I was on the hill somewhere in India. The song by Deva Premal – Chidananda was in my head and the surrounding was beautiful. And I started to move.
I had been a dancer/movement artist for all my life. Things stopped when life force me back to my country. I was lost and couldn’t feel the new ground under my feet. Watching myself dance on the hill help realign my self a bit.
After all I still miss dancing with my ex company in Singapore. In other words, I miss my life. But this feeling shall pass. The road doesn’t end. I just made another turn.
I just finished the hardest year in my life then. I went back home in Bangkok (with no coup de tat at that moment) to celebrate New Year with my family including my brother-in-law. They were quite surprised that I actually could dance everywhere in any outfit.
Inspiration? Just the beautiful light and the gorgeous moon. Plus, we just had to wait for so long before the count down began. So? I danced!
I am familiar with dance improvisation. But when it came to piano, I was not so sure I could do it until last Saturday while I was waiting for my art students in the classroom and the piano was there waiting for me to start exploring. (Again, I had never known before that I could draw anything until I needed to teach. I will share with you about this thing in another blog.)
More and more I found that being an artist is like being a hub of inspiration. Ideas and thoughts come and the artist need to translate them into something through some mediums. The stream of creation will never stop. I improvised this having the theme of The ‘OTHER’ Me dance project in mind. I think maybe I can use some of the material here and develop it for this dance piece.
Again, I am not saying this is the best work. I am not sharing with you because it is good. But I am waiting for your comment or advice if you have one. (Thanks in advance :)) By the way, I know that the sound quality is super bad. Apologize for that.
To be honest, I am so happy I can still play piano. And I had never imagined before that I could really do the improvisation on it! 😀
More than one time in my life, dance, especially when it came to site specific work, proved what they say that friend is someone who you can go crazy with. The guy in this video is my best friend, both in dance world and in yoga world. He rented a motorbike and took me to out one night to dance around Chiang Mai, the lovely city in the North of Thailand.
I learned over the time that site specific work is not just putting the work into the place. The relationships between dancers and the space is very important. The ‘feeds’ that the space give to the dancer is what we are looking at. And the way dancers or choreographers response to it will make the work interesting… or not.
By the way, this one was not choreography. We were on holidays and decided to play together. Based on improvisation again.
🙂
dancers : Kenneth J. Suwan and Mimie Tav
music : Toute est Calme – Yann Tiersen
I just happened to like this song so much. The first time I heard it, I was in a coffee shop thinking of how I could make the world understand what I was doing. I wanted to be a professional dancer. But I lived in a place that no one believed that such thing could exist. I felt I was standing alone.
That evening we, me and my friends who shared the same belief gathered at the same coffee shop. We called that place our office. And we decided to go out and just dance. Just DANCE. There was no fixed theme. We just picked the arrow as a sign of our goal and improvised on it in our own style.
It was not the good work when I came back to watch it again 3 years later. It was just a group of dancers playing together, improvising with no clear direction. But, as one of the dancers participating in this, what I can see (maybe not by me physical eyes) is the true passion of the amateurs. However, it was so genuine. It was like we said it out loud with every part of out bodies : “Yeah we are gonna dance here. Who cares?”
And now, 3 years later, here is my question.
How much passion I can maintain when it becomes my true career now? Can I still dance it out like no one cares and me caring of no one, just only me and the space and the team. How much can I still stay true to myself when it comes to improvisation?
You know what? The answer is 150% if not more.
Today, I am happy with where I am and what I do. Working with a dance company which does a lot of things based on loose choreography gives me enough space to make an artistic decision on the spot and it sharpens my idea. And if there’s anyone I need to thank. I’d say thank you to my friends who did the kick-start together that evening.
🙂
I will sprinkle some more site specific works I did in the past and maybe in the future once in a while. I will start sharing with you about the dance+discussion I am focusing on now – The ‘OTHER’ Me – cause I am hungry for opinions.
(This is the short version of the whole thing – 30 seconds only. More to come, of course!)
Before coming to Singapore to work in a ‘proper’ contemporary dance company, I didn’t know what site specific work was. But I did it already, mainly because I had no choice.
What could I do? I really wanted to dance my life out. I was with Bangkok City Ballet company at that time. It was a good ballet company, maybe the best one in Thailand, but it was only a part time job and my soul was hungry for more. I wanted to dance more. However, there was no place for me to really ‘express’.
What could we de when no one wanted to see. No one gave it a shit. It was an absurd activity for kids. It was not a real job. Noe one could earn money from it. Dance was only for being in the background, in a club, for the nightlife. They had never known how hard we worked on our bodies. They had never cared that dance can really transform people’s lives. And it had already transformed us. We dedicated our lives for it but in the end there was no stage to express our passion and tell the world that ‘DANCE IS ARTS’ – and ‘ARTS IS LIFE’.
That was painful.
That evening I was sitting with my four best friends in a cafe in Siam area – the busiest and liveliest area in Bangkok. We looked through the glass windows at the busy crowd outside. Then one of us asked “Shall we do something? Do you still have dance clothes with you?”
Then we just went outside and danced. Yeah! let’s go into the audience.
And that marked the beginning of my journey with my four best friends. We expressed our passions in a way no one would do it in Thailand. That was a fight. We were fighting together … for what we believed.
And we got a lot of audience. Some looked at us for a while and walked away. Some found a seat and be our audience until ‘the show’ finished. One of them, being so interested in what we did, offered us a meal after wrapping up. And we accepted his kind offer. Five of us (including another friend helping us holding the camera) got into his small car and we became friends after that. But until now, I still prefer to call him .. Mr.Stranger. Yes, we were stranger.
To be continued.
🙂
(about this video)
“DANCE EXPERIMENTAL PROJECT WITH MY DANCEMATES”
MUSIC : Die fabelhafte Welt der Amélie – La Valse D_Amélie
PLACE : Siam Center / Siam Discovery, Bangkok, Thailand
Root~top 