engaging, enchanting and vibrant”
Created and directed by Kuik Swee Boon, founder of Singapore’s T.H.E Dance Company, in collaboration with Malaysian sound artist Kent Lee, Searching Blue is a site-specific physical performance exploring spirituality, community, the relationship between human and nature, as well as between themselves.
It began inside the auditorium of the Coronet Theatre, where some audience members were seated onstage in a circle around the dancers (Carmelita Nuelle Buay, Priscilla Chan, Chang En, Klievert Jon Mendoza and Fiona Thng) whose bodies were covered in blue powder. The barefoot ensemble displayed exceptional techniques while retaining a strong and vibrant expression. It felt almost as though they were breathing not just through their mouths and noses, but through their entire bodies.
While the indoor part was more spiritual with Lee’s uplifting and loud soundscape effectively establishing the atmosphere, the outdoor part was much more engaging, enchanting and vibrant. The audience was asked to leave the auditorium and follow the ensemble walking into different gardens in the neighbourhood. The dancers started to invite the audience members to join them, running with them hand-in-hand like a child and dancing with them in a taichi-like motion. In these moments, you felt the three elements at once for all: your own body, the dancer’s body, and the grass or rock ground under your feet.
The audience interaction was by no means random. Instead, it gradually built towards a climactic sequence in another garden, where members of the audience, even including young people, mingled with the dancers to form a tiding circle. Watching this human tide, you clearly had a strong sense of community that merged seamlessly into its surroundings. No social formation. No modernity. Just visceral bodies in motion.
The circle is, to some extent, the hidden theme of the performance, presented both in physicality and in terms of time and human behaviour. The show ended in another small courtyard. Nearby there was super loud rock music. But here in this small garden, serenity and tranquillity surrounded under the sunset, and almost all sound went to silent (wanlaijuji 万籁俱寂).
As a site-specific performance, it is a shame that, while most of the outdoor journey is dramaturgically well integrated, the 10-minute walk from the Coronet to the first garden did not quite incorporates into the show. If given more time on adapting this section, the walk itself bears the potential to become an extension of the choreography, further exploring this performance’s whole theme on body, human relations and the nature.