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Anggota
by Lee Ren Xin & Tan Bee Hung
Five Arts Centre, GMBB KL
10-12 June 2022
REVIEW BY BILQIS HIJJAS
It might have been the perfect ending. Dancer-choreographer Tan Bee Hung held an electric table fan out in front of her face, tilting it from side to side as if steering a phantom motorcycle. Lee Ren Xin, her co-creator, perched behind her, riding pillion. The two women tipped back their heads, hair flying in the wind from the fan, savouring the delicious breeze as they rode off into the sunset. As the golden light faded, the audience burst into applause.
But it was not to be; there were another two scenes until the end of Ren Xin and Bee Hung’s new contemporary dance work Anggota. That this work should have such a teasing ending feels rather fitting. Anggota resists easy answers and pat dramatic pleasures, opting for open questions, spiky dilemmas and enigmatic reveals.
And it’s appropriate, considering that Anggota shoulders some paradoxical responsibilities: it’s the first public production in Five Arts Centre’s new space. After 23 years in its cosy shophouse in Taman Tun Dr Ismail, the interdisciplinary collective recently shifted to GMBB, Gamuda’s cavernous shopping centre on Jalan Pudu. The shift suggests a new generation, embodied literally in Lee Ren Xin, one of only three new members indoctrinated into FAC in the last 15 years. It puts her in a tricky position: how do you continue in a tradition of experimentation, iconoclasm and radical progress?
Intentionally or not, Anggota functioned as a kind of immersive song-and-dance advertisement for FAC’s new studio theatre, an oddly-shaped corner lot on the mall’s ninth floor. The audience sat in the round on the studio floor, swivelling towards the dancers as they swung from curtains, hauled up roller shutters, and burrowed through props stored on the shelves. Video projections, lights, music and voices sprang from all directions. The scenes sometimes seemed disjointed and fragmentary, but the commitment to finding radical form within the confines of a black box theatre did not falter.
In Anggota, Ren Xin hopes to “dance for all the women in her family who could not.” Her quest draws the two dancers deeper into why women, particularly Chinese women, have historically felt restricted in their bodies, and what it means to be anggota – both a limb and a member of a larger social body. The spectre of patriarchal control looms throughout, but Anggota tackles it with a light hand. For instance, sometimes the dancers wear the v-necked navy blue pinafores familiar from junior school uniforms, reminding us of many Malaysian women’s first experience of government-imposed disciplining of the body. But production designer Wong Tay Sy has cheekily turned the pinafores inside out, with the white seams on display, and underneath the dancers wear the gym shorts which have allowed generations of Malaysian schoolgirls to comfortably spread their legs.
Connecting to physical pleasure seems key in this work. It starts with Bee Hung and Ren Xin rolling on the floor, on either side of the audience in the centre. They stretch and flop, knead their limbs, hum and groan indistinctly, as if drawing out the process of falling out of bed in the morning. In a later scene, they repeat similar movements, but together, one lying on top of the other, curling and uncurling, sometimes awkwardly, as they carve a path through the audience. As they roll, Ren Xin investigates Bee Hung’s body with a flashlight. Bee Hung palpates Ren Xin’s abdomen, and snatches of speech and song issue from Ren Xin, as if Bee Hung is an exorcist releasing spirits with her hands from Ren Xin’s flesh. Later, their recorded voices contemplate their actions: Ren Xin remembers how her grandmother used to speak to her, but she can’t remember anything her grandmother said.
These scenes illustrate what it might look like for women to seek pleasure in their own and each other’s moving bodies, if ideas of prettiness and properness did not hold sway. This is sharply contrasted with a projected photo montage (all videos are by Chloe Yap Mun Ee) showing black and white stills of two immaculately-groomed Chinese women, circa 1950. In a series of extended close-ups, we see their bottoms in tight cheongsam, the backs of their ankles in black kitten heels, their hands arranged demurely in their laps. It’s a perfect example of the male gaze, in which the camera divides women into ‘nonautonomous morsels’, as critic Elif Batuman describes it, to be consumed by the desiring man.
By contrast, Anggota is trying to show us the female gaze, in which women (and men) might be viewed as entire persons with their own agency and desires, complete with pasts, presents and futures, but who are also defined and constructed by their connections to others, whether ancestors, family or chosen fellow travellers.
That Bee Hung and Ren Xin’s sequences of rolling, together or apart, remind me occasionally of pornography is perhaps a deeper indictment of the way our eyes are trained to view women as sexual objects than a condemnation of the work itself. But it also makes me wonder about the element of sexual pleasure, which goes conspicuously unmentioned in Anggota. This is a bridge too far, perhaps, especially in the Malaysian context. But there is a moment in the vintage black and white video which hints of it: a brief image, gone in a blink, zooming in on the two women facing each other, as if leaning in for a kiss. [Did I imagine it? It felt like a feminist come-back to Tyler Durden’s subliminal dick pics in Fight Club.] And when Bee Hung rips back the black curtain to reveal the mirror behind, and the two dancers spend a long moment entranced by their own reflections, I think of the joke about self-examination – isn’t that something you do with an angled mirror and looking between your legs?
Bee Hung sometimes comes across as secondary in this creative effort. She’s as strong a performer as Ren Xin, but Ren Xin’s artistic curiosity holds sway. In the middle of the work, Bee Hung dances solo through the audience in her characteristic style, unfolding from the elbows, and sliding to the floor to push up again, hips first in a V shape. But it’s Ren Xin’s solo right before the end that grabs us. To the weird lyrics of Moriarty’s ‘Jimmy’ – “The buffaloes used to say/be what you are” – Ren Xin offers an equally strange chimp-like movement, a shuffling walk with limp-wristed hands held above her head, bent knees splayed sideways and bottom stuck out. She also gives us a distinctively Ren Xin move – her whole leg, joints soft and foot at an angle, lifted to the back and then swung hugely around to the side and the front. It’s a movement familiar from choreographer Ohad Naharin’s Gaga technique, and it’s no accident that Ren Xin has been deeply influenced by Gaga, whose central tenet is “Connect effort to pleasure.”
Although Anggota may be driven by Ren Xin’s interest, the show needs Bee Hung as Ren Xin’s interlocutor, both to confirm Ren Xin’s experience as well as to gently interrogate her. At one point, Bee Hung on video mentions that she always thought she was free in this body, but that being in this work has made her aware of her body’s historical burdens. I wonder, then, is this desirable? Does mining the depths of the oppression of our female ancestors allow us to be more free? And is it in fact possible to hold space for the dead?
The actual final scene of Anggota, while not the feel-good call-to-arms of the scene of Thelma and Louise on a motorcycle, whispers it own answers to these questions, with a promise of redemption. We may have been burrowing in the dark, it suggests, or been buried by the weight of society’s expectations, but there are still ways we might float gently up into the light.
The two dancers lie on their backs with their feet up, soles together, knees making wide diamonds. Lighting designer Veeky Tan has cleverly designed the light shining from beneath, leaving the dancers’ faces in darkness, but illuminating their hands shaking, prodding and smacking the flesh of their own calves. We hear giggles and snippets of chatter. The atmosphere is reminiscent of hairdressing salons, nail bars or foot massage parlours, those spaces where traditionally women are permitted to take time to think about themselves and their bodies. It’s a new ritual of self care, but in the same way as the old rituals it makes more sense when you do it with others. We would be living in a freer happier world if the audience felt comfortable enough to lie down beside them, and address the stiff and tender spots in our own calves. As it is, we can only watch enviously, and applaud.
All photos by Bryan Chang, provided by Five Arts Centre.
Bilqis Hijjas is the founding editor of Critics Republic. A producer and community organizer in contemporary dance, she believes the main purpose of criticism is to enhance the audience’s appreciation of art. Full disclosure: both Ren Xin and Bee Hung are her good friends.