Re:Dance Theatre strolls down the Corridor

SINGAPORE — I wonder where choreographer Dapheny Chen lives. In comparison to my rather sedate neighborhood, her area seems very happening.

Or at least the world of HDB blocks in Seeing Through The Corridor.

The first of two shows from Re:Dance Theatre this month (with this year’s Co:Lab showcase in a couple of weeks’ time), it’s a follow up to an earlier HDB-related work A Box Full Of. This.

In Corridor, the quotidian dynamics of neighbourly relations are explored — Chen essentially creates a dance vocabulary from a whole bunch of different actions that are not uncommon in public housing estates. And this particular construct of a block — delineated by set designer Gene Tan’s cool neon light outlines of a corridor setting that’s regularly configured by the performers — has got some pretty friendly folks. You’ve got lots of thumbs up, hand waving and smiles going around, and snippets of banter also find their way into the piece. But there are also other gestures that may seem somewhat banal (the dancers enact waiting, one leans against the railing) but also amusingly OTT (animated gesticulations as if challenging a neighbour to a fight). (Technically speaking, I guess no one actually plays mahjong or sings karaoke outside of their flats but I can also imagine these aspects easily incorporated into Corridor.)

That the entire piece begins with the metronomic-cool electronic blips, to which the dancers synch their head thrusts, arm flicks and jerks, seems to presuppose a certain detachment, which I actually find quite compelling. Chen embraces even the most inconsequential thing like a playful but keen-eyed social observer, and the very ordinariness of the gestures she uses is actually what makes them special. Against the occasional ambient noises of keys and friendly neighbourhood banter, a very human expression is foregrounded. (Oops, wrong group.)

Corridor, however, sags somewhere in the middle, when the piece temporarily sets aside the ordinary-made-unique and goes for a more conventional (and at certain points, all-too-mannered) dance idiom.

It does recover its bearings near the end — by looking to recorded testimonies of unlikely friendships forged. This comes at the expense of the detachedness of the earlier parts and the piece becomes more sentimental. Which is still nice, hearing the story of someone’s growing connection with an elderly woman at the other end of the corridor or a girl’s certain “friend” that she feeds. (Yes, an HDB experience isn’t quite complete without a void deck cat reference straying in.)

As a work about HDB living, that focuses on a specific site that equally symbolises the ideas of transience and interconnectedness, the title itself is rather loaded. Does it really mean seeing *across* the corridor? Seeing *from* or *out into* the corridor? Perhaps it encapsulates all of these perspectives.

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Seeing Through The Corridor runs until tomorrow at the Gallery Theatre, National Museum of Singapore. Tickets at S$28 from http://sttcolab.peatix.com. And while we’re at it, Co:Lab 2015 is on June 27, 8pm and 3pm, at Goodman Arts Centre Black Box.