just dance
{ January 7, 2010 @ 5:00 pm }p8
Show’n'tell time. The Amrita kids show off their stuff.
KS says it’s the first time he’s seen them go through their warm-ups in a large group – usually it’s just one by one. We’re doing this ‘cos they described how they play the monkey role, the male role, the female role in court dance, folklore dance in their intros. Us ignorant barbarians have little idea what this means.
In the midst of rising and falling and stretching and chanting ting-tong-ching, the students describe their experiences: how teachers would rise and strike them with sticks if they wobbled while balanced on one foot.
Then Hafiz stages an intervention: he rolls across the floor in a continuous circle. Later he explains that it’s because he didn’t want the kids to feel alone on stage: they’re all in this together, faced with the stress of having to expose themselves.
And of course, Sopheap (a student at Amrita) stages an intervention to the intervention.
He’s a Ramayana monkey, scratching himself and puzzling over the horizontal giant. Together, they make something… abstract.
Afterwards, a brief discussion breaks out about gender: in contemporary practice of traditional dance, males and females are almost completely segregated – there are all-male masked Ramayanas which have quite different conventions from all-female masked Ramayanas. Often with youth troupes, both Rama and Sita are played by girls, but Hanuman and the rest of his monkey army are played by boys (though in the older days, even women played the monkey roles). Belle, one of the students, was actually switched from female to male roles once she grew too tall to be paired with any other girls. Once, they tried to stage a Ramayana with a female Sita and a male Rama. Riots nearly broke out.
Fred, the head of Amrita, explains that this is one of the reasons contemporary dance is sought after: it gives the young men and women a space where they can perform together.
But there are no contemporary dance companies here, only freelance projects so far, he tells us. Hopefully, we can set the foundations to change that.
A is for Amrita, that’s good enough for me
{ January 7, 2010 @ 2:09 am }
We’re here at Amrita Performing Arts Centre!!! About 40 of us crammed into a dance studio, and more to come!
And by golly, there’s wireless! Stay tuned.
UPDATE: There were about 58 of us, all told: Amrita students, Bophana students, guides. KS gives the intro, about how TheatreWorks came in 1992, monitored as part of a government tour, in streets full of people legless from landmines.
KS: There was constant sense of crisis in the air. There was the UN running around, a lot of foreign presence, foreign aid. We were entering into a country that at night there was totally darkness, no streetlights, there were accidents, and when the police are out they just shoot. The tour guide who was bringing us through Angkor was saying like, "I’m only 20 years old, but i feel my life is already over."
At that point he hadn’t an inkling that we’d be gathered together in an air-conditioned room full of mirrors, where half of us were artists who’d never even known life under the Khmer Rouge.
We do brief introductions – this takes an hour, because of translations. And it turns out that KS was quite deliberate in picking out a multi-culti group of artists from across the world: it started when he was at a festival in Rio de Janeiro and realised there were no other Asian artists there, he said. Western European and North American governments (and increasingly, Japanese and Korean and Chinese governments too) are willing to sponsor their artists to travel to distant climes to disseminate the word of Art. Artists from other climes – Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia – are seldom so lucky.
KS: There are some corridors of art circulation which are not used. sometimes they’re not even there. And we are moving in ways which are not so usual, because we’re not moving in the direction of touring productions.
A coffee break.
Ng Yi-Sheng