Mr. Judge and Firefly

A thunderstorm was building up when I stepped out of the Ngau Chi Wan Civic Centre on Jul 9, 2016, after watching Outshine (presented by E-Side Dance Company.) The weather reminds me of a summer evening six years ago when Yuh Egami, Luo Fan and I were sitting on the balcony of a restaurant in Central, chatting away while clouds gathered in and turned into heavy rain. I can’t recall the contents of that conversation. The one thing that left impression on me though was that the gentlemen transformed over dinner from dancers to individuals. Individual as an indivisible entity of his mind, his body, and his action. History repeats itself on this evening of Outshine. Luo and Egami did not present us with dance pieces named respectively Mr. Judge and Firefly. They presented to us two individuals named respectively Fan and Yuh. 

 

The René Magritte-ish Luo appeared as the stage lights up. In his felt hat, overcoat and leather shoes, is he coming in from outside or is he about to go out? Picking up the fallen chairs, is he putting them back to where they were, or is he dislocating them? Luo’s movements serve as the second narrative, alongside the first delivered in a man’s voice. Are the two narratives about the same person? Are they sequential or do they run in parallel? Amorphous. Unrestrained. Imagination-inviting. Laboriously, Luo moves the five chairs from the front side to the back of the stage, delivering his movements with limited magnitude and profound precision. When finally all the chairs arrive there, he takes off his overcoat and shoes, places them on and underneath the chairs. What is the condition for remembrance? Do we go into history when our bodies move or with the traces our movements leave behind? 

 

From that point on Luo dances. He dances with immense relaxation and fluidity, as if he was a brush drawing in the air. He dances with his limbs, his eyes and his lips, as if every piece of muscle had a story to tell. He dances with eagerness and spontaneity, as if he was only satisfied when the movement is made. If it was Luo’s body who used to dance, in Mr. Judge it is his soul dancing through the vessel named Luo’s body. 

 

My only problem was I had to make a choice between the two parallel-running narratives because they were addressing to different, and sometimes competing, faculties of my perception. Chang Lanyun’s poetic video images gently led me to my choice of landing on the moving body. Her canopy of trees is serene and imbued with the promise of the unspeakable, reliving us from the burden of the words. 

 

It has been a few years since Egami last choreographed in an E-Side production. To me a line of his personal quest quietly links his previous work(s) and Firefly: the quest for the relationship, or entanglement, of individuality, its expression via dance, and the ephemeral body. Will these three ever come to terms? This time around Egami chooses to work with two beautiful female dancers: Wu Cheng-fang and Yui Sugawara, who perfectly demonstrate what it means to be elegant. Yet what is more striking is the confidence and freedom in their movements, especially in the first part of the work, when they dance as Wu Cheng-fang and Yui Sugawara. They dance for nothing and no one but themselves and this is when they are most powerful and engaging. Their desire of having six legs and wings whispers the transience of the life as a dancer – as fireflies. 

 

I am curious with Egami’s artistic choice of glorifying the body of the dancer by taking it away. In the second half of Firefly, the bodies gave way to the motion-capture graphics on a dimly lit stage. If a dancer’s life-span as a performer is short because of the limitation of their physicality and they, like shortly-lived fireflies, can only strive to become the brightest spot in the air, is this an analogy that calls for visualization? Or is it because, again, the condition for remembrance is and only is the traces our movements leave behind?