Body without location : 4 dances

Image Credit: Alecia Neo

Timed as 4 solos danced in loops (each loop= 45-50 minutes), Body without Location, is an attempt at constructing a durational dance installation comprising the yarn and the moving body. The 4 solos, namely, String Through, Sitting/Spinning, Projectile, and Hopscotch, emerge from embodied ways of conceiving rhythmic connections between qualities of a yarn and vocabularies of a dancing body. String Through tests the engagement of the body with the yarn in its form of a mesh, Sitting/Spinning studies repetition and notation embedded in crochet knitting, and Projectile and Hopscotch mobilise the yarn as a ground of play. The work intends to create a space where the choreographic agency is parted between the dancing body and the yarn, and the audience too is invited to draw (using paper and pencil) the dance in the act of watching, so as to enhance their engagement from being mere spectators to notation makers. Treating dance and choreography as its key inquiries, the work employs the yarn as an entry-point into those inquiries, in that, a source that connects the cyclical and spinal thinking that are common to both dancing and weaving. More importantly, the yarn is imagined to be producing for the moving body a spatial texture, and by way of that, a sense of place and memory which the body otherwise fails to find in a lonesome black box.

Choreography and Performance: Meghna Bhardwaj

Sound Design: Marcel Zaes

Performed as part of Meghna`s exhibition and artistic research titled Yarning,

Supported by and Premiered at Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency,

Esplanade-Theatres on the Bay, Singapore.

Year of Premiere: 2022

Documentation: Alecia Neo

People/Fields: Inter-weavings

Devised in collaboration with Alecia Neo, People/Fields: Inter-weavings (29 minutes) is a video installation that emerges from a desire to bring yarn- a material often associated with domesticity and femininity in popular imagination- into public spaces, the streets. In this film, we invite- the passers-by, women and men in the moment of taking a break from work or waiting to pick up their child from school, groups celebrating their Sunday picnics, or friends enjoying recording tik-tok dances together- to knit with us. And what we achieve as a result, are these ephemeral yarning communities, which remind us of the tenacity embedded in a material as fragile and passive as the yarn. In these acts, what also becomes tactile for us are the transitory fields of energy and compassion that get formed and unformed between us and others as we lay out the yarn and its stitches in space. We imagine that perhaps this is one way to blur borders that divide our identities into separate complexes, trouble the entitlements of maps and territories, and bring us to touch each other with some techniques of play and wonder, with no burden of promises and contracts ever made.

Concept: Meghna Bhardwaj

Site direction, Camera, Video Editing: Alecia Neo

Sound Editing: Marcel Zaes

Displayed as part of Meghna`s exhibition and artistic research titled Yarning, Supported

by Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency, Esplanade- Theatres on the Bay,

Singapore.

Dis/En-tangling Concrete

Devised in collaboration with Alecia Neo, Dis/En-tangling Concrete (24 minutes) is a video installation that emerges from an intention to perceive varied urban architectures as threads that choreograph the moving human body. We began the experiment with the questions: how can the structured-ness of urban architectures become movement prompts for a dancing body, and shape her contours, and in turn get re-framed by her? How are our bodies implicated into the choreography of public (State) architectures, and what are the possible movement idioms that can intervene or trouble that? Further into the process, we began to value the contrast that the fragility of the yarn as well as the moving body projected against the concrete/rigid discipline of these architectures. We saw the yarn breaking, the body getting bruised, yet the architectures remained unchallenged and unchanged. One key thought behind these explorations was to bring the female body and her yarn dance freely through these architectures, while claiming a ludic presence as well as a sense of frivolity in public spaces.

Concept: Meghna Bhardwaj

Site direction, Camera, Video Editing: Alecia Neo

Sound Editing: Marcel Zaes

Displayed as part of Meghna`s exhibition and artistic research titled Yarning,

Supported by Contemporary Performing Arts Research Residency, Esplanade- Theatres on the Bay, Singapore.

Year and Place of Premiere: 2022; Esplanade, Singapore.