da:ns lab 2019: Collectivism in the arts
da:ns lab 2019: Taking up space
da:ns lab 2019: A public square
da:ns lab 2019: An Indigenous Body
da:ns lab 2019: Listen to Country
Dana Michel: Body, queerness, and chaos
(Un)making Nonsense with Sonja Jokiniemi
Melati Suryodarmo: Culture, performance and womanhood
da:ns lab
da:ns lab 2019: Listen to Country
Dance practitioners gather in this annual platform to discuss contemporary issues.
da:ns lab 2019 was produced by Dance Nucleus Singapore with the support of National Arts Council, in collaboration with Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay.
This fifth edition is a response to the heightened precarity of social and ecological climates, with artists turning inwards to examine their own complicity amidst these larger paradigm shifts. Four international artists—Jacob Boehme, Xiao Ke x Zi Han, Martin Schick and Paz Ponce—were invited to share more about their work in initiating capacity-building platforms to address the challenges faced in their respective cultural contexts. Participants from Southeast Asia and the extended Asian region were also invited, coming from The Philippines, India, Taiwan, Indonesia and Thailand.
In this archive, dance practitioners and participants Chan Sze-Wei and Chloe Chotrani respond, engage, critique and archive da:ns lab 2019: Listen to Country. The first two days of the programme were held at Dance Nucleus at Goodman Arts Centre, while the latter two were held at the Esplanade Annexe Studio. Each guest artist conducted a creative activity based on their experiences and current projects, lasting between three to eight hours.
Introduction by curator Daniel Kok
Responding to the shifting ground and changing climate—environmental, political, and economic—many artists in the performing arts have begun to augment their practices with a sense of urgency. This involves a critical re-examination of the arts ecology, the role of the arts and artists, and a greater emphasis on a model of relevance over that of excellence.
Compelled to address more directly social engagement and community participation, it can be argued that the arts in general, regardless of discipline or form, have begun to dovetail at performance, whereby as a relational practice, the arts attempt to play a more substantial role in building more dynamic, more equitable, more sustainable, and more meaningful relationships within their circumscribed contexts.
Furthermore, some artists are also reimagining themselves as curators of their own projects, in which the frameworks and formats for artistic engagement can potentially be renegotiated on the artists’ own terms. Accordingly, many artists are initiating projects that are self-directed in order to reclaim a sense of autonomy and agency, and to redefine the ways in which they can more directly, as well as more critically engage with their socio-cultural contexts.
The word "curate" comes from "curare" (Latin), which means "to care for"; the curator being traditionally a carer of cultural artefacts in a museum. Adapted into the performing arts approximately over the last 15 years, the role of the curator as a "carer" of cultural conversations has never been more critical, especially when so many aspects of our lives require care today: mitigating against environmental collapse, listening to dissenting views amidst political deadlock, even reviewing self-care or countering precarity, burnout and exhaustion among freelancing artists.
The verb of the day seems to be "to listen". As well as to speak, issue statements and to take a stand, the artist who cares also needs to build in listening as a salient ingredient in their artistic practices. Besides speaking more forcefully and more persuasively, how can we be better at listening to our communities?
