The Making Of Marion

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - Exposing and explicating the process of any artistic endeavour is tricky business, because artists communicate through drama, dance, oil paints, song and music, among other things.

So, when the artist must explain in words what they do in their art, the information often becomes either overtly technical – the artist details his or her technique and training – or completely abstract and philosophical. When the former happens, the target audience should be restricted to colleagues, peers and scholars while the latter would only appeal to academics interested in researching artistic processes.

The balance of information and entertainment is a pivotal mission of public lectures or forums by artists.

In the past, one of the most successful forms was the acclaimed series of interviews conducted by New York‘s Actors Studio called “Inside the Actors Studio” in which personalities from the world of film, stage and television, from Steven Spielberg to Kate Winslet, talk about their craft.

Lecture demonstrations also help to understand the artist‘s process. A popular form in the 1970s and 1980s, the lecture demonstration became an effective way to introduce avant garde performances, from the seminal works of acting technique pioneer Jerzy Grotowski and training methods of the acclaimed Odin Teatret by director Eugenio Barba, to experimental music by John Cage and Meredith Monk, to name a few.

More recently, the form of conceptual dance has challenged the very notion of a dance performance. The most popular at the moment has to be Paris-based Jérôme Bel with his piece Pichet Klunchun and Myself (2005) in which the contemporary dancer dialogues with traditional Thai mask dancer Klunchun, with very little physical dancing on stage. In Britain, acclaimed dancer Jonathan Burrows teamed up with Italian composer Matteo Fargion to create exquisite performances that deconstruct contemporary dance in Sitting Duet (2002), The Quiet Dance (2005) and Speaking Dance (2006).

The conceptual performance lands in Malaysia with contemporary dance doyenne Marion D‘Cruz taking the lead in her Gostan Forward, which debuted at Annexe Gallery recently.

Framed as a performance lecture that chronicles the early adventures of D‘Cruz into contemporary dance, Gostan Forward highlights the historical perspective of her works Bunga Manggar Bunga Raya (2007), Bacchanale (1981), Alter Art (1991), Urn Piece (1988) and Swan Song (1988) while briefly tracing her dance journey into Western and Asian forms, developing intercultural dance and finally arriving at the present point of working with non-dancers and non-performers. The 50-something choreographer extraordinaire is best known today for her unconventional dance-making methods, as well as her dances.

With a dance career that spans 30-odd years, it is only fair that Gostan Forward focused on a handful of D‘Cruz‘s significant early works, giving the audience glimpses into an exciting time, pregnant with possibilities. Indeed, for a young dancer about to embark on shaping her choreographic styles and methods based on a rich foundation of Eastern (from Malay terinai to bharatanatyam) and Western (ballet and the Graham technique), Gostan is rich fodder for dance practitioners and academics as well as the curious dance audience.

Which is why director Mark Teh gives an apt prelude to the performance by extending to the audience “an invitation to remember, an invitation to imagine”. For those who are familiar with D‘Cruz‘s works, it is a trip down memory lane as the choreographer takes us back in time to her east-west experimentation in New York in 1980-1981, honestly admitting to bask in the attention of white Orientalists who saw her as “double-jointed” while she performed Malay folk dances. We are also given a glimpse of her ascendance in the New York arts community, choreographing for the important Mabou Mines theatre company and performing for experimental music legend John Cage.

Then there is the subsequent return to Malaysia when D‘Cruz began to seriously explore dance-making that would speak of a Malaysian identity, mixing Western forms with local styles. Her stories of “The Making Of” Sook Ching, Swan Song and Urn Piece allow the audience beyond the closed doors of the rehearsal and also the dance psyche without indulging too much in the technical details that could have left Gostan Forward completely didactic.

And it is the fine qualities of story-telling that draws in the audience to ride pleasantly with D‘Cruz as she unfolds engaging nuggets of personal tales alongside the art of making dance. Here is an artist who is supreme at communicating with bodies but has also a keen sense of oral expression filled with drama and balanced with the right amount of serious facts and embodied knowledge.

Together with Teh, D‘Cruz has shaped a performance driven by her theatrical sensibility and grounded in her dance experience. The dramatics in Gostan draw in the audience – one which stood out was the silent moment just before D‘Cruz began her talk, with her head bowed, hand on forehead, as if she was summoning her own memory. This motif is repeated later when she talks of the “dream time” of an artist, the space to dream and imagine in order for artistic work to emerge.

In addition, Gostan offers a delicate balance of oral history and visual presentation as video images of the dances mentioned are projected for new audiences to get a sense of her historical works while excerpts are performed live.

The crowning glory was when long-time D‘Cruz dancer Anne James joined her for an excerpt of the seminal Swan Song. It was certainly a magical moment. Another compelling moment, which ended Gostan, was D‘Cruz deep in the terinai dance but executed with a Balinese topeng (mask) of an old man. It was a quiet visual frame that was filled with the performer‘s sincerity and pride.

From the personal, Gostan also hints at the politics of that period as she put together her dances. She talks of being the first female, non-Malay wayang kulit dalang (puppeteer) in her student days at Universiti Sains Malaysia and how the politics of race was worth fighting against when she took on a male lead role in the terinai dance in the 1979 SEA Games held in Kuala Lumpur while the press was outraged that “budak India tidak boleh menari Melayu” (an Indian cannot perform Malay dance).

“It was a time when we Malaysians claimed the Malay culture and so we did,” D‘Cruz explains matter-of-factly to the audience.

As a first outing, Gostan is best appreciated as a performance that allows the audience peeks at segments of an artist‘s life and work. The challenge now is for this piece to develop into director Teh‘s ambitious opus of Gostan being an excavation into memory as stated in his programme notes. It doesn‘t quite do the job yet of exposing the “fluidity of memory” that Teh writes about. The stories flow too smoothly and mellifluously to suggest the plasticity and impermanence of memory and history.

And as a reflexive piece of work, the challenge for Teh and D‘Cruz is to push the envelope now to work through the artist as an ageing subject, the artistic instrument of the dancer‘s body exposed to the process of ageing, and how this instrument negotiates wear and tear through a highly informed and historised physicality. For Marion D‘Cruz is best known as a dance diva and there is no doubt this persona of legendary proportions can still shine for a long time to come, performing different histories and experiences, and encapsulating the physical, intellectual and emotional bodies. Fred Lim

Source: TheStar.com.my

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