Da:ns festival is fast approaching, and we had an opportunity to catch up between rehearsals with award-winning dancer and choreographer Christina Chan and creative partner in crime Aymeric Bichon, choreographers of Iris ( 14th & 15th of October) with LASALLE College of the Arts dance students.
Christina speaks about working with dance students and the delicate and moving last few years of pre-professional training. ‘ All the dancers you will see in Iris are dancing in a full-length creative work for the first time.
I share a critical secret with them which I hope they will enjoy for the rest of their experience with dance, which is connecting your dancing spirit to your physical body then fatigue; letting anxiety, boredom or panic fade away.’
Bichon and Chan have been choreographing very compelling and intimate dance pieces in Singapore as well as abroad, founders of the innovative dance collective AsteroidB612.
In Iris, the artists want to bring ‘a little bit of fantasy to contemporary dance‘ however, challenging the audience with new questions.
The creative process for this production allows the choreographers to generate and articulate most of the movement material, facilitating an experience in which the students contribute towards an artistic vision through another movement language – transformation.
‘Our job as dance artists should be to share the true joy of dance with everyone, and we can only do so if we first remember to enjoy it ourselves.’
What were the difficulties of staging such a piece?
As much as we like to get creative, many of our ideas can’t be complete due to logistical and time constraints. Frustrating but we have done many dance works with even simple resources no costume/props/sets, so this is not a challenge we face for the first time.
I would say the greatest difficulty was the time constraint, as I like very much to workshop my dancers in advance, to understand the physical approach for each particular choreographic work. Challenges can be overcome to some extent, lucky there are two of us.