FUSE#2

SCOPE#3
There Is
Speficifisfety
- The Work As Scribed Text.
by Lee Mun Wai
In this written contribution to FUSE#2, I would like to use this
opportunity to (finally dare to make an attempt to) write about this
work. I would like to (finally dare to) transfer some of my thoughts
and feelings (a lot of them still very hazy) about There Is Speficifisfety
into words.
It is about encounter and what an encounter produces.
This is the first time that I have embarked on a creative journey
where it has been so hard for me to say in words what exactly it is
about. Of course I know it is about something. But for a long time I
had been hiding behind the convenient disguise of pretending that
this work has no about-ness to it. How can that be?
Perhaps I find it difficult to write about the work because its
about-ness is so different from the previous works I had done.
Previous works sought to describe or analyse certain world-views or
topics using the contemporary dance form. Thus, choreography,
movement and the bodies in space served to make these topics
visible to the audience.
With the Speficifisfety project however, the focus falls directly on the
act and the situation itself – the very encounter between Ren Xin
and I so to speak. It is the first time a project I am involved in ended
up being about itself and nothing else but its very self.
As the project began taking shape from 2016, Ren Xin and I soon found out that
with every meeting or rehearsal, we were trying to find ways to encounter each
other. Though we both share a great interest in each other’s practices and bodies
of work, it is clear that our approaches are very different.
Initially, this created some minor personal crises. I was not used
to this non-deterministic way of working, where each rehearsal
/ meeting began and ended with as many, if not even more,
options, directions and unanswered questions. My headspace
and my being were constantly splintering off in different
directions instead of streamlining themselves into a sense of
organised linearity. The questions that arose from our process
kept looping back to ourselves and our encounter. We were
questioning all our working habits and the personal practices
that each of us had grown used to.
Rehearsing not to determine or foreclose, but instead, to learn how to navigate and
negotiate.
Because of the way we were working, the very meaning of rehearsal – what was
being rehearsed – changed drastically. No more was I rehearsing in order to set in
stone a certain kind of spatial, temporal and bodily organisation that would be
replicated on stage for the audience. No more was I rehearsing in order to make
invisible a process wrought with surfeit and hiccups. Instead, rehearsals were
about honing a sensitivity towards our encounter. Rehearsals were about learning
how to tune in to the plethora of sensorial and tactile information arising from our
encounter; which ones to listen to, which ones to discard, which ones to ignore,
which ones to develop. Rehearsals were about learning how to negotiate our
partnership actively throughout the work. Rehearsals were less about attempting
to flatten unevenness and difference in favour of showing a smooth, uninterrupted,
culminated singularity, and more about training our bodies to readily face the
clashes and disruptions arising from the meeting of two very different bodies.
103 104