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>requiem by ea sola >reviewed by ma shaoling >date:
23 jun 2001 >tired
already? go home then |
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Once in a while, there comes a performance when after the curtain has come down and the lights have come on, we hear applause meant for a beginning. Not an end, but the start of something passed on from the performers to their audience. And when that happens, indeed a requiem has begun. REQUIEM is Ea Sola's last work of a cycle about memory that began in 1992 in Vietnam. Like many choreographers, Sola chose to return to her homeland so as to be liberated from her own memories, as well from the constraints of cross-cultural communication. However, unlike most choreographers, Sola reaches deeper into her soul, and in the process everyone else's, by extracting the most ordinary from anonymous people. On stage, the 22 men and women spun a web of memories woven so tight that the 100-minute performance seemed to stretch over numerous lifetimes. They were not trained as dancers, and they knew nothing about western theatrical art forms. The only training they had was to engage in a deep creative process with Ea Sola, who encouraged them to work on their own memories. These Vietnamese used a simple dance vocabulary, like hitting their bodies with their hands, and touching the floor with a start-stop motion. It was this very simplicity that moved the audience, because it came from deep-down internalisations. What we saw on Saturday night was not some people trying to jump on the "avant garde" bandwagon. REQUIEM was so truthful it almost hurt. |
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>>'It was this very simplicity that moved the audience... Requiem was so truthful it almost hurt.' |
One unforgettable
scene in displayed the painful coming-to-terms with death. The dancers
held up black and white photographs of dead loved ones while marching
to the resounding beats of funeral drums. Their own identities seemed
to have disappeared as memories of the dead effaced the life they still
had. This atmosphere shifted when the dancers began to break free of the
monotonous marching and swayed the photographs freely around their bodies.
It was a healing process that confronted the inevitability of death, while
celebrating the small but significant hope that life is left behind. |
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Ea Sola had not just transposed ethnic music and dance for presentation on a stage designed for the western theatre; she also strewed together the differing ends of eastern and western philosophy. While the former has taught the traditional community to overcome obstacles in shared combat, the latter has encouraged the emergence of individuality. Whether it was seeing the synchronised gestures of Sola's composition, or hearing the distressed call of one lone unit, the performers of REQUIEM evoked our memories by living through theirs. |