OzAsia Festival/The Human Expression (T.H.E) Dance Company. 23 Oct 2505
Heard the aphorism, ‘be like water.?
It perfectly sums up the delights and challenges of experiencing Director Kuik Swee Boon’s Searching Blue.
The work takes place throughout the spaces of Festival Plaza with a company of five dancers, a musician and Joel Manuel Fernandez’s portable amp playing much of the techno focused score.
This is a travelling piece, a guided journey, one with choices.
The audience arrives to a space near King William road. They find dancers in blue costume, arms, faces and legs covered with blue ochre chalk draped over benches, leaning against the building or stories poles.
The audience sits. Waits. Slowly, the work begins ever so gently as these dancers begin to awaken, stand, move. They’re accompanied by the sounds of solo human song and astonishing notes from a zither by Kent Lee.
A world within a world. One in which these dancers invite you take their hands, follow them. Walk or run. There’s a remarkable relationship unfolding between audience and dancers, indeed, an inner world is being created within the real one. That inner world directly challenges the one of sounds and people around us demanding its space,
so, like water, this moving production flows and ebbs in, around, and through the real world.
To take the dancers hands and follow them is to accept this new world of peace, seeking and wonderment.
The audience is constantly juggling this performance world and the real one. Perceptions of the two are extremely heightened by the fact we have accepted the dancer’s world. It’s moments of the dancers seeking something of each other, then offering their gift in warmth to us. From the King William Road corner, to Riverbannk, and across the footbridge.
At times, the troupe explodes into phrases of ensemble acrobatics and tableaux. The only moments they become like a conventional dance company in any sense of the term. That only makes ever more beguiling the mystery of choreography entangling audience members. It makes more profound the find and seek moments between dancers themselves.
Searching Blue is a remarkable waking dream experience. One that really makes you think about the realities you live in, physical, human, emotional, spiritual.
David O’Brien
When: 23 to 25 Oct
Where: Festival Plaza
Bookings: Closed
