SINGAPORE — The monkey dance dude is back!

One of the dancers in Khmeropedies III, the guy struggling with the monkey mask in that show’s compelling final scene, is back in the first of Japanese choreographer/dancer Hiroaki Umeda’s two pieces.

Cambodian dancer Nget Rady, together with Cheng Yu-jung (Taipei) and Hema Sundari Vellaluru (India), perform in Temporal Pattern. The idea here, it seems, is getting three dancers of different backgrounds and styles, and from there find some commonalities even as they’re each doing their own thing.

At the start, it’s pretty interesting. Umeda, who crafts everything, gives us brusts of electronic static and white noise as the trio stop and start. It’s all clinical, industrial and… cool. It continues to be cool and interesting when the lines come in, a never ending series of running lines in different patterns projected all over the stage and on the dancers’ bodies. Overwhelmed by the light show, the dancers are eventually reduced to a series of lines themselves. In a sense, it kind of works if you’re spotting patterns and seeing how the three disparate approaches to movement converge and diverge. And the lines are just so... hypnotic.

But at some point, I was asking myself if I saw any point to this exercise — what would be the purpose of these three bodies (and everything they embody) coming together only to be all completely subsumed under this surface of lines (no matter how gorgeous) and, consequently, regurgitated into something completely (and flatly) “contemporary”?

And yet, Holistic Strata, which is essentially like Temporal Pattern, works perfectly.

Here, Umeda himself takes to the stage, a mano-a-mano moment with light (erm, mano-a-lighto?). Perhaps because it’s a solo piece, the elements are more defined, the tensions acutely heightened.

If the lines in Temporal Pattern were mesmerising, this was on another level altogether. It was The Matrix to the former’s Tron. Here was snow, a wash of light particles, a constellation of stars, enveloping Umeda, who, at the start, does nothing. The most he does is to stoop, butoh-like.

The light-and-sound show is on and Umeda is rooted at the spot as if helpless at the sensorial onslaught, his partner(s) in this dance being a tad too pushy.

But at the same time, this is a rare perspective for me (especially in a dance festival). Where, as the visuals swoop and swerve and rush past, giving one the sensation of hurtling through space, it’s everything else moving *but* the dancer. More than virtuosity it’s about the body’s relation to external forces. (Although yes, of course, he later lets loose and breakdances. But never moving far from his spot.)

Locked in an embrace with light, when they sync, it is with impeccable and uncanny precision, an acceptable co-existence, even if one side seems to have the upper hand.

There’s a point where Umeda asserts himself, going full-on with none of the Matrix effects, the body momentarily free. But then technology comes rampaging back in to booming prog-industrial sounds, at times tsunami-like (I recently went to Tokyo and the earthquake is very much a recurring theme in a lot of artists’ works and I wonder if that’s also the case with Umeda’s).

The flipside of this image is that you can imagine the dancer as one of those big-ass shinobis in Naruto who can control nature with their chakras. Or, more aptly, Mickey Mouse in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice who tries to control things that are beyond his control and it all goes haywire.

You see, for all the visual spectacle, there’s a very brief moment where the sound and light cuts out and Umeda’s looking at you, panting and sweating, before it starts all over again. You can’t help but thing there’s something violent about all this, that, contrary to the whole idea of being one with the light, he’s being battered by it.

Temporal Pattern / Holistic Strata runs until Oct 19, 3pm and 8pm, Esplanade Theatre Studio. Tickets from Sistic. http://www.dansfestival.com/2013/