought this was going to be a “West Side Story” thang, because the goths and the teenyboppers are dancing with each other, albeit slightly combatively, yet still celebrating dance, and then the girl in green is seduced over to the dark side through a ritualistic dance. But then the goths actually start KILLING the teenyboppers, as in carrying them off and leaving them motionless on the floor, which is really a little harsh on the take of alternative club cultures, doncha think?

And we’re left with the teenybopper in blue, trying valiantly to save his friends as they’re swallowed up by the dark hordes, and then running away down the aisle to escape…

What could have been a strong but simple dance of celebration instead became a ludicrous mock opera about angst, perpetuating some parental rumour that wearing eye makeup turns you into a minion of Satan. Ms Theunissen, this was enjoyable, but it also really looked pretty silly. You could have dramaturged it much better.

(But props to the student rock musicians backstage, who performed Janet Jackson’s “Free Xone”. Live music scores high points.)

scene 2: “MESSAGE”
SMU INDANCITY
Choreography: Dan Kwoh

I’d heard that SMU dance groups were good. The opening of this piece actually seemed to involve showing off: an incredibly tall gangly boy was suspended on a platform (campus!) by other dancers’ brute strength as he scribbled equations with chalk on a blackboard. Then down again, for the group to disperse in a mess of gravity-defying athletic spins and acrobatic handstands, accentuated by uniforms of black pants and unbuttoned black jacket (no shirts for the guys).

And yet, Mr Kwoh, I have reason to complain. First of all, you have pushed this troupe slightly beyond its capability – which is great for growth in theory, but what we’ve ended up with is a series of violently beautiful dance movements which simply are not being done in sync. Many gestures just look sloppy – flourishes and not enough grace.

Then there’s the cliché. My gawd: for accompaniment, you’ve chosen the Knee Plays from Philip Glass’s opera “Einstein on the Beach”. Yes, it’s beautiful and postmodern but it’s also ridiculously overused – I’ve seen it in corporate retreat advertisements, for crying out loud. And there’s the triteness: your dancers reveal that the source of their longing is their thwarted need to communicate (the blackboard reveals a sappy love letter to someone named Sharon), and fulfill their desires by inscribing sappy messages saying I MISS U/I <3 U/ME TOO on the backs of each other’s jackets with chalk. (Admittedly, this is a creative move.)

I think I’m also bothered by the fact that this angst just doesn’t add up. Your dancers just don’t look oppressed by the tech world; they are not of a generation that actually pines for the days of handwritten letters and paper greeting cards. The way it looks, they’re executing vigorously beautiful dance forms not because they’re suffering, but because it’s their NATURE. Once again, dance to celebrate, not to mourn imaginary diseases.

scene 3: Beyond Sight, Within Sense
Dharma from Republic Polytechnic
Choreographer: Fathurrahman Said

Now we’re cooking with gas! Who says Singapore doesn’t have tradition to balance with the contemporary, ‘cos we’ve got your tradition right here: Dharma is RP’s Tarian group, and it draws on Malay dance tradition to create distinctly contemporary work, full of the turmoil and angst of modern living. (Hesitate to use the words “urban” or “21st century” or “late capitalist” for reasons I’ll explain later.)

And you can see the difference a tradition makes: as the dancers urgently writhe and jerk and groove, there is a standard vocabulary to their chaos, giving the work unity and elegance. Moreover, the costume – sarongs and tunics – combines with the movements to give the impression of rural life gone haywire. Why? Transmigration/urbanisation/heroin? We don’t know. But there’s a continuity here, an identification with a timeless setting throughout the lands of Nusantara, that makes the unease so poignant.

Mr Fathurrahman, you da man. I haven’t even got to the main visual leitmotif of the piece: conical farming hats made of straw, which these manic villagers keep at their sides, until the pas de deux of the boy and the girl trying to reach out to each other for contact, him pleading, her rejecting, then suddenly discovering the hats as masks: two conical hatface monsters, poignant as noh masks, dissolution of human individuality as the other villagers advance similarly masked, and the faceless body needs must be expressive through arms and torso and feet. These sinister hats which suck their faces in, which seem to hurt to remove like a vacuum cup, and which remain nonetheless their only ticket for interaction.

I can’t define what it means, but you must realise this is one of the keys to dance: if you could say it, why would you go to the trouble of dancing it?

scene 4: Conversations Too
NUS Dance Ensemble
Choreographer: Zaini Mohammad Tahir
Music and Video: Rafi Dean

This one may be my favourite – I honestly don’t know. Because if “Beyond Sight” had rasa Nusantara, this little number is Singaporean to the hilt.

The company appears on stage, similarly, in sarongs – but they’re all the colours of the rainbow, shimmering and solid, paired with uniform black T-shirts. Rather than bucolic, the dancers look regimental in their formation: a Southeast Asia that’s been denatured by the forces of mass production.

Their gestures quote various Asian dance traditions: a twist of the hand recalls Malay dance; a stance of the legs recalls bharatanantyam. And yet they’re trapped – they boogie within set individual grids: hybridised but paralysed. Or not quite paralysed, because as the performance continues we witness the stiffness loosening, the dancers moving from group formations into solos, running shirtless across the stage (and running back backwards), moving towards a culture that gives them both functionality and (ever so eventually) freedom.

And all through, the splendorous multimedia: screens of Roman/Hangul/Chinese/katakana/Devanagari/Thai/Arabic letters/syllabics/ideograms/abjads, shuttling through endless permutations of nonsense. Voices babbling in idiolects and creoles. Life-size videos of the performers in the self-same costumes, multiplying a chorus line into a mass-dancing platoon, or else focusing on single dancers who end up doing pas de deux with themselves; multiple soloists stepping forward before fading into the darkness, and then next movement, again.

This is our culture: bastardised, schizophrenic, a little repressed, technologically mediated to the point of perplexity. Yet not unbeautiful. Yet problematic. Yet worthy of pride.

Thank you, Mr Zaini. And I’m not just saying this ‘cos I was in your Creative Arts Programme workshop back in 1998, when you presented your hopscotch piece. (Remember? I was the one who’d seen you in Singapore’s first-ever production of “Cats”.)

scene 5: All These Private Things
Choreographer: Lee Mun Wai

Oh. Oh. And a great way to close the evening: a quartet of students drawn from different institutions, directed by a young choreographer from THE Dance Company – Elle Low and Wiing Liu Peiying from RP, Joshua Yao from SMU, Muhammad Hirzi from ITE East.

The multimedia screen is raised, allowing us the see the bare back wall of the proscenium stage and its ambient architecture. A girl lies on the floor in a white dress, barefoot. A boy in blue shirt, boxers and short slowly descends via the spiral staircase.

There are two doors in the stage wall, and thus the dance centres on a game of exits: the two men (both dressed alike) and the two women (also dressed alike) swinging and bandying each other across the stage, only to retreat behind the doors on occasion. The two couples are reflections of each other: one man becomes the other.

Again with the THE Dance Company style: as in “O Sounds”, the girl is something collapsed, something the boy has to breathe life into again, convincing her to remember her strength for one last gavotte about the stage before closing.

Against the naked backdrop, it becomes a moving valediction for Victoria Theatre: she is the fifth player in the piece, this vanishing reservoir of culture, to whom Mr Lee is saying goodbye.

And that’s the end of the evening! Criticisms of the critic are welcome. Went on Thursday night, by the way, and I heard that Friday was way more fun, with audiences of fellow students coming out in strong support – a big rowdy auditorium, with woohoos and wo men yong yuan hui zhi chi nis ringing through the rafters.

That’s the way high culture oughta be. And if Platform Campus endures, hopefully that oughta be can turn into an is.

Good night!

Ng Yi-Sheng