2 features on Asia Dance Channel

I wrote two pieces for Asia Dance Channel: a review of Fitri Setyaningsih's The Colour of Inner Earth, and my impressions of Franz Anton Cramer's lecture, "Dance Criticism in the World and its (possible) Social Functions." Here are excerpts:

Dr. Cramer then discusses "dance history's master narratives," reminding us of the social, political and aesthetic categories in which dance exists. It is here that he differentiates modern from contemporary, after a brief historical look at the phases between and the different movements that came out of Germany, including expressionism, constructivism and Tanz Theater. Then he asks us what is contemporary, and what makes contemporary dance? Given that ‘contemporary’ equals ‘new,’ he posits that a work valued by its "newness" isn't properly assessed, and that the concept of "newness" is "extremely boring," and "cannot be the only criteria" for a dance to be contemporary. In a global setting, the definition is definitely more complicated.

He then talks about how dance is exoticized as West looks at East, giving several examples of exoticized colonies, including the 1931 French exposition and French archive of international dance, and books published within the same decade looking at folk dance practice in South East Asian countries. It would seem that Dr. Cramer is perhaps reminding us of instances where European and Asian relationships can go awry, which is interesting given that the dance summit we were attending was organized by Europeans for the South East Asian region.

from "Possibly Functional in Society: Dance Criticism"
Talk by Franz Anton Cramer
by Joelle Jacinto
Read the rest here

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The dancers are not just androgynous but also ambiguous. We do not know what they are or what they are doing, why they are doing this strange dance of alternating calm and frenzy. As this goes on for quite a while, I was beginning to create stories in my head about who or what they were and thought they fit right in the first Star Wars movie where the stocky desert people walked gracelessly over sand dunes in their bulky cloaks. The stage began to look like a desert then, and the faint pastels on the cyclorama behind them reminded me of the colors of the strange double sunset of the planet that Luke Skywalker had lived the first half of his life.

After what seemed a lifetime of this kind of movement, the ambient music began to get more frenetic, and the dancers began to get more frenetic as well. I don't remember how this started; sometimes, when we wait for something to happen, we unfortunately blink and realize we shouldn't have.

from "Enviable Exchanges in Jakarta
A Review of Fitri Setyaningsih's The Colour of the Inner Earth"
by Joelle Jacinto
Read the rest here

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There are also reviews of Donna Miranda's Beneath Polka-Dotted Skies by Choy Su-Ling and Pichet Klunchun's About Khon by Constanze Klementz, as well as essays and opinion pieces by Su-Ling and Renee Sariwulan in this special Indonesia issue. Go check them out on Asia Dance Channel.

A network for dance in the Asia-Pacific region

My piece on the Goethe Institut's regional dance summit got published yesterday on Malaya. An excerpt:

The gathering was composed of dance choreographers and critics from South East Asia, New Zealand and Australia, who came together in the effort of building a network for dance in the region. Binding the summit together was the launch of the Tanz Connexions website, which aims to provide an updated view of the dance scene in the region, and to promote collaborations and further developments of contemporary dance.

There was a lot of buzz about the use of the terms "contemporary" and "traditional" in this summit. The theme of the summit was "Transforming Traditions." I see it as the Goethe Institut’s acknowledgment of Southeast Asia’s strong roots in traditional dance and how, coming from this background, choreographers attempt to explore the contemporary. Margie Medlin, director of Australia’s Critical Path, in her keynote address about the dance scene in her country, said that contemporizing dance meant to "take dance from outside and layer their heritage on top of it," which is normal in multicultural countries, and in post-colonial ones as well.

Of course, our own local dance scene has long dealt with the contemporizing of traditional dance and is looking towards other explorations than merely layering heritage on top of new choreography. Filipino choreographer Donna Miranda, who performed her Beneath Polka-Dotted Skies at the summit, is more interested in multimedia collaborations with other non-dance artists, both in the formation of ideas and in execution.

Read the rest here: http://www.malaya.com.ph/sep02/livi4.htm

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2 pictures from Tanz Treffen, thank you phone cam

The dance critics from South East Asia + Franz Anton Cramer, my favorite German dance critic



The rest of the Philippine contingent: Donna Miranda and Goethe Manila's Sebastian Griese, walking with me towards the GoetheHaus

Click on photos for larger sizes. Thanks!
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blog revival '09

The Goethe Institut organized a Regional Dance Summit for Contemporary Dance choreographers and dance critics from August 5 to 8, 2009 at the GoetheHaus, Jakarta, Indonesia. The summit brought together over 40 participants from ten different countries, including Australia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, of course Germany and the Philippines. For the Philippines, Donna Miranda presented her work, Beneath Polka-Dotted Skies, while I was the country's representative dance critic.

Part of the idea of the summit was networking and as I met up with a lot of critics and journalists from other countries, it became clear to me how important the online component of our writings were. Luckily for me, Malaya publishes my work on their website and they're online for at least a year; other critics either write for websites without online components or the paper they write for charges for their online readership. But it does make sense that I should have a blog for dance.

I've already been toying with the idea of a blog that's open to the public, really about my thoughts about dance that other people might enjoy and get something out of. Most of my previous blogs were private, personal blogs and while there were some important dance stuff in it, there was also a lot of stuff that I only wrote for myself. So, in the interest of sharing thoughts of dance with the general public, welcome to this dance blog.

Thinking of a new name for this blog (because the old name was very personal; yet again everything is always about me), I remembered something Donna said to me on another blog - a "magazine blog" I started years ago with a bunch of friends that we couldn't sustain because everyone was busy with their own thing. I had put up my initial thoughts on her piece, Summer Begins and Ends as You Wish in that blog, and she left me a comment which ended with, "Mabuhay ang Blog!" This is because dance writing was very sparse - it stil is - and blogs were so cool because they were an alternate means of getting the news out on dance and art to a wide audience. Spending this week with her, I am reminded of that comment of hers, our first actual exchange and thought, how apt!

And so, mabuhay!
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