T.H.E. to stage first full-length 360-degree dance production

Last December, T.H.E. (The Human Expression) Dance Company staged PheNoumenon, in which dancers flung footwear around and screamed, and audiences could walk around the space, even up close to the performers.

T.H.E. founding artistic director Kuik Swee Boon had said, with unsettling prescience, that the work was choreographed partly in response to "the age of the virus", in both the technological and biological sense.

Now it is 2020, the age of the coronavirus is well under way, and T.H.E. is trying to transform PheNoumenon - which drew much of its energy from the proximity of its audience - into Singapore's first full-length 360-degree virtual reality (VR) dance production.

Filming took place earlier this month at the Esplanade Theatre Studio in collaboration with immersive technology provider Hiverlab. Every day, the entire show was shot scene by scene from a different audience viewpoint.

Viewers will be able to watch the show from several perspectives, standing or sitting, through a VR headset that makes use of a head tracking system, so that what they hear will shift accordingly as they turn their heads.

PheNoumenon will be released in December. T.H.E. is in talks to set up pop-up locations at unspecified public venues where people can watch the VR film in the first quarter of next year, after which it will move to a home rental model for the film and headsets.

It is part of #THEGoesOnline: Being Virtually Present, T.H.E.'s new digital push, which also includes live-streamed work-in-progress showcases such as Contactless by British choreographer Jos Baker and Desidium by Bulgaria-born Dimo Kirilov Milev.

Both choreographed their new works with T.H.E. dancers over Zoom.

" I'm intrigued by the limitations we face in this process," says Baker, 35. "I would like to draw upon these limitations to see how we can find physical expression for both the distance and the closeness that we are all feeling."

AR adventure at Singapore Flyer

This month, the Singapore Flyer transforms into a portal to the moon, where a piano-playing astronaut guides the audience through lunar landscapes with bird-headed dancers - virtually, that is.

The Arts Fission Company typically marks the Mid-Autumn Festival with Moonstruck, a site-specific series dating back to 2009.

It has been staged atop an open trailer and performed in parks. But this year, the pandemic has thrust it into the nowhere of digital space.

Strawberry Moon In Four Acts is filmed in 360 degrees with augmented reality (AR). It is the first local production to make use of The Future Stage, an immersive platform unveiled in August that aims to reproduce the theatrical experience digitally.

Arts Fission artistic director Angela Liong, 69, makes no bones about the difficulties of the new medium.

"Honestly, I'm not totally at peace with this project," says the Cultural Medallion recipient.

"We finish shooting, we hand it over and we can only wait and see what the end result will be like. But whatever it is, I think that now everybody in the community needs to look at digitalisation, like it or not."

Strawberry Moon - which takes its name from the last full moon in June, during summer strawberry season - is a modular rather than linear narrative.

Viewers follow an astronaut - pianist Shane Thio, who plays pieces such as Gabriel Faure's Clair de Lune and Francis Poulenc's Melancolie - into a Singapore Flyer capsule.

They can then choose to enter four different lunarscapes in any order, from the watery Chang-E's Mirror to the arid geography of Pavane On Moondust.

In Rabbit Dreaming, percussionist Cheong Kah Yiong appears as the Jade Rabbit, playing the yunluo, a traditional instrument of tiny brass gongs mounted on a rack, while in Lunar Wind Chasers, the dancers don bird masks.

As one cannot actually dance in the Singapore Flyer due to safety reasons, the dance sequences were shot separately in a studio.

The moon has long been a realm of escape in many cultures, says Liong, and that flight of whimsy has become especially vital now.

"The human capacity to imagine is such a powerful tool. Dealing with real facts is one thing, but it is important to remind ourselves that it is this ability to imagine that will lift us amid all these challenges and enable us to go on."

Exploring social isolation felt by the elderly

Most weekends, Singapore-based Malaysian dancer Eva Tey crosses the Causeway to visit her retired parents in Johor Baru.

But since the border between Singapore and Malaysia closed in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic, she has not been able to go see them.

In this time, the 28-year-old has felt acute loneliness. "I am also worried about the welfare of my parents as the situation is not getting any better in Malaysia," she says.

She poured these feelings into choreographing Behind Closed Doors, a project by Maya Dance Theatre about the social isolation experienced by seniors. It takes the form of an interactive website that includes a dance film, a photo exhibition, poems by local writer Cyril Wong and interviews and resources about elderly loneliness.

Maya Dance Theatre, founded in 2007 by Kavitha Krishnan and Imran Manaff, combines classical bharatanatyam and contemporary dance.

Its socially grounded works have examined sobering issues, from mental health to sexual violence.

Behind Closed Doors is based on five months of research, including speaking with 12 seniors. The dance film centres on an empty chair (above) shot in five homes and explores the lack of connection between seniors and their grandchildren.

"It is not as simple as the elderly being neglected by the younger generation," says Tey, who has been a principal dancer with Maya Dance Theatre since 2015.

"This dance film intends to bring out the two sides of the coin, the perspectives of the elderly and the young adults."