(Re-Post) How Did I Get Here? (or What Led to A Reason for Falling?)
Originally posted on weallfalldown.dance/blog (now defunct) on 20 April 2021.
After working on something for a few years, it’s become pretty hard to be succinct about what I do, ‘cause leaving anything out feels like neglect of something important. That’s what I found out, writing this at the beginning of the year in an attempt to explain to a friend the journey that I’ve been on lately. Anyway, now that VECTOR#1 is over and A Reason for Falling has been presented for the first time, perhaps this is a good time to share this, before the next project starts and the rabbit hole gets even deeper.
This also serves as a brief primer for TalentLAB2021, which I’ve been invited to be a part of from late May to early June, and is where the next stage in my artistic journey begins. Organised by Les Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg, TalentLAB is a program that I was supposed to participate in last year, but well, Covid-19. The festival was postponed to this year, 2021, so here’s keeping my fingers-crossed that I’ll be able to travel and participate in it.
(To follow what’s happening in TalentLAB, you can check out their facebook page; official announcement of this year’s programme on the 26th of April!)
For a quick, TL;DR version of the story, Berms is a new duet that I’ll be choreographing during TalentLAB, a direct development from A Reason for Falling and the line of enquiry that I’ve been digging into over the past few years.
On with the story:
Back in 2016, I was in a bit of a slump: why was I pursuing dance? Why was I bored, and at times frustrated with it? Dance had become a job to be endured, rather than an opportunity for living out crazy possibilities like it had been back when I was a teenager, when I first started dancing.
In this period, I stumbled across a book called The Rise of Superman (TRoS for short). This compendium of adventure stories and collection of superhuman feats - by very human people - was a fun read. It felt like reading modern mythologies, only instead of fighting minotaurs and killing the men who killed our fathers the kings or flying on clouds, the characters in these stories rode waves and mountains, traversed impossible terrains, and flew not on wings made of feathers and glue but in suits built out of space-age materials.
One story that stood out is Danny Way’s. He’s the skateboarder who jumped over the Great Wall of China on the 9th of July, 2005, while nursing an ankle he had smashed on a test jump the day before. It’s a feat that seems to imply a severe lack of a sense of self-preservation on Way’s part, but it’s also a story filled with, well… wonder.
And also of promise: TRoS was about people like Danny Way, sure, but it was written so that people like you and me can learn from their stories. It’s not just about flying a wingsuit up in the Alps, or riding a wave so big that you’re not more than an ant to it (see “Big Wave Surfiing on Jaws/Nazare/Teahupo’o”). The psychological flow states that enable these feats aren’t just for super athletes looking to achieve the next impossibility, Flow states are for all of us, whether we’re trying to spin on our heads, have a good time with friends, or just get through the daily grind, but to get through it well.
The study of flow didn’t begin with adventure athletes; it started with the work of a psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, one of the pioneers of the positive psychology movement (think "me time" and mindfulness practices). Csikszentmihalyi didn’t study extreme sports athletes throwing backflips off 90-foot cliffs. He started his study with survivors of WWII, trying to figure out why some recovered from their traumatic experiences, while the scars of war haunted others for years and years. What he found was that flow is both the result of how we look at life (say, as a series of problems to be solved), that the experience of flow deepens our engagement with the world around us, and that more flow experiences lead to more healthy, fulfilled lives.
Back in 2016, this was great news for me, and perhaps was the key to reconnecting with dance. Now, whether or not learning about the flow state has made me a better dancer (I hope it has!), it sure has led to my current artistic journey, that I’ll finally get to now that I’m done with my preamble.
The first thing that resulted from reading TRoS was a more active exploration of The Art of Falling, the name that I gave to the “contemporary dance” class I was teaching. The name started out as a branding technique, to give clarity and purpose to attending my class, but it also ended up providing a direction that was interesting and exciting for me. From class, this practice became a short solo (also called The Art of Falling) during a 2018 residency at Rimbun Dahan. Today, I’m still building on this class and this solo.
The second thing TRoS did was to take me back to the days of watching the X-Games on morning TV in Malaysia, when I was supposed to be doing my homework before afternoon school sessions. I remember watching slack-jawed as the Yasutoko brothers would rocket out of the half-pipe on their rollerblades, hanging in the air for what felt like forever, while spinning, flipping, and veritably dancing in the air and on the lip of the half-pipe. TRoS brought me right back to those days of watching amazing, and opened doors to new versions of being mind-blown.
Red Bull Rampage was one of these new things to watch. A freeride mountain biking event held in Utah desert, Rampage showcases riders navigating what are basically bicycles dressed to the nines along tiny pathways so high up in the sky and so precarious that most people - myself included - wouldn’t even want to walk on them. Then the crazy begins, as the riders perform backflips and frontflips and 360s and cork 720s off huge cliffs, leaping across immense gaps right into the depths of impossibility.
And from Rampage I started watching slopestyle and downhill, and then big wave surfing and aggressive in-line, freeride snowboarding, Big Air competitions, and… you can see where this is going.
At the end of 2017, a serendipitous conversation led to an invitation to submit a proposal to become an Associate Member of Dance Nucleus. I originally wanted to work on a hiphopsomethingsomethingcontemporarydancesomethingsomething, to scratch an itch from my days as a dance student. (Yeah, I watched all the Step Up movies and thought they were cool, ok?) Thankfully, though, the director of Nucleus - Daniel Kok - told me to stop chasing old ideas in an attempt to live out dated dreams and encouraged me to investigate something that was truly captivating, to chase something that was bigger than my youthful fancies.
So I began looking at ideas from freeride mountain biking and the flow state, searching for ways to translate or transpose these ideas into a kind of contemporary dance, and how flow could also be tapped as a tool for both the creation and performance of new work. This line of enquiry would be a reason to watch hours and hours of freeriding videos, on top of being a way to reconnect with my dancing. And over a couple of months, that exploration and investigation - which included a mentorship with Arco Renz in early 2018, as part of Dance Nucleus’ ELEMENT#1 programme - led to this:
But what to do with these explorations? At first, I had no idea how this was going to translate into a dance performance (the video above is very much a mish-mash of ideas thrown together; more of a mindmap than a completed novel). But as time went by, what began to make sense was to put this together with The Art of Falling, and to look for the story that would emerge out of this process.
A Reason for Falling is what resulted. A reason, for myself. Hopefully, a reason that makes sense for you, too. Falling is fun; there’s more to it than that, but maybe, that’s enough.
And sure, there’s lots of inherent danger in falling, and generally as human beans we’re taught to avoid falling because it hurts, because it’s embarrassing, because it’s hard to get back up again. And all those things are true, but by avoiding the act of falling and learning not to do it, we learn to forget so much of what makes us human.
In my opinion, anyway.
And so, this is where the journey has brought me, so far. Next step?
TalentLAB 2021, during which some specific ideas from A Reason for Falling will be picked out, expanded, elaborated on.
And we’ll see where we go from there.