“I
had a good nap,” said a friend about Singapore Dance Theatre’s
Whose Voice Cries Out? It was Japanese choreographer Sakiko
Oshima’s second full-evening creation for the company after the
2003 Le Festin d’Immortalité, and while I didn’t
snooze through it, I don’t know when an SDT production left me
as flat-out drained as this one. Still, I managed to fight the urge
to follow those who fled their seats early on opening night.
I’m hard-pressed to find something that separates this piece
from other dances that express disappointment with society. Its bleak
tone registers in the steps, stage design and mish-mash score. Some
of its images stay in the mind. Otherwise, nothing very interesting
happens. Oshima has her own take on how technology has distorted human
communication, but her ideas seem buried under a string of strange stage
pictures.
Neither were the programme notes of any help: “In today’s
world, laced so richly with mechanisms of desire that inflate our self-consciousness
beyond need, we lose day by day the true outline of the self, a self
that would lend us a proper equilibrium,” blared the crimson text
in uppercase. There’s more concerning “a world of realities
that has lost its sense of reality”; I’m too dense for any
of it.
That world happens to be dark and dank. The bare stage is stripped
to the bone before it turns into a misty dungeon and then, finally,
into a spooky morgue. The cast of 14 live in this troubled space, their
bodies often racked with doubt and imbalance. They cackle and sob to
themselves; they struggle with their mouths gaping. So relentless is
their oppression that the few segments of fleet, lyrical dancing sweep
across you like a cool breeze.
Wires figure in Oshima’s choreography, not as tools for chanelling
Peter Pan but as expressive devices. Here, the dancers hang upside down
in mid-air, dangling like carcasses in an abattoir, twisting slowly
like mobiles. When their feet eventually touch the ground, they spin
and spin like ice skaters, something they can’t normally do onstage
without the cables’ added support. They’re airborne, yet
they’re helplessly trapped in their harnesses. But sometimes the
wire stunts lapse into cliché. Having Xia Haiying play the unreachable
sylph – she swinging away from Jeffrey Tan’s grasp, he chasing
her – just doesn’t cut it.
One of the show’s oddest scenes is set to the Queen of the Night’s
fast, high-pitched warbling from Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
The dancers wheel out tables and candelabras, toasting one another with
goblets as though partying at a banquet. Later, the tables are pushed
together to form one long table, topped with silver trays. Six women
crouch low enough for their heads to hover just above it, their ghostly
faces sculpted by stage light bouncing off the trays. Are they suggesting
talking heads? Or disembodied minds cut off from the physical world?
It’s your call. |
"Oshima has her own take on how technology has distorted human
communication, but her ideas seem buried under a string of strange stage
pictures."
Credits
Choreographer, Art Direction, Set Concept: Sakiko Oshima
Assistant Choreographer: Naoko Shirakawa
Technical Director: Takashi Hojo
Costume Designer: Shinjiro Asatsuki
Lighting Designer: Hisashi Adachi
Dancers: Xia Haiying, Natalie Clarke, Sakura Shimizu, Kellie van der
Ploeg, Liu Xiaomi, Chihiro Uchida, Alexandra Sklavos, Jeffrey Tan, Mohamed
Noor Sarman, Fu Liang, Zhang Jun, Jacek Bres, Robert Mills, Chen Peng
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