.Friday, November 16, 2007 ' 3:13 AM Y
estaandamelia
Sleek, spring-loaded, ambitious, disciplined; everything you would expect of a product from Singapore was present in the Singapore Dance Theatre's triple bill at the Peacock theatre.
Yet this seemed little more than a well-crafted product that lacked artistic imagination. The fault was, in large part, the uninspiring choreography of the first two works; but there was also something manufactured about the dancers themselves, talented and expertly-trained though they were. Birds of Paradise opened the evening. Choreographed by the late Goh Choo San, Singapore's most famous dance name who died in 1987 at the age of 39, this piece for two lead couples and an ensemble of nine was largely vacuous.
There was a great deal of well executed leaping and criss-crossing of the stage (to a deafeningly amplified soundtrack by Alberto Ginastera), but the overall effect was banal.
Maninyas by the Australian, Stanton Welch, was equally banal as a piece (and the soundtrack as deafening). Such interest as it afforded lay largely in the flawless coordination of the ten dancers rather than in their expressive vocabulary, which was painfully contrived and dominated by ejaculations of jubilation and despair. Or, rather, by an almost frantic attempt at mimicking them.
It came as something of a relief that the third piece did not keep raising the question 'to what end?'. The Lost Space, by Indonesian choreographer Boi Sakti, drew on traditional Sumatran folk dance and martial arts. It depicted a world being both torn apart and slowly eroded by the powerful forces of modernization, and it did so with genuine and vivid feeling.
Simon May
