Message in the movement

The Star, Friday, June 16 2006

Dance doyenne Marion D’Cruz takes on the second workshop in Five Arts Centre’s first-ever Krishen Jit Experimental Workshop Series. NILUKSI KOSWANAGE gets a glimpse of the creative process involved.

THE game plan is simple: take 10 individuals with little experience in dance and choreography and put them into an intensely creative workshop environment for seven weeks. Each participant has to choreograph a five-minute work of physical movement addressing any theme or issue in which all other nine participants have to be included.

Such dynamics are reminiscent of the late Krishen Jit’s vision to make the artistic process more collaborative and inclusive. However, for his wife Marion D’Cruz, it gets a little more personal.

“When Krishen came into my life, he turned most of my ideas and conceptions upside-down. This workshop celebrates this sensibility by having these non-dancers take charge of the choreographic process and place themselves in a potentially upside-down situation,” she said.

Nevertheless, the workshop firmly remains as a part of D’Cruz’s own artistic sensibility and outlook.

Often enough, it has involved collaborating with non-dancers whom she considers to have a more innovative movement vocabulary than dancers instilled with specific vocabulary.

“I have always pushed non-dancers onto the stage for many years because they are more willing to explore the possibilities of their bodies. So I figured that if I could get non-dancers to perform, I could go the extra step and make the process of choreography open to these non-dancers,” she said.

However, D’Cruz insists that the workshop is not geared towards choreographing technically flawless dance pieces.

“It is not about dance per say but it is really about seeing and understanding how the body can convey so many different messages, ideas and conceptions. While I do teach some basic choreographic techniques that can be taken up or discarded at will during the workshop, the main point is to get the participants to think creatively about using their bodies in any setting,” she said.

“The word ‘choreography’ is not always associated or used with dance. You can choreograph a political act or a war, you can choreograph a date, you can choreograph a meeting with your boss.

”Choreography is about positioning yourself in a situation, to get your opinion or message across and this is exactly what we are doing in this workshop, except we remain firmly in the realm of physical movement.”

While the workshop is open to non-dancers and non-choreographers, D’Cruz has taken most of the participants from the local arts community.

“Most of the participants have their own pre-conceptions on the choreographic process, so it would be interesting to see how they can bring together their own artistic experiences and ideas to this workshop. To put it simply, the workshop helps to empower them in any way they see fit,” she said.

The end-point of this intensive seven-week workshop is a 50-minute site-specific performance at the alley-way between Central Market and Liquid Room dance club, which will feature each participant’s five-minute performance.

“Making the performance site-specific is just a part of democratising the creative process. Performing on a stage forces the performer to define his or her work and this can constrain the creative process. With a site-specific performance, the work can be liberated from confining labels like dance and theatre,” she said.

Whether the performances get noticed is almost beside the point; the benefits of stretching creative muscles in an open, exploratory atmosphere will accrue in any case to these budding choreographer-performers and to the rest of the arts community.

The gamut of participating choreographer-performers who will perform this weekend is as broad as it can be – Kiew Suet Kim works as an assistant producer for a theatre company; Mark Teh, a seasoned performer from the youth arts collective, Akshen; Phang Khee Teik, the caustic editor of Kakiseni.com; Hari Azizan, a full-time reporter for The Star; quirky film-director and part-time photographer James Lee; June Tan, a trained biologist who works for the oil and gas industry while moonlighting as a stage-manager; theatre veteran Vernon Adrian Emuang; Gabrielle Low with her experience in working for non-profit organizations and theatre; Myra Mahyudin is a recent graduate from UITM, who is exploring theatre for now and Wyn Hee, who helps with Dramalab productions.

Interestingly, D’Cruz will take a back-seat during this creative process.

“In the end, the workshop is really about them and not about me. This is their chance to be garang so that they can intensively shape their choreographed works into something unique and thought-provoking. I will just give them certain tools and tricks on the choreographic process and after that I shall just watch,” she said.

This has also been quite liberating for D’Cruz.

“Before, I would take a more prominent role in collaborating with dancers and non-dancers. I would piece together all the different movement and ideas from everyone and give the piece an actual structure. Now, I just want to share the making of the creative process and watch freely how it unfolds – it can be as interesting as watching the end-product itself,” she said.

Performances from the Choreography for Non-Choreographer will be staged this Saturday and Sunday at 4.30pm in the alleyway between Central Market and Liquid Room.

Admission is free. To check out how the workshop participants are faring in the creative process of putting out a site-specific performance, log on to the workshop blog at www.boxspots.blogspot.com.