The opening show of the NUS Arts Festival in its 9th year, Overdrive, is 105 minutes of sheer aesthetic and technical accomplishment. Showcasing three performances by local and international artists from Japan, Israel and Taiwan, it is hard for the audience not to be astonished by the dancers’ capabilities of being stretched effortlessly within their physical limitations.
Emotional Strata (Akiko Kitamura)
Inspired by the Great East Japan earthquake, one of the worst natural disasters of this century, Emotional Strata resolves around the nuclear disaster brought round by human-made technology and the central theme at work is an exploration of the sensory experiences of a person in discovering the meaning of a relationship between the cycle of nature and the human body.
A thoughtful piece, Akiko Kitamura doesn’t fail to impress and Emotional Strata was appropriately selected to be the first dance for the evening. It was as if the dance managed to draw the audience’s attention from themselves to onstage instead, for the following pieces that ensued.
Private Dancer (Idan Cohen)
Performed by NUS dancers, Private Dancers aims to speak about the unspoken pressures and expectations people face in life. Beginning with an unpolished record of a song titled after the dance, sung against the backdrop of amateurish guitar playing, the dancers dance in pairs or groups across stage, all at once, but obviously at different skill levels, like an allegory to life as a playing field which is never level. Centre stage, a girl is shaped by her peers; her body molded by their hands, movements sculpted. Her expressions are forced, and her limbs are not her own while the others surround her and force their wills down into her dancing. As they leave her to be on her own later, satisfied at their progress of mentoring the ‘inexperienced’ dancer, she moves as they have taught her, and clearly the impact of their actions have carried on even with time.
Other dancers trip the light fantastic in their own spaces, but seemingly ever conscious. They do not express freely, restricted by the areas cordoned out to them. Yet they wish to impress. Evidently so, the music climaxes as a recording of live audience applause plays, and the dancers move even more eagerly and vigorously, in bid to outshine one another. The clapping turns into the barking of dogs and the dancers continue, and the audience understands what the choreographer means to say – that the recognition the dancers were fighting for doesn’t really mean anything. One almost feels sad for the dancers, because mirroring life, people do things to impress others, straining their back and exhausting themselves for things that do not count.
The group’s overall energy is amazing for a dance that lasts over twenty minutes. Even as the piece ends, the dancers twirl with this abandon that pours out free flow. They dance now, like experts, but soullessly and seriously like a troop from a marching band. Their struggles are played out and the music gradually stops. One by one they drop to the floor, writhing, still attempting to dance, till they cannot move anymore. There is this feeling one gets – the unbeatable spirit, and may the best dancer “stay alive”. As the accompaniment slows down and fades out, the bodies lie strewed over the stage. The cast look all butchered and bloody under the lighting and it is gruesome, like the aftermath of battle. After all, life is indeed a battlefield.
Two Men (Wu-Kang Chen and Wei-Chia Su)
Two Men by Horse choreographers Chen and Su has got to be the best performance of the night. A dance they developed to commemorate their own sixteen years of friendship, Two Men is thought provoking and entirely appealing despite the lack of symmetry between the two characters. In fact, it comes across as a story of their friendship in real life, with both men beginning the piece sitting side by side, then dancing step in step with the other. Their movements are flawless in perfect rhythmic timings and moves that are impossibly synced.
Moving on, each man has bouts of sleepwalking dancing and the other attempts to rouse him, to save him, like friends do for each other in times of need. There is so much variation just simply in the way the men walk that there is insufficient vocabulary to describe all the ranges of movement they perform. One scene captures Su as a rock and Chen sitting atop him, and the next, the other way round. Without so much as an audio cue the audience can catch, both bodies roll about each other with such familiarity that it must have taken eons of practice to capture such accuracy.
However, despite the shared intimacy, it is easily gleaned that the two men are silently competing and trying to out move the other. Yet after prolonged dancing-combat, there is no victor. Su matches Chen for agility; Chen matches Su for fluidity of movement and they go on, noiselessly, apart from the tumbling sounds in the play-fight. It is a joy to watch them, and their dancing is beautifully complemented by the wonderful experimental music from pianist Lee Shih Yang.
Lee makes music on a piano below the stage and there is little demarcation between mere sound and melody. The chromatic scales, bringing out tensions of rivalry; tinkling of notes on the keys mimicking footsteps, are literally music to one’s ears. One could say that the pianist took as much thunder as the dancers, as the audience brought the house down with their clapping at the end of the recital.
