presented by TheatreWorks, 3 – 5 April 2008
review by Ng Yi-Sheng
1.
First, there is the darkness. Then there is the body. A woman’s body, naked, opening up from a crouched huddle. Barely enough light to see. She moves tentatively, crossing the stage, circling herself. Moving.
Fragments of sentences across the tinted screen. I never dreamt. I am waiting. I try to forget. Then the pre-recorded voice of a man, speaking in Cantonese: It’s me. If I have an extra ticket, will you leave with me?
Next, a pool of light falls on a dress. The fabric is sharply angular, pleated. The woman approaches the dress. She puts it on. She repeats the sequence of motions, exploring the space.
Then the white outlines of a room appear on the dark screens behind her. The room transforms from a primitive sketch to a hyperreal phantasmagoria: an unending passageway of identical doors, a blue wallpapered room which slowly composes itself, each item of furniture built up from its metric components, suddenly losing their gravity, floating free around the performance space; then a landscape of rain.
She moves through the cycle once more. At times, she stands still to witness. Dreamt about her. Waiting for this dream. Forget what I can forget. If I have an extra ticket, will you leave with me?
A new image is projected on the screens behind her. It is video footage of the woman in a bedroom. There is a man with her, facing away from the camera, washing up in the adjoining toilet. He leaves the house.
On video, the woman dances through the rooms of the house, the same familiar dance we’ve seen her perform all night. The woman on stage, however, is motionless. Her image dances alone.
2.
I must be honest. I did not understand this piece when I watched it. I found the imagery opaque; the language of the accompanying programme loftily abstract and unrevealing: “dreams of the future and the past”, “bit by bit”, “byte by byte”, “seme by seme”.
I’m in thorough agreement with Life! reviewer Tara Tan when she notes, “it is unclear what message it is trying to sell.”1 But I’m shocked by her dismissive summation of the work as “a stellar example of art for arts [sic] sake; stunning but with little substance”.
In fact, Dance Dance Dance is one of director Choy Ka Fai’s most conceptually solid works to date, bound together with measured structure, minimalist restraint and personal sadness – quite unlike the brutual carnivalesque of his early works such as Design For Death. There were many in the audience who intuited this poetic structure, who loved the piece for its craft and soul. And then there were people like me and Tara, who were dumbfounded.
A big problem was one of communication: Dance Dance Dance was, in fact, not a dance at all: it did not stretch itself in research of the potential of the human body, limiting rather than expanding the talents of performer Joavien Ng. Rather, it was a work of drama, following a basic narrative with a carefully shaped beginning and end (indeed, a dramaturg was involved) with a very human plot driving the entire piece. Yet the highly stylised nature of the work - the extreme dissociation of performer, text and voice; the stark contrast between moments of bare minimalism and colourful spectacle — makes it difficult to judge the work by conventional standards of theatre.
For me, this performance resembles conceptual art, in that it only comes together when I’ve grasped its sources, its motivations and its broader context. It’s a show that I’m only able to enjoy after the fact. And yes, I believe that’s problematic.
3.
Dance Dance Dance is, unsurprisingly, based on Haruki Murakami’s novel of the same name. The book tells the story of a man who goes on a quest to locate a woman named Kiki with whom he had an intense affair four years earlier at a hotel. On his return to said hotel, he finds it changed, opulently renovated, with only the name and address still the same – yet linked to the worlds of the past and his subconscious through a mysterious dark passageway that randomly appears and disappears. The characters he meets thereafter are all somehow linked to Kiki, but all their clues eventually lead to dead ends. It’s a tale suffused with an air of dreamlike wandering, of existential impotence, and vast, diffuse regret.
Choy’s production is rooted in the same vein of sadness: the piece is structured around the gradual reconstruction of a memory, a lost event, suggestive of love, that ultimately materialises with the final video clip. The dance passes from the bare stage to the furnished apartment on screen, and we witness the pre-recorded past, more real than the present, more alive.
This sense of nostalgia is foreshadowed by the bits of broken text (also drawn from the book), by the soundbyte in Cantonese, drawn from In the Mood For Love by the perennially moody Wong Kar Wai. And there’s no doubt that the journey our protagonist undertakes is poignant in its imagery: she starts out vulnerable and naked, and while the additional accoutrements may be tools and signposts on her path to her destination, they also act as constantly renewable signs of displacement: she is not where she was ten minutes ago, and that in itself is disorienting.
And yet the cumulative effect isn’t emotional. With the trappings of technology and the signifiers of high conceptualism, everything comes across as so damn cerebral it’s frustrating. By the time you’ve realised you’re supposed to feel something, that something isn’t there anymore.
This, I think, is a great flaw in Choy’s work. He abstracts and abstracts. Consider his previous work, Drift Net: though inspired by a case of bloggers being arrested for sedition, it finished as a dance-and-multimedia fiesta with neither political rage nor specific human character. This is fine art, yes. But it lacks drama. If there was heart in the piece, somewhere along the way it turned into liquid crystal.
4.
I’d like, for a moment, to describe my individual experience of this piece, before I did all the background research. First, that pleasant sense of disorientation/wonder on arrival, being handed the origami-style programme, entering the performance space and seeing the jagged, toothlike seating arrangement made of stacked tiers.
Then the show itself: the intense dimness of the light as the performer began her movements, already obscured behind that screen, the bizarre focus on only one figure throughout so much of the show, my mind racing to interpret based on the scant information supplied.
What I came up with was: it’s about defining the self. The woman dances to describe herself, to assert her identity. When the situation changes, she must define herself once more; she must repeat the steps to locate herself in a shifting world.
Then the hyperreal projections began, apparitional spectaculars I’d later be able to identify as re-imaginings of scenes from Murakami’s novel. The performer now stood still, for a good long time; the world moved around and she didn’t. She’s lost, I thought. Then the video of her and her mysterious gentleman friend appeared. She’s lost, I thought, and so am I.
While I missed the emotional core of the piece, it turns out I wasn’t that wrong about the existentialist thrust of the project. The book Dance Dance Dance seems to derive its title solely from a piece of advice the mysterious Sheep Man advises the protagonist as they meet in the unearthly space of the pitch black corridor. “Dance,” he says. “Yougottadance. Aslongassthemusicplays. Yougotta dance. Don’teventhinkwhy. Starttothink, yourfeetstop. Yourfeetstop, wegetstuck. Wegetstuck, you’restuck … Yougottaloosenwhateveryoubolteddown. Yougottauseallyougot. Weknowyou’retired, tiredandscared. Happenstoeveryone, okay? Justdon’tletyourfeetstop.”2
My sense of puzzlement as I watched this might be a good thing, really: the mind is being forced to dance, working around the odd angles of the piece. Remember, there aren’t that many theatremakers now who’re really pushing to create strange, difficult works; experimentation often limited only to stylistics, preserving a narrative centre that’s digestible by everyone.
Yet the mind is lonely and demands discussion. The performance needed a talk-back session, badly; some avenue more formal than a post-show cocktail where both sides of the stage could share with each other their conflicting impressions, their creative processes, their frustrations. (Talk-backs have usually been part of the 72-13 performance process, and I can’t say why they were missing this time around.)
As a director, Choy is taking commendable risks and challenging his viewers. But if he wants an audience to grow with him, he’ll have to help them along: perhaps he’ll want to articulate his ideas more clearly, on paper if not on stage; perhaps he might also consider re-emphasising the emotional content of his work, all the better to draw his viewers into his universe. It is possible, I believe, to be sophisticated and complex, yet accessible by sheer dint of will.
Theatre — more than conceptual art — is about gathering people in a room, about community. Somehow, the performer must make contact. Otherwise, she dances alone.
notes
By Ng Yi-Sheng
in Reviews, Performing Arts