FUSE#5

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Foreword
da:ns LAB 2020
da:ns LAB Report Foreword by Shawn Chua
da:ns LAB Keynote Address by Tang Fu Kuen
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ELEMENT#6 Viral Archives:
Study Notes
by Loo Zihan
ELEMENT#7 Report
by Chan Hsin Yee
Walking by Emma Fishwick
Post-Residency Reflections by Rebecca Wong
@whereismysapo by Ashley Ho
Choreographing Theory — Seven Fragments
On Kitsch by Sheryll Goh and Rachael Cheong
Projections, Paper Dolls, and Effigies by Jereh Leung
Finding Soultari’s Lenggang: Walking Otherwise
by Soultari Amin Farid
The Problematic Danseuse by Nirmala Seshadri
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Foreword

In our last edition of FUSE, we proposed for 2020 to be a time to
review our modus operandi and move towards alternatives based on
principles of sustainability, simplicity, mutual support and care. How
oddly prescient then, that COVID-19 struck so quickly following that
publication. If we were previously unaware of the precariousness of our
arts ecology and the vulnerability of an arts and cultural worker, there
is no excuse to be now.
With many events scheduled this year cancelled or postponed,
our team quickly shifted focus to redirect some resources as quick
responses to support the arts community. We launched a list of
initiatives that artists could engage in during the collective downtime.
This issue of FUSE features some critical reflections and notes from
our reading group, Jereh Leung and AWKWARD PARTY (Sheryll Goh
and Rachael Cheong) also share their motivations and processes behind
their projects as part of our Micro-Residency programme.
This year’s da:ns LAB became a space for artists to imagine and
propose new ways to consider and enact mutual support and care—
How to Dance When We Are All Ill. Shawn Chua’s introduction of the
LAB and a transcription of the keynote address by Tang Fu Kuen are
featured in this FUSE.
Notwithstanding the pandemic, there are things to celebrate too.
A number of our Associate Members have been able to present work,
some adapting their projects to adopt an online format: Bernice Lee and
Chong Gua Khee’s Tactility Studies: Pandemic Distances, Syimah Sabtu
and Sonia Kwek’s Where You Move Me Most in the Substation’s Septfest,
Amin and Nirmala’s double bill Failing the Dance in this year’s da:ns festival,
and our artists who presented at the festival’s Open Call —Dapheny
Chen, Syimah Sabtu, and Bernice Lee. Hwa Wei-An was in residency at
Rimbun Dahan, while Jereh Leung participated in the CRISOL Italy-Asia
Artistic Exchange and Network Programme that began in October 2020.
As 2020 draws to a close, Singapore is slowly easing restrictions
on social distancing and public gatherings, and artists are gradually
discovering new strategies for their projects and artistic practices. At
Dance Nucleus, we have just submitted our plans for 2021 and beyond
to the NAC. We look forward to rising to the challenges of the coming
few years, and to more tangibly meet the needs of the arts ecology.
Yours Sincerely,
Dance Nucleus
Daniel Kok
On Behalf of the Dance Nucleus Team
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Hero image for da:ns LAB 2020 Co-Immunity: How to dance when we are all ill.
Photo by TheiKevin

da:ns LAB
2020

da:ns LAB 2020
Produced by Dance Nucleus and presented by the Esplanade, da:ns
LAB is an annual workshop-seminar for artists and arts practitioners to
critically reflect on key issues surrounding their creative practice.
Co-Immunity: How to Dance When We Are All Ill was the 6th
edition of the lab, and took place from 9 –12 July 2020. Co-curated
by Daniel Kok and Shawn Chua, the lab was conducted online with 64
participants across Hong Kong, Manila, New Delhi, Singapore, Sydney,
and Taipei—the most ambitious and heavily attended lab yet.
With virology as a metaphorical framework for the lab, participants
were invited to play the role of cultural “doctors” to reflect
on what has been disordered amidst the global crises and health
emergencies. In this paradigm of illness, we review the precepts often
assumed of the dancing body, as one that is able-bodied, productive
and live. From there, participants explored how dance can operate
within the paradoxical framework of co-immunity; to develop infrastructures
of support and thicker relations of care, building resistance
and resilience across the different arts ecologies in the region.
A full report of the lab by Chan Sze Wei is available on The
Esplanade’s Offstage website.
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Screenshot of da:ns LAB participants doing head massages.
Provided by Chan Sze Wei

da:ns LAB
Report Foreword
Shawn Chua
This article was written by co-curator Shawn Chua, detailing the overall focus of this
year’s LAB and the contexts that surround it. It was part of an information pack that was
shared with the participants prior to the event.

da:ns LAB 2020
Co-immunity: How To Dance When We Are All Ill
“Now might be a good time to rethink what a revolution can look like.
Perhaps it doesn’t look like a march of angry, abled bodies in the streets.
Perhaps it looks something more like the world standing still because
all the bodies in it are exhausted—because care has to be prioritised
before it’s too late.”
—Johanna Hedva
The world is standing still amidst transnational choreographies of movement
control orders, curfews and lockdowns. Governments implement
stricter measures to enforce social distancing, as an immunological
response to curb the spread of the global pandemic. As events, performances
and festivals are cancelled or deferred to an uncertain future,
many arts and cultural workers are left suspended in its wake. In these
extraordinary circumstances where we are unable to gather, to move,
and even to touch, dancers are faced with an impossible set of conditions—how
to dance when we are all ill?
While COVID-19 is a global health emergency, it also manifested
the symptoms of much longer socio-economic, political and ecological
crises, exposing complex systems that have already been chronically
ill. It painfully revealed the debilitating conditions and vulnerabilities
of being a dancer within a precarious arts ecology. In the region, the
Hong Kong protests are roiled by deep socio-political unrest while the
Australian bushfires warn of larger climate catastrophe. 2020 is in a
state of emergency. But these crises have demonstrated that recovery
in this context should not be a nostalgic return to the normal, because
the existing conditions of the ‘normal’ was what precipitated the crisis.
To dance in such times, we must recuperate the paradigm of illness,
reorienting some of the precepts that are often assumed of the
dancing body, as one that is able-bodied, productive and live. What
choreographies become accessible with the ill-bodied dancer, and can
this embodiment offer different strategies for navigating the crisis?
What remains live when our bodies are screened, and augmented by the
prosthetics of new media technologies? Amidst a contagion—a term
that etymologically denotes “together touching”— can we reimagine the
parameters of dancing together across social distancing, where other
forms of assembly are realised?
The restless ensemble of exhausted bodies is a symptom of the
precarious labour conditions that plague many arts and cultural workers.
It is time for us to take a break from the frenetic rhythms of production,
to slow down, and to deprogramme. By relinquishing our obsession
with the relentless metrics of productive output, we can rehabilitate
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FUSE #5
our working processes by recalibrating the conditions, protocols and
procedures to more sustainable modes that prioritise our creative practices
and wellbeing.
Inhabiting illness calls for a praxis of care that extends beyond
immunology. Immunological systems are predicated on the exclusion
of a threatening other—a foreign body. Instead of reinscribing the
xenophobic logic of immunitary nationalism, we aim to foster interdependent
networks of solidarity across borders. To reconcile this
immunological metaphor with the contaminations of community, we
will explore how dance can operate within the paradoxical framework
of co-immunity, to develop infrastructures of support and thicker relations
of care, building resistance and resilience across the different arts
ecologies in the region. Through a different kind of embodiment, we
might even feel the possibilities of a movement even as we remain still.
Shawn Chua is a researcher and artist
based in Singapore, where he is engaged
with embodied archives, uncanny personhoods,
and the participatory frameworks
of play. He has presented his research
at the Asian Dramaturg's Network, The
Substation, and Performance Studies international
(PSi), and his works have been
presented under Singapore International
Festival of Arts, Esplanade Presents: The
Studios, Amorph! Performance Art Festival,
and Panoply Performance Laboratory.
Shawn is a recipient of the National Arts
Council Scholarship and he holds an MA
in Performance Studies from Tisch School
of the Arts at New York University. He has
served on the Performance Studies international
(PSi) Future Advisory Board, and
currently teaches at LASALLE College of
the Art. Shawn is also a founding member
of Bras Basah Open School of Theory and
Philosophy and is part of the group that
runs soft/WALL/studs.
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Photo of Jared Jonathan Luna with mask by Leeroy New.
Photo credit: Bunny Cadag

da:ns LAB
Keynote Address
Tang Fu Kuen
A few weeks before the LAB, participants were sent a recording of keynote speaker Tang
Fu Kuen’s address, which has been transcribed here by Chan Sze Wei. As he reflects on
the LAB’s theme, Fu Kuen offers a perspective that intersects between virology, biology,
and philosophy to consider the ambiguity of medical metaphors and the poor reputation
of viruses. Finally, he shares Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the “Umwelt”—an indivisible
entity of organism and environment, in which organisms do not occupy their environment
but create it.

da:ns LAB 2020
Hello, everyone. I’m Tang Fu Kuen and I’m speaking to you today from
Taipei. I welcome all of you participants of da:ns lab, “Co-immunity: How
shall we dance when we are all ill.”
What a great title and a very difficult title. I should share that
this has been a big challenge to me. I was thinking, what is the real
function of making this keynote speech? Is it to provoke? And I then
took a back seat and thought about many questions. And of course,
these questions could only develop into even more questions to which I
have no answer. And I begin to think if seeking answers is what we are
tasked to do in this lab. I hope not. Rather, I hope that it is reflection,
sharing and a way of looking back to the past, in order to deal with
what we have now.
The kinds of hardships that we are struggling with right now,
and they are bound to increase in the coming months, I hope not
years or forever, but who knows? So answers is not what I can provide
to you. To be a provocateur is not something I’m very good at. So
neither the cheerleader nor the provocateur. I’m not so sure I could
fulfil those roles.
But rather today, I would like to share with you what I have been
reflecting on. I’ve been reading quite a lot in the past years on political
philosophy and it happens that a number of philosophers have written
from the perspective of immunology and pharmacology. Not just as
biology phenomenon but as socio-political theories on individuation
and community especially in the techno-sphere era. So amongst them,
for example, are Gilbert Simondon, Roberto Esposito, Peter Sloterdijk,
Bernard Stiegler, etc. I’m sure you can find plenty of these online
resources accessible to you, and it all really depends on your own
inclination towards the level of discourse and the kinds of language
you can engage in.
Today, I would rather choose to look at the trope of the contagious
malady which has been used through human history as a metaphor and
motif to represent describe and critique failures of the system by critics
of culture and politics. So the current COVID-19 pandemic is full of
examples that run the entire spectrum from profound to pathetic use
of these metaphors. And the fact that many metaphors are being used
have appropriated or borrowed them from the model and discipline
of evolutionary biology serves to underscore the difficulties that the
metaphoric mode of communication entails, as this has to move from a
figurative language to a scientifically-inscribed logos.
Okay, so now let’s get some facts straight from viruses. They are
basically quite misunderstood. They have been getting quite a lot of
bad press from everyone because we’ve been a bit ignorant perhaps
So basically, when you ask anyone about viruses all you can hear are
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complaints. It’s disease this or disease that, infection this, infection that
and no one seems to have anything nice to say about viruses. Can
viruses be positive? So of course, to talk about viruses is easy, and it
would be a shame because we wouldn’t be discussing this right now
without them, right?
So, let’s get back to a bit of real sciences, what real science tells
us. Viruses. Viruses are the most ubiquitous life forms on planet Earth.
They are also the least understood. They live everywhere in nature
everywhere, both on you, and inside of you. Less than 1% are known
to be what they call “pathogenic.” But, many more are known to be
symbiotic or mutualistic or benign. So by “symbiotic” it means they
assist, these viruses assist the host. By “mutualistic” it means both host
and virus benefit from the association. And “benign” means we don’t
know what they do. In addition, viruses’ modus operandi of targeting
specific cell types and interrupting cells’ genetic functioning means that
they can be used to destroy certain cells, certain cell types selectively.
So for example, cancer or HIV. And as well, repair genetic damage in
others. So, next time someone asks you about viruses, you can tell him
or her the scientific facts and show a more proper acknowledgement of
how viruses actually work.
Now, these days, when people say something has gone viral,
“gone viral”, they almost always are using the term as a metaphor for
an event that touches a great number of people and news of which,
is passed from individual to individual especially via social media. As
metaphors go, it’s not so bad.
Of course there’s nothing particularly "virus-like” about microbial
infection. They’re quite different things. So yes, so a number of all these
horrible microbial infection-type diseases spread among individuals via
close proximity or physical contact. But, the term “virus” the etymology
actually comes closer to “vita”, Latin for “life force.” And so, it’s obviously
the better choice for representing any event, idea, or philosophy
that touches masses of people. So “vita”—virus coming from vitality.
More interesting, perhaps, is the somewhat neglected aspect of
viral disease metaphors cultural extrapolation. Now, viruses are not
designed to kill or damage their host. The point of a virus is actually life,
not death. Now, because viruses need living cells to reproduce overtime.
They have developed transmission strategies that make the finding of
living hosts quick and efficient. So ideally, a pathogenic virus will enter
a living system and have sufficient time to make many copies of itself
before it is eliminated by the host’s immunological defences. Now, the
virus survives and then the host survives, that’s the model. The problem
with pathogenic viruses especially those that hosts have not encountered
before is that the system’s effort to find and develop a means of
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da:ns LAB 2020
Image from the Singapore glossary of What is the COVID Body.
Provided by Chan Sze Wei
neutralising the virus the state of the body is changed. And sometimes
beyond the point at which the body, especially weakened bodies, can
remain alive. Consequently, it is not the virus that kills. It is the body’s
reaction to the virus that kills.
At this point, I would like to go a bit sideways to talk about the
notion of “Umwelt.” So I’m moving a little bit from let’s say, how I’ve
explained the function of virus and how they work, which is a more,
let’s say, empiricist description into what is gradually a more subjective
description. Subjective because now we’re going into the perspective
of the virus.
So, “Umwelt”, it is developed by an Estonian biologist, Jakob
von Uexküll, a bit difficult to pronounce. Uexküll basically introduced
a new school in theoretical biology, which is called ethology. Now, in
contrast to the usual kind of what we call taxonomic approach of
classical theoretical biology, which we know, which consists in studying
living organisms according to their lineage and shared features, Uexküll
believes that one actually cannot know the organism without first observing
how it relates to its environment.
Now, a living organism is first and foremost defined by the specific
relationship it maintains with its environment, rather than by its specific
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FUSE #5
corporeal features. So instead of departing from a human point of view,
Uexküll tries to look through the eyes of the organisms themselves.
How do they see the world? What part of the world is meaningful to
them? What does this tell us about the organism itself? What counts, is
thus, less what organisms are, but more, where they are and how they
are. That is, how they interact with the environment in which they are
living in.
Now, according to Uexküll, organisms do not merely occupy
an environment, they create it. Their relation to the environment is
not a given but a constant development. Uexküll thus exchanges the
kind of static and passive view of taxonomic biology for one that is
much more dynamic and creative. This development does not occur
solely on account of the animal. It is not the case that the animal
is merely shaping its environment. But that the animal is likewise
shaped by its environment.
Right, so there’s something quite inter-subjective happening here.
Both animal and environment encounter each other in what we can
call a contrapuntal relationship of reciprocal determination. So in the
words of the French phenomenologist, Merleau-Ponty, the animal is
produced by the production of a milieu. A milieu, like the environment.
So the animal is thus a product, an effect of something it has produced
itself. Animal and environment make up an indivisible biological unity:
the “Umwelt” or loosely translated as milieu.
So what Uexküll has clearly offered us is not a mechanistic account
of nature but one that is intentional or expressive. Of course,
this appeal of the living organism towards the world can only happen
if the organism has the right physical features. So for instance, an
animal can only address the world in its liquid form, if it possesses
the physical capacity to extract oxygen from water. But thus, this does
not imply that the physical features of the organisms are the first and
only ground from which to explain “Umwelt.” So we can see that unlike
Darwin, Uexküll does not want to reduce the examination of the unity
of “Umwelt” to examination of the physical correspondences between
living organisms and its environment. So for example, animals with a
thick fur living in a cold environment. So instead, he wants to open it
up to an examination of how the living organism and its environment
relate through their ways of behaving and perceiving. That is to say,
their, let’s say, rhythmic postures, sounds or colours, in short, their
world of sensations and movement.
The COVID-19 virus is special but not for the reason that most people
think. Its infection of our bodies is nothing note-worthy as viruses normally
go. But what COVID-19 has spectacularly achieved is infecting our
machines of culture, economics, and politics, our everyday life on a global
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da:ns LAB 2020
Photo credit: Raghav Handa
level, leaving none of us untouched. It’s a virus and it’s a meme, and in
order to reduce the inferred levels of mortality in at-risk individuals, our
societies have reacted in unprecedented ways. By mandating the shutdown
of economic and cultural activities, which then right, involves all of us in
the arts field, curtailing the individual by all means of mobility, regulations,
and policies. And increasingly, the legal rights of citizens, entering
thus, into discussions of the bio-politics. And by forcing both individuals
and family groups into physical isolation for an unspecified time interval.
Although, of course, every nation is anxiously opening right now as we
speak, albeit with caution.
So at this point, I don’t know how to really speak, what tenor I
should proceed. And I think I can only speak from a commonsensical,
if not, rather, boring, but nonetheless I hope, sensible way of reading
the situation since I cannot, in any way foretell the future. So, right
now, we’ll have to wait to see if these social reactions will sufficiently
mitigate the damage that the virus will inflict on human population.
In a moral sense, we have no choice but to endure, to endure them in
the hope that they will. But just as a body’s reaction to a pathogenic
virus can leave it in a weakened state, and so susceptible to other
infections that would not prove problematic had the virus not come
along, the economic, social, and cultural reactions that COVID-19 meme
has caused will leave our social bodies in a much weakened state. It will
take a long while, a substantial interval and sustained efforts for our
societies to recover from their reaction to this infection. Or maybe, we
never will. Who knows?
So in thinking about the legacy of COVID-19 especially in the
light of the past experience and knowledge that we’ve accumulated
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from other pandemics, such as SARS and Ebola etc., that will likely also
happen again in the future. It will be important to remember that unlike
our bodies immune reactions, we are actually in control of our society’s
reaction to this and future infections. It is in our power to learn from
this infection, and so establish structures that will recognise the danger
and take steps to mitigate harmful social responses, both to future
pandemics and to other events of a holistically environmental nature
as they arrive.
Of course, this process is nothing more or less than an example of
cultural adaptation. As with all forms of adaptation, the key to success is
diversity. But, therein lies also the danger. The strategies that lead to successful
post-event diversification are unknown. Common sensibly, commonsensically
speaking, some lineages will remain more or less unchanged and continue
to pursue their old ways. Others will undergo rapid and profound alteration
to their approaches to life.
Now, success always belongs to whichever strategies work best for
whatever reason. Moreover, adaptations that offer an advantage, whatever
their origin and however slight, can eventually displace those that
don’t. Irrespective of the success the latter may have enjoyed previously.
So prior incumbency does not guarantee success in the aftermath of
a profound dislocation. As it is with nature, so it is with social factors
of economics, politics, and culture, humans, by their given capacity, can
do many things that are highly unusual, even unique. But by definition,
humans can never do anything that’s unnatural. Although, synthetic
biology has been proposing to radicalise that limitation. Hence, my own
personal interest in pursuing and reading up on the future according
to synthetic biology, but this is another matter, another day, we can talk
about this.
Now, due to the manner in which human cultures have responded
to COVID-19 infection, many of our very precious traditions, ways of life,
institutions, have, and to all intentions and purposes been suspended. It
is far too early to tell which will survive after the crisis has passed and
which will remain in whatever state. However, what one can say with
some degree of certainty is this, that aspects of tomorrow’s world may
be very different from yesterday’s world. And we already experience this
now, that the world has changed. So the challenges we’ll face in coping
with that world won’t end with our society’s survival. They’ll only have
just begun.
So on this note, rather, open and you know, how should I say… I
have no conviction about whether we, the world, the human race, will
collapse or continue in what ways, whatsoever I think we will just have
to find ways to keep surviving and then, to keep doing what we need
to do or think in what ways we can best contribute.
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da:ns LAB 2020
So with this, I wish all of you in Taiwan, in India, the Philippines,
Hong Kong, Singapore, have I missed out any other—Australia! I wish
you all the best in this year’s lab and to take away some of these
reflections I’ve shared with you today into your own discussions. Thank
you, and all the best.
Tang Fu Kuen is Curator of Taipei Arts
Festival (TAF), a city-wide platform held
annually in summer (Aug to Sep) to
present contemporary local and international
productions. With SUPER@#%$?
as theme for its 22nd edition in 2020,
TAF is helmed by Taipei Performing Arts
Center (TPAC) which also runs the Taipei
Children's Festival and Taipei Fringe
Festival. Fu Kuen worked previously in
immaterial patrimoine in UNESCO (Paris)
and in SEAMEO-SPAFA (Bangkok). He was
sole curator of the Singapore pavilion at
53rd Venice Biennale, presenting artist
Ming Wong who was awarded Special
Jury Mention. As independent curator and
producer and dramaturg, he has worked
with multiple platforms across Asia
and Europe.
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ELEMENT#6
Viral Archives:
Study Notes
Loo Zihan
ELEMENT#6 Viral Archives took place from August to November 2020, and was facilitated
by artist/academic Loo Zihan. As a group, participants spent time considering the
performance of productivity in a pandemic and the building of a collective viral archive.
Here, Loo Zihan shares notes accumulated over the sessions.

ELEMENT#6 Viral Archives: Study Notes
From August to November 2020, I facilitated a small study group of
artists in a workshop titled Viral Archives. We convened six times over
a duration of the three months in-person and online with two main
intentions, the first was to share research methodologies in relation
to artistic practice, and the second to share a space where we could
unpack our experience of the lockdown due to COVID-19 earlier this
year. We started with a group of five participants and concluded with an
intimate session of three. Various participants joined and dropped out
and this was part of the evolving process—there was a sense of fatigue
from the onslaught of arts events internationally and locally that were
made available with remote online experiences, and we were appreciative
what time we could afford together in this study group.
The organizing philosophy of the group was modeled after Fred
Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of black study that they proposed
in The Undercommons. They call for a kind of fugitive work that refuses
instrumentalisation, coming together in a space outside of the
university to consider ideas, philosophy, practice. When drafting up the
structure, I was also thinking a lot about the study of sociality. I wanted
to interrogate both the subject of ‘social studies’ in the Singaporean
education system and critique the relational turn of socially-engaged
practice in contemporary performance and art. Social studies was
often wielded in our education system as an instrumentalized form of
government propaganda in the 1990s. I wanted to investigate what
would a reconfiguration of social studies with an orientation towards
sociology bring about? Some of the provocations I posed in the first
session included: What does it mean to revisit the study of the social?
Who is counted in this sociality and how do we pay attention to what
is left aside? What is the relationship between the notion of study and
the gesture of practice?
With a desire to break out of habitual modes of engagement, I
invited the group to bond over food and to bring something they consumed
as support through the lockdown period to our first meeting. I
made small jars of achar (pickled vegetables and fruit) for everyone—
something I learnt how to make during the Circuit Breaker period. The
act of assembling achar became a monthly family activity that anchored
us and marked passing time. The sharing of these jars of achar with
my extended family and friends also became a way to demonstrate
affection despite the inability to meet in person. Achar was like a collage—each
batch will be different according to the flavour profiles of
the ingredients added. I have attached the recipe as an appendix to
this document, I would encourage you to try making some yourself.
Others in the group spoke of taking the opportunity during lockdown
to change their dietary habits. A participant brought flourless chocolate
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cake that she learnt to make when switching to a keto diet. Another
brought nougats with sesame seeds that she relied on as comfort food
from an Indian mama shop.
Ining, whose family runs a metal workshop in Sembawang,
recounted how Circuit Breaker forced the migrant workers from
Bangladesh and China to bond as they were not permitted to leave
their dormitories and had to share cooking and grocery duties, and
also acclimatise to each others’ dietary preferences. It started a general
conversation about her metal workshop and fabrication which
eventually led to us deciding to visit her studio as part of the final
session in November.
Over the subsequent months, the interest of the group shifted
to research methodologies as we discussed strategies of approach
practice-based research. I was working on an oral history project of
cruising areas in Singapore and shared some difficulties I faced while
conducting these interviews. The second half of the session evolved
into looking at works that negotiate with documenting history, veracity
of accounts, and the ethical positioning of the artist in relation to their
subject. We visited NTU CCA’s penultimate exhibition and discussed
Naeem Mohaiemen Two Meetings and a Funeral video work where
he attempted to reconstruct a history of the Non-Aligned Movement
(NAM) via interviews.
We encountered a mix of theory, audio materials and other
mixed-media as collective points of reference to anchor the conversation
throughout the three months to talk about the promiscuity
of the archive, exposure, and opacity. We read essays penned by
Vijay Prasah regarding the Global Left and the Third World. We
examined S. Rajaratnam’s appearance in the 1973 NAM meeting as
a representative Singapore and the role he performed in shaping
an imaginary Singapore as a global city. We listened to the New
York Times podcast titled Caliphate about the American invasion
of Mosul and reclaiming it from ISIS featuring journalist Rukmini
Callimachi and the peripheral reports that accused her of relying
on unverified sources and challenging the ethical limitations of her
profession. We also took the opportunity to share works-in-progress
to provide necessary critique for each other’s practice, we shared
ways we manage information through online note-taking and time
management apps like Notion.
By way of concluding this short report, I return to a fragment
from a speech in 1979 by S. Rajaratnam that we discovered in the
archives. He titled this speech Old Maps in a New Age and it was made
at the University of Malaya in 1979 on the subject of speaking truth
to power.
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ELEMENT#6 Viral Archives: Study Notes
"In Apocalyptic times, there can be no set rules to govern our
thoughts. We must therefore take the risk of saying things that are open
to dispute provided that vital problems are thereby raised." Rajaratnam
goes on to reiterate: “It is not that the material for new ideas, the
new maps are not already available. They are all around us in great
abundance. But we cannot see them because of our unwillingness to
empty our heads of old ideas to make way for the new.”
We hope this study group renewed our capacity to find different
methods to read old maps in order to pave the way for new ideas.
Appendix—Vegan Achar Recipe
Makes approximately 1kg of Achar (5 or 6 jars)
There are three main components to making Achar:
1. The frying of the rempah mix
2. The vegetables to be pickled
3. The garnish that is added at the end when everything
is assembled
The rempah (spice paste)
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 3 red shallots
• 1 chunk of blue ginger
• 1 stick of lemongrass
• 2 dried candlenuts
• 2 red chilli padi
• 3 red regular chilli
• ½ teaspoon turmeric powder
Peel the garlic and shallots and chop them into small chunks. Peel and
slice the blue ginger. Remove the center stem of lemongrass and chop
them into very fine bits. Remove the seeds from the chilli and chop them
up (unless you prefer your Achar extra spicy—then leave some seeds in).
Put everything except for the turmeric powder into a food processor and
blend it. Then transfer it to a mortar and pestle and pound the mixture till
it becomes a paste and the flavours are integrated with each other.
Heat 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil on a frying pan, add the paste
when the oil is sizzling, add the turmeric powder at this stage as you fry
the rempah. Fry the paste till it turns slightly golden brown and put it aside
to cool down.
24

FUSE #5
The vegetables to be pickled
• ½ head of cauliflower
• 200g of long beans
• ½ a yellow capsicum
• 1 small turnip
• 1 large carrot
• 3 Japanese cucumbers
• 1 honey pineapple
• 1 red shallot
Chop the long beans, cauliflower, turnip and capsicum into 2cm chunks.
Boil 3 cups of water and blanche these vegetables to cook them till they
are slightly soft before draining them and putting them aside. Chop the
Japanese cucumbers into 2cm long strips. Soak them in salted brine
for about ½ hour before rinsing the brine off them. This is to ensure
they remain slightly crispy when pickled. You may choose to use regular
cucumber instead, but remember to remove the seeds before pickling
if so, Japanese cucumbers tend to be a little bit more crisp. Peel the
carrot and cut them into 3cm long strips. Cut the pineapple into little
chunks—the sweetness of the pineapples really affects the flavour of
the achar, ensure that you are using ripe pineapples and if possible
honey pineapples from Malaysia. Finely chop the shallots.
Assembling and garnishing
• ½ cup of toasted white sesame seeds
• 1 cup of toasted grated peanuts (not powder)
• ½ cup of white rice vinegar
• ½ cup of apple cider vinegar
• 1 tablespoon of gula melaka / brown sugar
• ¾ cup of tamarind assam juice (you can make this by adding
hot water to a golf ball size tamarind paste and sieving it to
filter the seeds out)
Add all the vegetables to a big tub, and stir the rempah paste in while
adding the rest of the ingredients listed above. If you toast your peanuts
and sesame seeds slightly it helps to bring out their flavour before
adding them to the achar. Your gula melaka portion might vary depending
on the sweetness of the pineapples. The apple cider vinegar helps
to reduce the astringency of the achar, but if you prefer your achar tart,
you can add a whole cup of rice vinegar instead. I tend to add these
portions sparingly and taste the mix as I go along to ensure the flavours
are integrated. Do take note that the flavour profile will continue to
mature the longer you leave the achar to marinate. Leave it for an hour
25

ELEMENT#6 Viral Archives: Study Notes
or two chilled before portioning them into the jars to ensure the flavour
is even across the entire batch. After portioning them into jars, the achar
needs time to settle and is usually ready to be consumed the day after.
Do ensure that there is enough pickled brine for each jar of achar.
The achar should be consumed within two weeks, keep checking
the pineapples to ensure the batch is fresh, if they start to turn
brown this is an indication that the batch is about to turn bad. Always
use a clean non-metal spoon to dish out portions to avoid contaminating
the rest of the achar, and having smaller jars ensures easier storage
and portioning. Keep your achar chilled till the point of serving.
Loo Zihan is an artist and academic from
Singapore working at the intersections of
critical theory, performance, and the moving-image.
He received his Masters of Fine
Arts in Studio Practice from the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago and a Masters
in Performance Studies from New York
University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is
pursuing his PhD in Performance Studies
at the University of California, Berkeley.
His work emphasises the malleability of
memory through various representational
strategies that include performance
re-enactments and essay films. He was
awarded the Young Artist Award (2015)
and an Arts Postgraduate Scholarship
(2017) by the National Arts Council
of Singapore.
26

ELEMENT#7
Report
Chan Hsin Yee

ELEMENT#7 Report
Introduction from Dossier
The Clean Room project has been a major series of work that Juan
Dominguez has created for about 10 years. Structured like a mini TV
series, the work transfers the format of the mini-series into the context
of theatre to propose a different sense of temporality. In Clean Room,
the public is committed to attend each and every one of its episodes,
and is thus led to appreciate the continuity of its proposal, as well as
the production and reception of a theatrical event. Since no new spectators
could be added to the group, participants develop a sense of
complicity and a deep relationship with one another over the duration
of the project.
Following on, the Dirty Room workshop is based on the concept
of seriality derived from the Clean Room project. Using the same
structure and methodology, Dirty Room proposes an experimentation
with time sharing, ways of generating experiences and an idea
of contamination among different agents. The workshop plays with
fragmented temporality and how it might require the renunciation of
traditional narratological elements.
Dirty Room will consist of a chain of situations that activates
individual and collective listening among the participants, raising the
awareness of the here and now, and the idea of complicity. The situations
will prompt reflections on how to be together, where the different
collective gestures performed in the artistic contexts, as well as ‘real’
places and time have the potential to transform individual perceptions.
As we have to make tricky decisions in these situations together, a key
question arises: how the fuck are we going to do all this? (just kidding).
Through this online workshop at Dance Nucleus, we will invent a
lot of things.
28

FUSE #5
Day 1
We began the workshop by doing nothing for 30 minutes together. A
kind of togetherness and non-activity that feels quite familiar during
these times when lockdowns and quarantines are now shared experiences.
We kept ourselves unmuted and visible on screen, catching
soundbites of one another’s worlds, observing the changes in lighting
of Juan’s Spanish morning and our Singaporean late afternoon.
At the end of it, Juan proposed an idea that if everyone gathered
to do nothing together, we could literally stop the world. With his proposal,
the gathering to do nothing took on a political hue as it became
a deliberate choice to resist, to refuse productivity of any kind.
After rounds of introductions, Juan explained the Clean Room
project. This workshop included activities extracted from episodes
of different Clean Room seasons. For this first day of workshop, Juan
facilitated two activities, the first being a bombardment of “questions
that have a twist” from season 1, episode 3.
Some examples:
1. Are you curious?
2. Are you ready?
3. What cinematographic style would you use to film your
life story?
4. Of all the sounds you can hear now, which ones don’t
you recognise?
5. What is the smell of your room?
6. What is the minimum you have to do to make a change?
7. What would you like to be a beginner in?
8. If you were a killer, what kind of killer would you be?
9. Who would you kill?
10. Who else?
11. And what about literature?
12. If you were a sentence, what sentence would you be?
13. Where were you written?
14. Who wrote you?
In the original episode, these questions were broadcasted while participants
were organised in rows snaking around a room, facing one another
in pairs. While we couldn’t go through the entire list of questions, the
list would have gradually invited participants to silently imagine and
speculate about the person—whom they’ve never met—sitting opposite
them. What were they like as a child? Are they a compulsive liar?
What colour underwear are they wearing?
29

ELEMENT#7 Report
It is another kind of being together, and another kind of listening.
No conversation involved, just listening-observing to a person’s body,
their appearance, and to your own imagination’s responses to that body.
The questions would guide you deeper under their skin, as they become
a character you build in your head. You, dear participant, are thus an
important person in each Clean Room episode, because you construct
the actual stories and characters that occur and appear in them.
The second and final activity of the day would have been more
exciting if we had all been physically in the studio together. Juan gave
us a hypothetical amount of $2000 dollars (if only it were real…), and
posed the question “what will you all do with this money together,
that you cannot do alone?” This activity was also from another Clean
Room episode.
We never managed to come to an agreement—time was short.
But the discussion revealed to us where all our headspaces were
during this time—all our proposals centered on sending this money
to vulnerable, less-privileged communities. Like the “questions with
a twist”, our headspace, collective imagination and conversation
build the narrative of this activity/episode within the work. But rather
than speaking about intimate connections growing between discrete
characters, about participants being characters for one another, this
activity’s narrative saw them approaching some semblance of community,
characters interacting with one another, working with one another
towards a real-fictional goal.
Screenshot of ELEMENT#7 participants with Juan Dominguez
in a gathering for nothing. Provided by Chan Hsin Yee
30

FUSE #5
Day 2
While Juan was sleeping, we went off to Funan Mall in the morning to
read a compilation of short stories he had emailed overnight (some
copies are still in the studio, if you are curious). We could not communicate
with one another or acknowledge each other’s presence
under any circumstance—we had to come alone, read alone, and leave
alone, together.
This was the first activity that introduced the idea of complicity to
the narrative of the workshop, in which participants are secondary or
primary accomplices to a secret task or objective unknown by the rest
of the world.
We gathered back online in the afternoon with Juan. This time, we
gathered for nothing for 30 minutes:
“Today 13th of October from 1600h till 1630h We will gather, via
zoom, for nothing. Not for political reasons, not for leisure, not for
socialising. No label, no purpose other than finding out together
what gathering for nothing is. Very different from gathering to do
nothing, what we did yesterday. to do nothing has a purpose. to
gather for nothing doesn't have any purpose.”
We collectively noticed that with no obligation to do nothing, day 2’s
gathering for nothing seemed to pass by faster than day 1’s gathering
to do nothing. There also seemed to be the potential for something
to happen, unplanned and spontaneous, in that gathering for nothing.
Anything could happen when we gather for nothing. With that
playfulness of a gathering for nothing, we also reflected how it was an
activity more familiar to children than adults, which spoke to Juan the
“conceptual clown”, whose practice also includes elements of absurdity
and playfulness.
The last activity for the day was Juan taking us through his process
of creating questions that he used for different Clean Room episodes,
like the ones in the activity we did in Day 1. Perhaps Juan was gradually
inducting us into his band of primary accomplices of this workshop.
The steps:
1. Think of a topic you care about.
2. Write a question about that topic.
3. Add a layer of fiction.
4. Now add a political layer.
31

ELEMENT#7 Report
It was a challenge, needless to say. But through workshopping and formulating
our own questions we found ourselves falling into a rabbithole
of imagination and speculation. It began when we first attempted to apply
that fictional layer to a perfectly ordinary question, and the political layer
took us another step further in. And the descent began when we started
to discuss among ourselves about how we could refine and improve our
provocations. The imaginative, creative process became a collaborative
exercise. It was a co-creation even before it was given into the hands of
a Clean Room participant.
Day 3
Screenshot of ELEMENT#7 participants with Juan Dominguez.
Provided by Chan Hsin Yee
What better way to end the workshop than with the most jam-packed
day of all three days. We began “bright” and early too—the first activity
of the day was to watch the sunrise at Kallang Stadium, in beautiful
evening dress. Again, no communication, no acknowledgements. The
accomplices were to be total strangers to one another.
Again, another opportunity for us to write our own narratives—the
activity could not be enjoyable otherwise. A few of us wrote ourselves
as characters who, after late-night partying, decided they might as well
stay up a little while longer to watch night turn to day. Mysterious men
and women, insomniacs, Breakfast at Tiffany’s wannabes… anything
was possible. The particular context of this activity, with the early
32

FUSE #5
morning darkness and quiet, also made it easier for us to conjure some
dreamy, fictional world. But then seemed to dissolve and blur into a real
world as the sun came up and we saw dogs on their walks, athletes on
their runs, cars on the expressway.
The next activity for the afternoon was the Invisible Gathering. The
accomplices had to gather first at Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple,
then Bras Basah Complex to observe the space and the people in it,
never losing sight of one another as they moved from one location
to another. And, before leaving Bras Basah Complex, the accomplices
had to bend down and tie their shoelaces. All of this to be done alone,
together, without communication and coordination.
The experience of complicity, of sharing a secret that is unknown
to the rest of the world, was particularly intense in this activity. Being in
public spaces, people noticed our presence as a group. Some strangers
paused and joined in the looking around, wondering what we were
waiting for, or lingered in the space anticipating something—we roped
them into our fiction as characters who were “not one of us”.
The accomplices finally managed to meet at their “headquarters”
in the studio for a lunch. There was a table laid out, and food and
questions written on cards were successively placed on it according
to a detailed score provided by Juan to me. I had my own fictional
role to play—the maitre’d, the hostess who disappeared behind the
black curtains and always appeared with more food, more cards. It
was my turn to derive pleasure from being the only one “in on it”, as
the rest of my accomplices were not knowledgeable of my secret with
Juan. Here, storytelling became a shared responsibility or role—each
question prompting memories, experiences, and thoughts. As a group,
we created stories within that story of a lunch. It was a short story, but
rich with laughter and connection.
Back on Zoom, we had these instructions:
“today on 14th Oct at 16h, do not go to the Dance Nucleus studio.
do not be there for half an hour. Our action will happen, inasmuch
as none of us is there. Make sure you know where it is and how
to (not) go. Wear red for this occasion. Stay connected to our
non gathering for the whole time it is not happening. Can you? A
webcam will be streaming our not being there.”
For our final activity, Juan proposed a toast. We all proposed a toast.
Around ten toasts each, actually—60 altogether. This is from another
episode in Clean Room. It is long and drawn-out, a chaotic jumble of sincere
and nonsensical toasts to anything and anyone, real and imagined.
33

ELEMENT#7 Report
We all turned off our cameras and heard one another take turns to read
our toasts. This list of toasts could have gone on forever.
It was a quiet end to the workshop, that was also somewhat poignant
as I recalled how this ELEMENT was meant to be in person, and I
wondered how it might have felt if everyone was in the studio together
with Juan, each of us with a glass in hand. And the ending of our story
would not have been so abrupt as clicking “Leave Meeting”.
So perhaps one more toast: A toast to someday, when we might
do this all over again.
34

FUSE #5
Top: Juan Dominguez. Photo credit: Bea Borgers
Bottom: Hero Image for Clean Room. Photo courtesy of Juan Dominguez
35

Walking
Emma Fishwick
Emma Fishwick (Perth) participated in SCOPE#8 as a regional guest artist, which was
convened by Shawn Chua and Jee Chan. Due to the postponement of ELEMENT#6,
which she had originally been invited to attend, Emma’s week in Singapore was converted
into a residency prior to SCOPE#8. In this essay, Emma uses the movement of
walking to begin speaking about her artistic process and interests, her two projects
that she spent developing and thinking through in the studio, and her reflections on
time alone in the space.

FUSE #5
WALKING
LANDSCAPE
SLOW (art)
Duration Repetition Re-frame
walking
37

Walking
I visited the national gallery the other day and found myself lost in
the space for two and a half hours. The grandeur of the walls, tall
and stark in history, winding up back stair passages and landing in
open spaces, myself alone with the art. There was a work by a Thai
called Two Planets and it sits in the corner of gallery 15. Turning
the corner, I had to consciously walk around to meet it face on,
here I stand shifting my weight from left to right and right to left, a
lingering metronome. A collective of Thai villages sit, staring at an
artificially placed painting, Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass”. So,
I stand watching people, sitting, watching a painting. Seemingly a
static scene, yet as I linger, a conversation stirs through the villages,
who remark on the female figure, the character’s financial status,
their intentions and so on. They were collectively walking through
this painting together.
Walking we all do it, in some way shape or form, a repeatable action
that overall is a simple process of being and continuing. This process
encourages a cardiac rhythm, a breath, a line of sight, a smell, a memory
or a discovery. Each step, roll or shuffle offers another chance to begin
again or to continue to continue. It is malleable yet easily controlled with
physical, spatial or temporal parameters. These parameters, whether
pre-determined or not, generally define walking as a linear activity.
It has a point A and a point B.
A but not B,
B but not A,
A and B,
Not A and not B.
Illustrations by Emma Fishwick
38

FUSE #5
For author Rebecca Solnit, walking is “a bodily labour that produces
nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals… the mind, the body and
the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in
conversation together, three notes suddenly making a cord” (Solnit,
2002, p. 5). It offers a form of embodied movement that responds,
connects and shifts ways of thinking, making, seeing and moving and
approaches physical landscapes as “sensory environments… constructed
and understood through kinaesthetic motion” (Rogers, 2012, p. 63).
Doris Humphrey did it as a procession (1928)
Bruce Nauman did it in an Exaggerated Manner (1967)
Richard Long did it backwards (1967)
Trisha Brown did it up and down walls (1971),
Anna Halprin did it in mandalic circles (1987)
James Cunningham does it slow, isolated and performatively (2010–)
Amanda Heng did it so every step counted (2019–2020)
Walking is choreographic, it is rhythm, it offers multiplicity in thinking
processes, it is simple and has the ability to take the body and press it
up against, submerge in and on top of the place in which it finds itself
in. Walking is historical, its durational, repetitious, idle, spatial, temporal,
political and cultural. It is primal, yet not quite universal. For those that
cannot walk, can it still be universal if it is not bound to the body alone?
Can walking be evident without the body? Can process be a long walk?
I visited the national gallery the other day, Sunday 1st March and
found myself wandering throughout the gallery space for two and a
half hours. The grandeur of the walls, tall and stark in history lead
me up winding up back stair passages. So quiet and empty I felt I
was intruding until I’d land in the open spaces, alone with the art.
About one and a half hours in, I came across a video work by a Thai
artist Araya Rasdjarmrearsnook called Two Planets (2008) and it
sits in Gallery 15. Turning left into the gallery I noticed it placed
in the far-right hand corner of the room, I had to consciously walk
around three or four other artworks to meet it face on. Here I stand
shifting my weight from left to right and right to left, a lingering
metronome in front of two TV screens. On one of these screens, is
a collective of Thai villages, who sit, staring at an artificially placed
painting mounted on an easel in a clearing amongst the bamboo.
It was Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1863). It’s the notorious
one, that features two men in their gentlemanly attire, one lady off
39

Walking
in the distance collecting flowers and another in the foreground,
sitting completely naked, staring over her shoulder at us. I could
read that this work runs for fifteen minutes and so, I stand watching
people, sitting, watching a painting, that in many ways was
watching us back. At first this was a seemingly a static scene, yet
as I linger, a conversation stirs through the villages, who remark
on the painting pointing out details and asking questions like; why
is she naked? They must be rich if they are picnicking during the
day? As I watched this work unfold, I realised that these people
were collectively walking through this painting together. Through
their joint sitting, joint idleness, joint wandering of eye and mind,
they were on a collective walk. I too was now part of this walk,
where our could eyes return, our bodies could shift and our minds
question, reframe and discover.
Walking as both an embodied action and as a construct that frames the
way I talk about creative process has been an underlining my artistic
practice for a while now. Increasingly, it has been coming to the forefront
of my residencies, particularly during solo practice. During this
residency, more so than before. During the two-week period, I became
increasingly aware of being alone in the room alone and I noticed my
body becoming both the observer and observed, seer and seen. A
sensation not too dissimilar to the experience of walking, where one’s
“relations with the visible world intertwine in a double movement of
separating and joining” (Wylie, 2007, p. 152). Whether in the studio
moving my body or arranging objects or deciphering text or drawing
40

Emma Fishwick’s presentation at SCOPE#8.
Photo credit: Dapheny Chen

FUSE #5
lines, or out on the street putting foot to pavement, heel to toe, there is
a continual repetitious act of separating and joining.
For this residency, I was in many was walking in the space between
two projects. One concerned with landscape being a relational tool for
re-framing ideas and the other was looking at Slow Art making as means
for re-education of imagery. How do I keep these two projects alive in
the context of solo studio practice? I took the projects’ key concepts,
added the associated objects and materials, mixed them together, and
filtered them through the body. What emerged was the conceptual through
lines between the two projects and the present body. Ideas of duration,
repetition and re-framing to re-educate, arguably all present within the act
of walking. Yet where does this situate the drawn outcomes and arranged
objects within this studio investigation? Where is the walk in that?
The drawing, kept in control through simple parameters of
drawing triangles and going from one end of the scroll the other in
the space of two weeks. The improvised hand that draws or arranges
objects is indeed structured in the same way I would approach improvised
dancing; as an “overlap of associations, distractions, statements,
retractions, repetitions… beginnings, energetic states, regrets, assertions,
full stops, hesitations” (Pollitt, 2017, p. 207), as well as, spaces,
dots, marks, textures and plains. Every response is both a means to
generate knowledge and a means to reflect during action and after
action. The solo studio time inevitably always feels slow, laborious and
at times pointless, yet the time left alone with thoughts, objects and
movements gave way to a cyclic process of reflection. Where, for example,
the object placement is a reflection on the dancing, the drawing a
43

Walking
reflection on the objects and the dancing a reflection—on the drawing.
With the body being the common denominator between art forms and
responses, working as an associative and relational filter for the physical
and imagined happenings that emerge through the studio sessions,
extending “thinking in the tests and moves” (Schön, 1983, p. 280).
In this way process of any kind can be a long walk.
44

FUSE #5
References
1. Brown, T (1971). Walking on the wall.
2. Cunningham, J (2010). Cunningham Walks, sourced from http://cunningham
walks.com/
3. Halprin, A (1987). Planetary Dance
4. Hand, A (2019–2020). Every Step Counts. Singapore Biennale 2019. Esplanade,
Theatres on the Bay, Singapore.
5. Hart, D. (2002), John Olsen. St Leonards, NSW: Craftsman House.
6. Humphrey, D. (1928). Air for the G string.
7. Long, R (1967). A line made by walking.
8. Nauman, B (1967). Walking in an exaggerated manner around the perimeter of
a square.
9. Pollitt, J. (2017). She writes like she dances: Response and radical impermanence
in writing as dancing. Choreographic Practices, 8(2), 199–218. Perth, Australia.
doi:10.1386/chor.8.2.199_1
10. Richman-Abdou, K. (2018), The Significance of Manet’s Large-Scale Masterpiece
‘The Luncheon on The Grass’. Retrieved from https://mymodernmet.com/
edouard-manet-the-luncheon-on-the-grass/
11. Rogers, A. (2012). Geographies of the Performing Arts: Landscapes, Places and
Cities. Geography Compass, 6(2), 60–75. doi:10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00471
12. Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action
New York, NY. Basic Books.
13. Solnit, R. (2002). Wanderlust: a history of walking. London, United Kingdom. Verso.
14. Wylie, J. (2007). Landscape. Hoboken, NJ. Routledge.
Emma Fishwick is an Australian (Perth)
artist working across dance, art, design and
scholarship. Creatively, Emma is increasingly
questioning whether dance can achieve
the often-complex connections between
the human and non-human, challenging
her understanding of the form through
incorporating multiple art practices. Emma
is currently lecturing at Western Australian
Academy of Performing Arts, an associate
artist with Co:3 Australia, a STRUT Dance
board member and an active choreographer,
photographer, editor in Perth.
45

Walking
Top, Bottom: Studio installation by Emma Fishwick during her residency.
Photo credit: Emma Fishwick
46

Emma Fishwick’s presentation at SCOPE#8.
Photo credit: Dapheny Chen

Post-Residency
Reflections
Rebecca Wong
Rebecca Wong (Hong Kong) was another regional guest presenters at SCOPE#8. Like
Emma Fishwick, Rebecca spent a week in residency in Singapore before her presentation,
which was spent in reflection and observing female gender and sexuality—Wong’s focus
of artistic interest and study—within the local context of Singapore. She shares some of
her reflections and notes here.

Post-Residency Reflections
202032 – 9
50

Bird-watching / (2018) by Rebecca Wong.
All photos by William Muirhead

FUSE #5
20196
Dance Nucleus Residency (2 – 9 Feb 2020) reflections
Residencies offer space for art to develop, and time for the artist
to grow.
Developing art:
My recent performance led to me to view the artist-audience relationship
with suspicion. The performance space conventionally offers
protective boundaries; clear lines that divide the performer and the
audience such that one does not intrude upon the other. The performance
becomes an invisible wrestling of energies, without any real
risk of harm or offence.
My works probe into constraints of Asian women with regards
to gender and sexual desire, and I am primarily motivated by cultures
of patriarchism and female objectification. In my recent performance,
I blurred the boundaries of the performance space, and encountered
audience members from cultures that objectified women who almost
plastered their faces on my naked body. I was able to continue the
performance that day, but the emotions and thoughts of that performance
have continued to stick with me.
When I blur the divisive lines within the performance space, place
the work within the audience, and present my naked body to a group
of people who motivate me to create, do I put myself in danger? As a
creator and performer, how do I sensitively build a relationship with the
audience based on trust and equality? How do I navigate between the
light and darkness of humanity; to embody and affirm shared values, or
perhaps to challenge the audience without losing their trust?
53

Post-Residency Reflections
Bird-watching / (2018) by Rebecca Wong.
All photos by William Muirhead
In most residencies, there is space available for free exploration.
I chose to spend the majority of this residency in that space, walking
around the city, experiencing daily life, whilst reminding myself to fully
explore and immerse into things that pique my interest. I found that
just sitting and having a coffee alone made me curious about how
women in this city lived. I would be taking off my clothes at the hotel,
and realising how this might be breaking the law would change the way
I saw this city. On my evening walks, I would try to strike conversations
with a local, but to no success. It could be my luck, but I think it might
be due to cultural differences? I was not in a rush to find conclusions to
my observations and daydreams, and I found that they became a kind
of nourishment for me, and exercises in which my physical senses and
awareness were sharpened. My past curiosity about myself resulted in
understanding, and so in this unfamiliar space, I was still able to carve
my own path in the residency in much the same way as improvisation.
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FUSE #5
Growth:
This path allowed me to leave my comfort zones, cut away distractions,
and focus on thinking about my work in new ways as senses that had
been dulled by life were being sharpened again. This is what growth
means to me; the outcomes are not just ends in themselves, but embody
contexts and struggles behind them, and most importantly that they
reflect who I am back to me.
Chance allowed me to get to know a female artist who uses
traditional dance to question the identity and positions of women in
society. When I went to watch a show with her, I noticed a contrast
between her personality interacting with her seniors and friends and
the one reflected in the description of her works I read online. Women
meet their culture’s expectations to varying degrees, yet because the
ethos of the times emphasises the will and opinions of the individual,
they are in a challenging position. Each female artist engages with and
articulates this challenge differently, and this act is considered an act of
courage. With regards to my recent performance, “courage” was a word
I always heard because of my decision to perform naked. But in this
female artist, I saw a different kind of courage which was not a one-off
demonstration in an artistic performance, but manifested in daily acts
of exploration, change, and communication. It is a quiet but steady
strength which is just as hard to come by.
I did not expect a week-long residency in a foreign plane to
bring me so much inspiration. But with Hong Kong in a turbulent and
unstable state since June 2019 to now, being able to leave that space
and breathe a different kind of air released the desire to create that had
been suppressed for so long, allowing it to run freely, unbridled.
Rebecca Wong is a graduate of the Hong
Kong Academy for Performing Arts. Her
choreography and performances question
stereotypes from a female perspective.
At times provocative, her works evoke a
revaluation of attitudes by and towards
women, body, and desires—especially sex.
As a dance artist, Wong seeks to enrich her
choreography through the contemplation
of social issues. She anticipates creating
more works from the perspective of women
who question traditional Asian mindsets.
Her major works included When Time
Limps, Woman.Body, 19841012 and Nook,
and she has performed in many countries,
including Iceland, Japan, Korea, Malaysia,
Singapore and China.
55

Bird-watching / (2018) by Rebecca Wong.
All photos by William Muirhead

@ whereismysapo
Ashley Ho
Ashley Ho was one of 8 presenters in SCOPE#9 that took place on 12–13 September.
SCOPE#9 was conducted on Zoom, and convened by Shawn Chua. Using her attempt
to document the slow disappearance of her soap on Instagram as an entry point, Ashley
shared her artistic interest-obsession with document(ation)/ing and how it may construct
and constitute experience. This article is a document of Ashley’s thoughts and
reflections post-presentation.

@whereismysapo
@whereismysapo (24052020 – 04082020)
Screenshots from @whereismysapo Instagram account.
All photos by Ashley Ho
how have you been since we exited the
meeting? we parted quickly and did not find
each other again. thank you for being there
with me. i felt quite vulnerable scrolling
through my calendar, to-do lists, scores,
indecision charts. it was a bit too much,
wasn’t it?
58

FUSE #5
you witnessed—shakily, pixelated, lagging—the last image of this bar of
soap being uploaded on instagram, more than a month overdue. overdue
by whose expectations, since no one was awaiting its arrival? for whom
am i documenting—who am i documenting? which parts of me, which of
you, of us together?
is it strange that clicking «post» in your (online, zoom-rectangular) presence
implicated you into the gesture’s/the soap/the ig-account’s memory?
Illustrations by Ashley Ho
AM I LIVING FULLY?
FULLY? AM I LIVING FU
FULLY? AM I LIVING F
LIVING FULLY? AM I LIV
I LIVING FULLY? AM I
AM I LIVING FULLY?
FULLY? AM I LIVING F
THAT A THING A PER
SELF […] WHO CAN I
THE ONE WHO CAN
AND FANTASTIC IMA
this is one of the ways in which i documented the hour. how did you?
59

@whereismysapo
perhaps you were perturbed by
the obsessiveness with which
my documents attempt to capture
living. don’t worry, i think. do
not pity me for marking the passing
and holding of time.
i am paying tribute to the things
we do within the frame of chronometric
time—call family, emails!!!,
market, look for sara. the colour
blocks on my calendar are so
present because inscription
attributes and recognises value
in the things some may find unworthy
of documenting. when i
record an occasion in retrospect,
i am honouring that time dedicated
to the doing of a single thing.
do not worry! i only do the things
i truly desire spending time with.
to look at something and give it a
name is to say i want to place you
in the family of things. you have existed
i have witnessed you i have
lived with, within, and through you;
thank you for your time.
AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING
LLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING
FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I
VING FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM
LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY?
AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING FULLY? AM I LIVING
ULLY? WHAT IS WHOLENESS CAN U BE UNWHOLE IS
SON CAN BE OR R U A “SPLIT AND CONTRADICTORY
INTERROGATE POSITIONINGS AND BE ACCOUNTABLE,
CONSTRUCT AND JOIN RATIONAL CONVERSATIONS
GININGS THAT CHANGE HISTORY” (HARAWAY 586)
will you spend some time with me?
60

FUSE #5
shortlist of a long list of what the document could be
i currently (!) understand document-ing as the (dis/)ordering of
collected material—non-exhaustively: corporeal movement, verbal
language, image, sound…—and placing it within a context it may be
found.
[the document as then
[the document as now
[the document as you want to remember it to be
[the document as journalism & mis-journalism
[the document as mediation
[the document as intervention/everyday resistance
[the document as accountability/transparency/disclosure ≠ vulnerability
[the doxument as apparatus of capture (Deleuze & Guattari 424–473)
[the document as pact
[the document as typo
[the document as love letter
[the document as performance
[the document as performative afterlife
[the document as score
[the document as research presentation
[the document as context(ualisation)
[the document as mine
[the document as rework
[the document as {the space between u & me}
[the document as {the space we share}
[the document as veil
[the document as scenography
[the document as publicity/funding application material
[the document as merchandise
[the document as legitimacy/justification/phantom professionalisation/
academic aspiration/chop
[the document as body, as living-breathing thing
[the document as literally a month-old receipt can you just throw your shit
away already and don’t leave it lying around
[the document as (auto)biography
[the document as multi-plicity/-dimensionality/-plication of presence
[the document as speculative fiction
[the document as virtual background
[the document as education system
[the document as linguistic corpus
[the document as information
[the document as heritage #unesco
[the document as eulogy
[the document as cadaver
[the document as becoming—______(Deleuze & Guattari 237)
[the document as exhibitionist manifestation
[the document-ing as ritual
[the document as altar
[the document as grass patch through which we chart our desire paths
61

@whereismysapo
“What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so
persistently to my task, if I were not preparing—with a rather shaky hand—a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can
move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and
deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not
the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our
bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.” (Foucault 17)
i’ve been thinking more about the interactions
amongst:
L E G I B I L I T Y
I N T I M A C Y
within and through the document. in caring about the
relationship between performance and the people
who experience it, i am curious about the relationship
between legibility and intimacy in the movement
of document-ing. i write “movement” because
document-ing seems to be comprised of gestures
that perform its desire (how, to what extent, and by
whom) to be read. this places into frame performed
and perceived legibility, as well as various modes of
experiencing distance.
Image by Ashley Ho
62

FUSE #5
in the coming months, i will be tracing the movement of the document
through two paths of inquiry, within two bodies of work:
i. b-sides of smudging series
, which explores the
processes of translation
between document-ing as (a)
inscribing creative process
and (b) performance. i will be
creating “b-sides“ of a series
of performances through
reverse-engineering, based
on the documents generated
through their initial creative
processes. these documents
embody scores through
which the performances
recreate themselves.
i am curious about the
translation processes
between the human
performers on both sides,
and between various
mediums of document-ing
and performing documents.
how can different modes
of document-ing be
read? how is corporeality
experienced? how does
performative afterliving play
with the delineations between
“product”/“by-product”?
ii. collaborative work with Domenik
Naue
, a perspective that focuses on the dual
object-subjectification of document-ing
within a collective world(s)-building
process.
// the document is object through our
intentionality of employing it to inscribe
process and to communicate within
collaborative processes. where is
the document’s place in collaborative
intimacy? how do we relate to privacy
in the assemblage of life-documents
as practice? how (much) are we
documenting to each other? how do
we navigate authorship within co-documenting?
// in our work, the document is subjectified
as a performing being through
which experiences/material are
archived (i.e. as libretto, as scenography).
how does a performing document
shape the experience of intimacy
amongst performing and spectating
agents? does disclosure of these
documents help you read us better? do
they make you feel closer to us?
what is the document’s position within
production? what is its relationship with
the sustainability of artmaking processes
and conceptions of “value”, “waste”,
and legitimacy?
63

@whereismysapo
Screenshot provided by Ashley Ho
i hope this is not excessive. i’d love to
hear from you, because it’d felt so silent
then, the zoom-muteness. leaving the
meeting into empty-room sound, i felt
quite hollow and mad! at myself for
rambling on, and not having created the
conditions for a porous-enough space.
i wonder how this document converses
with the rest of this publication.
References
Deleuze, Gilles, Félix Guattari, and Brian Massumi. A Thousan
Plateaus. Athlone, 1992. Print.
Foucault, Michel. “Introduction.” The Archaeology of Knowledge
and The Discourse on Language. Vintage, 2010. Print.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 2015. Print.
Ashley Ho (b. 1999) is a Singaporean
artist who works from the perspective of
movement. Her work spans performance,
making, and writing, and is presently
preoccupied with archival, martial arts,
and technologies of caring. A recipient
of the National Arts Council Scholarship
2018, she is a Dancer/Maker undergraduate
at ArtEZ University of the Arts in the
Netherlands. She hopes to make the kind
of work she wants to experience.
64

Choreography
Theory—
Seven Fragments
From April till June 2020 Dance Nucleus convened a reading group that met once a fortnight
over the Zoom platform to discuss a selection of readings related to contemporary
performance and dance. The readings were selected and co-facilitated by Daniel Kok
for the months of April and May, with assistance from Pat Toh. Loo Zihan selected and
co-facilitated the final two sessions in June, also with assistance from Pat.

Choreography Theory—Seven Fragments
Introduction
We averaged ten to fifteen participants for each session who joined us
from Singapore and Australia. In the final two sessions, we also started
to write collaboratively on Google Docs in response to the readings
we have encountered throughout the three months. Here are seven
fragments from the document that might help to provide an idea of
how we were engaging with performance theory in the midst of social
isolation and the pandemic.
Note: Unless specifically credited, all the text that follows is collectively
written.
Zoom screenshot of reading group participants—25 July, 2020.
Screenshot provided by Loo Zihan
66

FUSE #5
Fragment 1: On Participation
Participation (in performance) is a multi-layered/multi-meaning type of
engagement in the creation of an artwork.
Participation involves (generally) effort or labour on the part of the audience
that is essential to the realisation of the artwork.
Participatory works exist in the gap between artist as creator and audience,
decentralising the artistic process, and allowing the audience
various degrees of agency to intervene in the outcome of the work.
Participation can be equal or unequal, physical or mental. It involves a
level of engagement, without which the artwork would not truly exist.
Participation also requires an examination of the intention and ethics
of the artistic offering—is the participation invited or forced, is it an
opening or a direction.
Participation is less emancipatory than it is turning out to be a new form
of (self)exploitation.
Participation has become the predominant mode of engagement and
consumption. Everyone is participating / has to participate all the time
now. (Note: FOMO—Fear of Missing Out)
Participation as free labour, generating data and content for the organiser
or owner of the infrastructure to capitalise upon.
Participation also often becomes like an end in itself— that there is
participation is often assumed to be meaningful engagement, democratisation
of power, evidence of mobilisation.
Slavoj Žižek refers to Bartleby: “I would prefer not to”… as a mode
of resistance.
Fragment 2: On Collaboration
Collaborator as the Enemy (consensus & dissensus)—this definition
was highlighted by an article I was reading recently about the two
definitions of a collaborator. Collaboration in art has always referred
to a consensus, a collaborative process that is positive, but
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Choreography Theory—Seven Fragments
‘collaborator’ in political discourse can also mean an individual that
is colluding with the enemy—“he is a collaborator, a traitor”. I found
this duplicity very fascinating.
Successful collaboration involves negotiation, conflict, and also
a letting go of the ego, or the idea of the artist as the “solo genius”.
Collaboration requires those that are involved to contribute their interests
and skills to the artwork that they are creating (hopefully with the
goal of creating something beyond what each of your individual efforts
could have achieved).
Collaboration should not be about finding the “lowest common
denominator”. However, collaboration is very much dependent on the
level of trust, relationship, belief, and ability of the artists to meet
differences of opinion with an open mind.
Collaboration is not always equal collaboration— people can
collaborate within specific roles or frameworks in the service of an
artwork, or it can be more of a 50/50 split, where there is much more
openness about who has the agency in creative decisions.
Fragment 3: On Participatory Performance, Online Events
and Post-Covid Art 1
What then, when the majority of work is now online, and the distance
grows even greater? What does participation look like now? Shannon
Jackson points to some of these ideas in her keynote Essential Service
and the Proximity of Labour (2020). In one way, the reliance on the
network plays into the hands of both neoliberal technocrats (we participate
endlessly in a series of digital pastiches, and exploit both our
own efforts and those of the artists who are usually doing this for
free) and relational aesthetics, where we are in a state of re-producing
sociality and re-negotiating the relationship of the elements through
Zoom-performances where everyone is “present” and “participating”
(because they are visible—a backdrop to the performance). And yet,
we are sitting behind a literal 4th wall of the computer screen. We are
lacking the desire to question, experiment, and engage as a means of
experiencing performance (Ranciere, 2008) because we are experiencing
Jackson’s spatial emptiness. In this instance, the distance between
the spectator and the artwork almost feels too great. We both lack
boundaries as an audience and have the most “hard-to-breach”
boundary of all. In an “experience economy” (Kunst, 2015) how do
we make this digital “experience” count for anything more meaningful
than scrolling through Instagram. How can we harness what Jackson
calls the “energetic power” of distance to bring the audience back
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FUSE #5
into the work, without mindlessly exploiting their “efforts” (Kunst). Is
it possible to bring a little of the relational back in? To bring the “joy”
back, when there is no energetic connection of a shared physical/
spatial/temporal experience?
Fragment 4: On Singularities and Counter-actualisation
Riffs on “Singularity”
• Event Horizon: The 'event horizon' is the boundary defining the
region of space around a black hole from which nothing (not
even light) can escape. In other words, the escape velocity for
an object within the event horizon exceeds the speed of light.
(Serena: read "brief history of time")
• In astrophysics, an event horizon is a boundary beyond which
events cannot affect an observer.
• The graphical notion of singularity. (In mathematics, a
singularity is a point at which a given mathematical object is
not defined, or a point where the mathematical object ceases
to be well-behaved in some particular way, such as the lack of
differentiability or analyticity.)
Singularity (Deleuze)
Singularities are the actualization of a
difference that matters difference
in the world:
“Singularities are turning points and
points of inflection: bottlenecks, knots,
foyers, and centers; points of fusion,
condensation, and boiling; points of tears
and joy, sickness and health, hope and
anxiety, ‘sensitive points’
Counter-actualise (Deleuze)
Why is every event a kind of plague,
war, wound, or death? With every event,
there is indeed the present moment of its
actualization, the moment in which the
event is embodied in a state of affairs,
an individual or a person… Sidestepping
each present, being free of limitation…
it has no other present than that of the
mobile instant, forming what must be
called the counter-actualisation.
Singularity (Lepecki)
There and then, between beatings, we
breath and take a break, we find vacuoles
and gaps, we cut grooves where we
run, dance, write, study, make love, live,
and permeate back to infiltrate and
undo their conditioning. For a moment,
life unconditioned. Or rather: life
deconditioned from all that had turned life
into a choreography of conformity. For a
moment, singularity.
Counter-actualise (Lepecki)
To seize the event and to transform
it through this seizing; to plan and
then to restart the plan into endless,
unforeseeable yet-to-comes—in the
dancer’s activation of freedom within
the choreographic plan of composition,
the political comes into the world as an
enduring movement of obstinate joy.²
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Choreography Theory—Seven Fragments
Fragment 5: On Precarity 3
I think it is important in recognising that precarity is a shared condition
(as Judith Butler says), and should not be individualised. Sometimes, in
the art world, we tend to prioritise and valorise the ideal of the artist,
of certain bodies (in dance), skills, capacities, and aesthetics. Of course
craft is always important, but we have to be careful not to end up playing
into precarity as an identity.
How do we resist ascribing to individualised self-development (eg.
securing a position as a recognised dance artist to survive in neoliberal
capitalism) to make ourselves less precarious? How does precarity shift
from individual identity(-making) at the expense of others to become
something relational with space to shift? In our processes of performance
training and making, how can we work towards establishing “bonds that
sustain us, a conception of ethical obligation that is grounded in precarity,
our common non-foundation” (Judith Butler)? And to still be clear that
“[w]e are different in our common precariousness. Not every precarious
body is the same, but it is always relational to others because it is
precarious, vulnerable, and mortal” (Isabell Lorey), not a flattening out.
Perhaps we might look towards emerging movements of protests
and mutual aid networks as one potential method of collective resistance
and refusal. Are these movements sustainable in the long term
though, and how?
Fragment 6: On Joyful Resistance 4
For this exercise I was more interested in reflecting on the notions
and forms of resistances that the readings point to. Resistance is
often framed as a heavy, weighty thing… in a neoliberal world where
performance and productivity is prized, resistance looks like drawing
boundaries and saying very seriously 'no' or 'enough is enough':
it may sometimes be ethically and politically necessary for a
dancer to refuse to give him- or herself to view. (Lepecki, p. 11)
[Fred] Moten defined “nonperformance” as being not really about
a mere refusal to perform, but a qualified, highly strategic, and
highly political refusal to perform under the normative (ir)rationalities
that condition and impose their own(i)logics as the only
possible/permissible/acceptable ones under which performances
can take place, are allowed to take place, and in taking place, are
validated as being (the only) valid performances. (Lepecki, p. 14)
70

FUSE #5
And maybe this is just my own hang-up, but I find myself constantly
circling back to this question—why does resistance need to be serious
and solemn?
I think of how André Lepecki ends his introduction with that
cheeky note about epigraphs, and I am reminded of how, in resisting
and finding ways to resist, it’s important to me to balance between
weight and lightness (would highly recommend Italo Calvino’s 6
Memos if people haven’t encountered that yet!), and playing with ‘fun’/
joyful/energising ways of resistances*. How do we expand notions of
resistance and what 'showing up' can look like? What are my ways
of ‘showing up’ as a person and as a practitioner, but also how do I
support other people to ‘show up 5 ’ in their own unique ways? How do
we grow thriving networks of resistances?
*Aug 2020 addendum: I have since started reading Pleasure Activism:
The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown, and am finding
it an exciting read in relation to these threads!
Fragment 7: On the Politicality of Knowledge 6
To consider: What is the politicality of a reading group? Is this part of
our praxis?
• Representational—the choice of content
• what we read, tying to specific politics, neoliberalism,
precarity, social reproduction, self-exploitation, relational /
anti-relational
• Citational practices—who is being cited?
• Are they inserting themselves into the discipline?—
A said this and B said this, and this is what A and B
said together.
• Upending disciplinary conversation?—A said this but
B said this, and B counters A and I think A and B are
both wrong because of Y.
• Denaturalizing knowledge production?—interrogating
how knowledge / language / grammar is being pieced
together, revolution against knowledge and legitimacy
(analogy, thinking in a different language)
71

Choreography Theory—Seven Fragments
• Medium of the text? Materiality of text and discursive dispositifs
(institutional, physical, and administrative mechanisms and
knowledge structures which enhance and maintain the exercise
of power within the social body)
• Who are we reading this alongside?
• Who do we pick to counter or support this argument?
• How does it fit into the larger conversation around the
artform, discipline etc?
• Theory as a dispositif—how is it disciplining us into
the language of art? Where are these knowledge centers
located?
• How we conduct this reading group:
• Hierarchy of relations. How are these sessions facilitated?
• How does the infrastructure of Zoom foreclose or expand
certain possibilities? How can we challenge the infrastructure
of Zoom and what are the limitations?
• What are the power imbalances that exist within this group
itself? How can we actively be conscious of this imbalance
and find ways to counter the tendency to lapse into default
patterns of learning/ doing?
• Durational endurance—returning and revision—beyond an
event, reading as a practice.
How to avoid a linear-causal relationship to the above points? Is there a
way of thinking about it as entangled and inter-relational? One nested
and imbricated by another? How can we collectively think about restructuring
this reading group—and in this restructuring perform the praxis
that we are interrogating in the texts we engage with? How do we shift
the weight of our words?
Notes
1. This fragment is an excerpt from a reflection penned by Serena Chalker who was
joining us from Perth, Australia.
2. This conceptual breakdown was compiled by Tay Ining.
3. This fragment is excerpted from a reflection penned by Sonia Kwek.
4. This fragment is excerpted from a reflection penned by Chong Gua Khee.
5. Gua Khee added a link to this site: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-tobe-an-activist-when-youre-unable-to-attend-protests
6. This fragment is excerpted from a reflection penned by Loo Zihan.
72

On Kitsch
Sheryll Goh and Rachael Cheong
AWKWARD PARTY (Sheryll Goh and Rachael Cheong) was one of 16 artists / projects
that participated in our Micro-Residencies, where each project was given resources
to develop ongoing artistic research and creation from April to June 2020. In 'On
Kitsch', Sheryll and Rachael share critical reflections and findings gathered from their
Micro-Residency, which was spent dissecting case studies of kitsch to distill a criteria
of what makes a successful piece of kitsch. These research findings will be featured
at CIRCUIT in January 2021, an exhibition of material accumulated from each artist /
project in the Micro-Residencies, and will culminate in the presentation of AWKWARD
PARTY’s third iteration Reunion Dinner.

On Kitsch
We love to hate kitsch
1. 2.
We also hate that we love kitsch,
"Omg".
"OMG!!"
But why? This simple question piqued a curiosity,
which blossomed into a fascination and before long, an obsession.
Chapter 1: Pretty Ugly?
Kitsch. It looks and feels cheap, almost as if it was
churned out without much thought to ride on the
coattails of a dying fad. Eagar to please, it is always
agreeable and unashamed of leeching onto sentimentality
for that instant connection with the onlooker.
3.
It may be tempting to write off kitsch as having
superficial appeal: a clumsy caricature of the motifs
that move us. But every passing remark, chuckle
and (dare we say) double-take inspired by the
kitsch around us says otherwise.
4.
• Trying really hard to imitate an iconic motif (the luxury of tulips hark back to
Tulipmania of the 17th century, water droplets to indicate freshness and the
luxury of being able to have it imported whilst fresh earnest
• Attempt(s) to be alluring or to appeal to sentiment coy
• In fact, trying so hard to appeal to us that it seems as if it’s trying to
fool us cunning
The earnest, coy and cunning nature of kitsch that draws us in are the same qualities we
desire in art.
74

FUSE #5
Chapter 2: Memento Mori
Relic Ruin.
The average adult Singaporean of today
is familiar with kitsch. From birthday
cake toppers that bastardise yesterday’s
cartoons to mother’s latest craft obsession
and festive public displays designed
as photo opportunities, we have been
bombarded by kitsch throughout our
formative years. Naturally, kitsch informs
our earliest palates and preferences.
While most of us have moved on in
terms of taste, the impact kitsch has
on us remains. When encountering a
piece of contemporary kitsch, we may
be overwhelmed by the instinctive abhorrence
that washes over us. But on
closer inspection, we may find that on the
brazen cashmere coat of loathing lies a
stray hair—a sliver of nostalgia that harks
back to our childhood. This may be the
root of our ironic appreciation of kitsch.
But with kitsch permeating so many aspects
of our daily lives, how often do we
observe our reactions to it or the influence
it has on us?
1. The transition from anime to collectible
figurine is a good quality one, because
the nerds are actually particular about
the details and how accurate it looks
from the anime. From an adult point of
view, we want the fantasy to be as on
point as possible.
2. When the anime transitions into mass
commercial doll for kids, it's a totally
different endeavour. Proportions are
whack, the hair is styled badly and the
face looks kind of deformed. It's about
bringing half the fantasy for children,
as they're not as particular about details,
but rather are more concerned
about the symbolism of the doll.
Owning what is marketed to them as
"sailor moon" makes the deformed doll
a desirable item. The other half of the
fantasy can easily be completed with a
child's imagination.
75

On Kitsch
Chapter 3: Adulteration
In 2020, AWKWARD PARTY took up a research residency with Dance Nucleus
to reverse engineer and distil the characteristics that make an object kitsch.
Using their findings, they have reimagined commonplace objects to evoke the pure
love-hate response that quality kitsch has on us.
5.
Children stickers
Restaurant signboards
6.
Moving image wall art.
Visit CIRCUIT#1 website for the full experience.
Tying their research back to where their fascination first began, AWKWARD PARTY will
also be creating an experiential installation inspired by the family communal dining
experience in Singapore.
76

FUSE #5
The third iteration Reunion Dinner unpacks what happens at the scene of the dining
table, when people can (hopefully) come together to celebrate new beginnings. Reunion
Dinner is an observation and kitschification of the tangible objects that make up the
traditional Singaporean communal dining experience that we hold dear. We imagine
audiences entering an exhibition space that appears to have been taken over by a
quintessential hawker stall. With an iconic tze-char dining table taking the spotlight,
the stage is set for a reunion dinner to begin. However, a double-take will reveal
that in place of familiar cutlery and crockery are tongue-in cheek versions created by
AWKWARD PARTY, each object embodying functionality with a twist.
11.
11.
9.
8.
12.
10.
7.
12.
For updates on Reunion Dinner and other awkwardness, visit awkwardparty.club.
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On Kitsch
References
1. Mini Mansions—Monk Album cover art, 2011
2. Untitled. (n.d.). Singing in American Accent, from https://singinginamerican
accent.tumblr.com/post/58272306791
3. Starry Eyed Anime GIF. (n.d.). Tenor. From https://tenor.com/search/
starry-eyed-anime-gifs
4. Special For You Cake Box. Google. Source unknown
5. Meat Girl, visual identity sample by AWKWARD PARTY, 2020
6. Waterfall, visual identity sample by AWKWARD PARTY, 2020
7. When Dad first met Mom’s family, Chin Chin restaurant, 1987. Photo courtesy
of Sheryll Goh
8. Back home after 4 years, CNY family reunion lunch, 2017. Photo courtesy of
Sheryll Goh
9. Golden Dragon Fish , by Chef Li Hui from www.instagram.com/p/
CBk8ydjnaAy/
10. Jin Pai Tze Char menu, Bukit Merah, Alexandra Village Food Centre. From https://
www.facebook.com/Jin-Pai-Zi-Char-Restaurant-100507848026788/
11. Quintessential Tze Char stall order counter. Source unknown
12. Visual identity sample by AWKWARD PARTY, 2020
Proudly presented by Fashion Designer
Rachael Cheong and Visual Artist Sheryll
Goh, AWKWARD PARTY is a social gathering
for the awkward / an instigation of
all things awkward / the world as seen
through awkwardly shaped glasses.
The Party is caught between its fascination
with bad taste and a desire to put
forth quality work validated by social
norms. It investigates notions of awkwardness
through parodies of cultural kitsch
that is evocative of nostalgic family gatherings
and festive celebrations. The Party
embraces discomfort and never takes itself
too seriously. Always evolving, at times it
is a hybrid object, a research essay, a
reluctant group of people, or a sentimental
environment.
78

Projections,
Paper Dolls, and
Effigies
Jereh Leung
Jereh Leung was one of 16 projects that participated in our Micro-Residencies, a programme
that Dance Nucleus launched as a quick-response COVID-19 Initiative. Here,
Jereh reflects on his childhood memories connected with the project he developed
during the Micro-Residency. Materials he accumulated during the programme will be
part of a virtual exhibition featuring documentation from all Micro-Residency projects,
which is slated to happen in January 2021.

Projections, Paper Dolls, and Effigies
When I was young, one of the activities I did was to match clothes to
paper dolls. A bit like putting on clothes for Barbie but instead of a 3D
doll, it was 2D and perhaps less incriminating for a young boy to play
with. It was also more fun because I had to cut out the figures precisely,
following dotted lines; making, instead of merely playing, fashion.
I find multiple artistic interests of mine embodied in this childhood
memory of paper dolls. I am interested in de-objectifying the body,
teasing out collective consciousness, poking at the subconscious,
inventing strategies to subvert patriarchy, and personally confronting
what it means to understand the feminine and all that it entails.
My time in the Micro-Residency programme was spent developing
a video work and bespoke book of paper dolls based on Maggie
Cheung’s character in Wong Kar Wai’s film In the Mood for Love (2000).
It is both a confession and autobiography (at least of the first few
chapters of my life). I thought being honest is the best way to honour
oneself as well as respecting the people who are involved in my work.
There is something about projecting one’s desires, sense and
imagination onto a paper doll. While a paper doll is essentially an
object it could, with time, acquire “body” and cease to be an object
but a subject that one interacts with and responds to. Reflecting on
my own works as paper dolls, how do I enable people to come into
my world? In what ways can my works cease being sheer product and
entail ephemerality and connection?
Perhaps the most important question to consider is what are the
kinds of tools needed to build a person’s investment in the performance.
I propose an analogy of making a paper doll for us to think this through:
1. Someone has to draw the doll.
2. Design the hairstyles, accessories and pets
3. Draw out the dotted outlines
4. Design efficient layout so that one can cut the figures properly
5. Choose the right type of paper that is hard enough for the
doll not to be flimsy and yet not that hard that it’s tedious
to use a scissors
After these steps are completed, we now observe the steps in making
a paper doll
A. Choose the doll to cut
B. Choose the relevant hairstyles and accessories.
C. Cut out properly the different pieces
D. Assemble the pieces together.
E. Invent stories to envision and make the doll come alive
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FUSE #5
Step E is closest to the idea of projection that I am interested in. I
cannot remember clearly whether I thought I was the doll or sophisticated
enough to clearly identify instances of role play, but it is clear
that I was superimposing my own aesthetics and experience onto the
doll. The doll becomes part me part doll, allowing me to perform, and
engage in fantasies of, a different gender. I wonder when I stopped
playing with paper dolls. It was irrevocably related to social expectations
of gender performance. And hence linking to my interest in
the subversion of patriarchal systems. Thus the de-objectifying of
the body.
As a child, I also participated in my mother’s rituals and practices,
watching her burn effigies (eerily looking like gingerbread men) or go
to mediums to smack effigies with clogs. These effigies too were a kind
of paper doll on which someone projected hopes, desires, anger.
The whole process was theatrical, involving a whole suit of analogue
gizmos and gadgets. The effigies were made of thin pieces of
rice paper, brightly coloured. There was the chanting by the medium
that rhymed and able to match the best Shakespearean thespian.
Smoke and incense triggered and overloaded the senses. And to top it
all, the final moment when fire comes into play: we’d flick the effigy into
the fire and watch it burn and dissolve into tinder ashes.
In my project, my body is the “paper doll”. So what are my accessories,
what do I dress in? Here, I have been working on invoking
emotions from past experiences or absorbing emotions from actresses
in movies I watch. I am still in the process of deciphering the methods
but it essentially involves forgetting oneself and letting the other
image seep into the body, very much like the temple mediums who
are possessed by spirits that they have called upon. The images of
actresses and my observations of their behaviour serve as a textbook
for me. The fun part is when there is not enough information for me
to totally copy from or my memory fails. The me will slip into the role
of the actress and merge with it, creating a whole new entity that is
neither me nor the actress.
However, my body still belongs to the male gender. How long will
it take for audience to forget my body and drift into believing the essence
that is projected upon it? When will they think I am performing,
when I am being myself, or even being a new me when allowed to do
so? Would people be able to project their own stories upon me? How
many times have they burnt up their own personalities so as to put on
characters that have been prescribed by others and society?
And now, with my eyes closed, I can see myself looking at the bin
of fire, flickering in the wind as I throw the paper dolls and see them
crumble into ashes. What’s left is a smoldering pit glowing. I stand
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Projections, Paper Dolls, and Effigies
there silently awaiting the phoenix to appear, and then hearing the
Weather girls sing “It’s raining men”. Hallelujah!
Jereh Leung’s work constantly evaluates
and redefines subverting patriarchal views.
By merging different mediums (body, sculpture
and sound), he creates landscapes that
require a dedication of time and seeks to
place viscerality as the central “vehicle of
meaning”. Combining strategies of tapping
into iconic filmic tropes and surrealism, he
looks into the politics of negotiating the
authenticity of personal memories, interpretation
and social construct. Trained in
SEAD (Salzburg) and NAFA (Singapore), he
has worked with Singaporean artists Bani
Haykal, Choy Ka Fai, Daniel Kok, Eng Kai
Er, Loo Zihan, Looi Wan Ping, Tang Ling
Nah, Ah Hock and Peng Yu, DramaBox,
Frontier Danceland, TheatreWorks and
The Necessary Stage; internationally with
Isabelle Schad (DE), Xavier Le Roy (FR/DE),
Alexandra Pirici (ROU), Oleg Soulimenko
(AT/RUS), Matej Kejzar (BE/SI), Noa Zuk
(IL), Ole Khamchanla (FR) and Wallie
Wolfgruber (USA).
82

Paper Doll cutouts by Jereh Leung

Paper Doll cutouts by Jereh Leung

Paper Doll cutouts by Jereh Leung

Finding Soultari’s
Lenggang: Walking
Otherwise
Soultari Amin Farid
This article by Soultari Amin Farid is part of a compendium that accompanied his work,
Pok!, that was presented in dans festival 2020’s Failing the Dance: A Double Bill of
Lecture-Performances. In Pok!, Amin attempts to find his own lenggang, a stylistic
walk-like movement with strict gendered codes of performance in Malay dance. In the
process, he confronts the term ‘bapok’—used both as derogatory word and a term
of endearment for an effeminate Malay man. This article consists of Amin’s critical reflections
and notes accumulated from his collaborative research and creation process
with Nirmala Seshadri. It is accompanied by a shorter write-up about Malay music/
dance genres, Quirky Facts about Malay Dance in Singapore.

Finding Soultari’s Lenggang: Walking Otherwise
“There are only a few reasons for your mediocre performance, Amin!
It is either you are wrong, you forgot or you don’t know. Which one
was it?”
Those were the words I received from a dance senior about my performance
of the Serampang Dua Belas that afternoon of 2012. 1 I pondered
upon his words and reflected on my performance after a video recording
of it was made accessible to me. I admit I made a mistake or two. One
obvious mistake was when I was supposed to complement my dance
partner in a movement phrase that involved a series of crossing steps
and manoeuvring in a square floor pattern. In that slight moment of
forgetting, a sudden looking back to “check” my partner and an abrupt
change of movements, was an jarring mis-step. In the recording itself, I
could hear a an audible “boo!” to suggest that I was not merely dancing
in the presence of a lay audience but quite an informed one.
Serampang Dua Belas is ultimately a partnered dance between
a male and female dancer. Structured as twelve segments arranged
progressively to denote a couple getting to know each other and
eventually to consummate their marriage, the dance’s strict gendered
roles thus served an important purpose for narrating the courtship
between a man and a woman. 2
With this in mind, any misdemeanour in the enactment of gender,
could be regarded as a transgression of the dance’s true intent.
Another mistake that was pointed out to me regarding my performance
that day was how my hips were moving too much. Unlike the
female dancer, whose hip movements are most prized and expected,
the male dancer’s role is akin to that of a warrior, hence any motion
of the hips is rendered unacceptable—even perceived as if the male
dancer is embodying the female character.
Throughout my artistic journey, my struggle with gendered performance
continues to shape my practice. It became a preoccupation
because of the “middle ground” that I believe I stand on: my natural
embodied affinity to the “female” movements and the pedantic learning
of the “male” movement in my formal training of Malay dance. In
addition due to the close-knit community of Malay dance practitioners,
the knowing of the who’s who in the circle and the genealogical baggage
that comes from years of kindred practice of the form, have
fostered quite a rigid understanding about the do’s and don’ts of
gender in performance. Thus a mistake in a public performance where
practitioners are present, is inevitably regarded as faux pas to the
community—especially when it is expected for an experienced dancer
such as myself to have had the repertoire embedded within my limbs
and joints.
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FUSE #5
The Lenggang as the Gendered Walk of
the Malay Archipelago 3
The Malay archipelago, or addressed at times as the Malay World or the
Nusantara, refers to the Malay communities living in various parts of
maritime Southeast Asia which today are the modern nation states of
Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, Southern Thailand
and Southern Philippines. 4 Other than sharing similar linguistic conventions
and connected historically, these communities share kindred
traditions, beliefs and practices which include music and dance heritages.
Practitioners of “Malay” dance in these communities would attest
to the kindred affinity of some of the music/dance folk genres, sharing
similar repertoires and structures. However, in the same vein, they would
emphasize how different their practice of these forms are. Some of the
similar folk music/dance genres are the Asli, Inang, Joget and Zapin. 5
This is very much reflected in the Lenggang which is a typical
movement phrase within the folk music/dance genres. There is no
direct translation for the Lenggang and to term it as merely a “walk”
does it little justice. I see it as a compound movement of various body
parts and the execution of a particular technique is dependent on
a dancer’s gender. Hence, I have chosen to define it as a walk-like
contralateral motion which involves the swinging of the arms, lifting
of the feet and the regulated swaying of the hips. 6 For easy reference,
one may consider it as a walk but done in a stylistic manner, i.e. with
aesthetics that are characteristic of what is regarded as “Malay” which
I will attempt to unpack.
Peribahasa or the Malay proverb provides an encompassing idea
to this concept of performing the walk. The beginning stance of the
Lenggang which requires one to bend his/her knees, could be regarded
as an embodiment of a ripened paddy which symbolises humility.
The proverb, “follow the example of the paddy, as it ripens it bends.
Never be the lalang which flutters from one side to the other, following
the direction of the wind” provides us with a cautionary tale that compares
one element to another. The paddy is of course most valuable
to village folks for rice is a staple food in the most communities in the
region. Thus it is held at high regard and featured as an important
imagery of humility translated through the body with bended knees
(as opposed to straighten knees) and the upper torso slightly inclined
forward, condong ke depan. 7
Another peribahasa, “the ground one treads on, there the skies
one must lift”, is the Malay equivalent for the classic saying “in Rome,
do what the Romans do”, which is a reminder to respect the practice
and traditions of the place one has chosen to live in. 8 The peribahasa’s
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Finding Soultari’s Lenggang: Walking Otherwise
focus on the bumi (ground/earth) and the langit (skies) acknowledges
the importance of land and environment in Malay culture. Thus the
stepping motion of the Lenggang pays homage to the land by treading
gently on it rather than to hit one’s foot onto the ground In fact any
sounds of stomping would get a reaction of disapproval from teachers
and the oft-heard, “macam gajah” (like an elephant).Hence an engagement
of one’s core is important so that there is control and awareness
of how the feet engage with the earth.
As a dance anthropologist, I have had the opportunity to travel
to different Malay communities and I have observed that depending on
the land one lives in, people walk differently. The Nusantara although
at times regarded as a monolith, is richly diverse. My curiosity for
how the Lenggang is performed has brought me to different parts
of Sumatra, Indonesia, in which pockets of Malay communities live in
different provinces such as North Sumatra, Riau (Inland), Riau Islands
and Palembang, wherein differing circumstances would provide varying
context to how the Lenggang differs provincially. In addition, my
time in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, also provided me with the insight of
how there is more of an attempt to homogenise the Lenggang.
In these locales, I participated in the training and observed how
the male and female Lenggang are executed. Using my embodied
training as a Malay dancer in Singapore as reference, I was able to
discern how the national/regional Lenggang are different.
In Medan, North Sumatra, for example, the male Lenggang is
executed like a marching warrior, with hands clenched and rather
than swinging, the arms are moving up and down. In addition, the
torso is upright to look dignified. In Malaysia, one of the codified male
Lenggang is called the serang (attack) and tepis (fend) which involve
palms facing downwards with extended fingers that when it is swinging
forward gives the impression of attacking and backwards as if
fending. It is clear that the image of the male dancer as warrior and
defender is embodied in both the styles.
The female Lenggang in the Nusantara is equally perceptive. Most
Sumatran communities would have their female Lenggang executed
with arms to the side moving up and down, with fingers articulated.
This is to give an impression of a demure woman that is delicate and
soft. If there is a difference, informants in Riau have shared that the
Lenggang there has a subtle buoyant quality to appear as if floating
which involves the body moving up and down. They have attributed
this to how the Malays there live near the sea thus imitating the motion
of the sea. One version of the female Malaysian Lenggang is called the
lambung angin (heaving winds). This would involve the articulating of
the wrists, rotated inwards to give the impression of winds in motion.
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Pok! video stills by Charmaine Poh

FUSE #5
For this version the curvilinear trajectory of the movement coupled by
the moving of hips provide a distinct style that is not seen in other
“nationalistic” styles.
In Singapore, the homogenisation of the Lenggang is partly due
to the close-knit circle of practitioners, most of whom with a genealogy
that can be traced back to the founding of persatuan-persatuan
or arts organisations established in the 1950s namely Sriwana and
Perkumpulan Seni, which are two artistic entities that are still actively
promoting Malay dance today. 9 Early dance practitioners of these groups
would have had intersecting experiences in artistic collaborations and
also as pioneering members of the national dance troupes such as the
People’s Association Cultural Troupe (est. 1965) and the National Dance
Company (est. 1970).
As a practitioner who began dancing with Perkumpulan Seni in
2000, a cursory standardised Lenggang was already in place. The
Singapore Lenggang is usually executed with arms swinging forward,
initiated from the wrists. The difference between the Lenggang of both
genders could be seen in the manner in how it is executed. The male
Lenggang usually swung forward higher to the level of the shoulder, feet
lifted higher and fingers less articulated. The female Lenggang would
have more limits imposed as compared to her male counterpart: the
swinging less forceful and not high to a point where her armpits are
exposed and the feet not lifted high to a point her calves are revealed.
As explained earlier in this paper, the motion of her hips are expected. 10
When I first started learning the Lenggang, I recalled my Guru
correcting my stances and my techniques a lot when I was performing
the Lenggang. He explained that as a male dancer, I should not have
my feet too close to each other and also for my elbows to be turned
outward so that my arms can swing wider. He taught me that the male
dancer is a man who looks at his female partner as if mesmerised by her
sheer beauty thus he cannot be as bashful as her but forward about his
advances. He must be able to attract her with his manliness and skill for
the martial arts. In other words, the male dancer is and can never be the
female because each as a role to play in this story of love.
He advised me firmly one day, whilst I was teaching my female
counterparts on how to perform their Lenggang, that I should not be
instructing them to do what comes natural to them as women. He added
that for someone like me who is effeminate, it will be a great disservice,
especially since I should be more concerned about performing the male
technique properly.
It is expected that I must embody my rightful demeanour as man, a
warrior, a charmer and one half of a blissful union.
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Finding Soultari’s Lenggang: Walking Otherwise
Faux Pas, Corrections, Disappointments:
Recipe for Failing the Dance
The necessity to find Soultari’s Lenggang is not a desire for a
well-crafted “walk” that is distinct and identifiable. In fact, the answer
here is very much in the finding which implies that it will never be
a finished venture but continues to be something that could and
should never be defined, always in a state of flu. Hence one must
have comfort in such a state of uncertainty—a positionality that I
have ironically found a gradual sense of equilibrium despite being
on shaky ground.
Through the process of finding, I realise the capacity of my
body to take on several roles, techniques and capabilities. Feminist
theorist, Elizabeth Grosz, understood this fluidity of our corporeality
when she affirms “bodies are not inert; they function interactively
and productively. They act and react. They generate what is new,
surprising, unpredictable”(xi). My body’s inability to conform has
rendered it a site of contestation for my community to label, argue
and debate; to be subjected to corporeal corrections; to be a source
of disappointment to those who expect better of me; and most importantly,
a triggering point for transgressing social norms. These
I take on board, at first with much duress, now with a sense of an
empowerment that I am able to walk otherwise. The ability to walk
otherwise hence also implies a sense of choice, the recognition that I
may choose as and when I want to walk with the “rest” or differently.
I walk otherwise with due diligence and respect for history,
archipelagic affinity and deep relation to the ecology that have facilitated
the construction of my persona without me realising it in the
first place. The new, surprising and unpredictable as Grosz exclaims
are in the acknowledgement that the body traverses different active
modes of performativity and accumulates embodied capital. Thus,
the body should always be in the pursuit of unexpected circumstances
rather than confined to certain predictable moulds.
The implication that I have failed the dance could now be understood
as I am failing the dance. The former sets me up as someone
who has not met the standards of the dance and the latter proposes
the idea that to concur about our corporeality’s inherent state of
flux, one must indeed give dance the “fail” grade. This is to say that
due to the dance’s rigid structures i.e. the Malay dance, there is
no room for alternative and divergent states of performance, thus
in imposing a “fail”, the non-conforming may realise and maximise
their potentialities.
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FUSE #5
Notes
1. I write this article as a reflection of my work entitled, “Pok!” which I have been
working as an associate member of Dance Nucleus for the past 2 years. The
article is also part of the compendium for “Failing the Dance: Double-Bill of
Lecture-Performances” commissioned by Esplanade Theatres on the Bay’s
annual programme, da:nsfest, premiered online on 21 October 2020.
2. I have written extensively about this repertoire as part of my Masters research.
Read Mohd Farid, “Serampang Dua Belas”.
3. I have written elsewhere of my curiosity about Lenggang as an entry point into
cross-gender performance. Some of the criticisms about that article were the
implications that I was endorsing an unorthodox practice, lobbying lifestyles
which were not in adherence to my Islamic faith etc. I would contend here that
my argument in the main intent of that article was to acknowledge the already
present practices of cross-gender performance in the Malay world and most
importantly to also realise the versatility of our bodies. I believe that it was a
necessary action on my part as a practitioner-scholar to offer varied perspectives
in the hope that practitioners may incite critical and mature discussions
about alternative practices of gendered performance in “traditional” arts.
4. These are terminologies that continue to be contested as it is in conflict with
rising nationalism in different modern nation states. Nationalism’s penchant for
manufacturing an intra-local sense of belonging, sees translocal affinity as an
antithesis to their purpose. Practitioners have been very creative to use the discourse
of internationalism to continue this commemorating of a kindred affinity
as more governmental support is given to internationalisation efforts rather than
to support an affiliation to supra-ethnic identity.
5. Refer to the short write-up about Malay music/dance genres in the
compendium.
6. Written a week after the performance-lecture recording in September, I have
decided to incorporate “regulated swaying of the hips” because through the
process and countless times of executing the Lenggang, I have observed that
the hips played an important part in the execution of the movement technique.
7. Ikutlah resmi padi, semakin berisi semakin menunduk. Jangan jadi seperti lalang
yang melentuk ke sana ke sini apabila ditiup angin.
8. Di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung.
9. For an overview about formal training and presentation about Malay
dance in Singapore, see Mohd Farid, “Commemorating the ‘Singapore-
Medan’ Connection”.
10. In brief, the subsequent decades also saw the establishment of other national
events which provided opportunities for some individuals to embark on their
own artistic journeys. This generated a new lineage of arts groups which would
share similar practices and repertoires. Some notable names would include,
Nongchik Ghani, Naim Pani, Som Said, Salleh Buang, Idris Abdullah, Ali Sungip,
Hamim Hassan, Khusaini Hashim, to name a few. For a list of key events on
Malay dance development, please read Mohd Farid, “Flashback: Seven Decades
of Malay Dance in Singapore”.
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Finding Soultari’s Lenggang: Walking Otherwise
References
Farid, Soultari Amin. “The Lenggang as Entry into Cross-Gender Performance Research
and Practice.” Fuse #2, Dance Nucleus, 2018, pp. 52–68, https://www.yumpu.com/en/
document/view/63113303/fuse2.
Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Indiana University
Press, 1994.
Mohd Farid, Muhd Noramin. “Serampang Dua Belas: Discourses of Identity in the
Contemporary Practice of a Malay Courtship Dance in Sumatra.” Master Thesis,
Roehampton University, 2016.
Mohd Farid, Muhd Noramin. “Flashback: Seven Decades of Malay Dance in
Singapore” Esplanade Offstage, 4 Jan. 2019, https://www.esplanade.com/offstage/arts/
flashback-seven-decades-of-malay-dance-in-singapore.
Mohd Farid, Muhd Noramin. “Commemorating the ‘Singapore-Medan’ Connection:
Contradictions in Appropriating ‘Indonesian’ Repertories into The Singapore Malay
Dance Canon.” Proceedings of the 5th Symposium: The ICTM Study Group on Performing
Arts of Southeast Asia, Sabah Museum, 2019, pp.142–146.
Mohd Farid, Muhd Noramin. “Imagining Tarian Melayu in Singapore: Curating Bodies of
Malay Dance” PhD Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, Forthcoming.
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Pok! video stills by Charmaine Poh

FUSE #5
Quirky Facts about Malay Dance in Singapore
The 5 Malay music/dance genres that practitioners in Singapore practise
are Asli, Inang, Masri, Joget and Zapin which are pan-Malay folk
forms shared amongst communities of practitioners of the Malay world.
Instead of merely providing basic information about Malay dance, I write
4 quirky facts about Malay dance. Why quirky? Because these facts are
“unexpected” and not insights that are easily packaged and available for
the consumption of non-practising readers!
1. Much Ado About Taxonomies
The term “tari” which is the Malay equivalent for dance is in fact a
term that was popularised during the colonial period to fit rigid artistic
categories from the West. The Malay world is replete with indigenous
taxonomies that also describe dancing or moving specific body parts
such as tandak, igal and liok. 1
In Singapore the argument between “traditionalists'' and “innovators”
have pushed for the creation of various umbrella genres,
in particular what constitutes as tradisional (traditional); kreasi (new
creation); and kontemporari (contemporary). Tradisional is relatively
regarded as a repertoire that continues to be practised actively today
since its creation many years ago and its form “unchanged”. Kreasi
refers to the creative re-creations of the traditional form yet maintaining
elements of traditional Malay dance without crossing into the
boundaries of the “contemporary”.
The kontemporari has received much attention in the past decade
and as an active practitioner today, there have been debates on whether
kontemporari Malay dance has lost its Malay essence. Thus the need
to make it kontemporari melayu as a reminder that even in the pursuit
of contemporaneity, practitioners must always ensure that the Malay
essence remains intact. Interestingly this “essence” also includes religious
(Islamic) obligations as most Malays are Malay-Muslims.
The preoccupation with the definition of these genres has been
hotly debated throughout different generations and continue to be a
topic amongst practitioners today.
2. Collective Identities
Malay dance continues to be a practice that is dependent on a
guru-siswah (master-disciple) relationship. Students at most times are
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Finding Soultari’s Lenggang: Walking Otherwise
obligated to stay and learn from one Guru for many years and the
move from one group to another is highly frowned upon. Thus, group
identities are usually associated with a particular master teacher and
in cases when the group has existed for many years, it is associated
with a prominent dance personality.
Due to the close-knit relationship of the community, it is no
wonder when a Malay dancer describes his/her activism in Malay
dance, he/she will refer first to its group identity and then the associated
master/personality. This specific group solidarity is most obvious
when the Malay dance community at large is involved in “collaborations”.
Collaboration for the community means being involved in one
full production with each group presenting their own work and they
are all strung together by a related theme. Although they are connected,
each will try to present a work which is representative of a group’s
ethos/identity/style.
Groups that are actively participating and contributing to the
scene today include, Sriwana, Perkumpulan Seni, Sri Warisan Som
Said Performing Arts Ltd, Era Dance Theatre, Atrika Dance Company,
Ayunda Lestari, Azpirasi Dance Group, Attrians, Kirana Seni, Artiste
Seni Budaya, Dian Dancers, Variasi Performing Arts, Artistari Gentari
and Mak Mak Menari. Also there are more recent collectives founded
by artists with Malay dance background but have chosen to work on
multi-, cross-, inter-disciplinary and cultural works such as Kaizen M.D.,
P7I:SMA and Bhumi Collective. However, there are also independent
artists whose backgrounds are from these groups but have chosen to
do independent work on their own.
3. Malay Cultural Affinity
There are Malay communities living in different modern nation-states
such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, southern
parts of Thailand and Philippines. This reality has allowed for the advent
of festivals and competitions that continue to commemorate and endorse
the pan-ethnic affinity but masks this agenda within the language
of modern nationalism which calls for the internationalisation of their
local (national) arts.
Some of these festivals and competitions, which have occurred
annually for about a decade or two, are now quite a brand in the region.
These events will feature groups from these countries and would usually
present works which conform to either one of the recognised Malay
music/dance genres. One such example is Singapore’s Muara Dance
Festival and Indonesia’s Dangkong Festival held in the Riau Islands. An
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example of a prominent annual competition is the Serampang Dua Belas
competition to determine the male and female champions of this popular
dance. Dancers from the Malay world would flock to be assessed
in this competition and has become a rites of passage amongst the
Indonesian Malay community.
But not all is well in the recognition of a kindred cultural affinity.
There are “culture wars” between Malaysia and Indonesia which are
disputes by either nation state to nationally claim aspects of shared
culture such as local songs and artefacts. One recent dispute being
about claiming the Tor Tor folk dance of the Mandailing ethnic group, a
people situated mostly in Northern Sumatra and a growing community
in Malaysia, as a national heritage of Malaysia.
4. Non-Malay Contributors to Malay Dance
Although there is a tendency to associate Malay dance only as a practice
of one ethnic community, the form has had contributors and practitioners
who are non-Malay as well. In the late 1950s, the political climate in
the region and specifically in Singapore was gradually transitioning into
postcolonial circumstances that allowed for more indigenous voices
to be heard and an inter-Asian solidarity towards independence from
colonial governance.
One personality that continues to be remembered for her contributions
to the scene is Indonesian of Chinese descent, Mdm Liu
Chun Wai who is affectionately known as Ah Choon. She was firstly
invited by students of Nantah University (private Chinese Language
University—now defunct) to teach Malay dance repertoires. Her popularity
with the Chinese students and the public caught the attention
of Malay dance practitioners, most notably Nongchik Ghani who is the
founder of Sriwana.
Through him, she became a resident choreographer with Sriwana
for two years and introduced many dance repertoires which are still
practised in Sriwana and other groups sharing similar genealogies.
During her short residency in Singapore from 1959 to the early 60s,
Mdm Liu continues to be revered for some of her works that have
become iconic pieces of Malay dance such as Tari Tudung Saji and
Zapin Asyik.
Another non-Malay contributor to Malay dance is Francis Yeoh
who was the founding director of the now defunct National Dance
Company (NDC) from 1970–78. Francis Yeoh, although trained extensively
as a Ballerino, was very attuned to Malay folk dances growing
up in Johore just across the causeway. His role as artistic director of
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Finding Soultari’s Lenggang: Walking Otherwise
the company from 1970–1978 was integral for Malay dancers who
were selected to be part of the company. To create the multi-ethnic
dance suites which will become the hallmark of the company’s repertory,
Yeoh had to synchronise the techniques of the dancers who came
from various traditional/ethnic dance communities. He did this through
introducing certain balletic techniques and presentational skills for the
stage. In addition, he also ensured the company’s dancers learnt from
each other by embodying specific traditional dance techniques. Yeoh
also choreographed Malay dance repertoires for the company. One of
his notable “Malay dance” works is the “Harvest Festival Dance” which
was a blend of balletic techniques and movements from folk dance.
Notes
1. Colonial historian, Mubin Sheppard, has identified four different descriptions
of movement in the Malay world. Sheppard describes, “Tandak emphasizes
the dancers’ steps, Igal means posturing or dancing with emphasis on body
movements, Liok is applied to low bending and swaying of the body, and Tari
describes dancing in which the graceful” (82).
Soultari Amin Farid is a choreographer,
arts educator and researcher from
Singapore. He is currently based in
London where he is a PhD candidate in
Theatre, Drama and Dance studies in Royal
Holloway, University of London, UK. He was
awarded the Singapore Youth Award (SYA)
in 2017. His recent choreographic credits
in Europe include: bhumi (Edinburgh
Fringe Festival, UK); What If…: The Mother
in Tagore’s Poems (Commissioned by Mora
Ferenc Muzeum, Hungary) and Unity in
Diversity (University of Szeged, Hungary).
Some of his works as Artistic Director in
Singapore include: Mak-Mak Menari (M1
Singapore Fringe 2020), yesterday it rained
salt (M1 Singapore Fringe Festival 2019),
Sau (dara) (The Vault, Centre 42), and
Padi Kuning [Yellow Paddy] (Supported by
National Arts Council's Cross-Polytechnic
Arts Initiative (CPAI)).
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The Problematic
Danseuse
Nirmala Seshadri
Nirmala Seshadri’s work, The Problematic Danseuse, was presented with Pok! by
Soultari Amin Farid in Failing the Dance: A Double Bill of Lecture-Performances. In
The Problematic Danseuse, Nirmala revisits embodied memories of marginalisation and
censorship, plagued by hegemonic and patriarchal issues, which have accumulated over
nearly 50 years of training in and performing bharatanatyam. Like Amin’s article, this
piece accompanied Nirmala’s presentation, which contains reflections and thoughts collected
during their collaborative research process under their Associate Membership
with Dance Nucleus.

The Problematic Danseuse
Seshadri, Nirmala. ‘The Problematic Danseuse: Reclaiming Space to Dance the Lived
Feminine’. Diotima’s: A Journal of New Readings, Kozhikode, Kerala: Providence
Women’s College, (2017): 54–79. Print.
The Problematic Danseuse: Reclaiming Space to Dance
the Lived Feminine
Nirmala Seshadri
It is understood that the Danseuse (nartaki) should be very lovely,
young, with full round breasts, self-confident, charming, agreeable,
dexterous in handling the critical passages… with wide-open eyes…
adorned with costly jewels, with a charming lotus-face, neither very
stout nor very thin, nor very tall nor very short” (Nandikesvara 1917:
15–16).
The Abhinaya Darpana (13 th century CE) and Bharata’s Natyasastra
(200 BCE–300 CE), serve as key texts in a Bharatanatyam dancer’s
training. The messaging of the above verse from the Abhinaya Darpana
is loud and clear—the female dancer is the object of the societal and,
more specifically, the male gaze. How does the modern-day ‘danseuse’
re-present her performance body to shift it from the male or externally-defined
representation?
In the years that I have lived in Singapore and India, I have experienced
classical dance training and its performance as a jettisoning of
the dancer’s real life experience rather than its inclusion. Highlighting
the separation between the lived and performance bodies of the
female classical dancer, dance scholar Urmimala Sarkar Munsi states,
“the reality of her everyday life is put aside, as she reclaims her tradition
through her body and performance—entering into an imaginary
realm of a world that begins and ends with the performance itself,
and does not have anything to do with the everyday reality of the
body” (2014: 307). Rather than move in autonomy and authenticity,
the dancer’s body is disciplined into presenting itself within the prescribed
boundaries. According to Sarkar Munsi, “locating the female
body within the historically derived public domain of the patriarchal
society has silenced any bodily activities or at least muted them in and
through classical dance” (2014: 308). Various societal forces collude
to discipline the female dancer into conformity. Against this backdrop,
I call the female Bharatanatyam dancer who defies societal yardsticks
of acceptability, resisting disciplinarity to present her lived feminine—
The Problematic Danseuse.
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FUSE #5
In this practice-led research paper I examine, through the lenses
of history, performance aesthetics and presentation, the approaches
towards and challenges of representing the lived feminine through
Bharatanatyam. I view the Bharatanatyam dancer’s portrayal of the
lived feminine through three broad modes: 1. the display of the erotic,
2. the challenging of gender norms and other social structures, and
3. the representation of the authentic experience of modern realities,
drawing primarily upon my choreographic works 1 —Outcaste Eternal
(1999), Eighteen Minutes (2002), Crossroads (2003) and Radha Now
(2006). As a Bharatanatyam practitioner, native Singaporean and a
non-resident Indian dancer who thirsted for knowledge and acceptance
both in Singapore and Chennai, I place myself as an embodied
subject in this phenomenological analysis of my body and its expression.
I could view myself as a participant observer in the field but given
that I have remained on the margins both by virtue of not being truly at
home in either location, as well as the fact that I gradually became the
Problematic Danseuse myself, I would call myself the insider/outsider
in the arena of Bharatanatyam, thus aiming to bring into this paper
my ethnographic and auto-ethnographic perspectives that arise from
this position.
Even as continued transgression may result in the marginalization
and eventual erasure of the Problematic Danseuse, I argue that in
her treatment and resistance lie the basis for some form of solidarity
with other women who have expressed their lived feminine emphatically,
in time past and present, that might support her persistence
in critiquing status quo and searching for alternate paradigms both
within Bharatanatyam and in its wider sociocultural context.
Expressing the Lived Feminine
The “lived feminine” is a concept adopted by feminist scholars to facilitate
the emergence for women, of meaningful and empowering
alternatives to male-instituted models. While supporting the notion
of sexual differentiation, feminist scholar Rosi Braidotti states: “being
a woman is always there as an ontological precondition for a female
subject’s existential becoming (1994: 102). Elizabeth Grosz insists on
“the irreducible specificity of women's bodies, the bodies of all women,
independent of class, race and history” (1994: 207). In a world that privileges
the male voice and perspective, it becomes important for women
to convey their “lived feminine” and I quote Luce Irigaray, who says, “the
‘masculine’ is not prepared to share the initiative of discourse. It prefers
to experiment with speaking, writing, enjoying ‘woman’ rather than
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The Problematic Danseuse
leaving to that other any right to intervene, to ‘act’ in her own interests”
(1985: 157). The opening verse from the Abhinaya Darpana comes to
mind. Expressing the lived feminine carries multi-pronged potential—
empowerment in women arising from the agency and authenticity of
expression, the gradual development of awareness and possible transformation
in society. Dance, with its emphasis and connection to the
corporeal, its negotiation with physical space and tools for non-verbal
communication can serve as a powerful and effective medium for lending
tangibility to the female dancer’s reality. Indeed, these expressions
offer a fresh perspective, “the point of view of the feminine subject”
(Lehtinen 2014: 85).
I examine issues surrounding the expression of the Bharatanatyam
dancer’s lived feminine through three approaches, namely: portrayal of
eroticism, critiquing of gender norms, and expression of her personal
lived experience. I discuss the creation and presentation of my artistic
work, reactions evoked within the socio-cultural context (including
audiences), my interactions and observations in the field as well as
challenges posed to such expression in the context of the globalized 2
dance form—Bharatanatyam.
1. Her Dance is TOO Erotic
After all, I was depicting Radha 3 and Krishna 4 in a post-coital moment.
I felt the strong need to include my own experience as a woman and
to allow for the expressions to be less stylized, to depict an everyday
reality. Instead of restricting my abhinaya to focus on the face
and hand gestures alone, I extended it to include the rest of my body.
Radha in this verse has been referred to as the Swadhinapatika nayika
[heroine], one who is in command of her lover. I therefore introduced
body positions and movements that I felt would convey this stance in a
sexual connotation. Since Radha was seeking to prolong the moment
and have Krishna indulge her in various ways, I interpreted the verse to
be the interim between two sexual climaxes and this was represented
through bodily abhinaya 5 (Seshadri 2011: 6; 2018: 118 – 9).
In the experimental Bharatanatyam duet Crossroads (2003) that was
primarily an exploration of gender through the recontextualization
of the conventional Bharatanatyam margam (repertoire), I chose to
perform as my solo piece the ashtapadi 6 Kuru Yadunandana from
Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda 7 . While earlier versions were performed in
the prescribed and acceptable manner, it was when preparing for
the 2006 staging in Chennai at Sri Krishna Gana Sabha 8 that I was
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The Problematic Danseuse by Nirmala.
Photo by Mervin Wong Seshadri

FUSE #5
inspired to push the boundaries of my expression to reflect my personal
interpretation of the poem as well as my authentic experience
as a woman.
As the piece progressed in its intensity, the final pose saw me in
a supine position and with both my legs raised to depict heightened
sexual enjoyment, laced with suggestions of autoeroticism. To my surprise,
my lighting designer dimmed the lights prematurely leaving me
to complete the piece in darkness, contradicting what was originally
planned. Later he told me that he had made the decision to shield me
from the audience gaze, given what he had understood of the general
mindset, thus censoring me based on his own cultural viewpoint. An
audience member told me that a group of young girls looked visibly
uncomfortable and stood up to leave the auditorium. Appearing curious
at the same time, they waited at the door, until the end. Later one
of my key musicians commented that my rendition of the ashtapadi
was “too erotic”. These reactions suggest to me that I had crossed a
line in terms of the expression of sringara (erotic love).
After the 2008 Singapore staging of the same performance,
the contemporary artists and some general audience members were
openly appreciative of my solo piece, but the Bharatanatyam community
offered me little feedback. It is plausible to read their lack
of feedback as a negative response, given the usual sharing that
takes place among them on social media after any performance. This
reading gains even more credibility when seen against the fact that
these same students were not entirely silent about the performance
as a whole—they expressed approval of my male collaborator's dance,
while remaining silent about mine. Underscoring my reading of the silence
as critique was a note I received from a Singapore-based female
dancer and scholar who referred to my piece as “a big bold step
which requires tremendous courage on your part…”. Her comment
about courage was mirrored—albeit in a less laudatory manner—in a
question posed to me in 2015 by a male interviewer from an established
Indian arts organization in Singapore (Institution 1): “People say
your dance is too erotic?” In general, the reactions emphasized that
the mainstream Bharatanatyam community does not welcome these
explorations in sensual expression. Even for the female dancer and
scholar who was open to the work, there was a recognition that it
demanded “tremendous courage”.
Another production that evoked such recognition was the 2008
staging of my dance theatre work Outcaste Eternal (1999) in Chennai
that highlighted the true story of a lone woman’s battle against a misogynistic
society. In their post-show communications with me, two
leading dancers in the field had also used the words “brave” and
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The Problematic Danseuse
“courageous attempt”. Both dancers seemed to acknowledge that
works that test boundaries and challenge the status quo are up against
hegemonic forces. Censorship of the Chennai performance began with
the requirement from the authorities that we amend the script in parts.
Then came the instruction from representatives of the government-run
Museum Theatre (our performance venue) who had attended the stage
rehearsal, to cut out the final pose of one sequence. This seduction
scene had two characters, male and female, lying horizontal together
on stage, the female protagonist (myself) suggestively placing her
lower leg over his before the lights are dimmed, to suggest triumph.
Dance critic Rupa Srikanth’s review that appeared in the leading
mainstream newspaper The Hindu emphasizes the expectations of
“dignity” that are placed on a Bharatanatyam dancer. Srikanth writes:
Strong words work well in theatre, but the stylization in dance
presupposes a certain measure of restraint… The graphic detailing of
the sexual encounters left nothing to imagination; such scenes actually
bring down art to its lowest denominator… It must be mentioned here
that the square stance that Nirmala adopted in her soliloquy, Odissi
chauka 9 -style, also did not do her dignified dance any credit (2008).
Irigaray’s emphasis—on altering the feminine style “as an excess
that exceeds common sense”, rather than reproducing or limiting its
expression within the parameters of masculine discourse (Lehtinen
2014: 78), becomes pertinent here. It lends tangibility to the existence
of strict boundaries in Bharatanatyam, evident through the praise I received
for my “courage” as well in Srikanth’s writing which reflects the
imposition of self-control, the denial of freedom for sexual expression
and ultimately the demand that the Bharatanatyam dancer reflect a
level of purity that invokes caste-based stratifications 10 .
The existence of Bharatanatyam rests, after all, on the expunging
of the hereditary Devadasi11 dancer as a result of “a female sexuality
that was exercised outside the acceptable borders of middle class
and upper caste womanhood” 12 (Hubel 2005: 133). Sociologist Amrit
Srinivasan’s seminal paper The Hindu Temple-Dancer: Prostitute or
Nun? describes the Devadasi as a “good and holy creature”, now “corrupted”
and to be replaced. The revivalists (E. Krishna Iyer, Rukmini
Devi Arundale), whose role it was to return the art form to its “pristine
glory”, operated within notions of “past purity” and “present sin”, in
weeding out the “profane” aspects of the “sacred” dance form (1983:
90, 95–96). Various aspects of the Devadasi’s dance form Sadir are
said to have been discarded in its purification/sanitization. Songs or
parts of songs that were considered overtly erotic were erased from the
repertoire (Allen 1997: 225). Rati-mudras (sexual hand gestures) denoting
various postures in sexual union that are described in medieval
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FUSE #5
Sanskrit treatises on erotics including the Kamasastra, have been
removed, terms such as “samarati (man on top), uparati (woman on
top, also viparitarati), and nagabandhamu (bodies coiled in the serpent
position) [having been] common parlance among the women” (Soneji
2004: 43). These gestures and postures emphasize the existence of
eroticism in Bharatanatyam’s past, and do not exist in the form today.
There has been some resistance from certain quarters against
this de-eroticisation 13 but the process continued unabated 14 . There
was no place for eroticism in the newly invented Bharatanatyam. In
this scenario where religiosity (bhakti) overshadowed sensuality, it
was reverence and submission that was expected of the dancer. The
Bharatanatyam dancer’s body came to be disciplined into imbibing
and projecting ‘sacredness’. Sarkar Munsi highlights that the training
in classical Indian dance imbues the dancer with “rules of rightness,
social correctness…” and a cognizance of “socially acceptable viewership”.
“The bodily values of right and wrong are so deeply embedded
in the minds and the bodies of these dancers, that the comfort zone of
expressivity remains structured by these value systems all their lives”
(2014: 307).
Literary scholar Teresa Hubel recalls the total lack of eroticism
at Rukmini Devi’s Kalakshetra 15 during her time there as a student,
realizing later that “the existence of Kalakshetra—with its bhakti-minus-sringara-oriented
dance—was predicated on the absence of the
Devadasis … draw[ing] inspiration from ancient Sanskrit texts such as
the Natya Sastra and Abhinaya Darpanam” (2005: 135). This ethos
percolated into Singapore where three of the oldest Indian performing
arts institutions, which I shall call Institution 1, 2 and 3, demonstrate
reliance on Kalakshetra. Institution 1 with its Kalakshetra-trained teachers
who are brought to Singapore to teach has existed for decades
alongside Institution 2 whose founder was a graduate of Kalakshetra.
In more recent years, even Institution 3, whose founder was trained
in the Thanjavur style of Bharatanatyam 16 , also imports Kalakshetra
graduates to teach Bharatanatyam. The slant of these established
institutions demonstrates the extent of influence of Kalakshetra on
the Bharatanatyam community in Singapore, directly or indirectly.
Dance scholar Avanthi Meduri underscores the role of Rukmini Devi in
the globalization of Bharatanatyam through Devi’s strong connection
with the Theosophical Society (2004: 16). New and complex issues
surround the form in a diverse global location such as Singapore—of
ethnic identity, belonging, nostalgia, exoticism, multiculturalism, as
well as Indian nationalism that is increasingly mobile. These issues
collude to freeze the form in what is considered its ‘authentic’ state or
‘sanitized’ versions that are close to it.
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The Problematic Danseuse
Hence while the Bharatanatyam scene in Chennai witnessed a
return to sringara starting in the 1970s with the return of Kalanidhi
Narayanan, a Brahmin woman who had been trained by Devadasi
teachers, it was only 30 years later (in 2012) that Narayanan’s style
of abhinaya was taught and performed in Singapore by her senior
students through brief workshops and performances organized by
Institution 2. This 30-year gap, in my opinion, demonstrates the freezing
of the sanitized form in the Singapore setting. While Narayanan’s
presence did heighten the emphasis on sringara, it was arguably
imparted and presented in an ‘acceptable’ manner. Pioneering contemporary
Indian dance choreographer Chandralekha’s return to sringara
in the 1980s, on the other hand, was marked by a total rejection of
traditional male-focused sringara as well as bhakti, but through an
emphasis on the corporeal. Both in Singapore and later in Chennai,
I do not recall hearing about Chandralekha’s work in mainstream
Bharatanatyam circles. I became aware of the confident portrayal of
female strength and sexuality when I witnessed her work—Sloka in
Bangalore in 1999 and Sharira in Chennai in 2004, at her own intimate
theatre space. According to the program notes Sharira “celebrates
the living body in which sexuality, sensuality and spirituality co-exist”
(Katrak 2011: 47). The stark costumes, slow and stretched movements,
evocative music, powerful lighting and the meeting and intertwining of
two bodies—male and female, left me both shocked and spellbound,
inspiring further my own feminist choreographic approach. Indeed,
the productions of present-day choreographers such as Anita Ratnam,
Hari Krishnan and others in the field reverberate with the influence
of Chandralekha (Katrak 2011: 53), the lone choreographer in the
1980s who dared to question patriarchal aspects of Bharatanatyam
and sought to provide an empowering alternative to the “bejewelled
semi-divine nayika” (Chatterjea 2004: 48) who constantly pined for
and praised an absent lover/god—invariably a man.
Chandralekha’s work drew some discomfort and skepticism
from the dominant forces of Bharatanatyam, including the traditional
dance gurus and connoisseurs as well as sections of the
mainstream media. Art historian Ashish Khokar explains how the
audience in Mumbai exited the auditorium half way through the performance
of Sharira (2007). He scathingly writes that Chandralekha’s
works produced after 1995 were “either soft-porn or a celebration
of erotica” (ibid). As for the textually erotic Kshetrayya 17 padams
(expressive pieces) and Jayadeva ashtapadis that are taught and
performed, while the male poet has been granted the license to express
the erotic sans boundaries, the female dancer is placed within
rigid confines.
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FUSE #5
I have come to understand that the danseuse who questions and
challenges the normative representations, particularly with regards to
sexuality, is a source of great discomfort and experiences some degree
of marginalization. The silencing and erasure of the Problematic
Danseuse, is after all, tied into the history of Bharatanatyam.
2. Visually Unexciting
I am wearing a skirt and a blouse. As the music begins, I stand on the
dimly lit raised platform (that was used to denote male space at the very
opening of the work) and begin to remove the skirt that I am wearing to
reveal a pair of short trousers. At the same time, ten bare-chested men
enter and are seen wrapping skirts around their dhotis 18. We begin to
perform the Ras Leela19; I at the center as they dance around me. At
various points in the piece, I dance separately with each of the ten men.
As I wait, can I pass my time, playing their game?
In Radha Now (2006), the Radha-Krishna myth was interlaced with my
own personal, socio-cultural and artistic history, memory and questions.
In conceptualizing the work, my artistic collaborator Vasanthi
Sankaranarayanan, also a film historian and translator, and I examined
the asymmetrical gender dynamic and patriarchal underpinnings in
the religious, practical and representational aspects of Bharatanatyam
and its wider societal framework. Role reversal and female centrality
were explored as possible alternatives to the existing patriarchal
paradigm. The work was devised as a performance by one female
Bharatanatyam dancer (myself) with ten male Bharatanatyam dancers
(Seshadri 2011: 8).
Radha Now involved questioning the validity of an old and
cherished myth that has placed the woman in a subordinate position.
Women’s studies scholar Elizabeth Grosz stresses on the importance
of “critique and construct” in the feminist approach, for it to rise above
“anti-sexist theory” (1990: 59). Both Grosz and postcolonial theorist
Gayatri Spivak emphasize the double-pronged nature of the feminist
process. The first stage is the reaction and critique of the existing
status quo and the next stage is the proposition of alternatives (Grosz
1990; Spivak 1981). Radha Now attempted to re-envision the myth to
elevate the status and representation of the woman.
I found tremendous support and sensitivity from the Chennai cast
of male dancers, all of whom had or were still training at Kalakshetra.
Radha Now was first presented in Dublin, the three-level discotheque
at the ITC Park Sheraton Hotel in Chennai. Given the exploratory and
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The Problematic Danseuse
subversive nature of the work, Sankaranarayan and I chose to present
it first at an intimate and informal setting. Dublin seemed most suitable
given that the hotel was willing to lend us unquestioning support
and that it was a space we felt was free from the hegemonic glare
of the conventional performance spaces in Chennai. Also, the layout
of the space offered scope for conveying our concept. The venue,
according to our male dancers, unsettled members of the higher
management at Kalakshetra, who in my view represent a significant
section of the establishment in the Bharatanatyam scene. The male
dancers were admonished by the then director of Kalakshetra for performing
Bharatanatyam at a bar (that served alcohol). Interestingly,
the dancers told us they had, in the past, represented Kalakshetra
at performances in hotels in the city, where alcohol was served while
they danced, which was not the case here. In the case of Radha Now,
the decision of location was an integral part of the work, and from this
angle too, the work may have been viewed as subversive.
Post-performance audience remarks both after the 2005 Chennai
and 2011 Singapore performances revealed a palpable discomfort
with the feminist interception of the form. Also, for the general audiences
of Bharatanatyam, there appears to be a culturally essentialist
expectation of how the female dancer ought to be presented. In a
milieu where audiences have been accustomed to titillation through
fast-paced and energetic jathis (rhythmic sequences), a woman in her
late 40s who is dressed in everyday attire, articulating her critique,
questions and aspirations is perhaps not easy on the eye nor comfortable
for the mind!
The transfer of focus from sringara to bhakti and the entry of
Nataraja 20 as a symbol in the revival period created a shift to privileging
speed, religiosity and the male dancer in what was a female centric
form. According to scholar Mathew Allen, “The ananda tandava, ‘blissful
vigorous dance’, of Nataraja, described and sometimes even mimed
by the new generation of dancers was in a manner totally foreign to
the lasya, graceful and feminine, Devadasi dance practice” (1997: 80).
Did the female Bharatanatyam dancer necessarily want to dance
in this fast-paced and strenuous way? This was one strand of questioning
in Radha Now that opened with a fast trikaala 21 jathi, progressing
through a series of questions to close with a slow-paced alarippu 22
that carries traces of that first jathi. The final scene is performed in
water to facilitate this slowing down as well as to symbolically heal
the female dancer from a lifetime of rigid prescriptions, disciplinarity
and the burden of cultural custodianship. No more music, rhythm,
narrative, abhinaya, sringara or bhakti. Only healing, rejuvenation
and peace.
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The Problematic Danseuse by Nirmala.
Photo by Mervin Wong Seshadri

FUSE #5
Read against the backdrop of my prior experiences I perceived a
sense of unease in the hesitant smiles, awkward silences and an absence
of any discussion both in Chennai and in Singapore. This we had
expected, especially given the general resistance of the establishment
to new work. While this resistance, in my experience, plays its part
in inspiring experimentation, it can also prevent meaningful dialogue
and constructive criticism that can be extremely valuable in artistic
development. In such a climate, I have to take refuge in Chandralekha
and draw inspiration from her when she says, “My work is small. It
reaches out to a few people to whom it makes a crucial difference and
with them one has the possibility of a creative dialogue” (quoted in
Bharucha 1995: 187). Chandralekha made these remarks in connection
with negative criticism that she received in the press after one of
her productions was staged (Bharucha 1995: 186).
While I believe that criticism is an important aspect of the artistic
process, I have learnt that the establishment is a powerfully resistive
force that attempts to clamp down on The Problematic Danseuse in
various ways. I have also come to understand that works such as
Radha Now that are rooted in Bharatanatyam and yet question and
challenge gender norms, seeking to reverse the male centricity both in
dance and society might need to be recognized by the creators themselves
as alternative and presented in non-mainstream and intimate
settings and to selected audiences, as a means of gradually building
viewership and a critical mass that seeks engagement, challenge and
societal transformation.
3. Let’s Snuff Her Out
In 2002, I [created] my full-length work Moments in Time. It was a
presentation of the traditional repertoire in the first two segments—
The Homecoming and Loving Man and God in Movement… However,
in the final segment Eighteen Minutes, I stepped out of these aspects
of the traditional framework to present my choreography that addressed
a personal question, “if I had only eighteen minutes, where
would I be, what would I do?” The eighteen-minute piece introduced
the concepts of impermanence, unconditional love and detachment
(Seshadri 2011: 5).
The first two segments had me in the typical and elaborate Bharatanatyam
garb, dancing pieces from the Bharatanatyam repertoire portraying
love, yearning, separation, sensuality, sexual encounters and also infidelity.
Surprisingly, it was Eighteen Minutes that evoked objection.
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The Problematic Danseuse
Narayanan, from whom I was receiving specialized training in
abhinaya at the time, attended my Chennai performance. She was gracious,
supportive and even came back stage before the performance
to bless me. A few days later in class, she asked me, “You are so good
at your classical, why do you need to present your modern work on
the same stage?” (Personal communication) I had chosen to express
my personal aspirations and to embrace the transience—choosing to
spend my limited time on an imaginary beach, walking on the sand,
reveling in my body, mind and spirit, spending precious moments
with an illusory lover, bonding with a girl child and finally departing
with grace and gratitude. At this point, I return to Irigaray who says: “I
consider it a mistake to divide my work into parts that are foreign to
one another. Its becoming is more continuous and the way it develops
is close to that of a living being” (2002: 200). Narayanan’s response
revealed to me that my attempt towards an integrated representation
of my various facets as a dancer and as a woman was not favored.
Irigaray’s concept of a “spiritual-embodied unity” is what I seek to
move towards which, “in phenomenology of the body, is considered
as structurally similar to the lived body” (Lehtinen 2014: 17).
A few months later I was invited to perform at the NRI 23 Festival
organized in Hyderabad by the Andhra Pradesh Tourism Department.
I decided to present Moments In Time and sent the organizers all the
required preliminary material, including a synopsis of the work and
publicity images. They had raised no concerns at the time regarding
the work. I had completed the first two segments following which I
changed into my purple sleeveless top and black trousers and began
the final piece. Twelve minutes into Eighteen Minutes, the organizers
turned off my lights and sound as they felt I was performing ballet
movements and my costume was indecent. The scene I was performing
was one in which I was in a supine position on stage to depict
the bonding between mother and child. The theme was expressed
through abhinaya and not ballet, a form in which I have not trained.
I had thought (somewhat naively) that as an NRI dancer, the value I
would bring was the reflection of my authentic experience of living in
a diasporic environment, along with my simultaneous connection to
India. It was then that I understood the expected role of a non-resident
Indian—to perpetuate status quo as opposed to adopting an
individualistic approach.
Bharatanatyam is positioned as the cultural touchstone of the
diaspora for whom India represents an imagined homeland. The
purity, acceptability, sacredness and link that had been drawn by the
revivalists to India’s ancient history were associations that encouraged
parents in diasporic locations such as Singapore to enroll their
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daughters in the dance classes. For many of us, there was no choice in
the matter. By the age of 6, we began our journeys as carriers of this
culture. The dance form has suitably satisfied the “diasporic demand
for cultural symbols” (O’Shea 2007: 55) and continues to do so even
today. Anthropologist Sitara Thobani highlights: “It is in the transnational
context that essentialized constructions of India are further
cemented, leading to the strengthening of ideas regarding coherence,
uniformity and impermeability of Indian culture” (2017: 105). In more
recent years, with neo-liberalism and the rising presence of the transnational
elites in Singapore, who come here with a much stronger
connection to India, India’s presence is felt more strongly. With the
shifting political landscape, there appears to be a growing partnership
between India and the diaspora in heightening the projection of
Indianness and Hinduness globally.
Conclusion
Despite its advent as an ‘invented tradition’ 24 , Bharatanatyam appears
now to be locked into a continuing nationalist project. I agree
with choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh who says, “It is one thing
to say that it has roots that go back two thousand years and quite
another to say it hasn’t changed over that period of time” (1993: 7).
Scholar Kapila Vatsyayan acknowledges that Bharatanatyam deals
with modernity as well as with “fragments of antiquity” (1992: 8).
Understanding Bharatanatyam as an invented tradition should offer
hope of its potential for reinvention. However my observations and
experiences in the field, as I have discussed, foreground hegemonic
structures in Bharatanatyam that restrict its scope to nationalist,
colonialist and various other agendas specific to each space in which
it exists.
I introduce the notion of the Problematic Danseuse, who rejects
the prescriptive framework of Bharatanatyam that is governed by
rules of purity and appropriateness, choosing instead to explore autonomy
and authenticity through the portrayal of her lived feminine. I
suggest that the danseuse who contradicts the status quo, especially
with regard to the portrayal of eroticism, is treated with contempt
and tends to be frozen out. However I also highlight that this act
of erasing the Problematic Danseuse who does not fit conveniently
into the mainstream agenda is after all, embedded in the history and
emergence of the transfigured Bharatanatyam. I propose that creators
of alternative works in Bharatanatyam acknowledge that they
occupy a different space, thus presenting their work in settings that
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facilitate the gradual nurturing of an audience base that is willing to
engage them critically. I highlight the various hegemonic forces—
Indian nationalism that is highly mobile, cultural essentialism, overt
emphasis on religiosity and privileging of the male dancer—that
conspire to suppress the Problematic Danseuse in various ways.
For the stray dissenters, it can be a lonely battle if not for the
solidarity and strength drawn from other “courageous” women in the
field—from the past and the present. As Hubel points out vis-à-vis
the Devadasi: “At this moment in India, when Hindu fundamentalism
works to essentialize women once again, it seems especially crucial
to celebrate those who don’t or didn’t fit comfortably into Hindu patriarchy’s
coercive narrative” (2005: 138). For the many women born
and led into rigid patriarchal structures (in my case Brahminism and
Bharatanatyam), it can be a lifelong battle on multiple fronts to resist
the silencing and to speak authentically.
The author wishes to thank Dr. Shobha Avadhani and Dr. Suparna
Banerjee for their critical inputs.
Notes
1. These works have been described in my essay “Challenging Patriarchy Through
Dance” (2011) in In Time Together [online], edited by Linda Caldwell, Denton:
Texas Woman’s University.
2. Dance scholars including Avanthi Meduri (2004) and Janet O’Shea (2007) have
written extensively on the globalization of Bharatanatyam.
3. A milkmaid and the favorite consort of the god Krishna, Radha is also believed
to be an incarnation of goddess Lakshmi.
4. A male Hindu deity worshipped as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu and symbolizing
romantic and divine love as well as protection.
5. An expressive aspect of the dance that conveys a theme through hand gestures,
facial expressions, body postures and mime.
6. A poem depicts the erotic love between Krishna and his lover Radha.
7. This anthology was composed by the 12th century poet Jayadeva. It is divided
into twelve chapters that are further divided into twenty-four songs of eight
lines each called an ashtapadi.
8. A Sanskrit term for performance venue.
9. A characteristic position in Odissi (classical dance form that originated in the
Indian state of Odisha), Chauka is a symmetrical, deep and low, with legs bent
and turned out wide from the hips.
10. See Coorlawala (2004) and Meduri (2005), where the issue of Bharatanatyam
and Sanskritization has been extensively discussed.
11. This term is translated as ‘servant of god’ and refers to female temple dancers
who were ceremoniously wedded to the male deity.
12. The era (end of the 19th century until the mid-20th century) that witnessed
the anti-nautch movement, abolition of Devadasi practices and the revival of
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the dance was also that of colonialism leading to post-independence. There
is a great amount of writing on this era by scholars including Amrit Srinivasan
(1985), Anne Marie Gaston (1996), Avanthi Meduri (1996), Uttara Coorlawala
(2004), Janet O’Shea (2007) and Teresa Hubel (2005).
13. See for example Amrit Srinivasan: The Tamil Bhakti tradition of which the
Devadasi was an integral part, rejected Puritanism as a valid religious ethic for
its female votaries” (1876), Balasaraswati: “There is nothing in Bharatanatyam
which can be purified afresh” (1978: 110), Ram Gopal: “Rukmini…has bleached
Bharata Natyam…we worship the linga [male sex organ] and the yoni [female sex
organ]… How can we deny sex between a man and woman? How can you not
feel that erotic drive? It is a charge between human beings.” (In Gaston 1996:
94), Chandralekha: “The basic aramandi [half sitting] posture, legs spread eagled
with the yoni [vagina] as the centre of the universe, is so elemental, sexual. How
can dance be sanitized?” (Mehra 1998).
14. The reform and revival of Bharatanatyam were very much situated in the wider
nationalist discourse of reform and revival of the position of women in society.
While reformists were aligned with the forces of colonialism and the “European
ideals of equality”, the revivalists emphasized the importance of “orthodox Indian
Hindu culture” (O’Shea 2007: 105). Out of these opposing forces emerged the
notion the “new respectable lady” (ibid) who would straddle both tradition and
modernity. This new image of Indian womanhood percolated into the reconfigured
Bharatanatyam.
15. It is a noted arts and cultural institution in Chennai founded in 1926 by Rukmini
Devi Arundale.
16. The style of dance that was practiced in the royal court of Thanjavur and known
to be fluid and abhinaya-focused with a special emphasis on sringara.
17. A 17th century Telugu poet and Carnatic music composer whose compositions
are performed by Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi dancers.
18. It is a traditional Indian male garment, an unstitched piece of cloth that is tied
around the waist and legs.
19. A dance that involves striking small sticks and is linked to the traditional story
of Krishna in which he dances with the gopis (cowherdesses). The dance is performed
in a circle to signify the eternal dance of life.
20. An aspect of the male Hindu deity Shiva who is worshipped as the lord of dance.
21. Jathi (a rhythmic metrical sequence) that is performed in three speeds.
22. A rhythmic piece that is generally the opening piece in a Bharatanatyam recital.
23. It refers to Non-Resident Indians.
24. A term coined by historian Eric Hobsbawm to describe: “a set of practices,
normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic
nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by
repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where
possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic
past” (1995: 1).
References
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(1997): 63–100. Print.
Balasaraswati. “On Bharata Natyam”, Dance Chronicle, 2. 2. (1978): 106–116. Print.
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Bharucha, Rustom. Chandralekha: woman, dance, resistance. New Delhi: Indus,
1995. Print.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary
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Chatterjea, Ananya. Butting out: Reading resistive choreographies through works by
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Chandralekha. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University
Press, 2004. Print.
Coorlawala,w Uttara Asha. “The sanskritized body”, Dance Research Journal, 36. 2.
(2004): 50–63.
Gaston, Anne-Marie. Bharata Natyam: From Temple to Theatre, New Delhi: Manohar,
1996. Print.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Contemporary Theories of Power and Subjectivity”, in Gunew,
Sneja, ed. Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, New York: Routledge, (1990):
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Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, London: Routledge,
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Hobsbawm, Eric. ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger
Terence, (eds). The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
(1995): 1–14. Print.
Hubel, Teresa. ‘The High Cost of Dancing: When the Indian Women’s Movement Went
After the Devadasis’, in Lengel, Laura B. (ed). Intercultural Communications and Creative
Practice: Dance, Music and Women’s Cultural Identity, Westport, Conn. and London:
Praeger, (2005): 121–140. Print.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which is Not One, Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 [1977]. Print.
Irigaray, Luce. Ed. Dialogues, 25. 3, Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press. 2002. Print.
Jeyasingh, Shobana. “Getting off the Orient Express”. Dance Theatre Journal, 8. 2.
(1993): 34–37. Print.
Katrak, Ketu. Contemporary Indian dance: new creative choreography in India and the
diaspora. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print.
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com/info/profiles/profil66.html. Accessed 25 January 2018. Online.
Lehtinen, Vipri. Luce Irigaray’s Phenomenology of Feminine Being. New York: SUNY
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Meduri, Avanthi. “Rukmini Devi and ‘Sanskritization’: A New Performance Perspective”,
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Indian Culture and the Performing Arts, (2005): 195–223.
Meduri, Avanthi. “Nation, Woman, Representation: The Sutured History of the Devadasi
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Vatsyayan, Kapila. Indian Classical Dance, New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of
Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1992. Print.
The Problematic Danseuse video still by Mervin Wong
Nirmala Seshadri is a dancer and researcher
who seeks to recontextualise her
classical dance form, bharatanatyam. Her
social justice perspective leads her to use
the body and performance space to interrogate
existing inequalities, problematising
boundaries of time, place, gender, and caste,
among other social constructs. Her quest
for autonomy and sensorial perception led
her to butoh. With her present practice and
research focus lying at the intersection of
bharatanatyam, butoh, breathwork and
yoga, she draws from these elements in creating
her movement approach—Antarika.
She graduated with a Masters degree in
Dance Anthropology from the University of
Roehampton, London.
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About Dance Nucleus
Dance Nucleus is a space for Artistic Research,
Creation and Production for the development of
Dance and Contemporary Performance.
Dance Nucleus fosters a culture of critical
discourse, self-education, artistic exchange
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designed to respond to the needs of our
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Arts Council of Singapore.
The Team
Artistic Director
General Manager
Programmes Coordinator
Programmes Coordinator
FUSE Editor
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Daniel Kok
Dapheny Chen
Chan Hsin Yee
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Chan Hsin Yee
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Singapore 439053
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www.dancenucleus.com/
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Cover Image Credits
1. Photo of Jared Jonathan Luna with mask by
Leeroy New. Photo credit: Bunny Cadag.
2. Meat Girl, visual identity sample by
AWKWARD PARTY, 2020.
3. Screenshots from @whereismysapo
Instagram account. All photos by Ashley Ho.
4. Bird-watching / (2018) by Rebecca
Wong. All photos by William Muirhead.
5. Juan Dominguez. Photo credit: Bea Borgers.
6. Screenshot of ELEMENT#7 participants with
Juan Dominguez in a gathering for nothing.
Provided by Chan Hsin Yee.
7. Screenshot of da:ns LAB participants doing
head massages. Provided by Chan Sze Wei.
8. The Problematic Danseuse by Nirmala
Seshadri. Photo by Mervin Wong.
9. Emma Fishwick’s presentation at SCOPE#8.
Photo credit: Dapheny Chen.
10. Image from On Kitsch by Awkward Party.

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