sarma

Is the decade-long drought in contemporary dance in Singapore finally over?

The year 2000 saw an increase in the number of homegrown and international dance companies performing here. Despite slim funding, several Singapore companies plunged into full-time operation.

Through the Arts Education Programme, the National Arts Council has been brokering these companies to schools actively to teach dance. But while this draws revenue for artists, it also siphons time and energy for real creative work.

The names that crop up when dance is mentioned over the last two years or so include: Odyssey Dance Theatre, the Dance Dimension Project, the Arts Fission Company, the Tammy L. Wong Dance Company and Frontier Danceland.

These few names Singapore has to keep – but not without scrutinising the quality of their works.

Nurturing the scarce dance stable is necessary. But dance-makers need time to produce works worthy of export to arts festival abroad.

As with other fields in Singapore art, dance observers ask: ‘What constitutes ‘Singaporean’ expression?’

While fairly diverse in approach towards subject, theme, site and material, no choreographer here has yet thumbed, with critical acuteness and maturity, the wider issues of tradition and modernity, national identity and the human condition.

Some apply East-West fusion with little cultural logic, which, unfortunately, has led to parodic effects. Others, slanted by Western training, display aesthetic sensibilities and technical skills that are curiously half-baked.

Nearly everyone lacks the basic technical prowess to execute truly inventive movements. At the core, the intellectual and practical study of the human body as the key tool in dance remains weak.

The Singapore Dance Theatre, the most seasoned player, sets the prototype by importing foreign talents to fill the absence of technically-accomplished dancers.

This year, it challenged its resources by tapping on European neo-classical and regional contemporary choreographers. It has strategically defined ‘Singaporeanness’ beyond its geopolitical limits while pushing its physical discipline and form.

Meanwhile, practitioners of so-called ‘physical theatre’ will profit to widen their perspectives by crossing borders to access dance training, knowledge and method of the human body.

When its rigour deepens and its disciplinary frontiers blur, contemporary dance here will find and sustain its artistic professionalism and sense of community purpose.