Main-main Aje: Suatu Filem
23 Aug – 7 Sep 2024
10 am – 9 pm
Promenade, Level 7, National Library Building
About the Artwork:
“Main-main Aje” is a dance film that captures the meditative expressions of freestyle dance and vestiges of enculturated movement forms. It explores the close affinities of play and expression, memory and future-making, ritualised and improvised movements, joyful exuberance and taciturn control of the body. The dance artists in the film incorporate various traditional dance and movement forms, drawing from the coordinated movement of dikir barat choral groups, inang, silat and maglalatik, which are fused with hands performance, vogue fem and contemporary dance.
Veering away from the strictures of choreography, the dances are the outcome of artistic trust between the artist-director and the dance artists and are experiments in dance-making and movement direction. “Main-Main Aje: Suatu Filem” is an invitation and invocation to view performance not just as a persembahan [presentation] of virtuosity or the deployed embodiment of a unitary artistic vision, but a permainan [playing], which offers novel recombinants for both personal and cultural stories to be told.
About the Artist-Director:
Shayus Sharif is an artist, researcher and performer. Her interests include institutional critique, ludic and parodic interventions, anthropologies of and from the margins, vernacular and musicking cultures, movement studies and artistic expressions interrogating gender and culture and global circulations of subcultural formation. Shayus is one of the recipients of the 2024 National Library Creative Residency.
Behind the work:
“Main-main aje: Suatu Filem” is a dance film that is inspired by Shayus Sharif’s family history, memories of being surrounded by Malay traditional performing arts, her current movement practice and interest in Singapore’s dance culture. The film also draws speculative links between various traditional performing arts and the youth street dance cultures of Singapore’s present.
The film is informed by Shayus’ encounters with materials such as Evolving Synergies: Celebrating Dance in Singapore (edited by Stephanie Burridge, Caren, Cariño), oral interview recordings (with Neila Sathyalingam, Som Mohamed Said, Angela Pui-Yin Liong), ephemera documenting Bharatanatyam dance performances and events in Singapore, and Berita Harian newspaper reports on the explosion of the Twist as a dance craze and efforts to fuse the Twist and traditional dance forms.
In thinking through what it means to perform in the Southeast Asian context, the film presents how the playful and performative coexist intimately in the expressive modes of dance-making. By melding traditional dance forms and freestyle street styles, the dance artists also contemplate their cultural, gender and artistic identities. The film is presented as an installation that references 1960s and 1970s Singapore shophouses, drawing parallels to a period of incipient social, cultural and political change.
Extending the themes of play and freestyle dance, the project is activated by the performance a Singaporean hip-hop rapper and singer-songwriter, Martin Spacely, together with a crew of dancers in “Games of Groove”. A public workshop “Pose and Waack Only!” offers the public an opportunity to learn basic and beginner-friendly steps in the styles of Waacking and Old Way Voguing, led by prominent figures in the local dance scene.
Find out more:
Check out these resources to learn more about the development of dance in Singapore.
About the National Library Creative Residency Programme:
The National Library Creative Residency is a programme that invites creatives from different artistic disciplines to draw inspiration from the National Library Board's collections, to reimagine or reinterpret its materials in ways that provide fresh perspectives and make them more engaging to a wider community of users.
