FUSE#2

For ELEMENT #2, Dance Nucleus brought together 4
Malay (or Malay-identified) dance artists from Singapore,
Peninsula Malaysia and Sumatra. Ayu Permata Sari
(Lampung/Yogyakarta), Mohd Fauzi bin Amirudin
(Kuala Lumpur), Norhaizad Adam (Singapore) and
Soultari Amin Farid (Singapore) came together to
formulate critical frameworks for their dance practices,
which respond to their respective political, cultural,
historical and/or socio-economic contexts.
Element# 2
BAHASA KOREOGRAFI
The artists share common roots in Malay Dance, even if they each have
different relationships with the form. Their ongoing negotiations with Malay
Dance potentially deal with critical questions apropos the dichotomy of
tradition and contemporaneity, which remains a pertinent question in
Singapore and Southeast Asia. In this residency, the four artists engaged
each other in discursive exchange and proposed their choreographic
projects as critical case studies for contemporary practices in relation to
Malay Dance. Coached by mentor, curator and dance scholar Helly
Minarti, this residency as a whole addressed tensions amongst notions of
‘Malayness’ and articulated plausible strategies to navigate the inherent
politics within Malay Dance.
In conjunction with the group mentoring, Helly Minarti facilitated a
practical workshop by dancer/choreographer Benny Krishnawardi.
Benny was trained in pencak-silat first before engaging with dance. More
crucially, this workshop introduces the idea of a ‘bodily archive’, in which
the dancer an inscription of history, and their dance an act of recall or
reactivation of cultural memory and processes. In this workshop, Benny
drew from his experience of being instrumental in co-shaping the
pioneering choreographic practice of the late Gusmiati Suid (1942-2001),
a Minangkabau-born choreographer who was presented internationally in
the mid-1990s, including in important forums such as Pina Bausch’s
festival. (Incidentally, Gusmiati’s son, Boi Sakti who is also a
choreographer, worked actively in Singapore at the turn of this century) By
reflecting on the development of Malay contemporary dance from the
recent past, Helly’s goal was less to valorise a historic canon than to
propose the body-as-living-archive as a springboard for reflection on
contemporary practices by our artists-in-residence in ELEMENT#2.
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