DEAD WAS THE BODY TILL I TAUGHT IT HOW TO MOVE by Bhumi Collective

“Breaking Into Less Familiar Territory“

Reviewer: Cordelia Lee
Performance: 11 July 2018

The room is dark, save for a weakly illuminated performance space. This bare, ovoidal area that the audience surrounds spatially resembles a dance cypher – a liminoid, where music and movement converge to unleash pure, personal expression.

B-boy and actor Dominic Nah sits at one end of the space, composed yet never completely still. With eyes closed but a body fully awake, he spontaneously responds to the lo-fi hip-hop pulsing through the speakers, constantly in perfect tandem with its rhythm.

Magic ensues whenever Nah breakdances in the space.  His body appears weightless, limbs slicing through the air with graceful precision. Dance is clearly Nah’s first language, and he speaks it fluently. The emotion driving every movement is conspicuous – ecstasy as he executes successive flares, rage as he steps into a dizzying frenzy, and anguish as he softly cradles himself.

Through a mixture of flashback scenes and breaking sequences, Nah divulges intimate details of his personal life to the audience. From his tumultuous relationship with his now-deceased father to his pilgrimage to the birthplace of breaking, we hear it all. Nah’s story is precious; his vulnerability and willingness to share it through theatre, commendable. It is therefore disappointing when amateurish habits sabotage his delivery, crippling an otherwise powerful performance.

Nah periodically fails to project his vocals, making himself barely audible. This is particularly problematic whenever he delivers a line with his back facing the audience. In such instances, we can neither hear him nor attempt to read his lips. This unfortunately renders some lines in the script lost. Additionally, forced sighs appear in every other line, long enough to either consume the first few syllables in a sentence or to distort the flow of speech midway. Perhaps these pauses are used to buy time, or they are meant to be instrumental in conveying a mood. Regardless of intent, the sighing quickly becomes a distracting element throughout the performance.

Sentences are frequently left hanging, especially when Nah switches between recounting his b-boy experiences and memories of his family. While I respect the artistic decision of using unfinished sentences as a transitional device, it does not discount the fact that it ruptures Nah’s flow of thought for his audience. A non-linear play containing flashbacks and parallel plots requires, at minimum, scenes that end coherently with a completed thought. Withholding information from the audience destabilizes their understanding of the entire narrative. It inevitably catapults them into a perpetual – not to mention incredibly frustrating – guessing game. This ultimately distances the very group of people who want to engage with Nah’s story.

I leave the performance space remembering how Nah’s body flowed as he breakdanced, like it was the only way his body truly knew how speak. If only he had applied the same charismatic confidence and clarity he wielded as a dancer to the rest of his performance.