The pursuit of
professionalism and the compartmentalization of knowledge are but the two sides
of the same coin. The alert to the relation between institutional structure and
the “qualification” of “knowledge” has led to the rise of multi-disciplinary
practices, art practice inclusive. With all due respects to the intents of
multi-disciplinary collaboration, those who have been involved know that it is
very difficult, if not impossible, for us to look at the same matter from the
perspective of another discipline. Because it does not only takes new knowledge
but also a shift of the core belief that has supported our own discipline – and
not everyone is prepared to do that. Our limited horizon means a world of mediated
meaning. When two or more art practices collide, practitioners have to directly
confront that limitation. Their art is how they deal with that. The art goes
beyond the presentation but the latent process behind it.
Bipolar Bodies, directed and performed by Daniel Yeung in
collaboration with Chen Jun of Hong Kong Dance Company and new media artist
Keith Lam, performed in Hong Kong between May 15 and 17, 2015, positions itself
as an multi-disciplinary experiment. While I am not sure what brings them together
in the first place, I propose the belief in the value of mediation as the
departure point. By manipulating the materiality of the media, the artists
mediate our perception of “reality”, and hence our world view. Dance is the
manipulation of the body (the media) to interrupt the dominant perception of
the world based on rationality and its expression with the logic of language.
Yeung and Chen manipulate the habitual usage of their bodies to mediate not
just the audiences’ approach to their arts but their relationship with
dance.
Pole dance is a new
set of skills Yeung has to develop based on his contemporary dance background
and by doing so, he successfully mediates the form’s dominant image which
swings between erotic and pornography. Yeung shows us that the pole is nothing
more than a means for the body to counter gravity. He brings our attention back
to the human body as an entirety in itself: it doesn’t symbolize anything, it
is the meaning. Yeung’s pole dance performance also mediates the gulf between
so-called “art dance” and “entertainment dance”. His experiment in this sense,
though not full-fledged multi-disciplinary, has been possible because he has
transcended the formal divide with his untrammeled belief in dance. The
representation doesn’t bother him. He is presenting his very existence as
dance.
The venture into
the unknown mediates one’s position in his comfort zone. Chen, as a principle
dancer of the Hong Kong Dance Company and much applauded for his extraordinary
skills in Chinese dance, has ventured into new movement vocabularies in his
duets with Yeung. He even shared the pole with Yeung. Undeniably his solos
reveal his drawing on his own resources, but I do regard this as a classic
example of what it really takes in a multi-disciplinary collaboration: an
exchange that goes beyond knowledge. It takes an exchange of trust and reliance
among the people that are behind it.
I therefore encourage
Lam to venture into a deeper exchange between the performance arts and that of
his. Multi-disciplinary is an idealistic notion that requires a lot for its
true potential to be realized. We will have to keep our experiments going until
we reach the other side of our little mediated world. Bipolar Bodies as an experiment describes everything from training
background to size and to aesthetics of its artists. The bipolar bodies embody
the rejection to bipolar dichotomy and our belief in the beauty of what lies in
between.
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