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Beyond Moving with Artisans: Coconut Shell Carver x Ballet
Telekom Museum
11 March 2023
Created by Lau Beh Chin with Ridhwan Saidi & Winnie Tay
Review by Bilqis Hijjas
Sitting on the floor of the Telekom Museum, we inhale the scent of freshly-grated coconut. Dancer Winnie Tay is hidden behind a pillar. One foot emerges into view, articulated into a ballet point—a shape both stretched and curled. The dance critic Arlene Croce once observed that the moment the flexed foot becomes the pointed foot in Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments illustrates the transformation of nature into art.
This show, another incarnation of choreographer Lau Beh Chin’s project Beyond Moving with Artisans, has a lot to say about the transformation of nature into art—particularly what tradition of art we choose. Since 2018, the BMoA series has investigated so-called ‘sunset industries’ of Beh Chin’s native Penang, documenting the lives of aging artisans from traditional cookie makers to basket weavers, and refracting the resulting archive of skilled movements through the lenses of dance, theatre and visual art.
With this show, Beh Chin returns to the initiating impulse of the project. As a clever animated timeline in the show recounts, Beh Chin’s grandfather owned a coconut grove. She is pictured in childhood surrounded by piles of empty husks from the processed coconuts. Although no one in her father’s generation followed her grandfather into that line of work, the coconut has haunted Beh Chin’s consciousness and has emerged in her art from the jovial but pensive all-male trio “Hello, Nuts!” in 2017 onwards.
One of the artisans Beh Chin selected for BMoA is a coconut shell carver. Incidentally, Mr Leong is about the same age as Beh Chin (now almost 40), and he deeply cherishes the craft he has inherited. But coconut ornaments are not enough pay the bills. For the sake of his growing family, Mr Leong has opened a restaurant, which is doing well, but gives him no time for his labour-intensive love of coconut carving.
In the first scene of the show, a voice-over of Mr Leong in Mandarin and Hokkien ruefully recounts his dilemma. We are seated in a horseshoe in a large bright room of the museum. Winnie Tay, in simple pants and top, shares the centre with a ripe fresh coconut. Carefully cradling its weight, she offers it to various members of the audience to heft and examine. They return it to her, carefully handing it over or rolling it gently across the floor. One little boy, unimpressed, chucks it, and we all go “Oh!” as the coconut hits the hard floor with a thud. There is such sense of promise in a seed, and the coconut is especially cherished, if not fetishized, in our culture. Who does not have classroom memories of labelling Pokok Seribu Guna, with which parts of the tree can become what?
But a single coconut has limited fates. Winnie foreshadows one possibility, as she divides a tetrapak of santan into little cups, and invites audience members to pour the cups over raw rice in a cooking pot. The simple ceremony brings the audience together, concluding with a click, as Winnie puts the rice cooker to work.
There is more at stake here, though, than the fate of a single coconut, or even the question of what Mr Leong will do with his life. There is also the question of what Winnie will do with hers. This show has been framed as an encounter between a ballet dancer and a coconut shell carver (as an earlier edition, at ASWARA in December 2022, juxtaposed a typewriter petition typist with Chinese folk dance). But is Winnie really a ballet dancer? She was trained in the tradition from a very young age at Dua Space Dance Academy, and excelled at all the local competitions. But then she undertook a Bachelors in Dance at ASWARA, where she encountered almost every tradition of movement under the Malaysian sun.
Now a young graduate who freelances for different choreographers about town, Winnie is seldom to be seen wearing pointe shoes, the token of a female ballet dancer’s trade. Yet she has been naturally gifted with the most envied of dancerly traits: the Ballet Body. Tall, slim, with a small head and graceful neck, she also has a beautiful curved pointe and natural flexibility in her long limbs, as well as technique honed over many years of hard work. In dancer’s parlance, she could really “make it”: go overseas, and get a sought-after job in a professional ballet company, to wear tutus and tiaras, and dance the roles of princesses and fairies. So why is she here?
Tellingly, BMoA touches rather lightly on ballet. While the pointed foot appears in all its forms — licking the floor in a pas de cheval, little circling motions of a rond de jambe en l’air, or fluttering against the standing leg in a petit battement sur le cou de pied — Beh Chin doesn’t restrict Winnie to ballet’s vocabulary. Winnie starts on the ground in a curl, one pointed finger working staccato on the ground, the impetus starting from the shoulder, like a needle at the end of a drill — a most un-ballet-like effect. Once she is standing, the sudden emergence of the pointed foot seems incidental; as she fits the arch of her foot to the curve of the coconut, it’s just another form of cradling.
In a later scene, Winnie wears a scoop-backed tank top and a long loose skirt, flirting with the idea of a leotard and romantic ballet tutu. But her movement is again not ballet-like: a series of galloping hops, with hands on her rotating shoulders, or stamping with her arms pinioned around her back. In a memorable moment, she squats on a traditional coconut scraper, working away with a kernel, and then smears the freshly grated coconut over her arms, face and hair. Such pure physical indulgence—who has never felt the urge to do that, to feel the rough oily sensation of coconut shreds against the skin, and the rich scent that it leaves behind? We have come a long way from ballet’s rigid codification and disciplining of the flesh. Winnie’s body, it is clear, also has a thousand uses, and she refuses to choose just one.
This performance in the BMoA series also seems to duck limitations and discipline. The previous edition at ASWARA came together, with dramaturgical advice from theatre practitioner Ridhwan Saidi, as a fully-fledged performance, with tightly-scripted sequences, narrative thrust, and simple but dramatic stage lights. This BMoA seems much more relaxed, perhaps thanks to its site-specific nature.
As usual with site-specific performances, the chattering audience stands where it isn’t supposed to stand, takes up more space than it should, and loses sight of the performer. Beh Chin has also deliberately fostered a more inclusive environment, by inviting a group of people with autism, as well as the Chin refugee teenagers she has mentored for many years. The loosely-jointed format of this performance is perhaps a sign that Beh Chin herself can now move on: free herself from circling the theme that BMoA has provided through many long and fruitful years of research, as she has freed herself from a more conventional vision of what constitutes a performance.
And perhaps we too may feel less anxious about the fate of the sunset industries. It seems unbelievable now, but there was a time when ballet itself seemed in danger of going extinct. After the shattering experience of World War I and threatened by the rising tide of modern dance, ballet’s focus on royalty and romanticism seemed quaint and irrelevant. Yet it did not disappear. The Americans will tell you that they rescued ballet; however it happened, it’s evidently a globe-striding behemoth in the dance world today.
All it takes is a single passionate impresario, or perhaps a community effort. People like Mr Leong are indicative of a new generation finding interest and meaning in old things. We see it in the retro styling of hipster cafes, and in the legions of young people, especially in the arts, excavating their roots. Specific skills may be lost, but people will never cease to feel a sense of potential when they hold a heavy coconut in their hands.
After the performance ends, and having made a circuit of the museum, we are welcomed back into the first room, where the rice cooker has done its work. Beh Chin and Winnie hand out pre-packed nasi lemak bungkus to the delighted audience. Now we know why the show is at lunch time!
It’s hard to argue against the importance of a free lunch when you’re hungry—or against Mr Leong’s decision to give up his carving practice to run a restaurant. But art can dwell in the mind, can plant a seed in the heart, in mysterious ways that cannot be denied. My strongest memory of the performance is its most enigmatic moment. We have been led to the outside of the museum, looking through tall windows with old glass panes, to Winnie on the inside. Jostling for position, we catch only glimpses of her movement — sometimes she seems to be practicing a classical ballet barre, sometimes something else entirely. Eventually she hauls herself out through the window towards us, then folds her body casually across the ornamental iron railing outside. Suddenly we feel we are all too close, but there’s no space to back up. She dangles right in front of us, eyes half-closed, balanced on her stomach, gently rocking back and forth.
It’s the last movement in the show, and it has nothing explicit to say about coconuts, or ballet. But I will never be able to pass the Telekom Museum again without noticing that railing, and remembering it’s where Winnie draped herself, beatific as a cat snoozing in a sunbeam. I can’t eat that memory, but it will outlast the sunset.
Photos of BMoA are by Adam Suharto, Steve Long and Ridhwan Saidi, courtesy of JinnD Productions.
Bilqis Hijjas is the founding editor of Critics Republic. Formerly a producer and organizer in contemporary dance, she believes the main purpose of criticism is to enhance the audience’s appreciation of art.