In this year’s iteration of its annual repertory platform, R.e.P by RAW Moves, one of Singapore’s youngest contemporary dance companies, focused on the spirit of inquiry. It offers a potent double-bill of evocative narratives, shared with you through movement rendered in a form so raw as to challenge one’s preconceptions of the function of performance dance.
In SSLD:7 (Standing, Sitting, Lying Down), choreographer Ebelle Chong has created a process portrait drawn from her lived experience of being a stay-home mother for seven years. The multi-sensory piece is provocative in the emotional overtones of the story it tells. It almost always dares you not to look away and confronts any simplistic, idyllic notions of motherhood one might hold via an explicit unveiling of what those notions obscure.
Floating Box, the second component of R.e.P, choreographed by Chang Chien Hao, also narrates an experience virtually essential to the urban human experience. In the midst of a crowd of people in the city and observing those around him, he had the sudden sensation of the soullessness of this population. Upon taking a step back as an observer, he turned the mirror on himself and wondered what impression he, an ostensible member of that same urban crowd, presented to others.
In totality, this double-bill strikes the dual-edged question, albeit expressed in the most elegant wordless form: What narratives do we choose to conceal, and what narratives are we concealed from?
You’ll be pondering these questions before you even realise they’ve been asked of you.
R.e.P runs from 26-28th March at Goodman Arts Centre; tickets are available at rawmovesrep2015.peatix.com.
Written by: Tan Yee Hui
Edited by: Claire Ding
Image Credit: RAW Moves
