Frontier Danceland reveals its quirky SIDES

SINGAPORE — The playful, charming idiosyncrasies of dance group Frontier Danceland is in full display at this year’s edition of its SIDES showcase. For one, the show begins before it even begins — as folks walk in or settle into their seats, there’s the “pre-show” ensemble piece, artistic director Low Mei Yoke’s dancers-and-chairs In Or Out, featuring scholars from its Pulse Programme. A nice way to have a bit of exposure time for the young ones — if anything, being continuously interrupted by “latecomers” as you spin around a chair is an exercise in character-building.

Once everyone’s settled, the (official) triple-bill night kicks off with a restaging of Christina Chan’s Between, expanded for six performers instead of the original’s three.

At the very end of the piece, they huddle close. They make as if sipping tea, scratching heads, and pondering what “it” all means. It could very well be a self-reflexive, preemptive act (“we’re one step ahead of you”) but it’s far from cocky. If anything, Between feels aloof and detached — movement seemingly emphasised as a kind of intellectual exercise. Chan mix-and-matches tempos and patterns, and you’ve got some really fascinating group dynamics going on. Occasionally, the team interlocks awkwardly, evoking some kind of chemical compound or strange hieroglyph. The atmospheric, space-droney sounds and the moody lighting, which opens up sections of the stage in a kind of episodic way, build up the sense of being in an enclosed laboratory witnessing an unfolding experiment. It does feel like a piece that’s evolving right before our eyes, performed by dancers feigning informality or even disinterest. Yes, there’s a hint of play but in a deadpan, even cold, way, which works for me.

The satirical Orientalist fantasy narrative The Rose And The Rhino then proceeded to liven up the room with its hilarious proposition about a king with an obsession with roses, and some reference to a three-horned rhino thrown into the mix. A complete collaboration between all six company artists, it sees Wayne Ong taking on the role of silly king who sits on an equally silly DIY throne. Frontier Danceland goes tribal, with catchy percussion-driven Brazilian tunes fuelling their quasi-ethnic-inspired choreography. I love this group’s sense of humour and you’ve got loads of such moments here: The juvenile play-acting of a traveler witnessing new sights — with Adrian Skjoldborg playing horse and Chan on his back; an earthquake that literally brings down a celebratory dance; the heckling that takes place (“Master, you are talking to yourself,” commented Chan early on, and later: “Master, why are you dancing like you’ve never danced before?”); and of Ong suddenly taking to the stage switching into `80s mode performing Maniac. One can never tire of WTH moments.

The closer, Order Of Things by Australian artists Gabrielle Nankivell and Luke Smiles, slightly echoes Between and, in fact, seems even more clinical. It’s a 30-minute piece — a fact you’re very much aware of as the countdown is projected on the screen, underscoring the performance’s finite nature — and of the three in SIDES 2015, it’s the most stylistically polished but also the most conceptually conventional. The performers form a living human graph, assembling and re-assembling themselves in a row in response to the questions typed and flashed on the backdrop, regarding everything from age to shoe size to languages known — it’s essentially demographic profiling. This is juxtaposed against a segment of “real life” — the metronomic head-nodding as the steady peg as they combine daily, regular movements into a choreographic statement.

The profiling action resumes but eventually unravels. Random words are typed out as “trivia”, which have no immediate connection to what the dancers are, by then, performing. Veering into surreal word association, here it echoes the off-kilter The Rose And The Rhino. But that’s not the only possible link — Order Of Things seemingly ends with a stance that emphasises spirituality as a unifying force for oneness — literally, it would seem, by having the performers in a line doing a series of Indian-influenced movements suggesting harmony and synchronicity. This time, though, there’s no earthquake for a punchline.

SIDES 2015 runs until tonight, May 16, 3pm and 8pm, at the Esplanade Theatre Studio. Tickets at S$20 (matinee) and S$25 (evening) from SISTIC.