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Bilqis Hijjas reviews LALUAN AMARYLLIS . STILL | zài by Kwang Tung Dance Company.
This series is completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship. Views expressed are solely those of the writer. It was first edited and published by Eksentrika.
At best, dutiful and crowd-pleasing. At worst, dogmatic and dull. To tell you the truth, that’s what I expected from Kwang Tung Dance Company’s recent production at Petaling Jaya Performing Arts Centre, when I heard they were presenting a dance theatre show in celebration of their 85-year old parent organisation, the Selangor and Kuala Lumpur Kwang Tung Association. But it appears that KTDC, under the artistic direction of Amy Len, has not lost the knack for delivering the unexpected.
A big team with lots of ideas
Even for a dance fan like me – accustomed to the non-narrative, sometimes opaque, style of contemporary dance – LALUAN AMARYLLIS . STILL was remarkably incohesive, although not entirely incoherent. It pulls in different directions, starting with the title, an unwieldy combination of 3 languages: Bahasa Malaysia, Greek (Amaryllis is the scientific name of a flowering plant from Central America, now popular in Malaysia) and English. In Chinese, the title is a single character pronounced zài – relatively simple, you might think, but two Chinese-reading friends sitting next to me whispered they had never seen it before. (It’s a ‘variant’ character, as the programme book explains.)
The performance also speaks through different tones in different styles. This might be the scattering effect of decision-making by committee: with such a broad artistic team, it is hard to tell which decisions were made by whom. As artistic director, Amy Len has led Kwang Tung Dance Company through various incarnations across several decades. The director of zài, also credited as conceptualiser, is theatre director Yeo Lyle. Added to the mix is choreographer James Kan, whose own smaller-scale works have won multiple awards, with previous collaborators Boyz and Zyee Leow from Orang Orang Drum Theatre with Alu8 responsible for the emotive music, and virtuosic lighting design by Low Shee Hoe, on a flying visit home from his job at City Contemporary Dance Company in Hong Kong.
KTDC’s last major show was six years ago: the pre-pandemic Bisikan Monsoon. It had a similarly wide creative team. While Amy retained responsibility for choreography, she gave up direction to Taiwan-based theatre veteran Chang Wei Loy. Bisikan Monsoon also shared a similar remit to zài: an interpretation of the Chinese community’s migration to Nanyang. But while Bisikan Monsoon was at times impressionistic, even enigmatic (remember the final unhinged circus scene?), it largely trod a familiar path, depicting migrants struggling in their new environment to make a patch of earth their own.
Lyrical beginnings
zài is infinitely weirder, although it starts gently enough. A spotlight comes up on Alu8 jamming on an electric guitar. The stage behind him is stripped bare, with stairways and emergency exits visible, hinting at the show’s own awareness of the artifice under construction. One by one, the dancers, wearing crumpled earth-toned layers designed by Queenie Chong, enter into a gauzy blue and yellow wash of light – stretching, reaching, hugging. Their movements build into schoolyard games of tag. Some dancers guard with outstretched arms, others stamp towards each other, sending their fellows leaping back. They coalesce into a heaving clump, their forceful breathing accentuating each lunge, stamp, stretch and spin.
Having formed a community, they seem to face a challenge. Where to go? What to do? In a corner of the stage is a pile of stuffed white sacks – a flexible and visually effective decision by set designer Passion Ma – which function variously as mountains, borders, roads, or islands. Hefted momentarily onto the backs of the dancers, the sacks evoke manual labourers, but zài quickly abandons this familiar trope of the indentured immigrant, as it seems to reject all easy narratives.
What follows is an undersea garden scene, gorgeously lit with shifting dappled blue light, reminiscent of a similar scene of nautical crossing in Bisikan Monsoon. The dancers on the floor waft their limbs like sea anemones, tumbling slowly in the water’s current. Kyson Teo, rehearsal master and the most senior KTDC dancer in this batch, pulls off a lovely liquid solo. Off-balance as if swept by waves, he reaches and crawls, staggers, and rises only to fall again, as the other dancers walk upstage over a wall of sacks as if into an unknowable darkness.
Later the dancers support each other in rolling lifts along the line of sacks, lit in shadowy chartreuse, as if walking a mountainous ridge. In the following scene, the dancers spin from one island of sacks to another, accompanied by arpeggios of electric guitar. Wong Shan Tie and Silver Yee, dancing in a duet, let waves wash through their bodies as they reach for each other, smiling. Women are carried above the crowd, swooping like birds.
A turn towards the theatrical
This is where zài, so far rather lyrical and dance-based, takes a turn towards the theatrical. The dancers, crowded on a too-small island, grasp each other’s hands. Instead of comforting, the hands are now seemingly restricting. The enchained clump convolutes in silence, as dancers are lifted in complicated ways, becoming more and more twisted and constrained.
The pounding of a drum raises the tension, and the scene morphs to present one individual versus the group. Soloists are hived off from the main group to blasts of melody, while the group starts a staccato phrase, all angular arm movements and sharp heads turning. With little shuffling steps, they assemble into a square light like a bunch of tin soldiers, then explode, coming to a crashing stop with each dancer standing in his or her little circle of peach-coloured light.
How will they resolve the conflict between the needs of the individual and the demands of the group? Perhaps with the help of a demagogue. Silver Yee grabs a microphone, not speaking into it, but gesticulating, as the others fawn around her. To drum beats and a cruel-sounding guitar, Silver seduces the group with her gestured argument. The other dancers try to muffle her, and succeed for a while, smothering each person who tries to claim the mic. But finally Silver regains the mic, and declares, in triumph, “FOR A BETTER LIFE!”
As if this is the deliverance they have been waiting for, the group lifts Silver on high. In a frenzy, as Silver goes crazy with the mic and the soundtrack grunts and roars, the group piles sacks into a mountainous throne for her – until suddenly all the dancers collapse, leaving Silver jerking like an automaton running out of fuel.
The dominance of an idea
Bisikan Monsoon happened the night before Malaysia’s momentous general election in 2018, and my interpretation of the work was tinged by that political atmosphere. zài took place the weekend before the US presidential election. It’s a coincidence, no doubt – there’s always an election happening somewhere in the world – and the production crew could not have predicted that Trump would convince American voters that he alone could lead them to glory. But the threat of menacing populist strongmen like Trump – Putin, Xi Jinping, or closer to home Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto and Najib Razak – looms large across the globe now, and its presence in zài is unmistakable.
What is more interesting is the single idea which zài presents as defeating all other: FOR A BETTER LIFE. As an explanation for why people migrate, on one hand it serves to excuse the immigrant, who might otherwise be viewed as greedy and grasping. After all, who can be blamed for wanting a better life for their children? But it also serves to homogenise: to erase the individual voices and stories which explain why some people move from one land to another. And it forgives the worst of humanity. Instead of theft, murder, politically-motivated famine, or genocidal oppression, we are left with the impression of simple need: not enough land for a growing population, for example, or a lack of opportunities for talented strivers.
It is hard to overstate the dominance of this idea in the Malaysian collective consciousness. I remember once asking my class of first-year university dance students why Black people had come from Africa to the Americas. The students looked sideways at each other. If any of them knew the truth, perhaps they felt it was indelicate to say. At last, one student piped up, “Teacher, in search of a better standard of living?” Ah, you poor sweet child.
zài proposes that domination is an idea, not a person. The following scene also suggests a kind of enforced uniformity of thought. A patchwork flag descends over the stage, flat like a table, gently crushing the dancers downwards. Electric blue light steals across the flag, playing upon the peaceful faces of the dancers lying beneath. As the flag lifts, they sit up, as if refreshed by sleep.
If the flag denotes the rise of nationalism, under which everyone accepts the social order and harmony reigns across the land, it is a hopeful gesture, but not one that holds true in Malaysia. In this nation, there is no even playing field, and not all citizens are treated the same. Perhaps the scene serves to underscore the irony of the modern nationalist myth, to force us with its evident falsity to question other comforting certainties.
A plea for many voices
Before the audience can quite digest this possibility, zài closes with a manic episode of dress up and debauchery, in place of Bisikan Monsoon’s crazy circus scene. A stagehand unties one of the sacks, and dumps what looks like red earth onto centre stage. Meanwhile, the dancers are donning scraps of finery – a white tailcoat for Kyson (reminiscent of his ringleader’s garb in Bisikan Monsoon), black gloves, sparkly skirts, or a foppish hat – to sit on chairs in a semicircle around the pile of earth. From the security of their seats, they gesticulate towards the earthen pile as if denouncing it, interrogating it, accusing it.
But as a ticking soundtrack builds up speed, Shan Tie enters like a sleepwalker, dressed in pyjama-like white t-shirt and shorts. She steps into the earth, and it begins to coat her. To pure xylophonic tones, she dangles her long hair into it. She seems serene, literally grounded, a distant link to the hazily-remembered community of zài’s opening scene. As she gets dirtier, the assembled crowd of high society decide they want whatever she’s having. All the social media influencers, key opinion leaders, popularity hounds, desperate souls – whatever you want to call them – pile onto the tiny island of earth. Jostled by the struggling crowd, Shan Tie stands motionless in the centre – a mute plea for reason, as the light fades.
In the end, I think zài calls into question the simpler narratives of works like Bisikan Monsoon. Rather than history, it offers historiography: dissecting how individual experiences of human movement can end up flattened and simplified, enslaved to metanarratives like nationhood. The show’s multilinguistic name, its team of sometimes divergent creative talent and its scattered artistic approach are trying to reassert how diverse our human story really is, and that we ignore this diversity at our peril.
Blazing the unorthodox path
In retrospect, when I went to watch zài, I should have had more faith in the creative team, and especially in Amy Len, whose work has intrigued me for decades. This year I am writing a series about Malaysian contemporary dance pioneers, and in this context Amy is somewhat of an outlier: although she is undeniably a trailblazer, she is a generation younger than many others. But she led a small dance group from the youth wing of a stolid Chinese community association, which had been founded to pursue straightforward ideals like physical fitness and teamwork, towards an unorthodox path on the cutting edge of Malaysian dance.
In the early 2000s, her work was characterised by a loyal inner circle of women dancers, and a recognisable style of outrageous costumes and dark atmospheres, in which the women, crawled, collided and convulsed more like cave-dwelling creatures than humans. So when Amy took time off from choreography to focus on her family, it seemed possible that KTDC might dissolve. The other dancers attempted to fill her gap, but nothing stuck. There was bickering and falling out within the core group, and then the pandemic happened, forcing many of the dancers to go their separate ways.
In 2018, I thought that Bisikan Monsoon, for all its scale and technical accomplishment, was a kind of last gasp. I missed the sense of Amy’s own singular genius at work, and I still do. But I had not reckoned that she may have been making space for others and creating the structures needed to support them, just as other pioneers like Marion D’Cruz started doing decades ago. With zài, Amy was able to pull together creators of impressive calibre and allow them all some individual liberty within the creative process. It cannot have been a simple or easy balancing act – I gather that the dancers were sometimes torn as to whose direction they should follow – but surely Amy was there nudging it all forwards.
Amy was not at the performance of zài that I attended at PJPAC; she was on duty at the 85th anniversary celebration dinner for the Selangor & Kuala Lumpur Kwang Tung Association, in a hotel banquet hall nearby. The show that she had dreamed about, weaving together the disparate strands of her creative team, went on seamlessly without her. Some of the performers told me that the Association had been pleased with the result, and surely that also was Amy’s doing. I can picture her during the matinee performance, gently interpreting the show for the committee members squinting from the VIP seats, and reassuring them, no matter how baffling the show sometimes seemed, that it served their purposes.
Their trust in her has been hard earned, and it is well deserved. In the face of today’s radicalising algorithms which drive people to crave simple truths and plant their flags on opposing extremes, Amy has made a place which allows many voices, that requires tolerance, negotiation and compromise, and that looks like the messy and complicated world we call life.
This is the fourth part of a series highlighting the continuing contributions and exciting new pathways of the 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 is completed under the ArtsEquator Fellowship. Views expressed are solely those of the writer. Read the previous installment here or read the next 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.