Review by Bilqis Hijjas

New Vision For A World in The City 

A World in The City—a dark spectacle showcasing young workers struggling under the pressures of urban life—was already revered even before the lights rose on this year’s restaging.

Loke Soh Kim created A World in The City in 1994 as a 20-minute piece for the fledgling Penang Dance Station. Since then, it has been restaged numerous times. Last year’s star-studded 35-minute production swept the BOH Cameronian Arts Awards, winning in categories for choreography, group performance, and costume, while also earning nominations for lighting design, set design, and best featured performer.

The 2024 production expanded considerably, growing to a full 60-minute performance. It incorporated new group scenes and an aerial rope solo by Gabriel Wong. Liew Chee Heai and Koe Mun Yoon designed a new multi-storey set using metal scaffolding, evoking a city in perpetual construction. The cast was refreshed with new dancers, including local dance luminaries Rohini Shetty, Liu Yong Sean, and Austin (formerly Steve) Goh, further enhancing the show’s artistic depth and appeal.

Most significantly, the production was staged in two locations: Kuala Lumpur’s KongsiKL and Penang’s Majestic Theatre, the latter as part of the George Town Festival. After 30 years, A World in the City returned to its origin city, a rarity in Malaysia’s theater scene where multiple runs or tours are uncommon due to budget constraints.

Soh Kim’s Creative Force 

Soh Kim’s recent success is remarkable given her long hiatus from the mainstream arts scene. After a professional dance career in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, she and her husband Choo Tee Kuang made vital contributions to Penang’s dance scene from 1993 to 1999. However, following their move to Kuala Lumpur, family commitments limited her artistic work. Her creative resurgence began in 2016 with dance film direction.

In 2017, Soh Kim joined KongsiKL, marking a turning point in her career. As producer of Seni Tiga, an innovative interdisciplinary performance series, she revitalized the contemporary dance scene by fostering unexpected collaborations and establishing KongsiKL as a respected venue.

This involvement allowed Soh Kim to engage with younger artists, stay artistically current, and develop her choreographic skills. She also honed her lighting design expertise, mastering KongsiKL’s unique space. In 2022, at age 50+, she delivered a powerful performance in Raymond Liew’s Kampung Baru, showcasing her enduring artistic vitality.

She sharpened her capacity as a lighting designer, becoming familiar with the unique potential and limitations of the KongsiKL space. Soh Kim was the most compelling presence in Raymond Liew’s Kampung Baru, exuding a firecracker power even in her 50s.

Concrete Despair In Choreography

KongsiKL’s vast concrete space inspired Soh Kim to revive A World in The City, its industrial aesthetic aligning perfectly with the production’s stark urban vision from the 1990s. For the revival, Soh Kim assembled a talented team of young dancers, many returning from overseas training, along with new collaborators such as costume designer Ix Wong and producer Low Pey Sien. The successful trial run in 2023 led to an invitation from the George Town Festival, prompting the expansion of the work to its current full-length format.

The 2024 production preserves key elements of the original, including its soundtrack dominated by Hong Kong 90’s duo 盒子 Box. The music is a collage as variable as the city itself: romantic strings dissolve into discord, fragments of jazz vie with incomprehensible yells through a megaphone, and ominous monologues accompany propulsive darkness.

The movement quality also retains the air of the original. In-sync group sections dissolve into running, while off-balance couples slump against each other as if exhausted. Dancers search for elusive meaning in office papers that sprinkle from the sky. Brief encounters lead to nothing. A writer (performed by Anthony Lee) sits at a desk working on an anachronistic typewriter, forming the static counterpoint around which the dancers whirl and fall.

In the final scene, the dancers, in stripped-down nude-toned dress, horse about on a long red metal ladder, engaging in daredevil feats or just dangling their legs. They slap their butts while intoning nonsense words with solemn absurdity. “Everything’s gonna work out right”, promise the lyrics – which seems a horrid joke, given what we have just seen. Depending on your mood, it can feel playful and optimistic, or silly and inconsequential. In the end, the whole cavalcade piles onto the ladder, and wheels off playing pat-a-cake, as if into the depths of Hell.

Contrasting Venue Experiences

If anything, this year’s version seems even bleaker than last year’s: the lighting dimmer, the spaces more cavernous, the costumes more monochrome. At KongsiKL, perhaps due to a limited number of lights, the dancers felt swallowed by darkness. They were so small and far away – and also largely unrecognisable, especially the women behind their curtains of dark hair and oversized costumes – that I stopped caring about them and their fates. It was not until the last segment, in which they emerge into the light closer to the audience and shed their bag-lady layers, did I feel I could engage with them as humans once again.

I preferred the Majestic Theatre staging, for its brighter lighting, but it also felt much more theatrical, replacing the gritty verisimilitude of KongsiKL with soaring brickwork and colonial ornamentation. In the Majestic, the multi-storey set (cleverly conceived, with the audience sitting near and on the small stage, gazing into what was once the cinema seating space) reminded me of Stomp and RENT on Broadway, framing Gabriel Wong’s aerial solo rather like a circus trick.

City’s Secrets, Raw Emotion

Gabriel Wong’s character serves as a narrative anchor throughout the fragmented urban scenes. His character reminded me of “lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows” in T. S. Eliot’s poems about cities choked with fog, cheap hotels and human disconnection. Gabriel traverses the urban wastes on a toy trolley.

Shaman-like, he silences the city’s din with a single crash of his gigantic bag of trash. But mostly he dangles above the city on a rope. Covered in a black cloak, he is like Batman gazing at the sins of Gotham City from the rooftops, before retracting like a hermit crab into his tiny coffin home.

Gabriel has the most significant character, but also the most enigmatic – he seems to know all the city’s secrets, but keeps us at arm’s length.

The dancer I found most affecting was Eden Lim. In the lean spareness of her frame and her long dark hair, she embodies the work’s drama with heart-breaking humanity, truly understanding the logic of the movement. In a duet, she suspends herself against her partner’s head pressed into her stomach, like a figure crucified. Later we see her as a stone gargoyle which melts into wax, and as a wraith in a single spotlight, utterly undone. Tough but vulnerable, as an older dancer perhaps Eden alone can channel the spirit of the 90s.

90s Dark Aesthetic

Are we still experiencing the same dark vision of the 90s city today? This representation of urban life is perhaps a little dated. Local choreographer Leng Poh Gee once expressed to me that a lot of Malaysian Chinese contemporary dance in the 1990s and 2000s tended to a rather dark and depressing aesthetic. In that context, the city loomed large as a sinkhole of soul-sucking capitalism, in which individuals were ground down into lives of cramped uniformity. A World in the City springs from this source.

There are certainly more and more reasons to feel dispirited about life in the city today, from global warming to rising living costs and creeping violence. But A World in the City’s own success belies its theme. The work’s new incarnation sprang from KongsiKL, a patch of urban wasteland which has been rejuvenated into a buzzing arts landmark. And it is embodied by an impressive roster of dancers, of an international calibre that was impossible to imagine in Malaysia in the 1990s.

I felt the dancers’ capabilities were somewhat mismatched with the character of the work. The dancers are all unique movers with their own special backgrounds, yet the work requires a more ensemble sensibility. In the end, outstanding dancers receded into the background, or were left unused. Wong Shan Tie, for example – with her tremendous core strength and wry expression, she could eat the modern city for breakfast. The most thrilling moment of A World in the City occurs when she and heavily-muscled Liu Yong Sean square off in centre stage. I really wanted to see Shan Tie take Yong Sean on, and win. But as soon as the duet starts to come into focus, it immediately melts away, leaving me feeling unfulfilled.

Perhaps the sense of regret, of missed opportunities, of unique dancers rendered as anonymous drones, is the intended effect of A World in the City’s depiction of late-stage capitalism. If so, it succeeds by filling me with dread.

Soh Kim’s Evolution 

But, as a restaging, I experience A World in the City as a triumph. The ambition of this restaging project was to “reactivate and reinterpret Malaysian pioneer contemporary dance archives, to preserve history and showcase artistic evolution.”

For us to know where we came from, and to make deeper and more meaningful work, such a restaging is vital for today’s dancers to experience in their bodies the same compulsions that moved previous generations. And it certainly showcases Loke Soh Kim’s artistic evolution: her emergence after a long quiescence as a creator at the height of her powers, who can harness a wide range of resources and tap the talents of a vast network of people, in service of a vision on an impressive scale.

Despite the tone of A World in the City, I feel tremendous optimism for Soh Kim’s artistic future. I look forward to seeing more of her positioning herself at the core of a creative initiative, rather than at the margins. She has shown she can breathe life into our cities; what else can she do?

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This article was edited and first published on the online Asian arts magazine Eksentrika.

This is the second part of a six-part series highlighting the continuing contributions and exciting new pathways of pioneers in Malaysian contemporary dance. The series considers issues of succession, creativity and novelty, as well as practices of archiving, documentation and restaging. This series was completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship. Views expressed are solely those of the writer. Read the first installment here or read the third installment here.

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.

Photos are by Taka Chang, courtesy of Kongsi Petak, and Thum Chia Chieh, courtesy of George Town Festival 2024.