Associate Artist Showcase: DUET By Law Soo Leng & Richard Philip
DUET
By Law Soo Leng & Richard Philip
Thursday 19 August, Friday 20 August & Saturday 21 August, 8pm (55 minutes)
The Substation Theatre
Admission: $15 (concession price for students and senior citizens) and $20
For all ticketing enquiries, please call 6337 7535(Chris) Presented by The Substation.
Click here to read Kenneth Kwok’s critical essay on Duet
Duet is an original and fearless dance performance that weaves together multi-dimensional movement with human drama and connection.
Featuring choreographer and dancer, Law Soo Leng, and musician, writer and theatre director Richard Philip, Duet is a stirring dance performance layered with live music, vocal text and visual projection.
(To jump to the preview article written by Kenneth Kwok, please click here)
Duet explores through stage images, words and positions of perception what kind of existence may arise if as Erwin Schrodinger said, there exists no barrier between the subject and the object. “The world,” the physicist said, “is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.”
Driven by dynamic ideas and music, including a live performance of finger-style guitar music, Duet will be an exhilarating, yet delicate dance experience.
MASTER-CLASSES FOR DUET
Dates: Saturday 21 August
We are sorry to inform the class is cancelled on 21 August
Come and experience the process that created the original and stirring dance movements featured in Duet.
In this three hour workshop, participants will be brought through the improvisational methods used to create the multi-dimensional and unique dance movements featured in the performance. Participants will also experience and execute these dynamic dance phrases, and gain a first-hand understanding of the inner workings of the creators and performers of this dance piece.
Bio:
Richard Philip
Director, Actor, Writer and Musician
Richard Philip is a medical journalist, theater director, playwright and musician. In 2008, he was appointed as an Associate Artist of The Substation.
Richard has acted in plays staged by local theatre companies. He also developed his interest in music and subsequently launched his solo album Splendid Love at The Arts House in 2004. One of his songs was selected to be on a compilation album released in Los Angeles, California, USA in 2007. Richard was also invited to perform his music in the 2007 Mosaic Music Festival as part of the singer/songwriter series.
Richard uses his understanding of dramatic structure and theatrical forms, grasp of music composition, ability to write dialogue, intuitive sense of stage dynamics and adept usage of improvisation to create a kaleidoscope of dramatic impressions which focuses upon the various aspects of human experience.
Law Soo Leng
Choreographer and Contemporary Dancer
A dance graduate from LASALLE – College of the Arts, Law Soo Leng has choreographed and performed in productions by local contemporary dance companies. She has also choreographed and performed in Salt Lake City, USA. In 2008, she was appointed as an Associate Artist of The Substation.
Soo Leng uses the relationship between the voice and the moving body to create performances that present the absurdities of life in the form of allegory. Soo Leng seeks to challenge commonly held assumptions about the nature and value of performance itself.
Soo Leng has collaborated with Richard Philip to produce movement theatre pieces such as Hubber (2006) which is a social commentary on the shifts of power and status in Victorian society. They also staged Pray (2008) and Poverty (2009), both movement theatre pieces about child prostitution and a multi-disciplinary play called Night (2009). They intend to develop this collaboration further by producing new works that will bring to the stage, poetic forms describing the human situation.
A preview of DUET written by Kenneth Kwok from Flying Inkpot Theatre and Dance
We Two Are One
By Kenneth Kwok
Contemporary dance.
Particle physics.
The two concepts do not immediately seem to go together but what scientists call the Observer Effect and the movement of electrons around a nucleus were actually sources of inspiration for Duet, the latest multi-disciplinary work by choreographer-dancer Law Soo Leng and musician-playwright-director Richard Philip.
A conversation with a friend about particle physics prompted them to explore the relationship between the audience and the performer: How does each influence the other in the context of performance?
With this notion in mind, the husband-and-wife team devised the show’s unconventional set design and format: The audience will be seated in a ring onstage with dancers performing around them and Philip stepping into the centre of the circle at intervals to perform self-penned songs.
This configuration has implications for both the performers as well as the audience members. For example, audience members may want to shift their positions at different points of the show depending on their line of sight and they will actually be able to do so because they will be seated on lightweight stools which can be moved around. “Also, this may give the audience incentive to buy tickets for all three performances because they will see the show a little differently each night,” says Philip.
The artists hope that the unique set up and Philip’s guitar-playing and vocals – performed in the midst of the audience – will help create an immersive “lounge-y” experience that feels casual and welcoming. This is important because one segment of Duet involves audience members responding to the performance with their own spontaneous movements to the music.
Those without any dance experience should not worry though. It is all optional, and, in any case, the idea is to simply respond organically to what is heard. Philip himself, a non-dancer, will be leading the way, and though all the six dancers in the accompanying dance ensemble pieces are trained performers, Philip and Law hope audience members will be less hesitant to participate as classical, formal dance movements are the last thing on Law’s mind when she is choreographing.
“In dance school, our bodies are like instruments or machines, made to move in specific ways according to dance traditions. Contemporary dance, however, is a rebellion against these structures. The emphasis here is on originality,” says Law.
“Audiences hear the word dance and they think of ballet or hip-hop or maybe even, pole-dancing! I want to really open up the definition of dance and play around with how it can mean so many things. Dance can be political, it can be a religious ritual, it can be an economic commodity, but for me, it ultimately comes down to beauty, expression and a sense of community and I’ve tried to construct a new vocabulary that breaks with traditional formulae to embody these elements.”
Indeed, the movements Law employs often catch one off-guard. On occasion, it seems like the dancers have too many limbs, other times, too few. Often, their postures seem awkward yet strangely natural and free at the same time.
Law draws inspiration from the works of iconoclasts like Bill T. Jones, Ohad Naharin and Pina Bausch. She wants to create new ways for her dancers to connect with the audience, even in the use of their own bodies to do so. For example, for warm-ups, the dancers are asked to imagine their postures and movements if their faces were at the back of their head or if the centre of their body were shifted to the right, the left, up or down. The dancers are encouraged to look away from mirrors during these exercises so that they will not feel self-conscious as they fold their bodies into bizarre shapes.
Just as the dancers are constantly encouraged to push themselves beyond the point of comfort, to really break barriers, Law demands the same of herself. That is why the choreography – indeed, the structure of Duet as a whole – has been allowed to evolve since work began in March this year. Law understands that she herself, as the choreographer, has to be constantly searching, constantly trying to discover new ways of perceiving and “re-perceiving” the human body. To this end, elements that have emerged spontaneously from warm-ups, rehearsals and even conversations with the dancers have been incorporated into the final version of the show.
Law and Philip are curious to see whether this organic and playful dance vocabulary will help audience members to feel more at ease during the audience participation segment. They have also chosen to score Duet with contemporary songs by Radiohead and Pink Martini which they hope will sound reassuringly familiar to the audience despite their otherworldliness as the music of both these acts have been used in soundtracks and across various media.
Indeed, this tension that exists between spaces is a central theme of Duet. The show reaches across the divide between audience and performer but also between the traditional and the contemporary, the known and the unknown, the strong and the weak. Some relationships are woven closer together; others, Law and Philip tear further apart, whether in Law’s choreography or in Philip’s stripped down, Dylan-esque protest songs (Slave Song and Don’t Leave Me Stranded).
Law talks about Samuel Beckett’s How It Is, which presents the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through mud while dragging a sack of canned food, in the form of a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs: “It made me think about isolation, not just specifically in terms of loneliness but more generally, about connections, relationships and whatever we consider as ‘other’ to our own selves.”
The exploration of such duality and contrast is perhaps unsurprising given that the two artists come from different art disciplines.
The pair first met through mutual friends in 2004 and, after working on small projects with other artists, eventually started co-creating their own full-length works. The first was Pray in 2008, followed by Poverty and Night. Earlier works tended to focus on social justice issues. Pray, for example, was a call to action with regard to the problem of child prostitution while Poverty pushed discussion about this issue further by exploring its root causes of poverty and wealth distribution.
Night was a turning point for the artists as the starting point was not a social cause but rather, the artistic concept, in this case, the story of five people who discover that the time they have left to live can be counted in a matter of heartbeats.
In addition, Night, written and directed by Philip, is significant because it was a conventional theatre piece while the pair’s first two works had been more dance focused. Duet sees Philip and Law returning to movement and music as their primary mode of expression but the duo suggests that, moving forward, they are likely to alternate the emphasis in their work between these two modes of dance and theatre.
It is a credit to both artists though that they are always open to expanding the limits of their craft, with Law trying acting for the first time in Night and Philip doing some dancing in Duet, even if it is primarily for laughs. Philip has also become more involved in Law’s dance choreography, giving suggestions and ideas to bring out the performativity of the movements. The pair feels that this is helpful not only because of Philip’s directorial experience but because his lack of formal dance education means he is free of the baggage that trained dancers are sometimes saddled with.
Of particular interest in Duet, though, will likely be the collaboration that brings the musician and the dancer together in a single performance that leads us into the close of the show.
For this piece, Law will do a solo dance to original music performed by Philip. “The evolution of the piece has been very playful, very fluid. I would play some music and she would create some gestures and poses as a response; she would explore some movement ideas and ask me for music that will support that particular form of physicality,” says Philip.
Kenneth has been writing about theatre for online arts journal The Flying Inkpot Theatre and Dance since 1999 and is currently its editor. He has been involved with various community drama projects over the years with The Singapore Drama Educators Association, The Necessary Stage, The Substation, etc.
Synopsis change for Duet on website
|
|
|
|
|
| Inbox |
| X |
|
|
|
|
|
|  Reply
|
Be The First To Comment