douglas in purple tights. not a sight for sore eyes. wait, maybe it IS s sight for sore eyes, as in the getting of. hahahaha
yes, that delightful *cough cough* sight greeted my eyes on saturday at TH's dance production. the drive to school was fantastic because the sky was burnished sunshine and gold in the most amazing of manners. this is what i like about storms--they wipe the slate clean and then allow the sky to exercise the full whim of her cloud palette upon her canvas, rose-tinged summer hues or incandescent auroras or just gold, gold, gold. it was like driving under my own personal midas vaulted-sky-- the same gold you get/see/remember as a child, driving through the cte tunnels ("mummy is this the long or short tunnel?"), where the yellow lights turn your world sepia and young unjaded eyes view it all as magical. i got hopelessly lost not knowing where the heck nus high school was and ended up at the shibuya waseda school or something like that. after walking around rather hopeless for 20 minutes i called abby for help and she totally saved my life haha dashed off in the 96 direction (ok i circled the school twice since i didn';t actually know the route 96 takes-- whaaat i've always only taken either btc or 95!) and after circling the carpark like a hawk for a good 10 mins i gave up and doubleparked somewhere before hopping off across the tracks to the school itself.
felt strange to be on the track in heels instead of spikes. SO. strange.
anyway got there in time to miss chun's item :(:(:(:(-- not wanting to disturb everyone i waited till adele's tones faded (yes, krys, you would have liked it) i slunk in while the applause was still going and then sank low in a chair. not a bad show, and the emcees were damn funny. short takes:
- xin hui's item was freaking funny. haha. engendered the douglas-in-purple-tights vision (vision as in the kind of hallucinations you get after eating bad mushrooms, not vision as in oh vision of loveliness. please do not wrong me.).
- omg i am blogging in bullet points. just slay me.
- kuan lye's hair is awesome. haha. she was in the jazzy piece-- or not really jazzy, but it was one of the better items of the night-- white outfit with green arm warmers? and seriously actually in ALL her items her hair was great. she really reminds me of the lead from after school (and coming from me that is high praise because i think that babe is hawwwwwt).
- qianwen is supremely happy when she dances haha i never knew she had such a beatific smile! she must have looked damn happy during fred/xuzi's item haha
- shingyeen has a very distinctive style and i am very very very glad for her that all her hard work paid off. i think she truly was happy and gratified that everything turned out so well in the end. i like her explosive style! set her apart from the rest of the dancers-- in a good way-- and although not all her dancers could catch her groove it was a good effort still.
- linda's item was niceeee :D
bah didn't really get to hang around a lot-- was in a bit of a mood and i had to go fetch michy michy mich. note to self: do not play girlfight in the car when driving, it is a song MEANT for bitchiness. turned out that i was early anyway so i brooded away in a carpark and somewhere amongst my consti notes is a page that needs to be torn out and burnt.
heard a few interesting things that night though. ROSES. hahahahaha :P and of course saw a few dozen cats-- okay maybe ONE dozen cats-- at the very deserted bedok interchange after michelle the miti suddenly remembered that she had to return an overdue library book, about a hundred metres away from home. thanks ah. bleh.
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also went for evocation last thursday... and-- rather surprisingly-- this was... strangely difficult to blog about. especially in comparison to the th performance.
i guess i have an explanation-- don't we all? but because i am at a loss for words, or my vocab bank has shrunk perilously low in this day and age of NOT reading anything except for textbooks (life sucks take drugs :(:(:(:(:( ), i shall take the words of one of my favoritest bloggers ever:
This journal is a public offering from a very private person, a way for me to work through things that happen in my life without giving away too much of myself in the process. I live a quiet life as a writer, with two small kids, one medium-sized hearing loss and one very big rockstar of a husband in a hundred-year old Victorian house in the middle of nowhere and we like it that way. I like it this way. We've been through a lot, though so if you pick a dark day to read, remember that brighter days are ahead. That's what I try to do.-- Bridget, Saltwater Princess
and as open as this blog-- my blog, i mean-- seems to be, it's not. i'm well aware that it is a very public offering from a very private person, and i have two servers (google and nuffnang) to remind me of that, and my constitutional law lectures to remind me that what you write in cyberspace DEFINITELY comes back to haunt you. and it sometimes comes back with bite. and sometimes worse still it comes back in the middle of lecture, on the lecture theatre screen-- one of the blog entries featured on the screen in relation to s 377A was a piece by one of our fellow yearmates, dearies. how do i know? haha. he was sitting right behind me when the screen flashed that.
but anyway-- i guess the public-ness of the space makes it difficult to speak sometimes, especially when it comes to emotions better left in the confines of our own heads. and evocation DEFINITELY triggered a great deal of emotional response, so forgive me if this sounds decidedly flippant or incoherent, because i'm trying not to self-censor without sounding coherent. (i'm already INCOHERENT). and flippancy is an easy shield.
anyway:
my favourite items of the night-- save him, bulletproof, slow dancing in a burning room and manumission, in that order. it wasn't that the other items weren't good-- it's just that these items made especially striking impressions.
i-- don't know. maybe i could relate to them more? does it sound wrong? haha. or perhaps they were hard acts to follow so sometimes the pieces that came after them might have been eclipsed in my faulty memory.
i think... the way ensemble dances is so-- different-- from blast. it's not just about the dance styles-- when you look at it after a while dance is dance is dance, but the crux of the issue is that at its heart dance is emotion; the expression of the heart's core. and i think the styles of dance which ensemble pursues, or maybe the whole emotional aspect of all its dances, is a far more direct conduit to the heart than what blast does, sometimes. so while there are times and areas in which parts of blast and ensemble's repertoire overlap, i think it's very rare that we ever achieve quite the same level of emotion. unless of course you get ensemble-ish choreos like fred and xiao hahaha. and i'm proud to say blast is really developing in that direction i think it's v positive! it's no longer just dance, it has to have meaning behind it, and you have to feel it like pat and ahmad and pretty much EVERYONE says, now-- a hand placed is not a hand placed, it is a hand placed in anticipation of love, or sorrow, or hurt, or loss.
sometimes i think i read a little too much into dance, and i think maybe I feel a bit too much when it comes to dance as well. i can count the number of times a choreography-- or a dancer-- has moved me to tears, and i don't know what it says of me that that number is fairly significant. sytycd's bleeding love; lina and joo teng's emcc duet; ahmad's can't let go choreo (ok, almost, and a lot of it at that time was also my own state of mind); and of course evocation's save him.
i don't like being so easily moved to tears, because all too often tears are regarded as a sign of weakness. and why in the world would any of us want to be weak? and i don't know if being so easily moved somehow cheapens my reactions. but dance-- dance can leave me weak-kneed, soul-shaken; and if you asked me the last time i truly cried in "real life" as opposed to for dance-- truly, really, honestly cried-- i would have to say i can't remember.
ARGH enough. back to evo. and ohhh my gosh seriously haha we saw a side of fred we never thought existed HEH. yvonne (heng) was like "omg after this i'm going to be damn scared of fred" and tracy's reaction was-- hehe. V CUTE!! but seriously in like bulletproof even though i think he was a leeetle self-conscious there was a certain almost-psychotic undertone to his voice when he was speaking. i think the way he spoke made it-- worse-- like "you're not ready? but you said you loved me..." was spoken in a way that seemed so hurt, like it was the girl who was engineering machinations and toying with a very broken heart or something. but-- i think i kind of figured out what was bothering me-- it was like the voice of a child, but a cruel, unfeeling child, who had gotten a gossamer butterfly between his fingers, a fragile blossom, and was ready to start rending.
honestly at that point i wasn't quite convinced of that darker side yet-- tracy and i were whispering bits to each other in between items so i can't remember if i actually vocalised this or just thought it, which was basically "omg fred's too nice a guy to do a rape scene...!" in fact despite his intention to be rough i thought there was something hesitant-- almost shy-- about his pinning the girl down... almost-- incongruously-- tender?? hahah YES he has got to be the most tender rapist i;ve ever seen hahahaha. i think he really was afraid of hurting his dance partner la!
and bullet proof was good because-- i suppose the dance was abstract, but i liked the emotion-- the fact that given so many dancers the choreo had managed to not scatter the energy, that it was focused, that the numbers actually worked in favour of the choreography and created a wave effect-- like a culmination upon culmination. leron was goood her expressions were like direct bolts-- nothing ambiguous or held back, if she felt it she showed it. or if she was supposed to feel it she showed it (i HOPE she didn';t really feel everything she showed...!)
i really liked the bulletproof song; in comparison i didn't think so much of the save him music (maybe i had grammar issues. okay actually YES i did have grammar issues EURGH). it wasn't bad emotionally speaking, but the real gem of that item was the dance and the choreography. xiao later told us that he'd basically improv-ed all his steps and i was like omg but it was so in sync, and so apt.
perhaps save him reached so much deeper and more piercingly than bullet proof-- although they dealt with pretty much the same subject matter-- because of the way the dancers were characterised and brought to life as well; the smaller number of dancers made it easier to identify with one particular dancer, and/or to have your eyes drawn to him/her again and again and again, to see the desperation or fevered fervour or the pleas in their eyes. plus characterisation-- and plus the fact that fred and amanda are seriously damn good at emoting. i mean they broadcasted their emotions, and they were believable! when they were in love they were really in love-- he loves her more, she loves him more, back to back, heads swinging from profile to forward to face the crowd with such incredibly beatific smiles-- you could practically feel the rustle of grass and soughing sighing winds and a wonderful sun beating down upon you. ESPECIALLY when they skipped forward hand-in-hand-- i found myself smiling with them! i swear amanda has a face which begs for a halo.
but it all turned bad so fast. at this point i must say-- fred is a damn fast quick-changer haha i think he took like 10 seconds to change from a white shirt to black. my blood literally ran cold when the beatings started-- i can still recall him holding amanda and slamming his fist into her again and again, and it did NOT help that she was so small and slight even against him. her cries-- you know how sometimes a performance can fail because the cries are too overwrought, or too over-dramatised, or too screamy? amanda's cries were practically genuine, and heartrending.
and everything just went worse, and worse-- i watched xiao's expressions and my heart shrank, because the moment of dawning realisation across his features was godawful, because fred'd this movement where he literally picked amanda up by the throat and slammed her onto the ground, because there was no way this was going to end happily and there was such raw pain everywhere-- and then the gun came out, and he shot her, and he shot himself, and all was still but for the children left and abandoned, and oh my god watching them finally precipitated the tears that had been hovering. and maybe all the time i was waiting for fred and amanda to rise again, because godamnit there had to be some sort of happy ending, or what sort of life was this??
but of course there wasn't.
it was hard to react, even when the item ended-- the rest of the audience were hushed, too. i know fred said that the dancers were worried that it hadn't quite worked out because the applause seemed so muted, but i mean-- how the heck do you cheer or whoop after a performance like that? i really didn't take in a single image of apres moi-- the item which came after save him. ask me at gunpoint what it was about and i'd still be speechless; i pretty much spent half that performance scrubbing at my eyes and the other half staring blankly into space and not thinking.
damn. freaking. good. haha jinglin was damn funny when i told her about evocation she was like "amanda all along prooo". i have to completely agree man. :D
and apart from that since this entry is becoming bloody long-- short takes!
manumission was good because of the dancers' techniques-- THEIR EYES. haha. the dancers were incredibly talented (apsara) and absolute masters of nuances-- i was and still am in awe of how they could switch their expressions by the slightest tilt of their mouths and their eyes their eyes their eyes. so directed, so focused. and the switch from ethnic stasis to sudden dynamism was unexpected but SO in keeping with the music.
and slow dancing in a burning room-- i've had a soft spot for that song ever since i first saw wade robson's sytycd choreography-- the full one, not the one on the show. i rmb showing it to jinglin like last year when her dad gave me a lift to tiong bahru from nus i think, and she was exclaiming away and telling her dad to drive slower (in rush hour traffic!!!) haha and i leapt out at like the last second. whoops. i digress. but this version was good too, and rather reminiscent of the wade robson piece-- but i think they did put their own spin on it. liked the -- canons?-- and the repetitions. clement was v good here haha i was like WHOA this guy is improving by LEAPS and BOUNDS. lightyear leaps and bounds. :D
OKAY. enough. i think this is the first proper post i;ve written in days; the last proper, thinking post was actually the john mayer quote, but EH plagiarised not counted. hurhur.
to all DU people-- GOOD LUCK jiayou!! i'm looking forward to the show! :)
a-n-g-e-l