Yokai

The choreographic development of Yokai explored fear, lightness and the passing on of cultural imagination and storytelling, using the ephemeral and mysterious Japanese Yokai ghost as its departure point. Yokai is a weird or mysterious creature, a monster or fantastic being, spirit or a sprite. But it’s much more complex that that - it also emerges from the idea of physical presence or knowing something is there - a sense. Yokai begin where language ends.

What fascinated me about the folklore surrounding these kinds of ephemeral beasts is that they have shape-shifted throughout history and, in each era Japan has passed through, these ‘ghosts’ have shifted and changed slightly in Japan’s collective cultural imagination. They’re diverse and abundant, constantly being reborn in this way. It reveals surprising connections between other cultures and even though yokais are one example, I would say that there’s globally so many contemporary dreaming stories of these kinds of presences and that our own consciousness manifests them.

In contemporary culture how do we transmit these folktales or stories? What are these contemporary beasts/fears? How do they manifest? How do we articulate what seems ungraspable? Mysterious sounds, something watching you in the darkness. The word ‘folk’ originally related to any group of people that share at least one common factor, such as shared language. In Japan, supernatural and/or inexplicable occurrences have filtered into the cultural imagination.

The choreographic development was supported by in-kind space with March Dance Festival and Critical Path. Thank you to dance artists Opal Russell and Olivia Hadley who collaborated on this choreographic development. Videography, documentation and video direction by Feras Shaheen.

Object Project

Object Project (2020) is collage-like performative video work that utilises bright colours, industrial and uncanny objects.  Taking Meg Stuart’s ‘Transformation’ improvisation as a departure point, the protagonists in this piece, including myself and two other dancers, follow a series of daydreams and mental escapes into small transformations via urban explorations and the performers’ own imaginations.

During this work, the trio allude to various aspects of art history - the Renaissance, Romantic Era and Pop Art by embodying their values to soften the industrial void they are dancing within, question their surroundings and physically defending each of their ‘dream spaces’ through theatrical breakouts. Conceived to be an improvisation series that is part-score, part-spontaneous, these aesthetically designed encounters between the body, industrial and theatrical props bring the spontaneous wanderings and powerful yearnings of the dancers into the visible realm through duration, repetition and transformation.

I introduced choreographer Meg Stuart’s task Transformation from one of her many exercises in Are We There Yet? (2010) as a 5-minute improvisation task that was integrated into the filming process. Each of the dancers, including myself, used this task, in combination with an object.

The ‘transformation’ exercise is an easy one that grounds people, in contrast to the jarring quality of ‘change’. It is one way to access trance in improvisation, which is an aspect to why we chose to introduce house, hip-hop and urban music to our ‘transformation’. Hybrid bodily practices, such as hip-hop, offers nuanced postcolonial perspectives, identity politics and grants transcultural artists opportunities to develop and transmit bodily knowledge. The repetition and synths found in these types of sounds allow one to find a trance-like state. The exercise requires both insistence in repetition and a surrendering to the material that appears.

Scratch

I began the sharing of Scratch with an acknowledgement of Country and paying respect to First Nations Peoples past, present and emerging. I then stated that the meditation/performance was an homage to each person that came to the sharing and the bodily histories each carried with them into the space. I then invited the participants to close their eyes to experience the work and framed that they had the choice whether or not to open them from that point onwards.

I guess the piece was basically tossing around a couple of main ideas which included sampling or ‘scratching’ (from Twyla Tharp), which are kinda these ways of creating which is basically taking inspiration from many different influences, dabbling and creating something new from these points of departure. The other idea I was exploring was that of transculturation, which is a word I’ve been using to encapsulate cultures meeting, converging and overlapping. Usually this term is used in relation to ethnic cultures overlapping. It usually means something is lost or something arises in that process (ie. colonisation). I wanted to use transculturation as a metaphor for how this work functions which is basically encouraging overlapping sounds, objects, sensations and shared experiences - essentially encouraging the emergence of new cultural phenomena.

Exploring transculturation

Transculturation describes the notion of merging and converging cultures. Where transculturation affects ethnicity and issues, the term ethnic-convergence is sometimes used. Originally, it was used as a term to articulate contact between empires ie. colonialism.

The term allows for the application of different perspectives to explain itself… because it is an ensemble of of heterogeneous elements, transculturation requires an interdisciplinary approach to understand its full richness. It urges a historical approach as it takes place over time - often long stretches of time - and in specific contexts of border experience (that is, where two cultures or more meet either peacefully or violently. This definition assumes that transcultured identities are something constantly evolving, continuously negotiated and nonessentialist. It does not abolish difference; it is syncretic. The different components do not lose their individuality; they maintain their particular identity and flavour. The elements exist in a dynamic, evolving and sometimes uneasy tension.

Transculturation relates to and opposes to these terms

Using interdisciplinarity and convergences between different artistic traditions as a metaphor for transculturation.

With my choreographic development, I wanted to focus on how ‘scratching’, or in other words, sampling and transculturation collide. As an artist who works from a diasporic perspective having grown up across Asia and South-East Asia, I’m interested in where transculturation also relates to ethnic-convergence and creative discipline convergence. Merging and converging cultures to reveal, to lose and to create new cultural phenomena.

Related terms:

• postcolonialism

• multiculturalism

• diaspora

• hybridity

Transculturation across practices and cultural constellations

Transculturation names a process of cultural contact in which elements are destroyed and reconstructed in a process of transfer which aims at renewing the promises modernity.

Kept traditions and identities radically in flux.

Development of choreographic work // 2020

Tasks

What does existence mean to you? To be human? Questions/brainstorming

• Brainstorming these moments of existence

• What do you recall? What speaks to us?

• How are we going to relate to ourselves and to other people in the future?

• GIF dances - 5-10 repetitions, celebratory things, universal looping movements

• Clay moulding - pushing the body through clay, resistance

• Switchboard - playing on the switchboard, switch board master - switchboard in the air, switchboard on partner

• Elastic body - tension, release, revolving around 360 degrees

• Humming into singing into crying, throwing sounds into the space

2.

• Going through the elements - water —> wood —> wind —> earth

• Going through them somatically, really articulating what they are and then finding a way of accessing them rhythmically

• Snapping in and out of these states

3.

• What do you do to a face that you care about? What gestures? How would you react?

• Do this with another person

• Imagine this and do this task by yourself and then with a stranger

• Speaking and then become quieter and quieter, as if you were having a conversation and suddenly it’s just mouthing words

• How could this task become participatory?

4.

• Singing/humming/hymn

• Throw a sound into the space upon entering it

  A word

  A hymn

  A laugh

  A hum

5.

• 魂 = soul, mind, spirit

•  Using the soul symbol as a point of reference to create a choreographed phrase

• Thinking about personal history, using the lines and points of the calligraphy to influence your movement pattern

  What does this tonal wash do to your experience of the space? How are you changing, affecting, contributing to the space upon entering?

• The difference between being in the physical ritual and embodiment of practice or the performance of it

• We are not performing the work

• The concept of ‘The Everywhere’ - a metaphor for Dreaming time

• Sound being continuous, eliciting the dreaming which is ever present

• The relationship between ritual and performance.

• Through the act of ritualistic performance, we confront a transformation

  A transformation of ourselves

  Of what we see

  How do we negotiate the space between ritual and performance?

• When does the public become the work?

Lightbody series

I’ve been working on a new video series entitled Lightbody series. The video works are compilations of recent performances I have documented.

Lightbody I, 2019, single channel video: 1.09 seconds looped.

Performer: Soleil Harvey

Lightbody II, 2019, two-channel video: 59 seconds looped.

Performer: Soleil Harvey

While developing these pieces, I’ve been focussing on two things - transience and archives (both the body as archive and archival documentation). I want to explore how documenting performance re-places the act of performing. Through the process of archiving, the performance has endless mobility that makes it emerging and transformative. In a way, it takes on a new life.

I’ve also been interested in how the act of moving as well as re-enacting performances becomes political. How many women have done these gestures before? How many will repeat them afterwards?

Personally, what has come up for me through the process is the importance of finding ways of paying homage to unspoken language. Specifically, finding ways of articulating oneself through the body when language ceases to be meaningful. I pay homage and respect to time, community, peripatetic, nomadic existence. Most importantly though, I wish to pay respect to transience and what it means to do something and acknowledging that it is going to fade away/change/evolve/be lost. Understanding that this is not where you’re going to be indefinitely.

Feedback on these works include:

• Transduction

• Catalysing

• Dance as metaphor

• Interplay - one is leading 

• Interaction

• Extrapolations of movements - seeing hints of the body

• Is the work already existing? Who is authoring the work?

• Analogue processes of replaying, re-videoing

• Constellations

• Talking about navigating these spaces, don’t determine what it is, it’s art

• Corporeality of the body

• Entanglement of the body - similar to other work in terms of entrapment, being tangled

• Acting the sense of touch 

• Dancing to the work - how can the work be re-acted, re-staged, shifted, changed again?

• Dissolution - out of the body

• Meditation of video

• References to performance artists Atsuko Tanaka and Ana Mendieta

• Atsuko Tanaka (artist), whose Electric Dress (1956) gestures toward postmodern body art. Tanaka’s Electric Dress is a phantasmal, ritualistic garment made from numerous glowing electric light bulbs, worn by the artist in her performance of the female Asian body.

Constellations of Thought (As It Fades)

Takeuchi, R. (2019), Constellations (As It Fades) [glow in the dark yarn, LED light]. QUT Frank Moran Gallery, QLD, Australia.

Light, passing time, memory, loss and rebirth - what makes up the galaxy of your mind? I began the solo development process creating movement material from personal memory and by taking inspiration from the simplicity of Nature - the entangled branches and spider cobwebs, in particular. I wanted to draw on these different lines of ideas, considering them as constellations of human emotions, consciousness and experience. The resultant sculptural, performance installation has become a somatic contemplation for me and I hope to explore the potential for this sensitivity to be shared with the viewer. 

In Constellations of Thought (As It Fades) I’m combining an installation using glow-in-the-dark yarn and lighting with my solo practice that I’ve been developing with dance practitioner Kay Armstrong. I have been very interested in working with light and ephemeral works that are constantly in flux - all of these materials as metaphors for time and space. I wanted to play with the idea of refractions of light – how lighting changes and impacts what one can see. I wanted to activate primal senses through darkness and examine what it means to see small residues of the body in darkness.  

In the documentation of this webbed sculpture I’ve been thinking about wrapping, moving and reacting. How can the spectators navigate the space? When the spectators negotiate the space, I’m anticipating the space being dark - the spectators will have to map the space for themselves.

The work has been influenced by artists such as Tomas Saraceno, Ken Yonetani, Marina Abramovic and Ryoji Akita with Forsythe.

My primary questions in assembling my new performance installation work are:

• How can choreographic play enliven agency?  

• How do you facilitate someone's agency through a process of decontamination and entering a work?  

• What does it mean to move through the threshold between passive spectatorship into enlivened and performative spectatorship? What is it to go into this space? To pass through the threshold?

• When disrupting the expectation of a ‘critique situation’, does it alienate the viewer's experience, or add a layer of curiosity?  

See pictures below for process shots of installation documentation:

The images above are documentation of my choreographic journal documenting the process of development under Kay Armstrong which took place over three weeks.

Personal toolkit for improvisation practice

Improvisation, by my own terms, means to be able to tap into any knowledge that is stored in the body. Human bodies are vessels brimming with knowledge and, in turn, the body becomes a kind of book and/or manual. New input are new scribbles over existing information. We are caressing thoughts and ideas through the embodied experience of improvising.  

Imagine that, in one slab of marble, all the faces that have ever existed are already present in that slab. All that needs to happen is for that to be carved out. This is like the dancer’s body. All the choreography in the world is present already in the body. It just needs to be sculpted and carved out. 

Skill A --> Emotional intention (story, narrative)  

Skill B --> Groove (rhythm)  

Skill C --> Puppet (someone else is moving you in space)  

Skill D --> Visual (visualisation, texture)  

Imagery visualisation   

- fists inside the pelvis, hands and feet  

- form/anti-form  

- angle/no angles  

- holding the heart and pulling the energy from the heart into your hands 

Questions:   

• How can one move between these different skill sets?  

• By using these different tools, can the dancer have multiple identities/a moving identity?  

Investigations to find answers:   

• Sending energy through the limbs and parts of the body, then using this impetus to go into a groove/rhythmic state  

• Imagining your body as a ‘guesthouse’ —> a new resident resides in your guesthouse and has just moved around the ‘furniture’ slightly, how do you react in your body to this feeling of something having changed? 

• Noticing the ‘arrival’ - the end of something or the beginning of something new, staying with the score. 

• Being able to use a scale of muscular intensity to affect the viscosity of the movement  

• Visualising from nature  

• Chaos vs. Control  

• Being passive, responsive and resistive to certain impulses to move  

The Sublime: a 'dreamt-of shadow'

Jacques Lacan begins one of his seminars on the Unconscious and Repetition (1981) by recalling an interrupted seminar a year earlier in which he developed the theme of anxiety. To nostalgia he dedicates the following poem by Louis Aragon, from Fou d’Elsa, entitled Contre-chant:

In vain your image comes to meet me
And does not enter me where I am who only shows it

Turning towards me you can find
On the wall of my gaze only your dreamt-of shadow.

I am that wretch comparable with mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
Like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited

By your absence which makes them blind.

Aragon’s poem, and Lacan’s positioning of it within the domains of nostalgia, anxiety, repetition, and the unconscious, speak to the particularities of performance, and offer us material significant for the reading of performance, toward a reading of moving bodies.

What this poem calls forth is an acknowledgment of the disappearance of the body which performance insistently makes manifest: the impossibility of ever really seeing—actually perceiving—movement (Gilpin, 1996, p. 110). What does it mean to perceive movement? What can we really see? What can we really hear? 

Perhaps what makes movement so compelling is that it is compiled of ‘dreamt-of shadows’ — fleeting moments of absent images.

It's like an earthquake deep under the sea. In an unseen world, a place where light doesn't reach, in the realm of the unconscious. In other words, a major transformation is taking place. It reaches the surface, where it sets off a series of reactions and eventually takes form where we can see it with our own eyes... The best ideas are thoughts that appear, unbidden, from out of the dark (Murakami, 2018, p. 203).  

Meditation, the eternity of the universe and the sublime are ideas that I reflect on in my practice. In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation.  

Ideas that I have been musing on…

• Practices of austerity to reach enlightenment and to arrive at a realm beyond life and death.  

• Passing shadows, living beings as mere shadows crossing paths 

• Shifting boundaries between reality and unreality 

• Lux in tenebris (light in darkness) --> subjects emerging from darkness, lighting conventions and dramatic impressions 

• Darkness, light and stillness  

• Depth and clarity of sound 

• Displacement

• Glimpses 

• Intermingling 

• Deformation

• Distortions

References:

Gilpin, H. (1996). Lifelessness in movement, or how do the dead move? Tracing Displacement and Disappearance In Susan Leigh Foster (Eds.) Corporealities : dancing, knowledge, culture, and power (pp. 54-71). London: Routledge. 

Translation as cited in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 17, from Section I: The Unconscious and Repetition: “The Freudian Unconscious and Ours.”

Murakami, H. (2018). Killing Commendatore. London:  Penguin Random House. 

Investigations around Memory & Authenticity

Let me imagine a locus for myself; a place that is both real and phantasmic... I will move through this memory terrain whilst writing, drawing from the memorized places the images I have placed on them (Hammergren, 1996, p. 54).

This is the starting point from which I have thus been focussing — questions around bodies as vessels of knowledge and the memories of our lived bodies. I’m interested in interacting with shadows, glimpses and memories as dancing bodies. What do these memories become? Perhaps they become glimpses of the Unconscious, Past and Present time intermingling. 

What is distinctive about the human memory? Memory is the basis of all culture. One of the major social movements of recent times has been the ongoing shift from a culture based on memory to one based on retention. Memory plays out in physical networks, where different parts of the brain move as in a synchronised dance. Every time we recall a memory, they say, the hippocampus is involved and ‘overwrites’ the original memory, each time with a slightly new interpretation or reconstruction. There are some cells in the hippocampus that are active only when we sit on a certain chair and not another chair — even in the same room.

If one tries to enter a particular space, one must adjust one’s body to that space but also yield to recollections springing from a bodily memory that is theirs and also belonged to strangers. How is this possible? How does my body react while entering that particular space? What bodily sensations do I get? How does it feel to touch an object, to adjust to a normative bodily code, to sit in a chair, to look out over a landscape, to move in a particular dress, to compare “this” body to “that” body? (Hammergren, 1996, p. 55-56).

In this sense, the kinesthetic discourse is a strategy which we perform with ourselves as tools, with the possibility of embracing all kinds of ‘source material.’ As a result we would privilege the bodily experience of wind, furniture, picking up objects, over their visual appearance. We would sense them before we visualize them, or at least use sight merely as a mediating sense. In privileging this bodily experience we call up memory associations, that is, we activate an artificial bodily memory (Hammergren, 1996, p. 56).

My question is though are they really artificial? Perhaps there is a kind of authenticity to our lived memories and the process of recollection?

Are you watching your inner film screen? Recall the memory and feel the sensations it contains. You can feel things like the water hitting your body as you dive into the sea. All these sensations flutter about our brains as we remember.

Between our temples most of us are equipped with our own private memory theatre, which continually stages performances, always with slightly new interpretations — and now and then with different actors (p. 27)

Improvisation tasks based on Authenticity & Memory

1. Improvisation task around body manipulation —> participants manipulate the one person’s body and limbs, the participant then improvises from the remembrance of that information  

2. Improvisation task in pairs —> person A sends impetus through different body parts of person B using touch, person B responds to the movement by going towards the touch, halfway through this improvisation person B closes their eyes, still responding to the touch… person A moves away, allowing person B to respond to this information and move from the remembrance of the information

3. Improvisation task of being aware and unaware of the body at the same time —> interacting with infinite number of selves frozen —> leaving traces and coming back to where the last trace/piece image was (can also be done by taking inspiration from other participants positions in space… imagining a statue garden of memories)

Questions that emerge from these tasks:   

• What is authentic?  

• What is your movement vocabulary and what belongs to others?  

• Is it me or is it not me?  

• Are we unable to delete knowledge?  

• When do we start 'curating' movement and body language? 

• Is vulnerability different to authenticity? To be vulnerable is intrinsic to being able to perform, is vulnerability key to authenticity?  

• How can one be present, available and authentic to the self?  

• When do we actually authentically move the body? I may think that I am moving a limb but actually I may be moving from a different point. It's important to remember that the body is a trunk with limbs attached.  

• How does the experience of the improvisation change/shift with the eyes closed? (Maybe it feels as if you are underwater, you’re unsure where you are in space)

• What parts of the body is your partner neglecting?

• How does it feel to move from the remembrance of the touches?

• Are these memory traces meaningless?

Memory Synonyms/related terms:

• Remembrance

• Mental images

• Impressions

• Reminiscence

• Recall

• Retention

• Evocation

• Reminders

• Echoes

• mnemonic (memory devices, techniques for memory retention and retrieval) - mnemonics make use of elaborate encoding, retrieval cues and imagery tools to encode any given information in a way that allows for storage and retrieval

References:

Hammergren, L. (1996). The re-turn of the flâneuse In Susan Leigh Foster (Eds.) Corporealities : dancing, knowledge, culture, and power (pp. 54-71). London: Routledge.