Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Dance dance evolution: Bridging the gap between dance and science

SINGAPORE — The theme for this year’s edition of the annual NUS Arts Festival, which kicks off on March 10, is Brave New World. And if there’s one thing that the National University of Singapore (NUS) has in spades, it’s people who are willing to journey to that brave new world — in this case, through the medium of the arts.

Where quantum mechanics meets Indian dance: Sambhavna 2.0 by NUS Indian Dance in collaboration with the Centre for Quantum Technologies. Photo: Kinetic Expressions Photography

Where quantum mechanics meets Indian dance: Sambhavna 2.0 by NUS Indian Dance in collaboration with the Centre for Quantum Technologies. Photo: Kinetic Expressions Photography

SINGAPORE — The theme for this year’s edition of the annual NUS Arts Festival, which kicks off on March 10, is Brave New World. And if there’s one thing that the National University of Singapore (NUS) has in spades, it’s people who are willing to journey to that brave new world — in this case, through the medium of the arts.

What’s interesting about the festival is the unique collaborations, whether it is music, visual arts or a stage performance.

“This is a place where two things that are so disparate can meet (and be) unpacked to a point that it’ll be more accessible to a wider audience,” said Thomas Harper, Manager (Marketing Communications) at the NUS Centre For the Arts.

And two dance programmes, Remember When and Sambhavna 2.0, showcase this unique, if odd, coupling.

HERITAGE AND GEOGRAPHY THROUGH DANCE

For NUS Dance Ensemble’s artistic director and resident choreographer Zaini Tahir, dance is more than just a movement of the body. It’s also about geography — the place we live in, its history, and how that shapes our future.

And that’s what he has in mind for Remember When, which will be performed on March 17.

“Things like the landscapes change so fast in Singapore and it raises questions like, ‘what does that do to me as a person and as a Singaporean’?” said Zaini. “It’s something I’ve thought of for quite some time (and) I thought it was interesting (to use) the concepts of geography to add a bit more depth (to dance).”

Helping Zaini in this project is Kamalini Ramdas, a lecturer at the Department of Geography in NUS. For her, the idea of meshing geography and dance was an attractive one.

“The contemporary understanding of geography has moved away from the idea that space is something very static,” she said. “(But) it includes movement and fluidity. For many geographers, performance is quite an integral and interesting aspect of how space evolves or develops ... which is what attracted me to this collaboration.”

A lot of the pre-production work began last year, even before a step had been choreographed, with Zaini doing research with geography team — going to museums, visiting the archives — to “get an understanding of it all”.

“The biggest question we’d like to pose with this show is: With the quick development of Singapore, are we losing anything — any sense of soul — and at the end of the day, is it worth it?” said Zaini.

However excited the pair were about this collaboration though, they were a couple of hurdles to surmount.

“The biggest challenge for me as trying to imagine the ‘movement’ side of things,” Kamalini said. “You know, people are going to perform these ideas. How are they going to do it (such that) people who watch the show should feel transported to another place.”

Another challenge, Zaini said, was figuring out how to infuse the emotion one feels when one encounters a physical space into a dance. “When you see an old building — maybe your old playground — you are laden with an emotion that you feel, but how do you translate that into motion?”

Then, there was the challenge of trying to get the dancers — “most of whom are quite young,” and had never seen Singapore’s vast geographic transformation — to imbue such ideas into their movements.

“The time period featured in the dance was 1975 to 1995, because (that had) the most change in Singapore’s landscape,” he said. “It was a challenge to get the dancers to understand this change, and I had to make them to speak to their parents or elders to get an idea of what it was like back then.”

But the dance will also incorporate “a lot of music and oral interviews with people as soundscapes” to form an aural backdrop; as well as a multi-media element, to add to the visual experience.

“Often, when it comes to heritage, history and change, we read about that in books,” said Kamalini. “When you attend this performance, it transports us away from text into something more experiential.

“While they’re talking about the past ... Each person takes something different (from it). To see changing landscpaes being performed, to immerse ourselves in the emotion, that in itself is creating something new,” she added.

Still, Zaini said, Remember When is, at its core, a dance show. “Behind the cheem concepts, it’s essentially a dance,” he said. “The choreography is ... what you would expect to see from a dance show today; but the subject matter is about the past and where we see ourselves in the future.”

DEVELOPING DANCE AND QUANTUM THOUGHT

The future is something that those at NUS’ Centre of Quantum Technologies (CQT) know quite a lot about. And they’re helping the NUS Indian Dance group shed some light on that with performance called Sambhvana 2.0, on March 24 and 25.

It’s a sequel to last year’s Sambhavna, the experiment to capture the complexity of quantum physics through traditional Indian dance, which was created by Cultural Medallion recipient Santha Bhaskar.

“Each festival, if (a show) has good artistic and academic merit ... we intentionally evolve it into the next festival,” said Harper.

But while that previous project was a 15-minute showcase, this year’s work is a full-length piece that “weaves the delicate movements of classical Indian Bharatanatyam, fundamental concepts of quantum physics and the richness of language in spoken text”.

Roland Marrero, a PhD student from Venuzuela who is studying at CQT and helping out with the production, explained how the show was conceived. “We had monthly meetings with Mrs Bhaskar and talked about what was weird or exotic about the research we do in quantum mechanics,” he said. “She chose quantum entanglements and developed it into a dance.”

This year, he said, the dance looks “beyond quantum entanglements to the world of quantum physics” and will also feature narrative, with poetry and spoken word elements, courtesy of Singapore-based interdisciplinary artist Kiran Kumar.

“This is a very complex topic explained in a very esoteric way, but Roland and Mrs Bhaskar took the complex ideas — in both the science and the dance — and made them more accessible to the audience,” said Harper.

“It’s a very weird combination,” conceded Marrero, “but somehow it found its synchronicity.

“How can you explain something like quantum mechanics without maths and with something visual? That’s exactly the point we’re trying to address. This is a visual representation of the phenomena we see in quantum mechanics.”

But don’t worry, this is not a science lecture, said Jenny Hogan, Associate Director, Outreach and Media Relations at CQT.

“There’s no certificate of participation at the end of this show, sorry,” she quipped. “But if you come out of the show being curious about quantum entanglement, or want to learn more about it — that’s what this show is about, creating that spark of curiousity.”

Hogan said that’s why there is interest in arts and science collaborations. “Because if you say to people, we want to teach you quantum physics, they’re going to say, it’s too hard or too boring. Working with the arts is a way to create that sense of wonder that exists in science — in a different format.”

“It’s such an unusual production that we feel there’s quite a scope for people to draw their own inspiration from it,” added Harper.

“I think people get inspired about the future. We want to bring a glimpse of what the future will look like. You could say it’s encoded in this nice dance,” said Marrero.

“Yes, the future is quantum and the future is nice.”

The NUS Arts Festival runs from March 10 to 25. For more information, visit http://www.nus.edu.sg/cfa/NAF_2017/index.html.

 

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.