Contact 2015: A snapshot of Singapore’s dance scene in DiverCity

SINGAPORE — For dance enthusiasts keen on seeing a snapshot of the local scene, this year’s DiverCity showcase at the ongoing M1 Contact Contemporary Dance Festival provided the platform to do so: 10 performances by 10 groups and independent artists equally divided over two nights last week. At the same time, the two shows, comprising mainly of excerpts and restagings, were also an opportunity for the scene’s players themselves to take stock and see what everyone has been doing.

While this reviewer missed the first show (which featured the likes of Chowk, Shahrin Johry from Maya Dance Theatre, Soul Signature, Singapore Dance Theatre and fest organisers THE Dance Company), the second show, held last Friday, nonetheless offered a decent glimpse of the various sensibilities found in Singapore’s dance scene today.

Familiar tropes and tendencies were revealed in the night’s last two pieces: A sense of sentimentality and a certain middle-of-the-road-ness. Chiew Peishan’s Peeling Me, for instance, was a weaker reworking of a piece she had previously performed under a show by RAW Moves. While the original one was done as a group piece, here it’s performed as a solo, where Chiew brings onstage a pile of clothes and employs a video to present a confessional piece about her introverted personality. Without other performers, and done on LASALLE College Of The Arts’ bigger Singapore Airlines Theatre stage as opposed to its previous intimate black box venue, Peeling Me’s views on interpersonal relations didn’t exactly shine through and felt abrupt.

Re: Dance Theatre’s That day, you — the only new work in DiverCity — was also hampered by a distracting, rambling voice over narration on the creation of music for the first part, which ultimately also took away from its more interesting second half, where it focused on the metaphor of park benches and the human relationships that surround it. While it does offer some noteworthy moments, such as dancers seemingly in the act of having their arms around an invisible/imaginary person while seated on the bench, like Peeling Me, it doesn’t seem to progress beyond an overriding romanticism and sentimental mood.

It is in the first three pieces where one finds stronger conceptual rigour and, indeed, a kind of energy that seemed lacking in the final two works.

One could find parallels between Chiew’s Peeling Me and independent dancer Daniel K’s lecture performance of a segment of his Planet Romeo project, which was created after going on 40 dates in two months via an online dating site. Like in the former, the latter likewise tries to build a relationship with audiences by way of the performance. Unlike the former, though, Planet Romeo ingeniously plays with and layers this very relationship, manipulating how his dancing — including a segment of poledancing — is to be perceived. He instructs audiences to “feel” certain emotions triggered by a change of light and even offers an extra “log book” that chronicles his personal reactions to his dates.

Another independent artist, Jereh Leong, meanwhile, stubbornly negated this connection with the audience. In his duet with Phitthaya Phaefuang titled When the cold creeps in with a thousand cuts, he has his back to the viewer the entire time. A dark and disturbing piece, emphasised by the grating string music soundtrack, the two dancers mirrored each other’s movements or combined like some unnatural living unit while playing on awkwardness, imbalance and, perhaps, even disgust. In this extremely physical work, Leong pushed, carried, swung and flipped his partner to the brink of manhandling.

Finally, there’s Stephanie Lake’s White Noise as performed by Frontier Danceland, to this report’s mind, the most playful of Singapore’s dance companies. Relying less on emotion and more on the causal effects of interlocking bodies in motion, dance here was an engrossing visual puzzle, more about intricate complex constructions than feeling, as they moved as if passing to one another some invisible energy force or falling under hypnosis.

As a showcase night, it was undoubtedly far from perfect, marred with a couple of slips from some of the performers. That the line-up was released rather late also brings up the question of whether it was hastily assembled by the festival organisers and its co-presenters, the National Arts Council — hence the fact that it was mainly restagings and reworkings (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, of course, unless it’s also hastily thought through).

Nonetheless, we really should have more of these types of “get-togethers” — only by laying out onstage what is being done can the dance scene (both practitioners and audiences) have a bigger picture perspective of the state it’s in at the moment.

M1 Contact Contemporary Dance Festival runs until Dec 13, with the next show being THE Dance Company’s triple bill, from Dec 3 to 5, which features a restaging of Kuik Swee Boon’s Pellucid, and new collaborations with Jecko Siompo and Iratxe Ansa. For more info, visit http://the-contact.org/