The evocative dance of sport

In a studio high up in SPH Media’s News Centre, a strobe fires and Mark Cheong’s camera silently clicks. In front of a black backdrop, two women dressed in white explode on cue into motion. One soars elegantly from the left, the other lunges artfully from the right. As they cross paths, their bodies extended, for a brilliant, graceful, athletic second it seems they are duelling.

Both women are athletes, who operate on separate stages, know the pull of perfection and are familiar with the penance of practice. But there is a difference. One, Glenda Yoon, 20, is a law student who is an amateur dancer; the other, Amita Berthier, 25, is an Olympic fencer.

They’ve never met before but it’s quickly evident that they’re distantly related. Movement connects them. Berthier has more muscle, Yoon more grace, yet both bodies are supple, eloquent, trained instruments which not only move instinctively but are also obedient to technique and instructions.

Their actions are precise, their bodies controlled, their feet balanced. Yoon’s are trained in ballet, contemporary dance and street jazz; Berthier’s in scuttling up and down a fencing piste.

“When I fence,” Berthier says, “I am responding to my rival’s feet”.

One may say, with a little licence, that she is dancing.

On a Marseille street in the Olympic summer of 2024 an idea arrives. Max Maeder is chasing a kiteboarding medal and Cheong and I are chasing him in this ancient port town. At a long day’s end, waiting for a taxi, we talk about the fluency of athletes at the Games and the expressiveness of their bodies. The Olympics are, after all, a festival of movement.

It strikes us that the feinting footballer, the arching gymnast, the soaring basketballer, all produce movements tied to dance. Indeed, when the Washington Post wanted to further examine Roger Federer’s balletic style, they invited their Pulitzer Prize-winning dance critic to write about him. “That light, fluid footwork,” wrote Sarah L. Kaufman, “the great coil in his midsection at the start of his stroke, the way he transfers his weight as if there’s no weight, only air and rhythm...”

In dancing, bodies tell wondrous stories; in sport, bodies are used to write grand feats. And so Cheong and I wonder, what if we find a dancer and a set of diverse national athletes and photograph them together to explore the symmetry and harmony between these whirling cousins?

So begins a joyous 12-month project which starts in January 2025. First, we manage to find Yoon, a former School Of The Arts student, who earned a Performing and Visual Arts Scholarship from the National University of Singapore in 2024 and is gentle, adaptive, generous and gifted.

Yoon is the constant, the partner to our narrowed list of athletes which comprise artistic swimmers (Debbie Soh and Yvette Chong), a fencer (Berthier), footballer (Lionel Tan), badminton player (Terry Hee), boxer (Danisha Mathialagan) and gymnasts (sisters Amanda and Emma Yap).

We photograph them in a gym, a boxing ring, an HDB badminton court, a private pool, the Kallang Football Hub and a studio. Once we are stymied by rain, another time by lightning. Yoon has law exams while the athletes are off travelling to compete. In between we find free days where they throw punches, do flips and flash blades for the camera.

“Again” says Cheong politely, camera in hand, his attention on angles, posture, light, shadow, trying to capture unity between dancer and athlete.

“Again. Again. Again.”

Neither athlete hesitates nor dancer because they’re used to commands and comfortable with repetition. They settle themselves, then move. Once, twice, 30 times. Excellence, they both appreciate, is a rigorous business.

In 1958, after Brazil won the football World Cup in Sweden playing lyrical football, a celebratory song A Taca do Mundo e Nossa (The World Cup Is Ours) was written. One verse went as follows:

“The Brazilian abroad!
Showed what football is all about
Won the World Cup!
Dancing with the ball at his feet!”

As time passed, we understood what this was: Football, samba style.

Sport and dance have vast differences – one is essentially a contest, the other a performance – yet it’s their similarities we celebrate. Both groups often have condensed careers, are constantly critiqued and produce well-rehearsed works of finesse, strength and flight before audiences. If Michael Jordan once challenged gravity by hanging in the air, so did Natalia Osipova, a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet, whose leaps were described by The New York Times as “improbable floating jumps”.

Dancers respond to choreography but so do athletes when figure skating on ice. What are tactics in football anyway but carefully designed sequences of movement? In the 1980s Johan Cruyff, that Dutch footballing artist, agreed to take part in a documentary titled Feints, where he and Dutch ballet choreographer Rudi van Dantzig attended each other’s training sessions. It is said that Rudolf Nureyev, the legendary Soviet ballet performer, noted that Cruyff should have been a dancer.

History is littered with these little linkages and cross-pollination. Athletes especially learn balance and body awareness from dance. Valarie Allman, the reigning two-time Olympic champion in the swivelling art of the discus throw, learnt hip-hop and jazz dance as a child. She told World Athletics that dance helped “me gain confidence in how my body moved with practice”.

Kobe Bryant, the late basketballer, did tap dance to strengthen his ankles. Harold Connolly, the 1956 Olympic champion in the hammer (a 7.26kg metal ball attached to a wire) throw, took help from his mother and aunts, who loved dance, to fashion ballet-like slippers to ensure proper grip as he spun in the 2.135m throwing circle.

It conjures up the most terrific image. A hulking, 183cm, 100kg, metal-hurling champion in a dancer’s footwear. The balletic brute.

In a house pool in Bukit Timah, Soh, 27, and Chong, 17, take a deep breath and disappear under water.

Then they turn upside down.

In December 2025, they’ll win SEA Games gold together in the artistic swimming duet, now in early August they give us a peek at their craft. They scull their hands (pushing water down with their palms) to stay upright, bend one leg and extend the other one out of the water like an elegant periscope. On the pool deck, Yoon, in a ballerina’s tutu, poses on one leg like a stylish flamingo.

In the water, using a special waterproof box for his camera, Cheong, assisted by Gin Tay, an executive photojournalist with ST, works diligently.

Click, click, click.

A portrait of grace emerges.

At every photoshoot, quiet conversations take place. Soh, the artistic swimmer, reveals she practised ballet from age three till 17. Yoon, the dancer, admired artistic swimmers as a kid and wanted to explore the sport yet never got the chance. Boxer Danisha, who looks at feet when she watches boxing, learnt bharatanatyam, the Indian dance, for a while.

Intrigued by the relationship between both tribes, the athletes explain the ties that bind them. Gymnast Emma Yap talks about leaps and turns and her sister Amanda about artistry and expression. Soh sees a parallel in how athletes and dancers “hold different positions for a long time” while Hee finds a dance connection in the way badminton players “stretch out our arms as we lunge or jump”.

In between poses, insight is offered and a sense of kinship grows. Yoon says she didn’t consider the similarities between dance and boxing/fencing till she saw those athletes in their element. Perhaps she eventually saw what Danisha does, a sense of flow in both crafts.

So much is being revealed. Like the ridiculously casual command they all have over their bodies. Emma, 20, bends into a stag handstand and holds her position effortlessly. Amanda, 16, does a back handspring with the ease of a blindfolded juggler. “This is easy”, the sisters laugh, for their competition routines are much more complex and demanding. Yet they are fine representations of what Yoon says about ballet: “We train hard to make it look easy.”

And always, shadowing everything, is a familiarity with pain.

In a February 2025 story in the dance magazine Pointe, there is an evocative picture of the Royal Ballet dancer Steven McRae with each leg in a bucket of ice. It could have been a scene from any athletic locker room. In the gym, Amanda talks about injuries to her heel, back, hip. Her sister points to her shoulder, ankle, knee. All these bodies, pushed and pounded, till something gives.

During breaks, athletes and dancer gather around Cheong’s viewfinder, looking at themselves and his work. Soon they will return to their arenas – their respective stages are their safe places – where they will free disciplined bodies and find their uninhibited and authentic selves.

As power has become predominant in sport, its grace has gently ebbed. Yet there will always be athletes, found in old footage and on modern fields, who merge both forms. Like the most celebrated athlete of all time, a boxer of bouncing, slick feet, who right till the end, even when he was a declining fighter, was still making the same beautiful promise.

“I’m going to dance all night,” said Muhammad Ali.

Eight athletes, six locations, six photographs. Online and in the newspaper it looks fluid, easy, simple.

Yes, the photography for this 12-month project – a year for planning, seven months for the shoot – took the least amount of time, though amateur dancer and law student Glenda Yoon’s quip to my colleague Rohit Brijnath about ballet says it best: “We train hard to make it look easy.”

It was the planning that proved to be the trickiest. After numerous meetings, we did our first photo shoot in March 2025 and our last in October of that year. Although all six sessions lasted no more than two hours each, we had to align the schedules for all parties, which comprised eight active national athletes and a school-going dancer with a packed timetable.

Then there were the poses. A key aspect of how I wanted the photos to look was to almost create a mirror between athlete and dancer, and to show the uncanny similarity of their movements.

Which meant I had to be meticulous in picking their poses. The idea was to have the audience question: If both were not in their outfits, would they know who was the dancer and who, the athlete?

A very geometric style was chosen to focus on the lines and symmetry which their limbs created. Plain and simple backgrounds free of visual clutter to allow the movements and nuances of the sports to take the spotlight. In the hunt for the perfect location, numerous visits to various spots were conducted.

For example, I wanted to do a top-down shot for badminton and there wasn’t a hall in Singapore which had that kind of vantage point. So I visited four HDB courts and trawled through Google maps till I found a block in Marine Parade close enough to the court for an almost direct top-down angle.

I also chose to light the subjects as naturally as possible to mimic the environment of a competition venue. The photo of fencer Amita Berthier and Yoon, for example, was shot in our photo studio to mimic the feel of a fencing competition hall.

My colleague Gin Tay was also of immense help throughout the six shoots, assisting me with lighting and acting as a second eye.

We made the project a collaboration, asking the athletes and dancer to contribute ideas, advice and suggest movements. It’s such a joy when the subjects participate fully and know exactly what we are trying to accomplish. We were lucky that everyone was committed and willing to repeat their movements multiple times before we nailed the picture.