https://en.danceresearch.com.hk/visualartsxdance
What is the ‘x’ When We Talk about ‘Visual Arts x Dance’?
Translator: HW
In 2017, there was an obvious
increase in local dance practitioners’ participation in events held in
traditional visual art venues such as museums and galleries. Whether there was
a direct link between the trend and the exhibition scene described above is
still an open research topic, yet it is crucial to recognise their spatial and
temporal coexistence. In order to gauge dancers’ experiences, I invited
practitioners through Facebook to provide information about visual/interdisciplinary events that they performed in
2017. The responses were compiled into the 14 entries below:
|
Organiser |
Event |
Venue |
Date and Title
(if any) of Performance |
Artistic personnel |
|
Ivy Tsui |
Used to Mud… Dance x Visual x Music |
tgt Gallery |
13-25 January 2017 |
Resident creators: Ivy Tsui, Hamchuk and musicians |
|
Wing Platform
and Enoch Cheng |
The Lost of a Yellow Striped Shirt–a performance as a convergence of cinema, sculpture,
installation, fashion, photography, dance, performance and music |
Wing Platform |
25 March 2017 |
Choreographer: Enoch Cheng Performers: Enoch Cheng, Tsang
Wing-fai, Wayson Poon |
|
Oi!, Leisure and
Cultural Services Department |
Sparkle! When Will I See You Again |
Oi! |
23 June to 17 September 2017 (1 hour every weekday) A Performance… |
Curator: Enoch Cheng Creator: Scarlet Yu Performers: Cai Ying, Sarah Xiao,
Pak Wei-ming, Jennifer Mok, Bobbi Chen, Gia Yu, Lily Tsai |
|
Art Promotion
Office |
Hi!
Houses–Jaffa Lam x Sam Tung Uk Museum opening and closing events |
Sam Tung Uk Museum |
July, 2017 |
Co-creators and performers: Jaffa Lam, Ong Yonglock and other artists |
|
Art Promotion
Office |
Hi! Houses closing event |
Dr Sun Yat- Sen Museum |
9 July 2017 Bye! Houses |
Performers: Pak Wei-ming, Sudhee Liao |
|
Para Site |
In Search of Miss Ruthless exhibition public event |
Spring Workshop |
12 August 2017 Disposed To Add |
Director: Jes Fan Performers: Joseph Lee, Kingsan Lo |
|
K11 chi art
space |
The Garden exhibition opening |
chi art space (Clear Water Bay) |
2 September 2017 |
Choreographer: Enoch Cheng Performers: Ronald Lam, Leung
Tin-chak, Frankie Ho, Leung Sau-yin Jo |
|
Endeavour |
Rootless, To be forgotten in a fleeting moment Fused Media Installation opening performance |
Videotage |
23 September
2017 Urban Tribe |
Choreographer:
Ho Ming-yan Performers: Ho Ming-yan, Tiffani Chiu |
|
4A Centre for
Contemporary Asian Art |
Art Central 2017 |
Art Central art fair venue |
20-25 October 2017 Fair Gestures |
Choreographer: Enoch Cheng Performers: Enoch Cheng, Tsang
Wing-fai, Wayson Poon |
|
Wing Platform,
Andrew Luk, Sudhee Liao |
White Cell interactive movement performance |
Wing Platform |
11 November 2017 |
Co-creators: Andrew Luk, Sudhee Liao |
|
Leisure and
Cultural Services Department |
Sparkle! Room for a Book exhibition special event |
Oi! |
18 November 2017 The Walk of the Rose—The Writing
and Improvisatory Dance of Cally Yu |
Performers: Cally Yu, Mimi Lo, Cliff Wong |
|
Altermodernists |
Dusk Rat Run – A Night of Back Alleys in Between the Industrial Buildings in
Kwun Tong (curator: Yip Kai-chun) |
Kwun Tong Industrial Area |
25 November 2017 |
Participating artists: Joseph Ngan and others |
|
M+ |
Zheng Chongbin ‘Another State
of Man’ exhibition public event |
M+ Pavilion |
9-10 December, 2017 |
Choreographer and Performer: Allen Lam |
|
Para Site |
Movements at an Exhibition Artist: Manuel Pelmuș Curator: Cosmin Costinaș |
Para Site |
9 December 2017
to 18 February, 2018 |
8 professional
dancers (The performers and Manuel Pelmuș agreed not to publish performers’
names. One of them, Carman Li, was an interviewee for this paper who consents
to be named) |
Perhaps bound by my ‘dance critic’ identity and the size
and makeup of my Facebook ‘friends’, most of the responses came from those who
were practising dancers. Inevitably, there are also obvious omissions of inter-disciplinary performances in 2017, such as Claustrophobia by orleanlaiprojects, which simply was not mentioned by any respondents.
Instead of enlarging the sampling size, to focus the discussion only on the responses collected is
because how practitioners responded in itself somewhat reflected dancers' perception of ‘visual arts’ and ‘crossing-over’, or the ‘convergence of art forms’. Precisely the curiosity on such perception is what
drives this paper. It also serves to note that, taking reference of my own experience in the field, I have two definitions here: ‘performance’ are behaviours with onsite audience and clear signs of
beginning and end; while ‘theatre’ is defined as a venue with stage facilities and audience
sitting area. Those without such facilities are considered ‘non-theatres’. There are no prerequisites for
technical specifications and degree of expertise for ‘dance’; it is instead a general term for practices involving
the use of the body. The above judgements were made.
The 14 performances for the 12 art
projects can be classified into 2 categories according to the context of
production. In the first category, while dancers were not amongst the core
creators, dance was one of the components of the whole project, and it was performed by both performing artists and
visual artists. In the second category, the dance performances were ‘add-ons’
(typically one-off) to the main projects, and the lead creators did not necessarily participate
in the dance part. The question here is whether the crossing-over happens in
the presentation of the dance, or in the making process? To answer this question, I intend to clarify the diverse ideas and actions presented by practitioners, who have different backgrounds, when they took part in projects that converged
different art forms. The more basic term ‘convergence of art forms’ is used
here instead of ‘crossing-over’, the definition of which is still highly controversial.
Imaginations: ‘Site’, ‘Performance’ and ‘Convergence of Art forms’
From
the art institutions’ perspective, introducing events such as dance into visual
art projects creates an occasion to draw attention and launch exhibits into the market, as well as
increase its value to media. It also provides yet another selling point for
potential visitors during the exhibitions and frames the interpretation of the
works with bodily practices. Sometimes it is out of something much more
practical, as Amandine Hervey, the then gallery manager of the Mur Nomade
(closed) puts it, ‘There was a need to guide visitor (to the South Island Art
Day) from one exhibition venue to another.’
Compared to the institutions’
no-fuss, non-artistic considerations, there are more nuanced drivers for artists to involve themselves in the
convergence of art forms. As early as the 1960s, the idea of choreography already existed in
non-performing works such as painting, sculpture, and installation by the likes of Jackson Pollock,
Bruce Nauman and Simone Forti. In Hong Kong, Leung Ping-kwan and Sunny Pang
introduced poetry recital and dance respectively to dialogue with Choi
Yan-chi’s paintings[3] in 1986; on 8-10 July 1988, the performance As Slow As Possible: An Evening of Music Art
Dance was held in the exhibition hall of Shatin Town Hall.[4] Whether ‘crossing-over’ still exists
in the context of 2020 contemporary art is debatable. However, there remain significant differences between how keywords like ‘site’, ‘performance’, ‘convergence
of art forms’ are understood in visual arts and dance. Below I shall use these
keywords as entry points in elaborating participating artists’ views and
experiences. If one may classify the four interviewees according to the art forms
they represented in the projects, Carman Li and Ivy Tsui were from dance while
Jaffa Lam and Enoch Cheng were from visual arts.
‘Site’
Except for industrial buildings, all the venues in the list were ‘non-theatre’ art and culture spaces, e.g. museums, gallery, heritage sites. Those from the dance circle would be familiar with the history that by the 1960s dancers like Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton started exploring the possibility for dance in spaces outside theatres--the Judson Memorial Church. Carman Li and Ivy Tsui both pointed out that they expected ‘something different to happen’ in galleries.
When Li agreed to perform in Movement at an Exhibition, she had never seen the works of Manuel Pelmuș. She also knew very little about her role in the project. But she imagined that gallery visitors would be more forgiving towards dancing techniques, ‘I danced in whatever manner I wanted. If that had happened in theatre, the audiences would “cut the chairs” (vandalising seats to vent dissatisfaction).’
Tsui
was not happy with her first performance of Morning Glory in theatre in
2016 and had since been looking for opportunities to redo it. As she had never
performed her own work in a gallery, she accepted Amandine Hervey’s invitation
to perform during the South Island Art Day.[5] With continued curiosity for the
gallery space, she did a durational performance in 2017 in tgt Gallery in Mong
Kok. She found that ‘galleries have a more “open” style than studios.’ ‘Dance created in studios tends to
adhere to certain formats. With mirrors and audio equipment, it felt that if
one doesn’t get all sweaty one is being lazy; yet the space has to return to
the condition before the rehearsal. Traces of the process was not allowed.
Galleries accumulates (the traces) better.’
In
retrospect, Tsui realises that she did not consider the idea of ‘white cube’ in
the context of contemporary art ecosystem. ‘I did not think about what “gallery”
stands for, its values and standards, and treated it as purely a venue. I went
to the gallery as if I were setting up a stage and jumped right into technical
aspects such as lighting and paths of movement. When I attended Christian
Rizzo’s[6] workshop and learned about his
nuanced contextual thinking; I realised mine was shallow. He taught me that no
space is neutral, no space can be approached out of context.’
To
Enoch Cheng, the
creator of Fair Gestures, the ‘site’
was not the Art Central venue, but the eyeball economy championed by art fairs.
‘I wanted to test how long I could keep the audience’s attention throughout 8
hours of non-stop dancing.’ Throughout the process, at least 2 people among
Wayson Poon, Tsang Wing-fai and himself were dancing at the same time. The
choreographic concept was the visual impressions from newspapers that day. In
his curation of Sparkle! When Will I See
You Again, he asked Scarlet Yu to choreograph A Performance…. What the dancers roamed on was both the exhibition
space, that is Oi!, as well as the visual art exhibition about ‘seeing you again’.
How shall one pin down the meaning of the encounter between dancers and
audiences in the site? Yu required that all dancers call her after every
encounter to discuss nuances of the process, leaving it to the dancers to
confirm the value of ‘see you again’ that may never repeat.
‘Performance’
There
are well-established spectatorial protocols in theatres, and the ticket acts as
the pact between performers and audiences. Agreed patterns of behaviour
delineate a comfortable zone of attention. For the performers who are
accustomed to being on the stage, they believe that once they start doing their
act, audiences just
naturally watch. Carman Li found it ‘cost-ineffective for several dancers to
perform for, at times, only one member of the audience and wondered why the
audiences were not grouped into timeslots.’ The gaps between performances when
there were no visitors were frustrating and boring. ‘Some visitors were like
tourists; all they did was to “check-in” (took selfies for marking their
presence at the location on social media) and then they would leave.’ The
experience that the performing self is not necessarily seen was at first
confusing to her, but later thought-provoking. ‘Our “dance” was to re-enact movements
from historical archives, but frankly in the beginning I could not relate to
the past events. And then I grew to be curious about where the protagonists in
the photos have gone. What exactly are we doing right now? Will people in the
future know about this?’ Some audiences got up close or imitated her movements. She was
uneasy at first but resolved into a more relaxed attitude and let go of the rights and
wrongs in dancing technique.
Ivy Tsui took part in several
exhibition launch performances for commercial galleries. In 2017, she conducted
the performance Used to Mud… , which
had no fixed form, for 2 consecutive weekends in a family-run gallery in
Mong Kok. Contrasting the two types of experiences, Tsui is more comfortable
with performances within an ‘event’ setting. While she is not sure if there are
fundamental differences between performances in theatres and in galleries, she
finds the experiences with audiences in galleries generally positive. ‘With the
audience less judgmental on techniques, I danced more freely. Proximity with the
audience made me more aware of their different styles, including those who were
not aware of me. Some of them would look at me through the handphone monitors
even when they were really close. I found that both weird and curious.’
In one of the 3 performances in the Hi! Houses Jaffa Lam x Sam Tung Uk Museum
show, Ong Yonglock poured boiling water onto clothes before putting them on; in
another, he wrapped himself uptight with a lot of fabric and invited
Jaffa Lam to perform together. ‘He had the freedom to interpret the context I
set out. We did not talk about how to “perform”. My job was to trust him.’ Can
dancers also be the ‘interpreter’, not just the performer? Enoch Cheng expected
his ‘score’ for the opening of the exhibition The Garden to be interpreted instead of executed: performers would
pick a target audience and make a sound to draw his/her attention, and then converged on
him/her until he/she showed unease. Dancers would then direct him/her towards
an artwork on bacterial movements and danced for 3 minutes, based on the ‘movements’
described by the audience. Enoch Cheng was taking the opportunity to ask a
question. ‘Performers must find their personal ways of approaching the
performance. They have to justify their presence even in the absence of
audience. Stage performers assume that the audience will always look at them,
but this cannot be taken for granted in an exhibition. What I am interested in
is the fluid boundary of “performance”, despite that it may create friction
between dancers.’
‘Convergence of Art forms’
While distinctions
between art forms are less rigid in contemporary arts, in Hong Kong the vast
contrast between realities of visual arts and performing arts- in terms of
education, ecosystem, social circles and audience- means that there are much
more to be crossed over than just the medium. Still, what are the lure and
frustrations between the promises and practices of 'convergence of art forms'?
When Carman Li and Ivy Tsui mentioned
that ‘there is more freedom in galleries’, their remarks reflect the reality of
dance in Hong Kong. One must climb the ladder of institutional subsidy for a
dance to be staged. Constrained to the high cost of production and limited
venue, local artists have very little room for a breakthrough of the subsidy ladder except relying on
commercial parties. Therefore, one can only imagine how attractive the
proposition of venue and opportunity to perform in visual art exhibitions is (especially) to young dancers. It is of course
also about the glamour of ‘contemporary arts’ and the aura created by the art
market for commercial purposes. Li and Tsui participated in the above projects,
driven by their curiosity of other art disciplines' creative processes; do they understand it better now? How can visual arts
and dance talk to each other? Due to time constraint, finding a common language
is
not always practical, and power inequalities may prevail between art
disciplines. Li is still interested to perform again in galleries, but ‘expect
to be a collaborator rather than just a co-operator’. In the previous performance,
she felt that Manuel Pelmuș already had a plan and was not really willing to jam with local
dancers.
For Enoch Cheng, his project was to ‘make
dance with a different way of contemplating dance’. More than crossing over, he
would like the dancers to perform their interpretations from the same departure
point as he does. He finds that in visual arts training, art form provides
vocabularies for contextual reading and analysis; while for dancers, it is the
contemporary artworks’ presentations that matter. When they become the exhibits instead of the performers, a crevasse opens between the need for clear
directions and the interpretation that visual arts encourages. He looks forward
to a stronger experimental mentality in dance; while in Tsui’s experience, ‘dance
students are doing it “right” only when someone else endorses it’.
Jaffa Lam repeated ‘respect’ during
the interview, which she considers the method to successful convergence of art
forms. By approaching the same story from different perspectives with the
deployment of various media, a whole is constructed. ‘But I know nothing about
dance and music languages, so my job is to explain the context the best I can.
I can only respect how other artists interpret and present. I do not take part
in that decision, instead I celebrate how multiple art languages enrich the
creation.’
Unleash Imaginations So It May Transcend
The interviews show that art training
background plays a huge part in forming imaginations on ‘site’, ‘performance’
and ‘convergence of art forms’, even for artists coming from the same city,
speaking the same language. To navigate and thrive in the contemporary art,
which is not constrained by the boundaries between different media, more
imagination is required for unencumbered traversing:
1. There is no logical relationship
between ‘site’ and ‘convergence of art forms’. Performing in exhibitions does
not automatically imply collaboration between art forms. One does not have to
be in certain sites to think ‘convergence’. All buildings reflect the
architects and users’ cultural backgrounds through its physicality. Given aesthetics
as experience, the audiences’ perception of the site impacts their assessment
of the value of that experience.
2.
Are there fundamental similarities between the medium in different art
forms? Can we transcend the barriers posted by the jargons used in different
fields? Is the body an entity in space and time before it dances? Is sculpture an entity in space and
time before its material and form? The American sculptor Richard Serra said
after he watched Yvonne Rainer's dance that, ‘the body’s movement not being predicated totally on image
or sight or optical awareness, but on physical awareness in relation to space,
place, time, movement.’[7]
3. Contemporary art emphasises research on historical and social context of the creative initiation.
While traditional dance training considers the body a self-contained system, the
body is indeed open and in constant exchange with the outside world; dance
training itself is inculturation. With the body as the method, the ultimate concerns of visual arts and dance
are the same.
In Radical Museology (2013),[8]
Professor Claire Bishop from NYU noted that among the phenomena in Western
museums, she has been most fascinated with the obsession with dance. ‘Dance
exhibition’ became trendy around 2008, when visual artists started employing
dancers to appear in exhibition spaces on the one hand, and choreographers
edited their works so that they are fit for performing in museums on the other.[9]
Bishop identifies three critical distinctions between pieces presented in the museum by visual artists and choreographers:
·
While museums would develop dedicated spaces for dance/performance and
contemplate ways to collect them, choreographers are more interested in the
encounter with new (random) audiences and the social choreography of audience
behaviour.
·
Choreographed pieces in the museum setting are highly professionalized and rarely critical of this
environment.
·
The concurrent social media boom. Both the museum and the camera phone are apparatuses
that steer attention and behaviour (just like the theatre), and the fact that
they were arising in tandem with each other seems very indicative of the
proximity and distance that is so characteristic of our era.
In 2017, the main period of interest
of this paper, auction houses Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Poly totalled over HKD
8 billion (USD 1.03 billion) at the autumn sales, recording a 25% increase from
2016.[10] As of 2018, Hong Kong was the third
largest artwork market in the world, after New York and London. The large
number of commercial exhibitions nevertheless provided opportunities for Hong
Kong to stay close to the latest developments in contemporary art. While Bishop's analysis applies to some in the list
of dances at the beginning of this essay, all in all it is premature for
comparative studies in Hong Kong. One of the reasons being that the number of similar projects did not rise much after 2017, while
there were even fewer performances in exhibitions led by dance.
How
should the dance circle benefit from the ‘performance turn’ in the visual arts
field? In the 1950s, formalism became the vogue in the New York art scene, and
it gained much power of discourse thanks to art sales. In the 1960s and 1970s,
artists and academics rose against formalism’s suppression of senses and the
value of the body to much success. The choreographer William Forsythe's 'Choreographic
Objects’ can be described as ‘objects that guide the body to move’. He reframes
the act of approaching artworks from visual-based watching to bodily
experience-based perceiving, as ‘an alternative site for the understanding of
potential instigation and organisation of action to reside’.[11]
In view of contact and collaboration with other art disciplines, dance needs
deeper and more intellectual dialogues with contemporary art and to establish
its own position in the contemporary context, taking advantage of fluid boundaries
between media.
[1] A case in point is the feature story
titled ‘Hipster for a Day – Media Light Shows Perfect for Social Media with the
Perfumary Organ Project’ in the popular magazine Holiday, 13 October
2017. Web version see HolidaySmart, https://holiday.presslogic.com/2017/10/13/article/44045.
[2]
For details of the information of visual arts
exhibitions in Hong Kong, please refer to Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook.
http://hkvisualartsyearbook.org/.
[3] See Asia Art Archive, “Paintings by Choi Yan
Chi and Works of Art in Dialogue with Poetry and Dance (Poems by Leung Ping
Kwan, Dance by Sunny Pang)”. https://aaa.org.hk/en/collection/search/library/paintings-by-choi-yan-chi-and-works-of-art-in-dialogue-with-poetry-and-dance-poems-by-leung-ping-kwan-dance-by-sunny-pang
[4] See Asia Art Archive, “As Slow As Possible: An Evening of
Music Art Dance”. https://aaa.org.hk/tc/collection/search/library/as-slow-as-possible-an-evening-of-music-art-dance
[5] Closing performance for ‘The Sun Also Rises’,
solo exhibition of Nastaran Shahbazi. 5 pm, 24 September 2016; dancer: Ivy
Tsui; musician: Lego Shum.
[6]
Christian Rizzo: choreographer, dancer, rock musician and fashion designer.
Appointed Artistic Director of ICI-CCN Montpellier in 2015. For further details
see: https://www.westkowloon.hk/tc/whats-on/past-events/choreographic-landscapes.
[7] Richard Serra, ‘Interview with Lynne Cooke and
Michael Govan’, in Richard
Serra: Torqued Ellipses, ed.
Lynne Cooke (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997): 28.
[8] Claire Bishop, Radical
Museology, or, What’s Contemporary in
Museums of Contemporary Art?(Germany:
Koenig Books, 2013).
[9] Marisa Hayes, ‘Recherche sur la danse au
musée -- entretien avec Claire Bishop’, in Repères, Cahier de danse 38 +39 (March 2017), eds. La Briqueterie and National
Choreographic Development Center of Val-de-Marne.
[10]‘Art
Sales 2018: Market Review and Forecasts’, in CAPITAL, 23 March 2018. https://www.capital-hk.com/2018/03/23/2018%e8%97%9d%e8%a1%93%e4%ba%a4%e6%98%93%e5%b8%82%e5%a0%b4-%e5%9b%9e%e9%a1%a7%e8%88%87%e5%89%8d%e7%9e%bb/.
[11] William
Forsythe, Choreographic Objects, p.7,
quoted by Stephanie Rosenthal in ‘Choreographing YOU - choreographies in the
visual arts’, in Move: Choreographing You (London: Hayward Publishing,
2011).
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