Way back in November 2020, I saw a digital performance livestreamed from The Substation. It would be the last performance I managed to catch from this historic space, long before the sad goodbyes during their final SeptFest (in March).
The work was Vortice Voyeur, a digital performance inspired by Water Station, by Ōta Shōgo. It was put together by Richard Chua, who played dramaturg to the artistic team. They performed live for the camera and for audiences dispersed in their own spaces, riffing off each other within the performance score.
The team working in the back-end to keep the technicalities functioning well made brief appearances during the talkback session. Their casual appearances heightened for me the sense that “we’re all in this together”. In this work and in so many other pandemic-responsive works, the logistical and tech whizzes have found ways to make “liveness” somehow still possible. Captured in a brief chummy moment between artistic and technical teams chatting, I felt the preciousness of those people, their living breathing bodies, in my screen, working together live, to manifest an artistic vision. I found myself reflecting on the original vision for The Substation, as a space for artistic experimentation in a supportive atmosphere. It did feel that, although times have changed drastically, the spirit of that space as ‘a home for the arts’ would linger on in other spaces, as other homes for the arts – through the practitioners, the cultural workers. The people make the home. Not real estate, and not wealth – something that bears repeating in our wildly unequal world, I think; some of us adapting far more quickly to the digital world, and its related expenses, and its consumerist impulse, and its cost to this earth.
And even though the screen would never replace the live encounter, in asking how performance might capture liveness through screens, Vortice Voyeur created a heightened awareness of my (then) present moment. I remember it well – heavily pregnant, a baby boy bubbling in my belly, watching the show’s beginning on-the-move on my small screen, then switching to a less-small but still too-small screen. Their liveness in their space made my liveness in my space feel somehow larger, more urgent. Our mortalities bound to each other across the literal and metaphorical web.
And on stage, performer Chen Jiexiao struggled sweatily with a web made of white fabric. It felt rare to see a male performer in a state of struggle. It is more typical to see women performers, thrashing and pushing against the constraints (made literal via physical restraints) life/society puts on them; I was glad to see male vulnerability in this case. In one particularly powerful moment, Jiexiao looked directly into the camera (at me/us!) like a wild, caged, animal. His body, like ours, captive to its circumstance.
Greenscapes were projected on the screens surrounding Chen, created by visual artist Urich Lau; all I could discern was a constant movement of what seemed like industrial images, set against a green glare. The green screen of digital life pervaded the physical space. Prevailing in the soundscape, created by sound artist Andy Yang, was the sound of water dripping. Rendered from the live stage to the digital space, these strong impressions mattered: green, water, man struggling. I could not perceive details easily, but instead experienced an overarching sense of existential empty, which then filled me with the question, what now? What do I do with being alive? What do I do with this body?
Vortice Voyeur captured a kind of esoteric slowness, almost a despair of the times – but also an acceptance of mortality. I have never seen Ōta Shōgo’s work, but could imagine that this sensibility had its roots in his theatre of divestiture. A dominant sense that, no matter what the performers got up to, it was merely one slice of time – one moment of human life in a cosmos far more ancient than our species. This philosophical perspective made these times seem more bearable.
But then I would remember the compounding of bad human choices that led us to this moment in time – this climate crisis, this global inequality, this erosion of cultural space for cultural imagining – and remember that while slowness needs to fill some spaces, urgency must enter others, to sustain the human race, if we care for it.
I don’t really know the intricacies behind this upcoming loss of The Substation, but I do know that it’s been said that the loss of its garden (tied to the rising cost of space), was the harbinger of doom. It’s not a leap, then, to link the ticking clock on our climate to the acceleration of cities being built and destroyed, built and destroyed, all in the name of the future – at the cost of the Earth. The irony of course, is that it seems like the future is being squandered too. And while a work like Vortice Voyeur perhaps invites us to embrace the transience of humanity, when seen in the context of The Substation and my body filled with futurity, I later found myself turning away from the flavour of fatalism. And instead, I mourned losses, feared for this burning world, and daydreamed about gentler ways for humans to inhabit space.
Vortice Voyeur livestreamed on CloudTheatre on 28 November 2020, at 5pm and 8pm. The writer attended the 5pm performance, then ran into friends watching it from Gillman Barracks at 8pm.
Bernice Lee is a contemporary dance artist who loves writing about performance even though she takes so very long. She’s written for FiveLines from its beginning and now runs the website in pockets of time. Bernice began to dance domestically as part of her movement practice – a way of remaking her roles of “wife” and “working artist”. Now a new mother, she has recast herself as #MAMAMILKMACHINE™ on Instagram as @bleelly. Bernice co-directs Derring-Do Dance/Rolypoly Family with Faye Lim and also has a joint practice The-Body-As-Theatre with Chong Gua Khee, manifest as Tactility Studies. An Associate Member of Dance Nucleus (2018-2020), Bernice holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) in Dance from The Ohio State University. She is an MA Fine Arts candidate at Lasalle College of the Arts.