Triangular Prism
28-30 May 2010
Panggung Bandaraya
A LAPAR Lab production
By Bilqis Hijjas

When you know a choreographer personally – or a painter, an author or a composer – it is almost impossible not to read whatever you know about them into their creations. Sometimes this can backfire, when your preconceptions of the person make you incapable of seeing their works in a new light. But I often feel that it adds an element of insight, of relishing a sense of secret connection between artist and audience. There is always the possibility of surprise, too, when an artist you thought you knew well, perhaps even understood, produces something entirely unanticipated. The process can also work in reverse – having experienced a work of art, you often feel like you know the creator better.

Going to see LAPAR Lab’s latest production, I was looking forward to exploring my multiple levels of familiarity with the three emerging female choreographers presenting their works in Triangular Prism. I know Crystal Low Sim Wei the best – she danced for me in several small performances, and I was one of four dancers in a recent work she made for Dancebox at The Actors Studio at Lot 10. We had chatted about her education in Australia as well as her ambitions in Malaysia during car trips to and from rehearsals. Louise Yow Sing Hwa, on the other hand, I had seen for the first time on stage in Low Shee Hoe’s The Dying Eyes in 2006, and been entranced by her cool elegant performances in numerous productions ever since. We have the kind of smiling hugging friendship common in the dance community – she comes to my shows, and I go to hers. Kathyn Tan Chai Chen was the wild card. I had seen her perform only once, in last year’s Toilet, where her absolute dramatic commitment to her role dominated the stage. I knew her by reputation as a multi-talented dancer and actress in the Chinese-speaking arts community.

Louise’s work ‘Incessant’ started the program with a characteristic sense of chic that never let up. In little black dresses and perfectly styled hair, the group of nine dancers swept across the stage in clean formal patterns. The focus was on the movement, with wide circling arms contrasting with quick articulations of the feet, and languorous moments interrupting periods of speed. The minimal palette of the costumes and lighting highlighted the occasional appearance of red shoes or a red dress, functioning more like the focusing red square of a Mondrian rather than the tear-jerking red coat in Schindler’s List.

Louise made her dancers look good. Even when their red-carpet-like poses were twisted to look torturous, every one of them could have been a model, devouring the stage with their long toned legs. These women were here to do business, and they did it with consummate style, without overburdening the movement with meaning.

Lau Beh Chin worked carefully and deliberately within her strong technique. In one moment, impressively timed with Ng Chor Guan’s difficult-to-count minimalist score, Beh Chin landed the final grand battement of her solo smack on the last beat of the music. In another example of lovely ensemble timing, the group stormed the stage just as Hii Ing Fung toppled off a perfectly calibrated balance. Moments like these were thrilling spikes within a carefully crafted celebration of beauty and skill. How very, very Louise.

When I think of Crystal Low, the adjective that comes to mind is ‘bolshy’. LAPAR Lab artistic director Leng Poh Gee’s reference to ‘stubborn rebelliousness’ in his program notes suggests the same. With ‘Frame Us, You?’, Crystal unleashed her natural mutiny, giving the finger to propriety, the male gaze and anyone else who would dare to pigeonhole her into submission. Instead of the artistically acceptable vocabulary of contemporary dance, Crystal chose jazz. Instead of stylish musical landscapes, we got a pastiche of the likes of Linkin Park.

The work swung wildly between punky literally hard-hitting scenes, full of falls and punches, and scenes of stereotypically sexy movement performed robotically to sharp metronome beats. By decontextualising the jazz movement, removing it from its usually sex-laden milieu and interspersing it with mechanical walking that could be played on fast forward or rewind, Crystal cleverly upset our ideas of what jazz is and what it does.

Ironically, the punky scenes seemed more conventional by comparison (after all, the idea of an angry young artist has been around for a while) but featured a few memorable performances. Saw Li Wai was totally convincingly in her abusive duet, landing her solid kicks on her partner with a bully’s methodical aggression. Nancy Ng at the end of an elastic lead struggled and leapt like a landed fish, and Chew Seck Nee’s evil grin brought the ghost of Chucky to the stage.

Surprisingly, the final image of the ‘Frame Us, You?’ that drew the divergent fragments together came at the suggestion of the artistic director, rather than the intent of the choreographer.

Yap Chee Yee crouched under a table, simulating masturbation while watching the female dancers bump and grind against the backdrop in full MTV mode. His placement with his back to the audience clearly invited the audience to empathise with his gaze, while feeling thoroughly disgusted in doing so. When the screen went dead before the voyeur had a chance to get his rocks off, it was the ultimate defiant “Screw you!” So far, so very Crystal.

Kathyn Tan’s ‘Urban Suite’ was the most interesting work in the program (although also the least coherent), perhaps because I did not quite know what to expect from it, and also because it continually confounded every expectation I had as soon as one arose.

The opening scene of city folk, costumed like Smurfs that had fallen into a flour barrel, displayed the kind of unabashed clowning which corresponded well with my image of Kathyn from her performance in Toilet. Urbanites gossiped over tabloids and twirled their umbrellas to a playful piano score. Tan Shioa Por entered dragging a bag as big as herself, recalling the dream sequence from Singing in the Rain with Gene Kelly’s idealistic country bumpkin arriving at the Great White Way.

From this theatrical somewhat kawaii scene, the work downshifted to feature an elegantly monochromatic video projection of the Bukit Bintang intersection, with the dancers stop-going upstage. The projection element developed further in the next scene, as a white line drawing grew into a skyline of buildings, all higglety-pigglety. As five white rectangles loomed over the city, the girl with the bag set it down and zipped herself inside it. One of the rectangles opened like a door, a metaphorical entrance to another dimension of city life.

This next dimension abandoned the tongue-in-cheek character of the early scenes to embrace a shamelessly lyrical romanticism. Two pairs of women gently embraced. Beh Chin and Chee Yee performed a love duet under smoky blue light, reminiscent of another Gene Kelly dream sequence, by the bridges of the Seine in An American in Paris.

From here, ‘Urban Suite’ lurched straight back to ludicrousness, some girls chasing the boy with the bag, and others performing jack-in-the-box pliés while grimacing maniacally. Just as it seemed like this knock-kneed tomfoolery would take the day, a nostalgic Ryuichi Sakamoto melody heralded yet another tonal shift.

The girl emerged from the bag as if into Paradise, beneath a projection raining golden fireflies onto dancers now clad in white shifts. In the end, the dancers raised their white umbrellas over themselves like Buddhist monks and walked calmly off into the city skyline at sunset.

In his program notes, Poh Gee hoped that Triangular Prism would ‘embody the emotional landscape’ of the three choreographers it presented. I thought the show precisely reflected my own understanding of those choreographers and their characters. Louise is forever poised and perfect. Crystal is rebellious. And Kathyn? Well, I still hardly know her at all.

All images by Allspire, courtesy of LAPAR Lab.