Body Swap

60 mins

20, 21 May 2009 Live Art Festival, Kampnagel

6, 7 June 2009 Singapore Arts Festival, Esplanade Theatre studio

Two dance-makers and perfect strangers, Joavien Ng and Dani Brown, travel together to Abu Dhabi, a city located geographically mid-point between Hamburg and Singapore. Each draws a portrait of the other through choreographic movement in this travel and encounter, using their own projection, perception and pre-conception. By engaging in a process of role-reversal, Body Swap challenges stereotyping and the signs of identity construction.

Body Swap is co-commissioned and co-produced by the Singapore Arts Festival, Goethe-Institut Singapore and Kampnagel.

"Cross-cultural projects often work on assumptions. As a foreign body, I transfer myself to a different culture, and assume that I can understand this culture - by learning, by experiencing, by informing. The work of Joavien Ng and Dani Brown in Body Swap challenges this assumption. It exchanges learning with lying, experiencing with e-mailing, and informing with inventing. It sacrifices the phantom of authenticity for the freedom to mix clichés with the "real", by breaking down the boundary of what is genuine and what is fake, by deliberately confusing cultural signifiers and by exchanging meanings of cultural practices. The phantom of authenticity thus transforms into a hybrid monster that performs her body as a touristic sight in the process, with the two choreographers indulging themselves in a pop-folklore auto-ethnography that enables them to determine whatever they want to be. "

- Jochen Roller, Dramaturg

 

Choreographer/Performer                       Joavien Ng (Singapore) & Dani Brown (Germany)

Dramaturg   Jochen Roller (Germany)   

Production & Stage Manager   Joanna Goh (Singapore)

Videographer and Editor  Daniel Schmidt (Germany)

Videographer Darren Tan (Singapore)     

Lighting Designer Henning Eggers (Germany) & Yo Shao Ann (Singapore)    

Sound Designer & Engineer Alessio Castellacci (Germany)

Assistant Stage Manager & Sound operator Caleb Lee (Singapore)                                      

 

Photography by Matthew Johnson