Duet

Last night, Amy and I attended Ballet Under the Stars, an outdoor event held twice a year by the Singapore Dance Theatre at Fort Canning Green.

Celebrating their 10th anniversary of Ballet Under the Stars, the Singapore Dance Theatre put up a number of celebratory pieces from their repertoire; it paid tribute to its late co-founder and choreographer Goh Choo San with the classical Birds of Paradise, and featured new contemporary pieces by choreographers Jeffery Tan and Mohammed Noor Sarman.

I was impressed with the danseurs; their elevation was visibly more sustained than their female counterparts, and they appeared to be in better form. The cavalier in the piece Don Quixote gave an especially impressive performance.

Personally, the highlight of the event was Duet, as choreographed by Jeffery Tan. Featuring only a pair of dancers, yet not quite the traditional pas de deux, Duet is a stunning intepretation of the relationship between a man and a woman. Lit mostly by a single downlight, rendering the pair in chiaroscuro, the dancers played out the intricacies of the interplay between their respective alter ego – their limbs intertwining, bodies colliding in soft violence, then parting in yearning – while being contained by the square of light from overhead, the metaphorical box itself evolving with the dance.

The performance, and the setting that I was in, was reminiscent of the Suite Saint-Saën scene from the film The Company, an intimate and documentary-like peek into the world of ballet. Featuring the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, the film revolves around its dancers and the trials and tribulations they go through in the pursuit of their craft, both indivdually or collectively. Starring Neve Campbell in a performance free of ego, The Company is a marvelous ensemble piece, the kind that only a director like Robert Altman can serve up, though his direction is near invisible.

Then I realized the past year has been a year of introduction to ballet for me; I have only seen two other performances in my whole life. The first was "The Trocks" (otherwise going by the intentionally nonsensical name of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo), an all-male ballet company comprising dancers in drag who gave a thoroughly enjoyable evening performance that combined comedy and virtuosity in technique.

Then there was The Company before this.

My interest in ballet piqued considerably after these varied forms of exposure. And I must say I am taking to it quite nicely, though being admittedly inept at dancing (I could not even get pass Intermediate 1 in Salsa), that is not to say that I am going to do a Billy Elliot any time soon.

Small eyes, you see. Periphery view considerably limited.