FUSE#2

SCOPE#3
about ‘Unison’
by Ming Poon
Unison
● A dance term commonly used to describe a group of people
dancing together with the same movements and moving at the
exact same time.
● A choreographic device that organizes human bodies to move in
synchrony.
The research looked at the body politics of the individuals within a unison.
These questions form the basis of the research.
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What do we have to do in order to be in unison?
Is dancing in unison a force of unity, or is it a form of
conformity?
Are we empowered by being in unison or merely hiding
behind it, abdicating our responsibility?
When unison turns into forced homogeneity, how do we
create space for individual voices and alternative existence?
Footage of the Tank Man at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
For this research, I worked with 16 dance students from NAFA.
The movements used in the unison were based on the footage of
the Tank Man at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Other than my
interest in its choreographic composition, I chose the Tank Man
because for me, his actions embodied the quintessential conflict
between the individual body and the collective body, expressed
through the refusal of an individual to stay within the collective and
the disruption he caused to the hegemonic power. The idea was
to use the Tank Man as a starting point for us to look at the political
potential contained within the individual body. In addition to that,
in executing the movements in unison, the students were also
confronted with the body politics involved in the choreographic
device of unison and the role they play in their participation of it. In
a society like Singapore, where social unity, cohesion and order
are prioritized over other social values and are meticulously
engineered and maintained, I wanted to find out the students’
relationship to these values and where were their personal voices.
I employed unison as a base from which to start a discourse about
the wider socio-political context that the students lived in.
As the research progressed, it became clear to me what the students’ relationship
to being in unison was, whether as a choreographic device or a social apparatus.
So I decided to shape the end performance in such a way that it portrayed the
students’s state of mind and their predicament. Through the experience of these
young people, I hope the performance would capture a glimpse of the zeitgeist of
Singapore in 2018.
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