Interdisciplinary artist Kiran Kumar performed Dear Dead Dancer on 2 July 2016 at the Centre 42 Black Box. This video recording is accompanied by documentation of the projection slides, text, and images of the performance. Dear Dead Dancer is one element of the multi-part presentation.

SynopsisThe ArtistsResourcesEssay PerformanceAudio InstallationExhibitionReflections

A curatorial experiment in presenting dance beyond the frame of performance

Kiran Kumar is a Singapore-based independent interdisciplinary artist whose practice is dance-centric. About a decade ago, Kiran took an audio-guided walk around Little India conceived by spell#7, a Singapore performance company whose site-specific, environmental audio works weave history, culture and politics into everyday life. Titled Desire Paths, a voice from an earpiece guided Kiran through the landmarks, streets and people of the historic neighbourhood. The experience of simultaneously being both audience and performer has stayed with him since.

In 2016, Kiran responds to the audio archives of spell #7’s Desire Paths in an investigation of the performer’s and audience’s positions in dance. In this instalment of The Vault, in conjunction with the Dance Nucleus ELEMENT residency programme, Kiran seeks to challenge the convention of “spectators watching dancers perform” through four configurations of movement, text and image: an essay-performance, an audio-installation, an exhibition and a workshop. Together, the four configurations may be seen as a curatorial experiment in presenting dance beyond the frame of performance.

REGISTRATION

Essay-performance: ‘Dear Dead Dancer’

Saturday, 2 July 2016
3.30pm @ Centre 42 Black Box
Registration required, click here.

Monday, 4 July 2016
8pm @ Dance Nucleus Studio
Registration required, click here.

Audio-installation: ‘There is no dance’

Saturday – Wednesday, 2-6 July 2016
5–10pm daily @ Centre 42 Black Box. Free admission.

Exhibition: ‘Expanded Writing’

Saturday – Wednesday, 2-6 July 2016
5–10pm daily @ Centre 42 Black Box. Free admission.

Workshop: ‘Distilling the Dance: Somatic Principles’

Tuesday, 5 July 2016
7.30pm @ Dance Nucleus Studio
Registration required, click here. 

Kiran Kumar
As an artist, Kiran’s interest is in the making of reflexive spaces for people to inhabit. These are spaces for meditation as much as they are spaces for thought; these are spaces for action as much as for observation. His intention is for these spaces to be inviting, insightful and somehow infinite. Such spaces are activated through his experience of dance, of music, of poetry and of light. With a desire to make such or similar spaces accessible to others, he often makes configurations of images, objects, actions and text, which are open to visitors.

Part of the craft of making reflexive spaces, has been a practice of ‘expanded writing’. The present focus of his writing practice is with two forms: the ‘axiom’ and the ‘anecdote’. While they are each terse and economical in their own right, between the axiomatic and the anecdotal, there is a range of fictionalization to work with.

See more of Kiran’s work here.

Dance Nucleus
Dance Nucleus is an independent dance house, directed and managed by industry practitioners for artists, a home for artists to develop their artistic practice and craft. Dance Nucleus aims to inspire artists, allowing them to initiate ideas, projects and conversations, by providing them with the space and time to incubate these ideas and projects in fruition. ELEMENT is Dance Nucleus’ artist-in-residence programme focusing on movement and choreographic research practice. It supports rigorous discourse, research and wide-ranging experimentation in all movement-based forms, so as to nurture new movement and choreographic expression. Kiran Kumar is the first artist-in-residence under this programme (January – June 2016).

 Find out more about the ELEMENT residency programme here.

Reading Material

#1: A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPELL#7

#2: DESIRE PATHS & OTHER SPELL#7 AUDIO WORKS

#3: KIRAN KUMAR

Programme Handout

Dear Dead Dancer

This process of actively seeking subtlety has thrown open some fundamental, critical questions on pedagogy, aesthetics and philosophy in dance. This essay-performance takes the form of a reading of an open letter addressed to Kelucharan Mahapatra, the late Odissi guru and a pioneer of the dance’s reconstruction, with the intention of relating the aesthetic and the critical dimensions of my journey.Kiran Kumar

Kiran performed Dear Dead Dancer on 2 July at the Centre 42 Black Box and 4 July at the Dance Nucleus Studio. The Centre 42 performance was video-recorded. The video recording is accompanied by documentation of the projection slides, text, and images of the performance.

Dear Dead Dancer Documentation

Yet, the notion of ‘presenting subtle dancing’ inheres a delicate contradiction. This audio installation addresses such a contradiction. It is situated in a theatre black box and it engages a structural set-up for a performance. But there is no dance. There are a few audio recordings, placed on fewer seats; each different from the other, yet all pointing to a common absence.Kiran Kumar

The audio installation There is no dance was presented in the Centre 42 Black Box from 2-6 July 2016. Members of the public were free to listen to any of the MP3 devices laid out in the space. You may listen to the MP3 tracks in the player below.

Please close your eyes I There is no dance Epic Anecdote The Unoptical Image Please close your eyes II The Disguise The Stage A Dull Dance This is not a dance On Choreography and Pornography Siva's Dance Institutional Critique The Wait (Hang on Love)

Expanded Writing

Through this journey I have attempted to unpack the aesthetics of subtle dancing through a practice of ‘expanded writing’. Reading is also fundamental to a writing practice. So this exhibition serves as a library of reading and writing materials that are structured into five strands. These strands may seem to rest as static references on the book shelf, but transform through continuous, dynamic intersections on the reading table. Each visitor may have a unique access point in to materials in this library.Kiran Kumar

The exhibition Expanded Writing was held in the Centre 42 Library from 2-6 July 2016.

Program Framework

1. I appreciated the flexibility of the program to adapt to my concurrent research residency, although The Vault itself is not conceived as a residency.
2. Despite admittedly being a little conceptually dense, I also appreciated the effort made through repeated dialogue to understand and articulate the terms of my response to the Spell #7 text.
3. I have since also been in dialogue with the other two Vault artists, Lee Mun Wai and Shantini Manokara on their ideas and processes for this program. For me this has allowed a comparative understanding of each of our angles of ‘response to text’.

[Aside] In light of these dialogues (2 & 3 above), I share my present reflection/analysis on the notion of ‘text’.
This has helped me better understand my own instinctive way of response within my artistic practice,
as well as draw a relation to other ways of thinking. This has also been instrumental in shaping my
future project methodology.

On Text/s

The metaphor is that of a book.
The core is its ‘text’, the primary text.
The book also carries secondary text, that is equally manifest as the primary, yet peripheral to the
core. This is the ‘para-text’: the blurb, synopsis, list of contents, preface, foreword, and other textual
material supplied by editors, printers, publishers of the ecosystem.
Tertiary text tends towards being more subtle in its manifestation than primary and secondary texts.
These are ‘con-text’ and ‘sub-text’ that are more implied than stated; that are manifest between a
collective readership and the primary and secondary texts.
There is considerable reason to posit the existence of further quaternary text, that is increasingly
more subtle than tertiary text due to subjective variances between individual readers. This may well
be her/his personal ‘pre-text’.
The reader’s access to the book is rendered complex through an engagement with any or all of these
textual layers in isolation or simultaneity.
The reader’s response to the book may equally range in subtlety of manifestation, from pensive
pause to proud protest.

Presentation

1. I appreciated the open-ness to varied presentation formats, as well as to utilise and integrate multiple spaces of the centre towards the presentation.
2. The willingness to co-operate with Dance Nucleus on the presentation was also great.

.
The Vault: Distilling the Dance is the first of three presentations focusing on local dance-makers’ responses to Singapore play-text. This is a part-research-part-presentation endeavour to investigate movement in space and the body through inspired by play-texts. In Distilling the Dance, dance artist Kiran Kumar works with spell #7’s audio archives.
.

Click on the image to download the programme booklet.

The Vault: Distilling the Dance was presented from 2-6 July 2016.

Distilling the Dance was a multi-format presentation seeking to present dance beyond the frame of performance. Singapore-based independent interdisciplinary artist Kiran Kumar created four configurations of movement, text and image: an essay-performance, an audio-installation, an exhibition and a workshop. He has also written some reflections on his time working on and presenting Distilling the Dance.

Distilling the Dance was conceived in response to the audio-guided tour Desire Paths created by Singapore theatre company spell#7, as well as Kiran’s movement research under the Dance Nucleus ELEMENT residency programme.

Further Developments: Kiran will be continuing his research in a two-year research fellowship at the Graduate School, University of the Arts Berlin. His fellowship project, titled “Archipelago Archives”, will further develop the content and methodologies he had experimented with in The Vault programme and ELEMENT residency.

 Essay Performance: Dear Dead Dancer

This process of actively seeking subtlety has thrown open some fundamental, critical questions on pedagogy, aesthetics and philosophy in dance. This essay-performance takes the form of a reading of an open letter addressed to Kelucharan Mahapatra, the late Odissi guru and a pioneer of the dance’s reconstruction, with the intention of relating the aesthetic and the critical dimensions of my journey.Kiran Kumar

Kiran performed Dear Dead Dancer on 2 July at the Centre 42 Black Box and 4 July at the Dance Nucleus Studio. The Centre 42 performance was video-recorded.

The video recording below is accompanied by documentation of the projection slides, text, and images of the performance.

 

Dear Dead Dancer – Documentation

 

Audio Installation: There is no dance

Yet, the notion of ‘presenting subtle dancing’ inheres a delicate contradiction. This audio installation addresses such a contradiction. It is situated in a theatre black box and it engages a structural set-up for a performance. But there is no dance. There are a few audio recordings, placed on fewer seats; each different from the other, yet all pointing to a common absence.Kiran Kumar

The audio installation There is no dance was presented in the Centre 42 Black Box from 2-6 July. Members of the public were free to listen to any of the MP3 devices laid out in the space. You may listen to the MP3 tracks in the player below.

Exhibition: Expanded Writing

Through this journey I have attempted to unpack the aesthetics of subtle dancing through a practice of ‘expanded writing’. Reading is also fundamental to a writing practice. So this exhibition serves as a library of reading and writing materials that are structured into five strands. These strands may seem to rest as static references on the book shelf, but transform through continuous, dynamic intersections on the reading table. Each visitor may have a unique access point in to materials in this library.Kiran Kumar

The exhibition Expanded Writing was held in the Centre 42 Library from 2-6 July.

Reflections

Program Framework

1. I appreciated the flexibility of the program to adapt to my concurrent research residency, although The Vault itself is not conceived as a residency.
2. Despite admittedly being a little conceptually dense, I also appreciated the effort made through repeated dialogue to understand and articulate the terms of my response to the Spell #7 text.
3. I have since also been in dialogue with the other two Vault artists, Lee Mun Wai and Shantini Manokara on their ideas and processes for this program. For me this has allowed a comparative understanding of each of our angles of ‘response to text’.

[Aside] In light of these dialogues (2 & 3 above), I share my present reflection/analysis on the notion of ‘text’.
This has helped me better understand my own instinctive way of response within my artistic practice,
as well as draw a relation to other ways of thinking. This has also been instrumental in shaping my
future project methodology.

On Text/s

The metaphor is that of a book.
The core is its ‘text’, the primary text.
The book also carries secondary text, that is equally manifest as the primary, yet peripheral to the
core. This is the ‘para-text’: the blurb, synopsis, list of contents, preface, foreword, and other textual
material supplied by editors, printers, publishers of the ecosystem.
Tertiary text tends towards being more subtle in its manifestation than primary and secondary texts.
These are ‘con-text’ and ‘sub-text’ that are more implied than stated; that are manifest between a
collective readership and the primary and secondary texts.
There is considerable reason to posit the existence of further quaternary text, that is increasingly
more subtle than tertiary text due to subjective variances between individual readers. This may well
be her/his personal ‘pre-text’.
The reader’s access to the book is rendered complex through an engagement with any or all of these
textual layers in isolation or simultaneity.
The reader’s response to the book may equally range in subtlety of manifestation, from pensive
pause to proud protest.

Presentation

1. I appreciated the open-ness to varied presentation formats, as well as to utilise and integrate multiple spaces of the centre towards the presentation.
2. The willingness to co-operate with Dance Nucleus on the presentation was also great.

The Vault: Distilling the Dance is the first of three presentations focusing on local dance-makers’ responses to Singapore play-text. This is a part-research-part-presentation endeavour to investigate movement in space and the body through inspired by play-texts. In Distilling the Dance, dance artist Kiran Kumar works with spell #7’s audio archives. Find out more here.

(Credit: Dance Nucleus)

Born in Bangalore and based in Singapore, Kiran Kumar is an artist, researcher and writer who specialises in dance-centric projects. He first graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 2006 and began his career as an information technology analyst, but he was lured into the world of dance and movement through his practices of Odissi, a traditional Indian dance form, and Hatha Yoga.

Now armed with postgraduate degrees in Solo Dance Authorship from the University of Arts Berlin and in New Media Art from the City University of Hong Kong, Kumar takes a process-oriented, research-based approach to examine how dance can be presented. His past works took the form of performances and installations encompassing multimedia, text and archiving, which have been staged in countries such as Germany, Poland, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Kumar joined Dance Nucleus for a six-month artist residency at the start of this year, where his research has been centred on Odissi, Hatha Yoga, and traditional Javanese dance. His four-part presentation comprises an essay-performance, an audio installation, an exhibition, and a workshop, which will take place at Centre 42 and Dance Nucleus over the first weekend of July.

Dance & Text

Kumar has explored writing and text as extensions of his physical dance practice. Drawing from grounded theory and anthropological research techniques, he uses text to document movement and thoughts, to explore the development of a dance work both from the artist’s perspective and within its wider sociocultural context.

Ethnographic researchers in dance have used various forms of dance notation to, for example, record ceremonial dances that are on the verge of ‘extinction’ because the people who perform it are becoming integrated into another culture. Nevertheless the focus here is not on conventional dance notation (like Laban or Benesh). Instead the focus is on the notion of notation with relation to the process of development rather than the movement itself.
Source: Congruencies in Ethnography and Choreography by Kiran Kumar, http://expandingnotes.tumblr.com/post/23283134943

When the artist is also the ethnographer of one’s own practice, autoethnographic journaling, or “expanded writing”, becomes a way to capture the intent and processes embedded in the development of a work. These texts not only become the material remnants of transient artistic practices, they can also become sources of new work in themselves.

By Daniel Teo & Gwen Pew
Published on 24 Jun 2016

The Vault: Distilling the Dance is the first of three presentations focusing on local dance-makers’ responses to Singapore play-text. This is a part-research-part-presentation endeavour to investigate movement in space and the body through inspired by play-texts. In Distilling the Dance, dance artist Kiran Kumar works with spell #7’s audio archives. More information here.

After moving into their new home at 65 Kerbau Road in Little India in 2002, theatre company spell#7 wanted to introduce their audience to their neighbourhood. Their initial plan was for performers to bring groups of up to six people on a guided tour. Titled Kinda Hot, it was schedule to happen in July that year. It was ultimately cancelled, however, as it was refused a public entertainment license because it breached a rule stating that performers are not allowed to be “mingling” with the audience for more than 15 minutes.

Structured like a guided tour where a performer leads up to six people to a location and speaks to them, the interactive play was later refused a public entertainment licence because it breached the 15-minute mingling rule.

The rule in the licensing agreement states that if a performer wishes to interact with an audience, the duration should not exceed 15 minutes.

Source: Sites and sounds of Little India by Ng Hui Hui. In The Straits Times (29 September 2004).

Undeterred, the group decided to try out a new format that they had heard artists in London and New York were using – an audio-guided tour. This had never been done in Singapore before, but spell#7 teamed up with Evan Tan from the band The Observatory to record some music, and ended up creating a 45-minute experience called Desire Paths.

The way it worked was simple – participants would meet at Kerbau Road, collect a portable CD player and a map, and set off to explore the district by following the instructions from the recording. But on top of learning about the significance behind landmarks such as the Sri Veeramakaliamman Temple, they also followed the story of a fictional couple, and encouraged to take part in activities in the area like having their fortune told by a parrot. Said Ben Slater, the associate director of spell#7 and co-playwright of Desire Paths:

[Little India is] an area full of vibrancy and rich sensory experiences and also has lots of little nooks and crannies that casual visitors don’t notice. We want people to look beyond the surface of the place.

Sites and sounds of Little India; Desire Paths, an audio tour devised by local theatre company Spell#7, lets participants experience the area in an unconventional way by Ng Hui Hui. In The Straits Times (29 September 2004).

The Singapore Tourism Board picked up on the idea and gave spell#7 a grant to carry the project forward. A Mandarin and Japanese version of the tour was made available a few months later.

Desire Paths (2004)

Brochure from “Desire Paths”.
(Source: Centre 42 Repository)

The audio tracks from “Desire Paths” are available here:
https://soundcloud.com/spell-7-706237284/sets/desire-paths

Other Audio Works by spell#7

Sky Duet (2008)

spell#7 staged an audio performance at the Singapore Flyer the same year the attraction opened. Sky Duet invited participants to plug their headphones into an mp3 player, step into a capsule and listen to a 30-minute recording. Timed to coincide with one trip around the observation wheel, the performance featured a series of conversations and sounds by characters contemplating what it means to grow old in a fast-paced city like Singapore.

Video: https://www.facebook.com/spellseven/videos/573704576117165/
Audio: https://soundcloud.com/spell-7-706237284/sets/sky-duet

Ghostwalking (2010)

Keen to see how far they could take the audio tour format, spell#7 once again collaborated with Evan Tan, as well as visual artist Sherman Ong, in 2010 for Ghostwalking. Here, audiences followed the journey of a character named Tony by travelling along the North-East MRT line. They are asked to stop off at Dhoby Ghaut, Outram Park, Little India and Punggol stations to embark on audio-guided walks. The audience could download the soundtracks to their smart phones, and also view three video works showing confessions of various people who live in Singapore.

Audio: https://soundcloud.com/spell-7-706237284/sets/ghostwalking

And Then There Was One (2013)

Inspired by the real-life murder of Edward Tan in 1926, And Then There Was One was a whodunit audio tour sited at the NUS Baba House, a Straits Chinese conserved shophouse located on Neil Road. Audience members, given portable mp3 players, were guided around the various spaces in the house as well as the surrounding neighbourhood by the voices of characters. They were also provided with a set of case notes to help them solve the crime. And Then There Was One was presented as part of the NUS Arts Festival.

NUS Arts Festival And Then There Was One webpage: http://www.nus.edu.sg/cfa/NAF_2013/th-and-then.html

By Gwen Pew & Daniel Teo
Published on 16 June 2016

The Vault: Distilling the Dance is the first of three presentations focusing on local dance-makers’ responses to Singapore play-text. This is a part-research-part-presentation endeavour to investigate movement in space and the body through inspired by play-texts. In Distilling the Dance, dance artist Kiran Kumar works with spell #7’s audio archives. More information here.

spell#7 was founded in 1997 by husband-and-wife team, Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan. The couple met at the University of Bristol in England when they were studying drama. For the first two years of spell#7, Rae and Tan managed all aspects of their performances themselves, from writing and acting, to design and marketing. They even rehearsed in their own living room.

In 1999, they became the first group to be taken on by TheatreWorks as part of its resident-artist scheme. They were given administrative support and, more importantly, access to the old Black Box Theatre at Fort Canning Centre to create work in.

Being resident artists at TheatreWorks was a big step up for us. We had an office, half a monthly wage each, and we didn’t have to rehearse in our living room anymore!

Source: From Identity to Mondialisation: TheatreWorks 25 by TheatreWorks, p.112.

The company relocated to 65 Kerbau Road in Little India in 2002 under the National Arts Council’s Arts Housing Scheme, meaning that they were able to use the space at a heavily subsidised rate.

Over the years, spell#7 became known for staging innovative site-specific promenade theatre pieces – where audiences are free to roam around the set – in unconventional spaces. One notable example is Bud (1999), which took place in various parts of Zouk as part of the Singapore Arts Festival Late Night Series.

There are many things going on at the same time in their work. In the theatre, says Rae, the audience may be “baffled” because they feel “they are supposed to be taking in everything”.

Because the audience in a club has the freedom to circulate during a performance, “they choose how they construct their experience. If they don’t like something, they can go somewhere else”, he says.

Source: Zoukettes, choose your own artistic adventure by Clarissa Oon. In Straits Times (April 23, 1999).

spell #7’s works are also often rooted in personal relationships, and they have never been shy to draw inspiration from their own lives. A noteworthy example is their Duets series, which began as a work-in-progress in 2004, when Tan was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with the couple’s first child, Lola. The piece addresses the anxieties that a couple feels when they become parents for the first time, and it was staged as a full play the following year – with six-month-old Lola listed as their dramaturg. As Rae puts it:

We explored what it’s like to be two going on three, how to be two when a third is on its way. The aim has been to avoid her determining everything in our lives – but her arrival does determine the structure of the show.

Source: Child's play; A six-month-old baby inspires her parents to write Duets by Edward Choy. In The Straits Times (21 April 2005).

As the family eventually grew from two to four – baby number two, Summer, came along three years later – Rae and Tan would revisit the series every few years. This culminated in Family Duet (2013), which is created by and stars members from three generations: the couple, their two young daughters, as well as Rae’s and Tan’s mothers.

[Family Duets] is a raw and quietly heartwarming work – a barrel of laughs for the children in the audience, whose reactions to the work were sometimes funnier than the scenes themselves – and also a tender study of parenthood and the transformative journeys that families must face together.

Source: Family snapshot; Children steal the show in this autobiographical production involving three generations by Corrie Tan. In The Straits Times (3 June 2013).

The family bid farewell to Singapore in 2014, when they made the move to Australia so that Rae could take up a new post as senior lecturer at the English and Theatre Studies department at the University of Melbourne. spell #7 is currently inactive, and as Rae said when they were planning the big move:

It’s hard to say what form [spell #7] will take because theatre is a local activity and so it does reflect the place it’s made in. So going to a new place, it’ll be interesting to take some time to see the lay of the land. It might be a very different thing that we do, especially because theatre is so much part and parcel of our lives. I don’t make theatre out of choice. I do it when I have to and I expect to have to because there are some ways of working out the world that we are able to do only by making theatre.

Source: Couple spell#7 out plans for new move by Corrie Tan. In The Straits Times (16 April 2014), http://tinyurl.com/j5msk6v

That said, a truncated version of their acclaimed 2006 work, National Language Class – which is inspired by Chua Mia Tee eponymous 1959 painting – was revived at the end of 2015 as an interactive performance art installation for ten days during the opening celebrations of the National Gallery. spell#7 even extended their revival with a full staging of the play the following January in the historic City Hall Chamber.

spell#7’s logo

Selected works:

1999 – Bud

2002 – Various Gangsters

2004 – Desire Paths

2005 – Duets

2006 – Duets 2

2006 – National Language Class

2007 – Tree Duet

2010 – Epic Poem of Malaya

2013 – Family Duet

View the entire Repository collection of spell#7’s works:
http://repository.centre42.sg/company/spell7

 

Additional Sources:

• spell#7 Infopedia entry: http://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/infopedia/articles/SIP_2013-06-07_154855.html
• spell#7’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/spellseven/
• The creation process of Family Duet documented in Tan Ngiap Heng and LASALLE’s Work in Process project: http://workinprocess.sg/details.php?vid=12

By Gwen Pew & Daniel Teo
Published on 9 June 2016

The Vault: Distilling the Dance is the first of three presentations focusing on local dance-makers’ responses to Singapore play-text. This is a part-research-part-presentation endeavour to investigate movement in space and the body through inspired by play-texts. In Distilling the Dance, dance artist Kiran Kumar works with spell #7’s audio archives. More information here.