WORKSHOP BY ANDREW TAY

WRITTEN BY STINA EHN

Confessions from a copycat


After three days of afternoon workshops and a one-hour-long stage presentation, I am left with a loose sketch of Andrew Tay’s practice as an artist, performer and curator. Among all the material I have been introduced to, my experience of his catwalk practice echoes the loudest in my memory.


We’re in MDT’s studio and begin the practice by walking. Andrew instructs us to slightly change something in the walk’s mechanics, to steadily increase each weight shift, to delay or to bend until the rhythm shifts and the appearance of the walk changes. We are on a runway, following each other in a line along the room's longest wall, then crossing the space diagonally.
Whilst we started by attending to the physical execution of the walk, we are now asked to notice the images and representations that its patterns bring about. We continue walking several rounds, sliding on this scale where our focus shifts between physical sensation and image, and sometimes starting by directly stepping 100% into a known character, world or situation.


The practice comes from Andrew's group piece Make banana cry, which he made together with Stephen Thompson. He tells us about how they used the walking practice to mess with the audience’s perception of the performers, as they worked with Asian stereotypes in Western culture. However, he says, gesturing toward the group of workshop participants, the majority being white, this topic won’t be our focus here.


The piece was also staged as an ongoing runway, just like we practice it in the workshop. Seated along the aisles, the audience was wearing scented, purple plastic bags on their feet as if they were boots. In a true fashion week manner the audience, especially the front row, was part of the setup, with their outfits and gazes on display. For each walk, the performers reappeared differently, in a new costume, with a new set of accessories, and through a new movement pattern.


As I watch my peers walking in the workshop I recognize certain movement qualities and means of performance that produced the specific relationality of Make banana cry, which I saw in Stockholm in the spring of 2023. And as I walk the runway over and over again, I experience this specificity in my own body. The pacing steps transport me from the studio in MDT’s basement to the main stage and right into my memory of the performance. This time I’m not in the audience, I’m one of the performers! Or more precisely, it seems like I walked myself into dancer Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, who especially caught my eye last year. I walk, and I become her. I catch myself in a lip-syncing-in-front-of-the-mirror moment. I feel myself through her image.


Back in the studio, we gather to reflect upon the session. Slightly embarrassed about my fangirl fantasy, I keep quiet about where my mind went, but the more I think about it, the more crucial it seems. The use of the runway, a format that both glorifies and objectifies its models, underlines how a theater also works in this way. And I am interested in how it was my experience of embodying the task that highlighted this aspect of the piece to me.


I remember a workshop with Jennifer Lacey during the last year of my BA studies in dance and choreography. It was a couple of weeks after my class had presented our individual graduation projects. Jennifer gave us the task to perform each other’s work in front of its maker and this resulted in fifteen short group pieces. The exercise multiplied the significant moments in each performance and mirrored our own work back to us in new shapes. I think all of us got confronted with the new aspects that each reenactment taught us about our own projects. The exercise also made visible how it matters which bodies perform what material. As an example I particularly remember a work originally performed by two cis-men performing a macho scenario in a locker room, which was read as a drag show when a group of women performed it in the workshop. The exercise sometimes balanced on the edge of parody, and therefore trust and sensitivity were important in order to care for each other in it. Perhaps such an exercise was only possible because our group spent years learning to trust and care for each other’s work and process. I’m wondering about how and if such practices can be practiced outside of institutions. With the short work periods and flickering responsibility in the freelance field, can we practice performance through mimicking?

My colleague and friend Sophie Germanier told me about Echo Club, a study circle hosted by the venue Gessnerallee in Zürich, led by artist Jo Baan. The study group went to see performances together and some days later, they met to reflect on the piece they saw through practicing performance. In one session, they were writing scores based on what they had seen, in order to then perform them for each other. As the piece they had seen prior to this session was dealing with representations of black masculinity, they quickly foresaw the problems that a potential reenactment by a white person would entail. In general, reenacting a piece about someone else's identity does pose a series of problems. This is perhaps the delicate matter of reenactment and my friend told me about the discussions that followed. Agreeing to not recreate the image of the performance, they instead approached it through breaking down the different choreographic strategies and wrote scores for muscle tonus and gestures. Instead of copying the image, they copied the doing.

What does it mean to be within practice? I see the proposal of the festival as a way of creating discourse around dance and choreography that does not solely rely on verbal conversation and theoretical frameworks. Embodied knowledge is crucial for how dancers understand their work, and, at least for me, also important to how I read, digest and make sense of what’s in front of me when seated in the audience.
I am interested in the bodily experience of practicing dance and how this can shift our perception of what we see on stage.

I think that exercises for copying and reenactment, like the ones I’ve mentioned in this text, can be useful to gain such an experience. They have taught me about both performing and choreographing by pointing to the relations between the doing of a practice and the images produced. I’m playing with the thought of how copying what we see can be an ongoing procedure within the freelance field, to engage in such a discourse around artists’ work and what’s presented at the venues. What formats and ethics would be required for this? And, if this particular experience is an important aspect for accessing the potential in dance works, how do we invite audiences that are not already practitioners into it?

BIO
Stina Ehn is a dance artist based in Stockholm. With an interest in the relations between image and materiality, her work experiments with how dance and language inform one another, often working in close collaboration with other artists. Her choreographic work has been presented at venues and festivals such as Weld in Stockholm, Dance Nucleus in Singapore, HAUT and Dance Cooperative in Copenhagen, Revolve Performance Art Days and Köttinspektionen in Uppsala, DanseRom Bergen and Kiezkapelle Berlin. Stina holds a BFA in dance and choreography from the Danish National School of Performing Arts. She’s a member of the artist-driven house höjde in Stockholm where she’s part of arranging the performance event Kafé Mix.