Building collaboration

Supported by the Australian government and the Australia-Thai Institute, two contemporary dance works – “Fractals” by Navinda “Lordfai” Pachimsawat Vadtanakovint and “Metasystems ‘Multiplication’” by James Batchelor – known collectively as “Urban Templates” attracted many young dance students to Creative Industries last weekend. 

That’s a good sign in itself. In this country, there are dozens more dance schools than professional dance companies, the number of which you can count with one hand. “Urban Templates” provided a good opportunity to exercise their imagination as well as critical thinking, but we also need to hope that their dance teachers will discuss these works with them in class and encourage them to develop their own work later. 

And in comparison to “Ersatz”, performed by the same Victorian College of the Arts alumni here in September 2013, “Urban Templates” better connected with the audience. It did not, like its predecessor, appear to question if Thais people had ever watched contemporary dance.

Of course, the venue played an important part. While “Ersatz” was staged in a cinema foyer, “Urban Templates” was performed in a blackbox studio configured with a thrust stage set up. This fit Lordfai’s “Fractals” perfectly as the audience on the three sides of the stage could equally enjoy the performance by three dancers in white outfits – Amber McCartney, Batchelor and Lordfai herself. While they moved more freely at the start, their movements, inspired by daily movements of people in a city, were more restricted when ropes started to connect the three poles. The sound design by Nathan Homsup effectively complemented the performance whose choreography had enough variety to be neither predictable nor mundane. While the set design by architects Nattapong Phattanagosai, Donlaporn Chanachai, Kirin Tanglertpanya and Wasin Muneepeerakul suited the concept, and might have reminded some spectators of the Rama IX bridge, I wouldn’t go as far as the house programme which proclaimed it as an “architectural installation”.

In Batchelor’s pulsating work “Metasystems ‘Multiplication’” two Australian and six Thai dancers in grey outfits and the same brand of sneakers moved 576 bricks from a pile and neatly filled the stage, a square of 24 rows of 24 bricks, with them in a repetitive yet engaging pattern. Paopoom Chiwarak, Pakhamon Hemachandra, Tanakorn Kanjan, Jittima Muangsuwan, Vanalin Pachimsawat Vadtanakovint plus the three “Fractals” dancers then rearranged the bricks, putting one on top of another and leaving some space in-between in which four of them moved. In the end, all eight performers collapsed amidst the bricks, which now sat centre-stage. 

Given the fact that “Fractals” was created in Bangkok and that “Multiplication” was further developed here during Batchelor’s five-week residency, neither of them boasted details specific to Thailand capital. 

In “Multiplication”, for example, the choreography was inspired by construction workers’ movements and on stage it clearly and cleanly proved so. Nevertheless, a large number of construction workers in Thailand are not Thai, and that’s the same in many other countries. Also, unlike Melbourne and Paris where this work has been staged, Bangkok is notorious for its lack of urban planning, and I’m not sure if many images in this work really reflected our ever-expanding metropolitan. Specificity was lacking and “Multiplication” clearly needed either more input from collaborating local dancers or a dramaturg.